The Bottom Line

...This is not to say that Catholics care more about money than about clerical sexual abuse...

...Also, "the diocesan tax, which they are trying to avoid, is often based on parish income and therefore, the less reported the better for the parish...

...I don't know that we're seeCommonweal I I February 13, 2004 ing a growing uniformity," he said...

...Combine that with the various government grants the church receives for other projects, and one quickly realizes that dioceses today are sprawling, multitiered corporations that often have annual budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars...

...Despite this size and complexity, there is no mechanism in place for publicly ac-counting for these monies, or for doing so in a way that is remotely intelligible to the average parishioner...

...The problem is that while the scandal has prompted the bishops to take unprecedented—some would say draconian—steps to halt sexual abuse in the future, few practical steps have been taken to make the church more financially transparent...

...Although these are all useful first steps, they remain ad hoc efforts with nothing to compel compliance except the heat of scandal and the good will of the particular bishop...

...Just as important as releasing financial data is doing so in a manner that is consistent with "full disclosure...

...Not only will the report detail the number of priests accused of abusing minors and the number of victims over fifty years, it will also put an overall price tag on the debacle...

...Still, Korotky questions whether there could ever be a onesize-fits-all financial statement...

...Opening the church's books involves no change in doctrine or theology, and the bishop or pastor would still have the final say on how diocesan or parish funds are spent...

...Polls consistently show that eight in ten Catholics rate church financial reform as a top concern...

...t is often noted that, as in few other places, money is fungible in religious organizations—and Catholics today are dealing in serious money...

...The first is to define the problem...

...A 1986 study re-ported that some 70 percent of dioceses released financial reports, but even that level of openness has slipped since...

...Concern over the lack of transparency was already troubling some in the bishops' conference before the scandal broke: in November 2001—three months before the first abuse stories from Boston—the bishops tried to come up with a policy that would prove more effective than the earlier statements on financial accountability they had approved dating back to 1971...

...David Gibson he release later this month of a much-anticipated survey quantifying a half-century of clergy sexual abuse of minors is sure to be another blow to American Catholics, even as it serves as a necessary purgative for a lingering crisis that surfaced more than two years ago...

...Catholics continue to give to their church at rates far below those of other faiths, donating about 1 percent of their incomes to the church versus almost twice that for other Christians...

...Clearly one of the byproducts of the sexual-abuse scan-dal is the recognition that the church needs to be financially accountable, and that's not going to go away," " said Charles Zech, an economics professor at Villanova University and David Gibson is author of The Corning Catholic Church (Harper-SanFrancisco...

...Additionally, since the conference does not compile that information, it is not known whether any of the bishops have been following the guidelines...

...It is not just having yearly statements, but it has to be a real attempt to have information in place to make it understandable," said Zech, the Villanova economics professor...

...Ideally that would be undertaken by, or in collaboration with, the bishops' conference, perhaps along the lines of the National Lay Review Board...

...Fortunately, most bishops have judged it so, and studies indicate that more than 95 percent of parishes have a pastoral council to help the priest set mission priorities and carry them out...

...The bishops' conference itself releases detailed financial statements, and the bishops care-fully scrutinize, in public session, the conference's budget...

...Catholics, who for the past two years have often focused their fury on the enormous amount of money, much of it supplied by lay people, paid out to cover up cases of abuse...

...Yet the resolution before the conference was not especially rigorous...

...The bishop himself is often clueless about True North 'Every mile is two in winter.' Herbert One's mind has changed in five London winters and their half-light, wearing no more than a coat, blood thinner again to behold a January sun's pale reflection, and trees that run black, ragged in last leaves, with rain...

...So no one knows what the parish across town, or anywhere else, is doing...

...Rather, the fact is that aside from donating money, Catholics feel virtually powerless to affect the course of events within their church, and the scandal revealed that those donations had been used in ways that wound up subverting, rather than building up, the church...

...Finally, while the information gathering could be accom-plished by a private foundation or university-based researchers, eventually some mechanism for national oversight and re-porting is essential...

...In June 2003, for example, the Philadelphia archdiocese issued a financial statement detailing expenditures of $334,449,037, and reporting a $7 million deficit that it chalked up to investments that were "negatively impacted by the financially challenging times...

...Too often there is a lack of detail and frankly a lack of respect for Catholic lay people, who are very well educated and deserve to know what is going on...

...In a wise effort to prepare his audience for the bad news, Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and prime mover behind the report, has warned that the total number of priests and victims tallied in the report will be "startling" and "painful...

...Ignorance is bliss, but the price is steep...

...There are, however, a number of relatively simple steps that could quickly and effectively improve the situation...

...This is not just about the laity looking over the Commonweal I 0 February 13, 2004 pastor's shoulder...

...Similarly, there must be a survey of the dioceses to deter-mine the number and quality of diocesan finance councils, whether they release regular financial statements, and how those statements are prepared...

