{"id":3663,"date":"2007-01-05T10:11:41","date_gmt":"2007-01-05T10:11:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/embezzlement.html"},"modified":"2007-01-05T10:11:41","modified_gmt":"2007-01-05T10:11:41","slug":"embezzlement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/embezzlement.html","title":{"rendered":"Embezzlement"},"content":{"rendered":"

For years, folks have been saying that the next big RC scandal would be financial. Today, the NYTimes reported on a study from some Villanova University researchers hinting at the wide scope of the problem:<\/a><\/p>\n

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A survey by researchers at Villanova University<\/span><\/a> has found that 85 percent of Roman Catholic dioceses that responded had discovered embezzlement of church money in the last five years, with 11 percent reporting that more than $500,000 had been stolen. <\/p>\n

The Catholic Church has some of the most rigorous financial guidelines of any denomination, specialists in church ethics said, but the survey found that the guidelines were often ignored in parishes. And when no one is looking, the cash that goes into the collection plate does not always get deposited into the church\u2019s bank account. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I would actually question the first sentence of the second paragraph. There are no "Catholic Church" financial guidelines, since it handled on a diocese-by-diocese basis, and honestly, the rest of the article lends no support to that sentence. I really don’t know what it means. Yes, on paper, every parish is to have a finance council (it is required by Canon Law, as opposed to say, a Parish Pastoral Council, which is not), but diocesean regs vary widely, and external auditing of parishes is a rarity. The oversight is even worse. We’ve seen over and over again that while dioceses might have regulations about how collections are to be counted and reported, they have been regularly flouted by determined clerical and lay thieves, with too often concerned people – again, sometimes lay, sometimes other priests – being brushed off by diocesan officials. Not always, obviously, but too often. <\/p>\n

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Canon law requires each parish to have a finance council to provide oversight. But Bishop Schnurr, who heads the diocese in Duluth, Minn., said there were no standards for how finance council members were chosen or whether they should have any expertise in accounting or finance. <\/p>\n

Only 3 percent of the dioceses said they annually conducted an internal audit of their parishes, and 21 percent said they seldom or never audited parishes, the survey found.<\/p>\n

This lack of scrutiny is at the core of the problem, said Francis J. Butler, president of Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities, a nonprofit organization independent of the church.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re taking a lot of risk,\u201d Mr. Butler said, \u201cand these days the church cannot afford to take these kinds of risks.\u201d <\/p>\n

Bishop Schnurr said the study\u2019s findings on lack of parish oversight contradicted his experience. But both he and Kenneth W. Korotky, chief financial officer for the bishops\u2019 conference, said a committee could soon consider writing guidelines for the composition of parish finance councils and how often dioceses should audit parishes. <\/p>\n

But they cautioned that the bishops\u2019 conference could not make guidelines mandatory, because each bishop was in charge of administering his own diocese.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Villanova study is here.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For years, folks have been saying that the next big RC scandal would be financial. Today, the NYTimes reported on a study from some Villanova University researchers hinting at the wide scope of the problem: A survey by researchers at Villanova University has found that 85 percent of Roman Catholic dioceses that responded had discovered…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nEmbezzlement - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/embezzlement.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Embezzlement - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For years, folks have been saying that the next big RC scandal would be financial. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3663\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}