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.
When I signed the indictment for embezzlement against a Catholic priest at a local cathedral when I was forman of the Criminal Grand Jury, I told the District Attorney that I thought I could make a reasonable defense for the priest.
You see the Dogma of the Church is that its Priests are married to the Church... and California is a community property state!
Let the rationalizations begin!
My favorite is "The Protestants are evil for even bringing something like this up."
forman=foreman... oops.
There is no need for rationalisations, because the fact is that there are no organisations which are proof against financial pilfering. It happens all the time. Recently an Australian credit union had huge amounts stolen from accounts, by a trusted senior employee, a lady of good social standing ... who was a secret gambling addict.
At least they are mostly women for a change!
"Unlike monks, parish priests do not take a vow of poverty; but they promise to be celibate..."
That statement is COMPLETELY inaccurate! So how can we trust any of this article? Obviously he confused "religious" and "diocesan" priests, misunderstood the vows monks take with the fact they usually do not receive Holy Orders, no comprehension that "vow" of celibacy is not a promise not to have sex, virtue vs. vow, that parish priests can be non-diocesan, etc.
LOL, you sure got that right about community property. Very clever, you were able to educate the DA on Church Doctrine and get off jury duty in one stroke.
"Still, the increasing number of clergy getting caught with their hands in the offertory is once again prompting questions about the Catholic priesthood..."
This whole article seems to be whitewashed Catholic-bashing. What "increasing number"? The article lists four priests. What is this about "low moral credibility"? The abuse scandal was almost all cases from the 70's and 80's and less than 4% of priests. A much smaller number than DOCTORS and TEACHERS who molest their charges. People did not leave the Faith in droves because of a tiny number of miscreants.
You misunderstand, I signed the indictment, the written accusation of the crime. It was my duty the foreman of the Grand Jury that sent him to trial for embezzlement. I spent one year as foreman of the San Joaquin County Criminal Grand Jury and signed numerous indictments. During that year, I sat in the Judges bench, with a gavel, in a courtroom as DAs brought cases before 27 citizens they didn't want to go to Preliminary Hearings.
What's a few dollars between friends?
How in the world did these parishoners not notice all these purchases and notice a lack of funds?
My guess is that they didn't want to run programs in the first place. Otherwise, they would have wondered where all the cash was going to.
I am not joking.
Fortunately, I am member of St. Thomas More Parish in Boynton Beach (close to Delray Beach) and our Pastor is trustworthy and has excellent "transparent" financial practices.
Last weekend, our Parish generated over $17,000 in collections and I am confident not a penny was stolen or diverted into somebody's pocket.
As for the priest claiming he wasn't properly paid, that is a risible attempt at justification so absurd that only he could have made it :)
You know what?
I have been waiting for years to hear a Catholic admit that not all is perfect in Rome. We of the Reformed Confessions openly admit to any one who will listen that we are all rotten, it is very refreshing to hear such come from a RC.
< hats off>
Also, they hired 15 extra hands to run things - there is no free labor anymore.
Around that time I was interim pastor of a congregation and I tried to establish the normal safeguards, and was resisted strongly by the vestry. The members considered the guidelines to be insulting!
To me this is just another "proof" of the divine call of the Catholic Church: without divine protection no institution run so badly would have survived as long as the Church has. What a bunch of bozos we are!
Once, After I became a Catholic (obviously) I was part of the team counting the haul at our small country church. There was a procedure with rotating counters who had to fill out a form and sign it and all. My partner for that Sunday announced that she had experience in book-keeping and was certainly not going to fill out this silly form. I finished the count, went to the bulleting board and took my name off the counting roster.
**was certainly not going to fill out this silly form.**
Sounds like pride to me....
***I finished the count, went to the bulleting board and took my name off the counting roster.***
Good call.
I was once a deacon at a large church and we had three people counting and signing off on the offerings. We also signed off on the bank statements when they came in indicating that we agreed with how much was deposited. We had a copy on file of the deposit slip and compared it with the statements.
Children aren't the only losers when the expectation is that both husband and wife will work outside the home.
I have no issue with you posting this thread,but it does seem to me you're looking for a fight by the tone of your follow ups.
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