...So as to keep damp from seeping into our bones as rain drops and the land soaks a city shoe, at nightfall we'll watch branches like new roots reaching through the wind, and later listen, bodies together beside paired empty boots, only for something of the life to come...

...One church official I spoke with estimated that in recentto "consider some advertentia, that is, helping bishops pay attention to the law of the church and confirming that each is doing so...

...A lack of trust has now been added to that mix thanks to the abuse scandal...

...A failure to reform the church's financial policies would present an enormous risk to lay morale at a time when the credibility of the institutional church is at an all-time low...

...Every finance council struggles out there on its own," says Mark Fischer, a professor of pastoral theology at St...

...John's Seminary in Los Angeles and a leading expert on pastoral councils...

...Under the pressure of scandal, other dioceses are also be-ginning to release financial statements...

...Others argue that comprehensible disclosure is not all that difficult, and that whatever the hurdles, they must be over-come if the hierarchy is to regain its credibility...

...Finally made bare, the valley beyond appeared, balanced between drained light and shadow on the banks of the hidden, slowturning Avon...

...In fact, there isn't even a means to gauge how many dioceses reveal their finances on a regular basis...

...The voluntary system of "fraternal support" that the bishops finally adopted did nothing to infringe upon the time-honored authority of each bishop, nor did it ensure much openness...

...Commonweal 13 February 13, 2004...

...The 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People adopted in Dallas bound bishops not to sign confidentiality agreements with victims (except for "grave and substantial reasons brought forward by the victim/survivor"), yet everything else about diocesan and parish finances remains as obscure to most Catholics as the rubrics of the Tridentine Mass...

...Ken Korotky, chief financial officer for the USCCB, told me that he sees a trend toward transparency and comprehensible annual statements...

...Indeed, an official of one East Coast diocese told me of a burgeoning immigrant parish that was struggling financially and continually asking for leniency from the diocese, which was patient...

...Contrary to widespread assumptions, the lack of data about parish finances concerns not only the folks in the pew...

...Parish finance councils, on the other hand, are mandated by church law (canons 537 and 1284...

...Although a number of factors contribute to this phenomenon, the lack of a "sense of ownership" in the church is chief among them...

...Still, with-out a systematic effort to promote and ensure transparency, credibility will remain elusive, and malfeasance will remain a regular temptation...

...dioceses were releasing annual statements...

...In all likelihood there will be no universal template for diocesan statements, but they could all comply with a certain set of standards for intelligibility...

...They're all separate little corporations...

...The changes necessary to reverse the church's closed-door mentality on financial matters need not entail a radical revision of church structures or a return to the divisive nineteenth-century battles over "trusteeism...

...Each diocese is so different in terms of the way it is set up legally and financially...

...Right now it is hit-and-miss...

...Zech estimates that two-thirds of parishes nationwide have finance councils, but many of these may exist in name only...

...Yet the February 27 survey of most of the nation's 195 dioceses, produced by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, will also reinforce the fact that the scandal has two interconnected natures—one sexual, the other financial...

...The sexual-abuse scandal is offering the church's leadership a chance to reform Catholicism's dysfunctional financial culture...

...It is instructive to note that in the Hart-ford Seminary's comprehensive 2000 survey of American congregational life, Catholics voiced the highest levels of satisfaction of any denomination with their parish communities...

...Darius Victor Snieckus Commonweal I 2 February 13, 2004 the budgets of his parishes...

...Then one day the parish announced that it wanted to build a new church, and when asked how it intended to finance it, produced a bank account with several million dollars in collected donations...

...It would be like saying GM should look exactly like your neighborhood Wal-Mart...

...from Saturday Morning IV Through an upstairs window on the southeast side of the house, you could see the last of the tree's maroon leaves had found its own peace impaled among thorns or flat on the lowest ground...

...Lay Catholics—liberal, conservative, and inbetween—could become truly involved in the day-to-day life of the church, and their greater "investment" could lead to greater returns in the form of higher donations...

...And it sought to do so in a "collegial manner while at the same time respecting the principle of subsidiarity and the desire not to burden any person or office with unrealistic responsibility that might encroach on the legitimate rights of a diocesan bishop to manage his diocese...

...Some believe the bill could approach or even surpass the billion-dollar benchmark that has been floated by the hierarchy's toughest critics...

...Reports that surfaced in connection with the sexual-abuse scandal gave anecdotal evidence that canon law is not being observed well or uniformly...

...years as few as twenty of the nearly two hundred U.S...

...The danger is that in the wake of the release of the February 27 report on sexual abuse, the attentiveness of scandal-weary Catholics will begin to falter...

...With the laity (and priests as well) often ill-prepared for the workings of parish governance, and with individual finance councils operating in virtual isolation, it is vital to pro-vide how-to guides for laypeople who want to have a voice in the running of their parish...

...This is a glaring oversight that undermines the ability of lay people to become involved in their church, and of bishops to reassure the faithful that they are being good stewards...

...The short day grown late reveals you in your gloam: still life of a man with bathtub and sink as seen through dusk-blind glass, pen and ink...

