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PASTOR'S REPORT, May 14, 1979
Page 17
Now by the time it's finished, the company will have nothing. If we
get a penny on a dollar, we will be lucky. So that's what a receiver
and trustees and .accountants will do to a company if they get their hands
on it. And that's exactly what they wanted to do here.
Student: In 1976 my brother had an oil company in Bakersfield. It
started from nothing two years before that. A receiver came in (it was
in '76) and in three days took over his company that had 366 investors.
While my brother was running the company, he never missed one payment
to any of his investors. It's been two years now, almost three years,
and not one person has received a penny from that receiver. So this
type of thing is going on all over the whole country. This is real.
When I saw this happening to our Church, immediately I knew what was
happening. I just want to make it known that it's not the only thing
that's happening. It's happening to other businesses.
Rader: Now this particular case, it has made me, it's made Mr. Helge,
it's made all of our lawyers that we're working with, for the first time
begin to lose a little faith (which Mr. Helge and I really shouldn't have
anyway) in the legal system. I told Michael Jackson the other day on ABC
(anyone hear that program?) ...He asked if it had changed me in any way,
and I said,"Yes, in one important respect. Prior to this experience,
being a lawyer and member of the profession, member of the bar, and former
law professor, I thought Mr. Armstrong was taking too immoderate or too
severe a position over the years when he said, 'The legal profession is
bad. There is no justice in this world. We'll have to wait until the
World Tomorrow is ushered in. There are nothing but unjust judges.' And
I would try to get him to moderate those views because I really believed
that he was wrong. And, by the same token, being a lawyer, and a member
of the profession, and law profession,! didn't want to be included in
the same group."
And I have found that he is 100% right, as has Mr. Helge. And our other
boys are beginning to wonder whether there is any such thing as real
justice. But we will win the lawsuit. It is a mopping up operation.
It'll take time, like any other mopping up job. Any other plaintiff
would have fled the scene by now. The relators are already gone. The
state, they don't care about time and money, but eventually it'll drop
by the wayside.
But we will capitalize (as Mr. Armstrong said just yesterday to me) on
the publicity that we've had because it has catapulted us to the front
pages around the world. You can't go anywhere in this world now without
people knowing the Worldwide Church of God. And people begin to ask who
are we, what we are doing. And they're not concerned any more. If you
can 'stear' $45 million and the business is still here--the Church is
still here--/they realize/ it's got to have something going for it. How
do you get $45 million or $70 million out of an operation that is still
here? We're bigger than Oral Roberts and Billy Graham combined. People
are wondering about us now, so we'll capitalize on it.
But he /Mr. Armstrong/ knows that there will be in the minds of some
people thoughts that-maybe he was a little dishonest. We will win the
lawsuit, but you can't wipe out the impression. I used to explain it by
talking about a blackboard. You put something on the blackboard and
you take the eraser and erase it, but you still have part of the image remai