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:

1. Volunteer to participate in the collection process
2. Eliminate cash contributions and contribute only by check
3. Recruit people with good financial skills to run for the finance council
4. 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.