Render Unto Rome (2 page)

With 1.2 billion members, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest organization in the world, the most populous single entity that operates nearly everywhere. It is also a vastly decentralized church, with power invested in individual bishops. No matter how much a bishop relies on advisory boards or staff, his authority looks to Rome. Each bishop answers to the pope through officials in the Roman Curia. Few Catholics questioned this monarchical arrangement until the bishops’ strategies to conceal sexual abuse unraveled in lawsuits, allowing the press to expose a netherworld of pathological secrecy.

“I’m constantly amazed by how little information some dioceses have on their finances,” Patrick Schiltz, the dean of the University of St. Thomas Law School in St. Paul, Minnesota, told the
New York Times
in 2002. “They are like mom-and-pop operations.”
⁶
Schiltz has since become a federal judge. Words like that from a legal scholar who had done defense work for dioceses in abuse cases hinted at a deeper dissatisfaction shared by many prominent Catholics.

“The church should open up its books,” Erica P. John, an heir to the Miller brewing fortune and a major philanthropist, also told the
Times
. “We want transparency.”
⁷
A family foundation established by John’s late husband had been a bedrock supporter of Milwaukee’s archdiocese when she discovered, in May 2002, that Archbishop Rembert Weakland had used $450,000 in church funds in 1998 to pay off a disgruntled male lover from years before.
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Weakland was closing parishes at the time, citing a need for fiscal pragmatism, while his lawyers negotiated the secret settlement; he was also steering $1.5 million to Rome for an endowed chair in
social teaching in his name at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and a $500,000 chair in liturgy and music, courtesy of an archdiocesan fund that relied on the John family foundation.
⁹
In a 2009 memoir, Weakland noted: “I knew that people’s allegiance was primarily to the parish: their Catholicism was identified with it. The closing or merging of parishes would almost certainly reduce the number of practicing Catholics.”
¹⁰
Weakland, who had a remarkable history of recycling child molesters, commissioned a $100,000 bronze relief for Milwaukee’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist that gave honor to Saint John, Saint Anne, and himself.

The celibacy law, which any pope could make optional, has become an expensive 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 Church in America is undergoing the most massive downsizing in its history. A religious infrastructure built up over the century between the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy is liquidating assets at a startling pace. Abuse cases alone do not
explain the “national fire sale” of bishops selling churches, to quote a notable critic, Peter Borré.

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.
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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 has lived alone in a 30-room, stone-clad Victorian villa that serves as the archbishop’s official residence … with interior decorating, brass rails, Queen Anne chairs, gilt-edged mirrors, tasteful floral and pink draperies, pink brocade couches, poster beds with matching drapes and valances, brass chandeliers, brass sconces and polished stone statues of Italian greyhounds.
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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.”
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T
HE 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.
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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.
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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.