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.
It took me a while to figure this out but some people view communication as an infringement on their autonomy. They also tend to find the concept of cooperation to be an intolerable restriction of their control. I said to someone, "I don't care that much about [this or that detail] but I DO want us all to be on the same page." He angrily retorted, "You want to control EVerything!" I was nonplussed.
My dad, who was CEO of a largeish corporation was also senior Warden at his church for one term. His take was that for some people an administrative role at their church was the only chance they would ever have to run something and they were by heaven going to run it -- into the ground if necessary, just as long as they were running it.
Are you kidding? One of the RC Church's most charming characteristics to me is the genial contempt we all share for the folks who run stuff. This isn't about doctrine, this is about people being bozos, especially when they are outside their field of competence.
Haven't you noticed that everybody knows how to do your job better than you do? -- and they'd be only too happy to tell you, if only you had the good sense to listen to them?
So they make the decisions, and (again, outside of doctrine) we gripe and complain and mock. Full employment!
If you've been a deacon, you already know this: Everybody knows what Sunday School SHOULD do, but nobody knows enough to volunteer to teach. EVERYbody is a contractor AND a Liturgical Interior Decorator when it's time to buy a carpet or fix the roof. After all, the RIGHT way for a church to look is mostly the way the one I went to when I was a kid looked. Everybody knows that!
Complaining about why other people aren't as smart and as good and perceptive and tasteful as I am is one of life's greatest joys and most popular occupations. Why should we Catholics deprive ourselves of this amusement?
First, of all this was all over the news....and Freerepublic last September when they were arrested so it's pretty old news.
Second, why do you post so many articles about Catholics, some of very dubious quality, it seems to me that you seem to post more than any two Catholics combined.
I think you will find I post articles without regard to confession, yes, even my own.
Spoken like a true Catholic.
no comprehension that "vow" of celibacy is not a promise not to have sex,
I'll have to find this loophole at New Advent. I bet a lot of priests will be happy to hear.
LOL....but true. Our pastor wanted to errect a statue in the church of whomever was the patron saint of unsigned notes, since that was the only kind he got. And they weren't compliments on the assorment of doughnuts after Mass.
Sounds Clintonian to me.
That statement is COMPLETELY inaccurate!
Diocesan priests do not take a vow of poverty -- only chastity and obedience.
Being one of the people who "runs stuff", by which I mean "posts these kinds of news stories on Free Republic", I find that the "contempt you all share" has been anything but genial, and IMO it is anything but a "charming characteristic", unless you're also into bloodsports.
In my experience, Catholics by-and-large don't have a problem with having immoral priests. What they have are immeasurable problems with outsiders who tell them that they have immoral priests.
I.E. there aren't enough french crullers. IMO there can never be enough french crullers.
.We had our 50th reunion and there were many many people there. After the services, we had several hours of socializing, etc. Then the book keeper asked one of us where we had put the collection, and nobody really had done anything with it. We went back out in the main part of the church and there it was, sitting out in the open, with all kinds of kids and adults milling around, completely ignoring it. If God can't protect what is His in his own house then who can?
actually, there aren't enough fritters.
Let me get this right, dude...you're blowin' my mind.
You're saying that catholics don't like hierarchies nor those who run them.
Have I got that straight?
If so, then get with gamecock's PCAs. I think they're fairly decentralized. If not, then get with B-D's baptists. They are so decentralized that you can take your marbles and leave anytime you feel like it. My grandpa's SBC church would be SBC one year, and Independent the next depending on the convention in question.
the folks who run stuff? Oh do you mean "the little people"?
Krispy Kremes.
I am sure those where manna to the children of Israel.
We were at Stansted Airport (north of London) last November awaiting our flight back home after our annual England trip to eat Chinese food on Thanksgiving Day.
Anyway, we had 19 Pounds in coins (about $40) and banks won't allow you to exchange coins back into Dollars or Euros so we needed to spend it before boarding our flight back to Germany.
As I wandered around looking for a way to spend that change, I saw a Krispy Kreme stand. A dozen cost $24.00, and they weren't even hot! The entire family enjoyed them.
**If so, then get with gamecock's PCAs. I think they're fairly decentralized.**
You got that right Chappy.
If a local body doesn't like what the home office is doing, we don't send them money. Plus the local body owns the church.
Prevents the mischief seen in the PC(USA).
Surely there will be Krispy Kremes in heaven, and they'll always be hot.
My wife was on her way back from Slovakia a couple of summers ago (missions trip). In the Paris airport she bought a half dozen chocolate croissants for our (then 15-year-old) son. We met their bus at the church around midnight. She carried them all the way across the Atlantic. He ate them before we got back home.
The light will always be on!
Preach it brother.
In my experience, Catholics by-and-large don't have a problem with having immoral priests.
I know this is not your experience here on FR. If it is your experience outside this forum, then you do have very limited contact with Catholics. I strongly recommend that you become a frequent reader of such publications as, This Rock, Crisis, National Catholic Register and Catholic World Report. I think that you would take great comfort in knowing how stongly Catholics feel about the need for all of us to live moral lives, most especially those whose failures cause so much suffering, like our priests. Then I would ask you to join us in praying for all those who serve the Lord in a leadership position, especially pastors and priests. You know that Satan constantly attacking them.
see #33. Shoulda pinged ya
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