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.
They bow to them and kiss their rings and robes. They quote them (church fathers) endlessly as if they were Scripture themselves. They kneel to them and ask for their forgiveness. They believe those in power are one giant step above themselves between heaven and earth.
No, they ADORE folks who run stuff.
Took the words right out of my mouth, uh, keyboard...
You know what I mean.
I guess the allure is to rise in rthe heirarchy to where you can look down on others with amusement. And they kowtow to you. Anyway, that's the impression.
Your experience? As an outsider?
We -- by-and-large -- have an aversion to washing our dirty laundry in front of hostile strangers.
We also have an aversion to immoral priests. On the other hand, one might well expect priests to have an aversion to immoral laypeople ... but, then again (remember that total depravity business), is there another kind? And, then again, some priests are better than others, but every one of them is a sinner ... like me.
Do you guys have an aversion to immoral ministers? Do you know of another kind?
"All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God."
At least, last time I checked. Maybe Protestant clergy are the exception, but I doubt it.
**We -- by-and-large -- have an aversion to washing our dirty laundry in front of hostile stranger**
Which is exactly why there is a, shall we say, large amount of suspicion by the Proddies? What came first, the shuffling of immoral priests or the hostile strangers?"
**Do you guys have an aversion to immoral ministers?**
We have an aversion to someone latently, unrepentant, occupying the pulpit. But our goal is not to hide what he has done and move him to another church, but to restore him.
***remember that total depravity business***
Wait just a minute! Are you a Jansenist?
Just FYI, canon law (canon 537, to be exact) requires a parish to set up a (lay) financial committee, to oversee the finances of the parish in cooperation with the pastor.
Most dioceses (not clear if this is requirement of canon law or not) require periodic (annual, at least) financial reports from each parish.
The priest in question is a thief, and the bishop is falling down on the job. And what of the parish financial committee?
The hostile strangers first appear in the Gospels, I think.
Wait just a minute! Are you a Jansenist?
No, but you're a Calvinist. Don't you believe your own doctrine?
You just did Mother Angelica proud.
My point is that this is without question an area where Rome (yes, big bad Rome, the focus of evil in the post-Reformation world, that Rome) intends and in fact requires laypeople to exercise responsibility and oversight in parishes.
And if they don't, and the bishop doesn't exercise his responsibility either ... the cat ends up in the chickencoop.
"We -- by-and-large -- have an aversion to washing our dirty laundry in front of hostile strangers."
Amen.
Especially hostile strangers who seem strangely uninterested in their own perverted ministers.
"We also have an aversion to immoral priests. On the other hand, one might well expect priests to have an aversion to immoral laypeople ... but, then again (remember that total depravity business), is there another kind? And, then again, some priests are better than others, but every one of them is a sinner ... like me."
Again...amen.
All the catholics I know are outraged at the immorality of the child abusers.
If there is one common complaint I see is that the media seems bent on covering cathoic scandal, but is indifferent to the scandal in the schools.
But whoever said life is fair?
***Especially hostile strangers who seem strangely uninterested in their own perverted ministers.***
Example please.
Imagine for a moment that the Pope, Spurgeon and Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer all went to the marketplace as unknowns to buy apples. All the people would bow down to the pope because of his robes,and the Rabbi and Spurgeon would be treated as everyone else, since they went about dressed as ordinary folks. Fancy robes and titles are the rewards of this lifetime, not in heaven.
So if D. James Kennedy went along, dressed in the usual academic robe he wears when he preaches, would everyone bow down to him, too?
This is just silly.
***would everyone bow down to him, too?***
Nope. And if they did he would pick them up.
Yes they probably would, for that is the purpose of the things.
Kinda blows away the idea that people "bow down" to the Pope because of his clothing, then.
People "bow down" to kings and queens, too, but I guess that must be an exception to the "robes == bowing" rule.
Bowing down to a religious figurehead is wrong on so many levels.
lol, I'm of a different congregation, the only robed figure I've ever been around once was a woman of the Anglicans, who wore a white robe with a spotlight on her. I thought I was getting ready to be beamed up with Aimee Semple McPherson
I love this!
Somebody puts up a thread evidently intended (as subsequent remarks show) to offend Catholics. The remark is made, entirely without foundation in fact as a few minutes research right hereon Free Republic would show (hint: "SSPX" do a search) that Catholics keep on insisting that Rome is perfect. I jocularly point out the FACT of my EXPERIENCE that RCs are always dissing the hierarchy, and you decide i'm talking about you.
Carry on. Don't let reality interfere with your sense of injured innocence. Go ahead and cry. You'll feel better, maybe even well enough to read what I wrote BEFORE you respond to it next time.
Thank you for your opinion, which is all that that is.
2 Samuel 9, verse 6. Recall that David is "a man after God's own heart".
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