Lies, Damn Lies and the Press
The California Catholic Daily twists some dates to take a cheap shot at the Church and its priests. My comments in bold.
Molestation has not been the only scandal to strike the Catholic Church in recent years. In December, researchers Robert West and Charles Zach at Villanova University concluded that 85 percent of Catholic dioceses in the United States have experienced embezzlement since 2001. Eleven percent of dioceses have lost more than $500,000 each, while 29% lost less than $50,000. Take note of the year, 2001. It will become the Maypole about which this article will twist.
A month after the study, the Accounting Practices Committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops recommended changes to diocesan policies governing parish financial practices. The committee said parish financial policies should be under “effective oversight by the bishop” to ensure compliance with diocesan standards.
The bishops’ committee did not recommend independent oversight of parish finances, a measure proposed by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (www.efca.org). The EFCA recommends church audits by an independent CPA with the details of the resulting financial statement to be made available upon written request. The EFCA is a loose network of Protestant churches, most of which are not affiliated with any major denominations and thus without any central controls or organization. I can understand how they might be afraid of theft but it hardly bears upon the Catholic issues.
Michael Ryan, a retired federal law enforcement, offers other protocols on his website, www.churchsecurity.info. Parishes, he said in 2004, should establish a system where no individual alone has access to collection money until it is deposited. At least three parishioners should be present when the money is counted. None of the examples which follow involve parishioners.
California dioceses have had their share of embezzlement scandals. Bishop Patrick Ziemann of Santa Rosa, resigning from the diocese in 1999, left it $16 million in debt. His lover, Father Jorge Hume Salas (who had accused Ziemann of forcing a sexual relationship) in 1996 admitted to embezzling funds from his parish, St. Mary’s in Ukiah. A 2005 audit of St. Patrick’s parish in Merced showed that its former pastor, Father Jean-Michael Lastiri, had “misspent” $60,000 in parish funds on personal expenses. 1999 and 1996, before the dates of the study and involving men who not only may have stolen but broke their vows to God. A far worse sin.
In 2002, Monsignor Patrick O’Shea, a former San Francisco archdiocesan priest (and one time head of its Society for the Propagation of the Faith and director of the archdiocese’s outreach to homosexual Catholics), was accused of embezzling $250,000 in church funds, which he spent on a vacation home in Palm Springs. O’Shea was laicized in 1994 after several men accused him of molesting them when they were boys. O’Shea was a trusted confidant of former San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn. 1994. Starting to see a pattern?
Parishioners of another of Quinn’s confidants, Father Martin Greenlaw, had complained for years of his spending habits, accusing him of taking parish money. (Greenlaw had been pastor successively at St. Robert’s in San Bruno and St. Paul’s in Noe Valley.) In 1995, a year after an archdiocesan internal investigation exonerated him of wrongdoing, the archdiocese filed suit against Greenlaw, alleging he had stolen $250,000 from his parishes and from the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, of which he was director in 1994. According to the lawsuit, Greenlaw set up false parish accounts into which he deposited parish contributions and then transferred them to his personal accounts. 1995, still another example before the study.
In 1996, Greenlaw pleaded guilty to embezzlement, grand theft, and money laundering charges, promised to make full restitution, and was sentenced to one year of home detention and three years’ probation.
Apparently the authors of this article chose not to try to find any California crimes that would relate to the dates of the study. Instead, they dredged up a handful of older cases, which may in fact now be prevented by changes in policies. They never even bothered to see if policies had changed. Instead they talk about a Protestant organization. Why not talk about the crimes committed against Protestant churches?
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