The Roman Catholic

Just when we thought it was safe to go to church without scandal, a new one strikes. Time Magazine recently published an article on Pilfering Priests.

It’s a very demoralizing piece that details how some priests have siphoned off up to $8,600,000 (that’s right, 8.6 million) in one parish over a 42 year period. The magazine also highlights a few other cases of embezzlement by clergy. All this can be put down to lax accounting procedures. I doubt this is an exclusive problem of the US church and is common to most arch/dioceses of the Roman Catholic Church. Naturally we can have a prolonged discussion and develop a treatise on how to implement procedures to prevent such scandals from recurring.

I believe an equally, if not more, important question we should ask ourselves is why do we have such priests in the first place. The number of priests who have been involved in the child abuse scandals and pilferage may number in the hundreds and as a percentage of the whole population of priests (which is in the tens of thousands worldwide), it’ s small. However, it’s always a few rotten apples that spoil the bunch.

As a knee jerk reaction, the laity may debate if they should reduce or completely stop contributing to the church coffers. Such a decision will be most unfortunate, as the ones who will suffer the most will be the beneficiaries of all the offerings from the other churches where there are honest priests. What we are called on to do is to trust in the Holy Spirit that our offerings will be safe from dirty hands and will be used to witness to God’s glory.
Besides trusting in the Holy Spirit, He also expects the laity to press the parish administrative body and the priest to be transparent with the accounts. Next when we find churches with a dubious set of acocunts, the Bishop has to press charges against the responsible priest and not protect the priest and draw the entire church into a cover up guilt trip, as happened in the sex abuse cases. We as laity should also learn to forgive the priest (although he deserves to go straight to jail and not collect $200) and not be suspicious of the entire hierarchy.

The Church should examine it’s recruitment and selection process for priests. Among the reasons Time discloses as the motive is that these priests feel they are underpaid. They are driven by the sense of keeping up with the Joneses in a money-conscious society. As a manager in a corporation, we always ensure that the recruitment process involves conducting a profiling test on the shortlisted candidates to management positions. This gives us a picture of a person’s motivators and derailers (up to an accuracy of 90%). I think many men of doubtful character are slipping into seminaries and have to be weeded out before they enter religious formation.

The success of any programme outlined above is entirely dependent on the character of the bishop himself. If he is a wimp, he will cover up the guilty but if he’s Christ-like he will discipline the priest, not by himslef but by turning him over to the competent authorities. Laity always respect it when the hierarchy admit unpleasant truths. We should remember that Jesus could have avoided scandal to the early Church by not selecting a thief like Judas Iscariot to be a priest. I hope bishops will recall St. Peter’s advise in 1 Peter 5:1-4.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 1:00 and is filed under Catholic News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.