Bill Maher, The Huffington Post, July 17, 2007
In this great and diverse country, one is always proud to see their own city on the front page of the national newspapers, so you can imagine my pride yesterday when Los Angeles turned out to be the place where the Catholic Church has had to pay the largest fine ever for diddling kids, $660 million. (Full disclosure: I was raised Catholic and I was sometimes alone with priests, although none ever tried anything. Which is a little insulting.)
Cardinal Mahoney announced that to help pay for the deal, the church would sell a building it owns on Wilshire and about 50 other properties they weren’t using, which reminded me, oh yeah, the Catholic Church owns more property out here than Bob Hope did — and why? Oh, yeah, because it’s a business — and not just a business, really, the greatest business in the world, in that, like all religions, it’s selling an invisible product. It doesn’t really get easier than that, unless you count Edgar Bergen, a ventriloquist on the RADIO.