Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [6]
“Assuming Sunday collection embezzlements are ongoing at 10 percent of the approximately 17,900 parishes at any given time,” states Ryan, “the average parish loss falls somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 per week, or roughly $50,000 per year. That computes to an annual loss of about $90 million solely attributable to Sunday collection embezzlements.” If one accepts Ryan’s theory, it would mean that in roughly the same time span in which sex abuse cases cost the church $1.775 billion, the loss from embezzlement and theft by priests or lay staff was $2.16 billion.25 Ryan’s figures are raw estimates. Joseph Harris, who demands hard data, scoffs at them. But on this issue, Ryan has good company.
Leon Panetta, the Obama administration’s CIA director (and President Clinton’s former chief of staff), served from 2002 to 2004 on the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People, composed of prominent lay Catholics who were chosen by the bishops’ conference to research the abuse crisis and advise on reform procedures. Panetta has called for outside oversight of parish finances. “They’ve got to be able to move into the 21st century,” he told USA Today, “and begin to apply some management practices that can help insure that they protect the trust of their parishioners.”26
Terence McKiernan, a director of BishopAccountability.org, the library and online archive of the Catholic Church crisis, has tabulated intrachurch theft losses in press reports of sixty-nine cases, amounting to $38.5 million, based on indictments, convictions, and civil actions. In many reports, prosecutors allege a greater amount of embezzled funds. When those figures are added, the total leaps to $81.5 million. How much of that was recouped by insurance, and at what cost to premiums, we do not know. “Reported losses,” says McKiernan, “are a fraction of the total. We’re dealing with an unaudited, cash-based system. The great majority of theft goes unreported in parishes, dioceses, and institutions run by religious orders. The same organizational problems that make theft possible in the first place make it difficult to detect. The general terms of the Villanova study show from another perspective that it is impossible to count the funds embezzled each year.”
“The complex that bishops have as the authority is that no one can give them constructive criticism,” explains Mike Ryan. “I think the primary reason they refuse to accept and act on the need to safeguard Sunday collection funds is that they were pastors, back when, and they know that all hell will break loose if they change the present system where Father has access to a little ‘walking around money’ before the funds are deposited in the bank.”
“Many priests and parishioners would not consider ‘walking around money’ to be theft,” adds McKiernan. As Ryan points out, if funds are accurately deposited, a priest can write checks to cash. The parish finance council will monitor the accounts, with special focus on the cash account. The weekly collection should always be counted in the presence of two people with the total collection matching the amount that is deposited in the bank and shown on the deposit slip. For many years the bishops claimed that they could not impose binding standards for the removal of child molesters because every bishop was autonomous. They changed their position in 2002, adopting a youth protection charter. The same could be done with a policy to safeguard the collection plates. Were that to happen, argues Ryan, dioceses would see a surge of income. Alternatively, as McKiernan states, “losses can go unnoticed for decades.”
When the losses spotlighted in the BishopAccountability.org database are weighed against the financial management of religious order provinces, the situation is more serious. In Philadelphia, a religious order’s finances were as vulnerable to theft as those of a diocese. The Reverend Charles Newman, OFM, was charged by a county