Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [84]
Teague had never heard a bishop speak so baldly about church finances.
Money was a source of gossip and folklore among clergy, most of it not good. Priests in religious orders, like Jesuits and Dominicans, take vows of poverty. Diocesan clergy take no such vows, but with modest salaries, a car, housing, health insurance, and presumed pensions, they lived with comforts. Teague knew clerics who traveled well, with money presumably from family or generous friends. Priests were expected to be prudent in handling a parish’s money. Pastors with large parishes had laypeople to handle bookkeeping, paying bills, and other jobs. But with all the cash washing through collection plates, money required vigilance. Teague knew a pastor who had been responsible for two parishes; he borrowed from the first to pay bills at the second, creating a mess at both ends. In Springfield, Bishop Marshall faced other thorny problems. An accountant pilfered from a parish’s fund for staff Social Security taxes. Another pastor renovated his rectory with funds reserved for cemetery maintenance. Marshall intervened in both situations; he saw that the taxes were paid.
Financial deceptions to race the blood of a dying bishop have come out in the open. Reform groups like Voice of the Faithful clamor for financial transparency; many bishops treat VOTF as enemies, alienating the kind of diligent Catholics that a diocese needs.
Bishop Marshall’s admonition about money took on heightened meaning after the next bishop sent Father Teague to St. Brigid in Amherst. “The parish was bleeding money,” Teague told me. “A lot of renovation had been done to the interior of the church. Our income was about three thousand a week. I had been a college chaplain and knew nothing about running budgets. This was in 1996. We suddenly had a termite problem that needed attention—you’d be surprised, Amherst has a large termite population. Then the boilers started to go out, and right before Christmas a new boiler broke. My predecessor had raised a lot of money and left $100,000 in a surplus fund. But we had an old accounting system: there was no debt listed on the books. The window washer came to me at Christmas, he hadn’t been paid. A guy doing repairs on the organ was owed $1,000. All of a sudden a lot of bills were coming due … I thought my treasurer was handling everything. When I went through St. John Seminary in Boston, we never had an accounting course.”
Catholic cemeteries sell a service called perpetual care, which guarantees the tending of a plot beyond the life of a family. Teague said that in his parish, which had a cemetery, “We couldn’t say for sure where everyone was buried. The caretaker dropped dead at fifty and left no records of who was where. So a former schoolteacher came in and did dogged research with funeral directors.”
He paused. “You know, at one time being a pastor was like a sinecure. Older priests talk of the pastor taking the Christmas and Easter collections and dividing it five ways with the assistant priests. My home parish was built and paid off during the Depression. Cardinal Cushing wanted to take excess money from the parish to build new ones in the suburbs. My grandfather and a few others went to Cushing and said, Over our dead bodies. It’s so different today, with not enough priests to staff the parishes. Fund-raising is hard.”
As the bills mounted against the chaotic record keeping he had inherited, Teague installed a software accounting system. “Only then did we realize what trouble we were in.” The parish owed the diocese $100,000 in assessments to the chancery office, which is not quite like dodging the IRS. For Teague, the unpaid assessments masked a larger problem. St. Brigid was not a poor parish. “But it reached the point where we couldn’t meet payroll. I had to let go of some people. I made a lot of enemies.”
“But you walked into a quagmire,” I countered. Teague nodded. “My predecessor