Our Role in Financial Accountability
Mary Pat Fox
President, Voice of the Faithful
April 28, 2007
Good morning and thank you for inviting me to be part of this
very important day. Financial Accountability or the lack of it
in the Catholic Church is not new news. But we are more aware of
it. Just this past Monday, April 23, 2007 the New York Times ran
an article on Cardinal Egan in which we see the next crisis of
secrecy of the Catholic Church formally and intentionally announced – the
financial crisis. Cardinal Egan’s response to the idea of
transparency, stating that he is “transparent to the best
possible people” is the same arrogance that moved abusive
priests from one parish to another in Bridgeport, CT.
We saw the study done by Charles Zech of the Villanova School
for Church Management in December where 85% of those dioceses
that participated indicated that they had experienced some level
of embezzlement within either the parishes or at the diocesan
level. The survey consisted of the 174 dioceses in the US, and
78 (or 45%) responded. In addition we can list numerous instances
in the press including at least 2 in our own backyard where there
has been proven fiscal malfeasance: Rev. Michael Jude Fay of
St. John Roman Catholic Church in Darien and Father Michael Moynihan
at Saint Michael the Archangel Parish and Saint Timothy Chapel
in Greenwich.
It is critical that we realize that it is up to us, the laity,
to fix this. We must take responsibility for what we are funding
whether that be a soup kitchen or a priest’s lavish lifestyle – we
need to “own” what we fund. And there is a job for
each of us who wants one regardless of our financial expertise.
I would like to cover four actions that we can each engage in and
a process that we could use to report suspected problems. The actions
are:
- Volunteer to participate in the collection process
- Eliminate cash contributions and contribute only by check
- Recruit people with good financial skills to run for the
finance council
- Demand audited financials at the Diocesan level
The process will address one way we might effectively escalate
suspicious activity. And I will finish with a call for us all once
we do have a financially accountable and transparent church to
support the church and her missions and this means a realistic
budget and a living wage for its employees.
To have financial accountability in our church we must start with
the collections and this includes the poor box. “We have
no idea how much money disappears each year in the Catholic Church
because much of it disappears prior to ever being counted.” As
we all know the collection and the poor box are basically a cash
business. The manner in which the collection and the poor box are
secured is critical. Michael W. Ryan of churchsecurity.info provides
us with some practical ways to handle this. If you haven’t
checked out his web site I would encourage you to do so. There
needs to be 2 people collecting the money from the baskets and
boxes. These two people should not always be teamed up together – the
teams should vary. The money should immediately be put it into
a positively locked or sealed bag with a numbered, tamperproof
plastic seal. This type of arrangement requires a chain of custody
that continues throughout the process when the money is counted
and then deposited. In each step there should always be two people
involved. No one should have unobserved access to the monies.
In order to successfully implement this type of process your parish
needs a lot of ushers and money counters. This is something that
any of us regardless of our financial skills can volunteer to do.
Another thing we can all do is to only contribute with a check – no
cash. And I would also encourage you to check your cancelled checks
if you think anything might be array.
Each Parish and Diocese must have Finance Council by Canon Law.
Though not all of us have the financial skills, which would make
us good candidates for the Finance Council, we probably know someone
who does. We need to encourage those people to come forward and
we need to appeal to the Pastoral Council and the Pastor to have
at least some members of the Finance Council elected. Finance Councils
must be independent to be effective. The Structural Change Working
Group, which is comprised of VOTF members from around the country,
has developed very strong and reasonable principles for Parish
and Diocesan Finance Councils. Their recommendations include the
make up of the Finance Council, the duties of its members, operating
procedures and the releasing of financial data. It is by having
an effective Finance Council that we can minimize and hopefully
eliminate the financial improprieties that happen after the money
is deposited. The Finance Council must ensure that the proper procedures
are in place with one or more of their members playing key roles.
One change that can have an immediate impact is for a different
person to reconcile the checkbook than the person who writes the
checks. Having a member of the Finance Council reconcile the checkbook
once a month would achieve this.
Finance Councils need to ensure that parish budgets are realistic.
We should not have priests taking $500 out of the collection for
necessary expenses that don’t show up anywhere because the
budget is not reasonable. We need to provide them with the money
they need to realistically run the parish. We need to pay the priests
and the lay church workers a living wage.
