Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [4]
Since 1995 the bishops have closed 1,373 churches—more than one parish per week for fifteen years. As new parishes go up in suburbs, many old enclaves of Irish, Italian, and East European immigrants turn into ghettos.18 As the European ethnics found more affluent environs, poor people of color moved into streets on a downward spiral. Cavernous churches face steep maintenance costs; parish schools are put to other uses. If a grim inevitability drives some church sales, few bishops relish abandoning at-risk neighborhoods where churches historically served as anchors for poor people in a hard struggle to keep afloat.
In every diocese, the parishes pay an assessment charge to the bishop, a fee of between 5 and 15 percent of the collection, based on revenue stream, operating costs, and ability to pay. Wealthier parishes pay more. The fee (which has a Latin name, cathedraticum) is a tax the parish pays the diocese. In this realm, the bishop is both tax collector and central banker. The diocese pools the assessment fees to earn interest; when a parish falls behind on payment, the bishop can charge interest for the late charges. He can devise ways for wealthier parishes to cover costs for poorer parishes. He can forgive poor parishes’ assessment debts or charge interest until they are paid up. He can lend money to parishes for their projects at interest. He can send funds to other dioceses or foreign countries for causes he supports. The bishop also raises money for capital campaigns as suburbs expand or structures face renovation.
On becoming a bishop, a man—or his diocese—pays a fee to the Vatican called the taxa. “The amount varies according to the size of a diocese,” explains Tom Doyle, a Dominican on leave from the priesthood who served as a canon lawyer at the Vatican embassy in the early 1980s. “I remember when Joe Bernardin of Chicago was made a cardinal, the taxa was $6,000. I thought Chicago got a good deal on that one.”
These days, many dioceses have turned to the bond market to reconsolidate debt and for building projects. “Investors increasingly view the collection plate as a reliable source of cash flow,” James Freeman wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Church debt, which is increasingly packaged and sold as bond, has even offered sanctuary from otherwise turbulent credit markets.”19
The bishop historically stands as a protector of immigrants and the poor, a role many hierarchs handle for the betterment of church and society. Cardinals are called Princes of the Church; each bishop functions as a prince of his own realm. In a monarchical power structure, money is a story of personality, how a given bishop tends to the infrastructure, funds, property, investments, social service programs, and parish life. But regardless of how they do the job, bishops are largely unaccountable for their decisions. The Vatican occasionally removes an incompetent bishop, but unless a hierarch speaks against dogma, he operates with little oversight. In the late 1990s Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia spent $5 million renovating an archdiocesan-owned vacation home on the New Jersey shore, his residence in Philadelphia, and three office buildings. Meanwhile, he closed fifteen inner-city parishes that had a combined deficit of $1.2 million. “Bevilacqua spent the approximately $5 million without making the expenditures public, bypassing his own advisers on some projects,” wrote Ralph Cipriano in a National Catholic Reporter investigation.
In one instance archdiocesan officials failed to notify city officials about renovations at archdiocesan headquarters, in violation of city law.
In contrast to his public style, Bevilacqua is remote in his private life. He reportedly