The headline for Tim Padget’s February 26th article in Time was guaranteed for shock value: “Pilfering Priests – Still recovering from the sexual abuse scandals of five years ago, the Catholic Church is facing another crisis; clergy who steal money from the parish.”

Padgett reports that until two years ago, the Roman Catholic diocese of Palm Beach Fla., ran audits of its parishes only when they changed pastors.

He goes on to tell of St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic church in Delray Beach, where the pastor, Rev. John Skehan, retired after 40 years. In 2003, when the diocesan accountant, Denis Hamel, called on Skehan’s successor, Rev. Francis Guinan, a close friend of Skenhan, he was told “to beat it.” However, the new bishop, Gerald Barbarito, ordered Guinan to cooperate.

By the time the audit was concluded in 2005, Hamel was left dumbfounded, and told Padgett: “I called the bishop and I told him we had a tiger by the tail.”

Forensic auditors estimated that Skehan and, later, Guinan, misappropriated $8.6 million over 42 years by diverting the collection money to secret slush-fund accounts, “while living as hedonistically as Renaissance Popes.” From the police report, Padgett also learned that Skehan, 79, gave a “girlfriend” $134,000, made a rare-coins purchase of $375,000 and owned an oceanfront condominium worth $445,000.

The same report revealed that Guinan, 63, whom Barbarito removed from St. Vincent’s in 2005, spent his “take” on expensive vacations to Las Vegas and the Bahamas; a $220,000 renovation of his parish residence, and payments to his own: “paramour,” the bookkeeper of his former parish, to whom he gave $47,000 for credit card bills and her child’s tuition.

Padgett wrote that both priests were arrested in September, 2006, and were charged with grand theft, to which both pleaded not guilty.

The writer gives us a laundry list of such offenses, a source of pain for all Catholics, lay or cleric. Last month, a Virginia priest was indicted for allegedly embezzling $800,000 from two Catholic churches – partly to help support the woman and three children he had been secretly living with. Last year, a Connecticut priest was accused of pilfering up to $1.4 million to pay for his Audi cars, luxury-hotel stays, jewelry for his boyfriend and a Fort Lauderdale condo. Last June, another priest was sentenced to five years in prison after the misappropriation of $2 million from the Church of the Holy Cross in Rumson, N.J.

Chuck Zech, director of the Center for the Study of Church Management at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, told Padgett, “This is the last thing the Church needs when you think how low its moral credibility already is in the wake of the child-molestation tragedy. But I am appalled at the lack of external (financial) controls at Catholic parishes..”

Recently, Padgett reports, Zech and accountancy professor, Robert West of Villanova, co-authored a study showing that 85% of the 78 U.S. Catholic dioceses responding to their survey (out of a total of 174 queried) reported embezzlement cases – and 11% had scandals of $500,000 or more. Some cases involved lay people and not priests, and the study’s one silver lining is that priests are often the whistle-blowers. Personally, I have a difficult time accepting that high figure.

Zech points out that Protestant churches are often “more transparent and encouraging of lay participation” in the financial apparatus, while Old World attitudes with some pastors is still “what’s in the collection basket is theirs personally to do with as they wish.”

Michael Ryan, a Massachusetts Catholic and former U.S. postal inspector, who runs a watchdog site, Churchsecurity.info, told Padgett that the nation’s 19,000 Catholic parishes, which gather about $6 billion a year from congregations, are still often medieval in the way they secure or don’t secure Sunday collections. ...Skehan and Guinan had immediate access to offertory cash– and according to the police report, had staff hide purloined stacks of bills in parish-office ceilings.

Ryan and other experts emphasize that church ushers should put that money into tamperproof bags with numbered seals, that rotating teams should count it, and that separation-of-duties standards, such as ensuring that bookkeepers logging the funds aren’t the ones counting and depositing it should be adhered to.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops insists that canon law does not allow the Vatican or the Conference to impose such reforms on dioceses, Padgett informs us.

And many a lay person will respond, “If not they, who?” Padgett will tell us, “So the job may be left to Catholic laity.” If so, we find ourselves on the horn of this dilemma: The hierarchy with limitless power has no responsibility; the laity with no power has all the responsibility. Somehow, that doesn’t wash with Christ’s directive about feeding his lambs and sheep.

The fact is that the hierarchy are supported by generous salaries just so they can concentrate on the big problems facing the flock on both sides of the pond. Would the Vatican welcome coercive action by the American laity; i.e., taking over the finances of the parishes, and cutting off all funds to the Vatican, considering the fact that the United States is its major contributor? I doubt it.

This is not a question only of money; it’s a question of preserving the laity’s trust in the hierarchy, both here and abroad, and also the trust of priests that their pensions, earned by thousands with hard work and sacrifice, are being protected for their retirement. If not, to whom can they turn but to the bishops and the Vatican?

Writer, Laura Crimaldi, submitted an article to the Boston Herald, February 11th, with the headline, “Priests’ trust shaken: Clergy say mismanagement left pension funds in pinch.”

Crimaldi reports:

Hundreds of distraught Boston-area priests are facing stark cuts in their retirement benefits as the Archdiocese of Boston scrambles to shore up its teetering pension system after decades of poor fiscal management.

“I see all of this as unjust and a failure to observe canon law,” said the Rev. Richard Craig, 72, who retired four years ago as pastor of St. John the Evangelist in north Chelmsford. It leads me to wonder, are we, the senior priests, becoming objects of elderly discrimination?”

The writer tells us: Church documents show that as of April 2006, the pension plan – the Clergy Retirement/Disabiliity Trust – faced an $85.4 million gap between the money on hand and what it is expected to have to spend for hundreds of priests, active and retired.

Frightened senior priests have seen monthly stipends frozen to amounts as low as $1,889, with other benefits such as health and housing also diminishing.

Had the members of the Curia in Rome, and the bishops in the United States acted expeditiously, compassionately and wisely at the first word of the pedophile scandals, thousands of children would have been spared untold suffering, scandal would have been lessened, and we would not now be facing bankruptcy after bankruptcy in diocese after diocese, in law suit after law suit, and our fine priests, who have labored long and hard in the vineyard, would not be awake at night wondering about their futures.

For our encouragement, let us close with Carlo Corretto’s lines about his relationship with his Church, our Church:

How much I must criticize you, my Church and yet how much I love you!
How much you have made me suffer and yet how much I owe you.
You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand holiness!

Next week: Does the Catholic organization, The Voice of the Faithful, offer direction and hope for true Church reform?

Peace. Hope. Love.

Amen.

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