When Priests Pilfer

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Embezzlement is a plague of all nonprofit organizations, given their threadbare accounting systems. But the nation's 19,000 Catholic parishes, which gather about $6 billion a year from congregations, "are still often medieval in the way they secure or don't secure Sunday collections," says Michael Ryan, a Massachusetts Catholic and former U.S. postal inspector who runs another watchdog site, Churchsecurity.info. At St. Vincent, for example, Skehan and Guinan had immediate access to offertory cash--and according to the police report had staff hide purloined stacks of bills in parish-office ceilings. Ryan and other experts emphasize that church ushers should put that money into tamperproof bags with numbered seals; that rotating teams should count it; and that separation-of-duties standards, such as ensuring that bookkeepers logging the funds aren't the ones counting and depositing it, should be adhered to. Professor West says that parish-finance councils--which are required by canon law but are too often as ornamental as stained glass--"have to stop acting like rubber stamps for priests."

But as in the sex-abuse crisis, many are asking, Where are the bishops? Barbarito was sent to Palm Beach in 2003 to fix a diocese already reeling from the departure of two of his predecessors under sexual-abuse accusations--one of whom had also dismissed reports of financial misconduct against Guinan at another parish in the 1990s. Following the St. Vincent discovery in 2005, Barbarito decreed biennial audits for every Palm Beach parish. But only a handful of other U.S. dioceses are cracking down. Chicago recently set up a hotline to report malfeasance, and St. Louis is creating a centralized bookkeeping system. But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops insists that canon law does not allow the Vatican or the Conference to impose such reforms on dioceses.

So the job may be left to Catholic laity. The sex-abuse litigation "forced church documents like parish audits into the open for the first time ever," says McKiernan, emboldening more lay scrutiny. After Barbarito began a probe into the St. Vincent mess, an anonymous parishioner sent a letter to the Palm Beach County state attorney. That made it harder for witnesses to keep the case "a secret within the church," as the letter said--despite the efforts of Skehan, who had allegedly sent Christmas cards to church secretaries with $1,500 each and an oily thank-you for not cooperating with diocese investigators. The secretaries refused the supposed bribe and are now prosecutor's witnesses. That's the kind of lay resolve that Hamel believes will give the church "a better chance of dealing more effectively with this crisis" than it did with the one that so badly tarnished it five years ago.