To see what was going on, Dr Hansen superimposed the actual curves for each decade from the fifties to the noughties on a normal distribution, which acted as a referencecurve.
The requirement, drawn up after Robert Maxwell robbed his companies' pensions funds in the early 1990s, attempts to assess the present value of pension funds' future liabilities, taking the yield curve on gilts as its reference point.
"It was really uncharted territory and he was way ahead of the curve, " said Jerry Topczewski, the archdiocese's chief of staff, in a reference to the mediation program.