Reforms must go beyond matters of legal settlements to include a wholesale change in the way funds are accounted for in the church. 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. This is not just about the laity looking over the pastor’s shoulder. Sadly, there are plenty of examples of lay people absconding with church funds. Rather, this is about averting the next church scandal, and prevention must happen at the parish as well as the diocesan level. The stakes are huge, in terms of faith and the amount of money involved.
It is often noted that, as in few other places, money is fungible in religious organizations—and Catholics today are dealing in serious money. The latest survey, by researcher Joseph Claude Harris, indicated that American Catholics put $5.8 billion into the collection basket in 2002. 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 accounting for these monies, or for doing so in a way that is remotely intelligible to the average parishioner.
….It is an odd situation. Parish pastoral councils, which flourished in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, are not mandated by canon law, and in fact exist only where a local bishop “judges it opportune.” 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.
Parish finance councils, on the other hand, are mandated by church law (canons 537 and 1284). Yet there are no comprehensive data on how many parishes have finance councils, how they work, or how well. The bishops’ conference doesn’t know, and even many individual bishops are apparently in the dark. Reports that surfaced in connection with the sexual-abuse scandal gave anecdotal evidence that canon law is not being observed well or uniformly. 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.
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