Posted on 02/15/2007 11:18:10 PM PST by Gamecock
Until two years ago, the Roman Catholic diocese of Palm Beach, Fla., ran audits of its parishes only when they changed pastors. It was a risky, even foolhardy policy when you consider that a parish like St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church, in Delray Beach, hadn't changed pastors in 40 years. In September 2003, upon the retirement of St. Vincent's pastor, the Rev. John Skehan, diocesan accountant Denis Hamel dutifully showed up to inspect the books and the procedures for counting Sunday collections. The new pastor, the Rev. Francis Guinan--a close buddy of Skehan's--told him to beat it. But the new bishop, Gerald Barbarito, eventually ordered Guinan to comply--and by Easter 2005, after parish staff had come forward with what they knew about St. Vincent's slippery bookkeeping, Hamel was left dumbfounded. "I called the bishop," says Hamel, now the diocese's financial administrator, "and I told him we had a tiger by the tail."
It was an especially ravenous beast if the allegations are true. Forensic auditors estimate that Skehan and later Guinan misappropriated $8.6 million over 42 years. They allegedly diverted St. Vincent collection money to secret slush-fund accounts while living as hedonistically as Renaissance Popes. The police report says Skehan, 79, gave a "girlfriend" $134,000, made a rare-coins purchase for $275,000 and owned an oceanfront condominium worth $455,000. It says Guinan, 63, whom Barbarito removed as St. Vincent's pastor 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, whom he gave $47,000 for credit-card bills and her child's tuition. Both priests were arrested by Delray Beach police last September--after Guinan returned from a South Pacific cruise--and were charged with grand theft. (They pleaded not guilty.)
St. Vincent's may be the worst known case of embezzlement to hit U.S. Catholicism, but Skehan and Guinan are joined by a gallery of other recent alleged klepto-clerics. Last month a Virginia priest was indicted for allegedly embezzling $600,000 from two Catholic churches--in part 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. And 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.
Just when the Catholic Church in the U.S. was beginning to recover from the sordid sexual-abuse scandal of 2002, it may be staring at a new crisis. "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, says Chuck Zech, director of the Center for the Study of Church Management at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. "But I'm appalled at the lack of internal [financial] controls at Catholic parishes." In a recent study co-authored by Zech and Villanova accountancy professor Robert West, 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 involve laypeople and not priests; and the study's one silver lining is its finding that priests are often the whistle-blowers.
Still, the increasing number of clergy getting caught with their hands in the offertory is once again prompting questions about the Catholic priesthood. Not that clerical enrichment is by any means an exclusively Catholic scourge: it's hard to forget that Protestant TV evangelist Jim Bakker once defrauded his followers of $158 million. But scholars like Zech argue that the financial apparatus at Protestant churches is often "more transparent and encouraging of lay participation" than it is at Catholic parishes--where, says Hamel, some pastors still carry "an Old World attitude that what's in the collection basket is theirs personally to do with as they wish."
Priestly arrogance may not be the only factor. Unlike monks, parish priests do not take a vow of poverty; but they promise to be celibate, which many assume blunts greed since they don't have families to support. Ironically, says one South Florida priest, many priests see the sacrifice of sex and family as a source of "entitlement--a reason parishioners should provide extra pin money for Father." What's more, priests can resent seeing how comparatively well their Episcopal or Jewish counterparts live--and the fact that Catholics in the U.S. give half the share of their income to their churches that Protestants do, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
That's no excuse for pick-pocketing parishioners. But the issue underscores a changing social dynamic between priests and their flocks. In past generations, U.S. Catholics tended to be working-class, and priests often had comparatively cozy lifestyles. "Today," says Terry McKiernan, co-director of the watchdog site BishopAccountability.org "there's been a strange flip-flop." Parishioners are often middle or upper-middle class, while priests--whose median salary is about $35,000, including their free room and board--can be left with a nagging sense of diminished stature in our money-conscious society. Palm Beach is home to some of the nation's most affluent Catholics; but Skehan and Guinan were born in Ireland when it was still dirt poor. By most accounts, Skehan was a beloved pastor, yet one of his most telling remarks to police was that he felt he was "never properly paid."
Embezzlement is a plague of all nonprofit organizations, given their threadbare accounting systems. But 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," says Michael Ryan, a Massachusetts Catholic and former U.S. postal inspector who runs another watchdog site, Churchsecurity.info. At St. Vincent, for example, 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. Professor West says that parish-finance councils--which are required by canon law but are too often as ornamental as stained glass--"have to stop acting like rubber stamps for priests."
But as in the sex-abuse crisis, many are asking, Where are the bishops? Barbarito was sent to Palm Beach in 2003 to fix a diocese already reeling from the departure of two of his predecessors under sexual-abuse accusations--one of whom had also dismissed reports of financial misconduct against Guinan at another parish in the 1990s. Following the St. Vincent discovery in 2005, Barbarito decreed biennial audits for every Palm Beach parish. But only a handful of other U.S. dioceses are cracking down. Chicago recently set up a hotline to report malfeasance, and St. Louis is creating a centralized bookkeeping system. But 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.
