Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [5]
People in the pews had no role in choosing Bevilacqua. The Vatican and other bishops did. Nor, as laypeople learned during Philadelphia’s particularly harsh abuse crisis, could they remove him. Only the pope or a prosecutor could do that. The district attorney guided a lengthy investigation by a criminal grand jury in 2004–2005, which finally decided that Pennsylvania statutes did not support a prosecution of Bevilacqua for concealing pedophiles—the time frame was too far in the past. The 2005 grand jury report noted that the cardinal had a law degree: “What makes these actions all the worse, the grand jurors believe, is that the abuses that Cardinal Bevilacqua and his aides allowed children to suffer—the molestations, the rapes, the lifelong shame and despair—did not result from failures or lapses, except of the moral variety. They were made possible by purposeful decisions, carefully implemented policies and calculated indifference.”21
THE EMBEZZLEMENT DILEMMA
Catholics historically function in a culture of passivity, a mentality of pray, pay, obey that assumes that donations and decisions entrusted to ecclesial officials are executed for “the good of the church.” That timeworn term is elastic with irony. As Catholics we know too little about how well, or poorly, bishops and religious leaders manage the money we give and the larger sphere of church assets. The world’s largest organization is governed as a monarchy with no inherent structure for accountability, nor a true system of justice. Theft and embezzlements by American priests and lay workers account for substantial losses. Professor Charles E. Zech, an economist at Villanova University and director of the Center for the Study of Church Management, coauthored a report in which 85 percent of dioceses responding to the survey acknowledged having funds stolen. Eleven percent of the reported cases exceeded $500,000 in losses.22
In 2009, for example, a jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, convicted the Reverend Francis Guinan, age sixty-six, of grand theft after hearing testimony about how he took funds over many years from his parish, St. Vincent Ferrer. The judge sentenced Guinan to four years in prison. The assistant pastor, John Skehan, drew fourteen months after a guilty plea in which he promised to make $780,000 in restitution.23 The two Irish-born clerics used church funds on expensive vacations, girlfriends, and lavish living. Dozens of cases of priests or lay workers who have stolen church funds have been reported in the American press. It is a problem that affects other denominations, too. In the reports on Catholic cases, one rarely reads of the priests being defrocked.
Consider Monsignor John Woolsey, an ousted pastor on Manhattan’s Upper East Side who in 2006 agreed to a guilty plea of grand larceny for stealing more than $50,000 from parish funds. Prosecutors contended that Woolsey had stolen more than $800,000 in the previous seven years. The parish, Church of St. John the Martyr, sued its Travelers Crime Plus policy for denying its claim of $1.2 million in losses from Woolsey’s theft. Woolsey spent a year in prison. Upon his release, a spokesman for the New York archdiocese said, “We will have to sit down with Msgr. Woolsey to discuss his future with him.”24
Such news reports, and the Villanova study findings, did not surprise Michael W. Ryan, a retired U.S. Postal Inspection Service manager who for years conducted field audits to ensure the integrity of post offices’ accounting systems. Across two decades, Ryan, a rock-ribbed Catholic and father of five, patiently wrote to bishops, cardinals, and the USCCB, proposing a plan to safeguard the collection plates. The bishops avoided