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The Catholic Church’s financial convulsions are another take on the spoils of deregulation, but the church fisc was never regulated much to begin with. The Vatican Bank is not included in the Holy See’s financial statements. How much of Peter’s Pence actually goes to the needy is a mystery. So is Allied Irish Bank’s role in American dioceses that struggled to pay abuse settlements. Was AIB a pass-through for Vatican funds to help certain dioceses while others had no such advantage?

Politics is the movement of money. Every system has its players. The Vatican deemed Cardinal Sodano a descendant of Jesus’s apostles. Certain congregations were his to manipulate for Maciel and Follieri. The scheme in which Follieri routed at least $387,300 to the Vatican Bank would have destroyed Sodano’s career in a democracy, if not sent him to prison. Follieri pleaded guilty to money laundering in New York. How did the money circulate after it entered the Vatican Bank? Was it, in a legal sense, laundered? Stepping down as secretary of state, Sodano became dean of the College of Cardinals.

The church financial system resembles a constellation of medieval fiefdoms in which each bishop manages his fisc ideally to serve his people but with an eye riveted on Rome. Few dioceses subject their finances to robust auditing. Every five years the bishop sends a secret statement to the Vatican, which has scant interest in “transparency.” The culture of passivity by which most Catholics receive the sacraments and give their dollars is a bedrock. As long as the people ask no questions about their money, the bishop can ban reformers from church grounds. The issue is not faith but fear that people might see where the money goes.

The beatification ceremony of John Paul II slated for May 2011 was an ironic way of avoiding that pope’s call for “the purification of memory.” Why beatify a pope whose faith in Maciel and myopia on the abuse crisis left a trail of human wreckage? The rush to spectacle cannot airbrush facts from history.

The Catholic Church’s great problem is structural mendacity, institutionalized lying. The church that fosters Christian witness through the values of peace and reaching out to the world’s poor is also saddled with bishops who, like Father Maciel’s Legionaries, cannot criticize their cardinals, and with cardinals who fail to uphold the human rights of children. Under heavy media pressure, the U.S. bishops in 2002 adopted a youth protection charter. “In 1985 I didn’t know anyone else who had been molested by a priest,” says Barbara Blaine, the founder of SNAP. “Today, bishops have removed hundreds of predators from ministry. Survivors who speak up are more likely to be believed and to receive sympathy from parishioners and compassion from church officials. Secrecy is still a top priority for bishops; but the church has safe-touch programs for children. Teachers and lay workers are taught to report inappropriate behavior. The climate is safer for children and better for survivors who report abuse.” Yet, as Blaine points out, the hierarchy’s concealment of perpetrators is still a reality. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, three years after the youth charter was adopted, put an accused pedophile back in ministry over warnings from his advisory board. The priest reoffended, went to jail, the archdiocese paid heavily to the victims—and Cardinal George was elected president of the USCCB.1

Rewarding failure is so embedded in the good old boy culture of the ecclesial princes as to suggest that bishops think the church will always be rich. Demographics do not bode well for maintaining double standards. A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey found that Catholicism is still America’s largest single religion—about 25 percent of the population identify themselves as Catholic—but the numbers are in decline. The second-largest cohort polled, at 10 percent, consisted of ex-Catholics, people who left the church.2 The monetary losses in the Boston archdiocese with so many believers gone may be seen as a worst