We must demand audited financials and we must find a way to withhold
funds until we see them. In a letter to the editor, which as of
yesterday had not been published, both Voice of the Faithful National
and VOTF NY called for parishioners in the Archdiocese of NY to
withhold contributions to the Cardinal’s Appeal until a full
audit is released. This is a difficult tactic to implement because
you need a lot of people to do it. It is strange the guilt many
feel in not contributing. But as I said before we all have to take
ownership of what we are funding. Certainly none of us wanted to
fund the moving of abusive priests from one parish to another – yet
we did. The payoffs to victims for their silence came from donations
from you and from me.
Your Fund of Compassion is an excellent method for ensuring that
people can contribute to those organizations that need their money
and meet the fiscal scrutiny that is warranted. But I know that
you have struggled with getting enough money diverted to gain the
attention of the bishop. It is hard work and we have to keep at
it.
I periodically get calls from people saying they suspect something
is not right in their parish – the pastor seems to be living
a high lifestyle, etc. They want to know what to do - Whom do I
tell? Years ago no one asked. When Fr. Fay was arrested in Darien
I had someone say to me “We knew for years that something
wasn’t quite right there. He used limousines to go to New
York and went to the finest restaurants.” I asked them “If
you knew something was wrong why didn’t you say anything?” They
had the same question ‘who would I tell?’ It is a tough
question to answer primarily because our trust is so broken and
because of the secrecy behind which so much of this occurs. We
need to break the culture of secrecy and we need to balance our
concern with our civil liberties of innocent until proven guilty
and you don’t want to be guilty of gossip.
Here is a recommendation I would like to share. Some reasonable
fact finding should happen – examine your own cancelled checks,
volunteer to help count the money, have a conversation with a member
of the parish council and or the finance council about your concerns.
Once you determine that you want to take this forward, I propose
you start with writing a letter documenting your concerns to the
parish council – all of the members. Send the letter to all
of the members as a first step in breaking down the secrecy. The
letter should be clear, dated and it should contain a date by which
you expect a response. In addition the letter should clearly articulate
that if you don’t hear back from them by that date what your
next step would be. I would recommend that the next step is to
send a copy of that letter with a request for their assistance
to the Bishop, the CFO of the Diocese and the head of the Diocesan
Finance Council. Again this letter should contain a date by which
you expect a response and what your next step will be if you do
not get a response by that date. The next step would be to go to
the authorities with your concern. However, we need to understand
that the authorities are not likely to investigate your “feeling” that
something isn’t right. You will most likely need to gather
more concrete data before you can go the authorities and expect
any kind of satisfaction.
I also want to call attention to the fact that often times the
perpetrator is not the pastor or a priest but a layperson. A layperson
can hide additional income easier than a priest so they may not
come under suspicion. Our goal with engaging in the actions above:
secure collections, good processes after the money is deposited
and strong finance councils is to reduce the opportunity for financial
misconduct throughout the process by anyone. These processes will
also protect the innocent – good accountable and transparent
processes will reduce suspicion and build trust.
The time is right for the Laity to step up and even some of the
bishops are realizing this. The USCCB calls for full implementation
of finance councils. Bishop Schnurr, CFO of the USSCB said in
a press release in January, "Finance is an area of parish
ministry that is wide open for participation of the laity. Members
of the laity who have expertise and experience with administration
and finance should be invited and encouraged to consider
a stewardship of their talents. The message to our seminarians
should be that, as parish leaders, they are to recognize, call
forth, and coordinate the talents that God has entrusted to a particular
parish community." If this isn’t an invitation I don’t
know what is. Finally, once we achieve our objectives: we have audited financials
at the diocese level, effective finance councils at the parish
and diocesan levels and secure processes in place for all financial
matters we need to take a long hard look at what level we fund
the church. When I was a teenager I earned $.50 to $1 an hour for
babysitting, today my nieces get $10-15 an hour to do the same
job. When we went to the movies it cost us $2 today it costs me
$11. Yet I still see people putting the same $1 into the collection
basket that I did when I was a kid going to church with my parents.
This is more important than it seems. In the article I quoted earlier
from the NY Times about Cardinal Egan he is quite clear that money
talks. He is quoted as saying that “ I am transparent to
the best possible people” and I can tell you that isn’t
us. In 2005, two members of Voice of the Faithful, including one
of the undersigned, met with archdiocesan CFO William Whiston to
ask why the New York Archdiocese has not published financial statements
for many years. Mr. Whiston committed to publishing complete and
audited financial statements by August 2005. We have yet to see
them. We the Faithful must make our money talk as well. We need
to hold back where appropriate and we need to make sure the hierarchy
knows that given the right circumstances – we can be very
generous in supporting our church in time, talent and treasure.
Thank you.
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