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By Root 1363 0

yoke on the church. Since the 1960s many more men have left the priesthood than entered, most of them to marry; the priesthood has also acquired a vast gay subculture. The number of seminarians has plunged by 85 percent. One-fifth of America’s 17,958 parishes have no priest. A key rationale in the eleventh-century papacy’s imposition of celibacy was to prevent the children of priests and bishops from creating dynasties; the church was trying to secure its territories and a role for its legal system in European society. Ending clerical marriage was “an essential precondition for the liberation of Church property from lay control,” writes the historian James A. Brundage.11 Today, bishops have liquidated assets at a numbing pace to pay victims of priests who should have been prosecuted but mostly went to expensive treatment centers.

In the 1950s, the ratio of priest to parishioners was 1 to 650; today, it is 1 to 1,600.12 Most priests strive to give the Gospel meaning in their parishioners’ lives. They are also the parish fund-raisers; the priest shortage has escalated financial pressures and losses. Pastors rely on lay staff, many of whom have families and real salary needs, unlike priests and nuns of yesteryear.

A true financial profile of the church is elusive. Few dioceses post complete financial statements, nor does the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which has a large building and staff in Washington, D.C. In 2002 the USCCB released a report that calculated $5.6 billion from Sunday collections, and all parish revenues of $7.6 billion.13 Financial analyst Joseph Claude Harris, author of The Cost of Catholic Parishes and Schools, has studied the available figures on Sunday giving from people like Rose Mary Piper. “The largest church in the world has no definitive data on its American collection yield,” states Harris. “A complete portrait of church financials would include all revenues and expenses. We have only a portion. Maybe there isn’t a big demand. If every bishop wanted the information, the USCCB would do it.”14

Harris revised the 2002 Sunday collection figures, using updated metrics on the number of U.S. Catholic households. For 2002, the year the abuse scandal became a national media narrative, he calculated the Sunday collections at $6.102 billion. In 2003, as the scandal coverage worsened, the weekly contribution rose by $38 million, to $6.140 billion. In 2004 there was an increase of $207 million to $6.347 billion. In 2005 the giving rose by another $194 million, reaching $6.541 billion. And for 2006, the last year for which Harris has data, he tallied an even greater jump, of $441 million, to $6.982 billion.15

An escalation of $880 million to the Sunday baskets during the worst religious scandal in American history is a testament to Catholics’ faith “in the church”—but not in its power structure. A USA Today poll in June 2002 found that 89 percent of Catholics thought that a bishop who recycled a pedophile should be removed. Apart from Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, few complicit bishops “stepped down.” The increase in donations (in cash and other assets) suggests that Catholics looked past guilty bishops to support parishes and programs they wanted to preserve. But the abuse crisis was unrelenting.

Between 1950 and 2002 the church paid $353 million in victim settlements, legal defense, therapy for victims, and treatment for perpetrators, according to a study commissioned by the bishops. Insurance carriers paid $218.5 million, for a combined cost of $571.5 million.16 The chain reaction of reporting ignited by the Boston Globe in 2002 caused many more victims to seek redress. Church expenses for 2002 through 2009 were $1.42 billion. The total cost (including priests’ treatment) from 1950 through 2009 was $1.775 billion. The average annual loss (or expense) for the most recent seven-year period was $203 million.17

How does an organization recover from losses of this magnitude?

The short answer is by selling property; the long answer is through deficit financing.

The Roman Catholic