...Just as important, both conservatives and liberals agree on this issue, making it one of the rare areas of convergence in a polarized church...

...It is an odd situation...

...Catholics are now focusing on fiscal accountability as a priority in restoring trust in the church...

...he financial situation is even murkier in the nation's nineteen thousand parishes...

...Pastors can appoint whomever they like to a council, and in some places the councils just act as rubber stamps for the pastor's decisions...

...This is not a zero-sum equation...

...True, it is another challenge for a church already facing a number of hurdles, but reform is surely better than enduring another scandal...

...For example, when asked if their congregation had experienced "any disagreements or conflicts about money/finances/budget," nearly 7 in 10 Catholics said "no," while just 41 percent of Episcopalians and 46 percent of Methodists were able to make the same claim...

...True financial reform presents one of the greatest opportunities for the bishops to re-store trust in the church...

...the leading authority on church finances...

...As currently written, canon law (canons 492-494) stipulates only that a bishop must appoint a finance council "of at least three members of the Christian faithful truly skilled in financial affairs as well as in civil law...

...He must also name a diocesan finance director, and none can be closely related to the bishop by blood...

...Although we are only now about to learn the overall costs of clergy sexual abuse in the United States, some two decades after the first wave of such revelations appeared, there is no equivalent snapshot of the state of parish finance councils...

...Next is to cultivate the collaboration that canon law requires, but which is not being fulfilled...

...Whatever the tally, the gross figure will certainly stick in the minds of U.S...

...To be sure, there are many parishes and dioceses across the country that practice disclosure and accountability, along with the collaboration that is both the seed and fruit of such practices...

...Consequently, there must be a national survey on exactly how many parishes have finance councils, and then a qualitative study on how they operate— which work well, and which do not...

...Such an outcome would risk returning the church to the dangerous state of affairs that existed in the pre-scandal days, when a generation of lay Catholics was content to pursue the admirable goals of ministry and theological education, yet at the price of neglecting the mundane but equally crucial vocation to become involved in church governance...

...Rather, this is about averting the next church scandal, and prevention must hap-pen at the parish as well as the diocesan level...

...Sadly, there are plenty of examples of lay people absconding with church funds...

...The stakes are huge, in terms of faith and the amount of money involved...

...Yet without basic information on the parameters of the problem, it is difficult to provide detailed answers...

...It merely asked the conference Without basic information on the parameters of the problem, it is difficult to provide detailed answers...

...Statistics can conceal as much as they reveal, and audits can blind readers with a blizzard of figures or provide little more than an easily digestible "summary" that tells little...

...They're just so varied...

...It is axiomatic that every crisis is an opportunity...

...The priority right now is for simple transparency, so that everyone can know what is coming in and what is going out, and where it is going...

...It is a low-risk enterprise with a huge upside...

...For one thing, the pastor often thinks the faithful will not give as much if they see that the parish has money in the bank...

...Catholics today are eager to know what concrete actions they can take to affect how the church is run...

...A second step would be to provide a central clearinghouse for information for parish finance-council members and pas-tors...

...When it was revealed in July 2002 that a Brooklyn diocese pastor had misappropriated some $1.8 million in parish funds, the diocese's finance chief acknowledged that as many as one in five parishes in the nation's fifth-largest diocese did not have a finance council...

...Consequently, there must be a national survey on exactly how many parishes have finance councils, and then a qualitative study on how they operate—which work well, and which do not...

...The bishops' conference doesn't know, and even many individual bishops are apparently in the dark...

...o what can be done—what should be done...

...The Boston archdiocese went so far as to post its financial statement on its Web site, and in December, Manchester, New Hampshire, bishop John McCormack, the embattled former aide to Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law, released an audited financial statement for the first time in the 120-year history of the Manchester diocese...

...A 1999 volume by the Canon Law Society of America, the Church Finance Handbook, details dozens of case studies highlighting the range of problems that can afflict diocesan finances...

...Contrary to what many prelates fear, accountability is not a threat to the bishop's trifold mission "to teach, to sanctify, and to govern...

...But since it was the first time in nine years the archdiocese had released a financial statement, there was no point of comparison to make any independent judgments on the overall fiscal health of the Philadelphia church...

...The bishop's financial advisers must also prepare a yearly accounting of receipts and expenditures for the bishop, but if the bishop chooses, that is as far as the disclosure has to go...

...The latest survey, by researcher Joseph Claude Harris, indicated that American Catholics put $5.8 billion into the collection basket in 2002...

...Reforms must go beyond matters of legal settlements to include a wholesale change in the way funds are accounted for in the church...

...Parish pastoral councils, which flourished in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, are notmandated by canon law, and in fact exist only where a local bishop "judges it opportune...

...Yet there are no comprehensive data on how many parishes have finance councils, how they work, or how well...

...As the authors note, the diocesan tax levied on parishes leads some pastors to think "that being less than candid on financial statements is wise...

...There is no comparative data...