So the job may be left to Catholic laity. The sex-abuse litigation "forced church documents like parish audits into the open for the first time ever," says McKiernan, emboldening more lay scrutiny. After Barbarito began a probe into the St. Vincent mess, an anonymous parishioner sent a letter to the Palm Beach County state attorney. That made it harder for witnesses to keep the case "a secret within the church," as the letter said--despite the efforts of Skehan, who had allegedly sent Christmas cards to church secretaries with $1,500 each and an oily thank-you for not cooperating with diocese investigators. The secretaries refused the supposed bribe and are now prosecutor's witnesses. That's the kind of lay resolve that Hamel believes will give the church "a better chance of dealing more effectively with this crisis" than it did with the one that so badly tarnished it five years ago.
You never answered my question in post 73. And since that post Alex provided more examples demonstrating our interest in "scandals" in our back yard.
Sandy: it appears to me that non-catholics are more interested in catholic scandal than they are in scandals in their own backyard.
GC: Care to retract or should I go on?
So my question stands. Do you care to retract?
I'll look forward to your reply when I return on Monday.
Well, its 1140pm here and I'm going to bed.
Blessings ya'll!
Cloaked in what appears to be sarcasm and subtle denial, but it's better than most. I'll give it a 7.5. ;-)
Wow, I have no idea as to what you are talking about.
What's there to say about the article? Don't steal? Oh look, more sinners? Well, that's kind of a "no kidding" type of thing. Maybe Catholics are well aware of the fact that priests sin. It's not like this is a big shock or anything.
I guess we could all point and say, look more sinners. But why? I know that my good and holy Pastor is a sinner. I have heard him lose his temper. So an article pointing out the sins of priests is old news to me.
Take a look at post number 3 in this thread. Note that it summons a host of Protestant polemicists while pre-emptively saying, "Let the rationalizations begin." Before it is made, the Cahtolic response is characterized as deficient. What looks like an article about a grievous trend is revealed by post number three to be, at least, bait. Is the trapper on the same side as his prey?
Then by the time we get to the posts in the 80s not only have we had an injured innocence act, but Catholics are being criticized for not taking the bait, despite the fact that their future responses were already discounted as rationalizations and thus discouraged.
In other words, an article was put up as a provocation. Evidently the response was insufficient and post #3 was a further provocation. The response was still not enough, the bait not swallowed, the hook not set, so then it is suggested that not taking the bait is a kind of flaw.
On the whole, it's not an auspicious beginning for a thoughtful enquiry into the meaning of the sinfulness of the clergy. It's a great beginning for a bar fight, though.
Thou art [not thou personally, thou understandest?] like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the table and says "God send me no need of thee!" and by the operation of the second cup draws him on the drawer, when indeed there is no need.
Where precisely is the sarcasm and what exactly am I denying?
You asked for comments, you complained that you weren't getting any comments. I find the whole thing unremarkable. They didn't put controls in, they got peculated. This is news?
What is it with you people? I know clerics of all manner of denominations and even religions. I know swamis, fakirs, roshi, sensei, pastors, brothers, sisters, "revrunds", rabbis, you name it. All of them sin. Some fail spectacularly. I knew that before I became a Catholic. I knew that before I became an adult. Just WHAT is the big deal?
What kind of response, other than spitting on a picture of the Pope and renouncing Catholicism, would you consider appropriate?
Yeah, I'm angry. This whole thing is bogus.
"Ping to 79. BTW, there have been precious few Catholics here who have commented on this article, even though I am sure they have popped in just because of the title.."
In my view, your track record shows just how disingenuous your posts and comments are.
I've always thought of myself as tasting lousy and being more filling.
It's called "discussing current news".
I wasn't talking about silly evangelicals or even Ted Haggert visiting a male prostitute - as that does not involve child abuse.
I'm not talking about Rick Warren's recent wanderings into la-la land either.
There are non-catholic clergy who are also committing lewd and predatory acts against innocent children.
It appears to me that non-catholics would rather not talk about the married baptist minister who has sex with a 14 yr. old girl, kidnaps her and manages to turn her against her own family.
Now, forgive me if I'm wrong. I'm sure I must have missed the numerous threads...but where are the threads about perverted non-catholic ministers preying on children?
"Will that do?:"
LOL!
sounds good to me Mad Dawg!
I'd like to add my own catholic comment.
It is the rare priest who is properly trained in the matters of administration of finances.
Those matters should be left to a parish council who in turn reports to the diocese.
Let the priest be there for the people and take part in the council meetings.
But to have one person in charge of large sums of money with no oversight is just begging for trouble no matter what the denomination of church you are talking about.
Amen!
How fortunate you are to be a part of such a congregation.
Yes, thank you
But sin appears in Genesis before any commentary on it, one way or the other.
No, you'll see few comments. The deal is, a Catholic can't speak in defense of his or her faith on "Free" Republic. The religion mod moves quickly to ban any Catholic who doesn't toe the protestant line.
Just for laughs, use the search function and count the number of "Sola Scriptura" or "Mary, Mother of God" threads posted by Catholics just in the last ninety days, and get back to me.
Bonus points will be awarded if you can tell me how many of them were posted within the very same week as others on the same subject.
Triple points will be awarded if you can find any "Sola Scriptura" threads posted by Calvinists, that went uninterrupted by dissenters, within the same time period.
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