Parishes can’t always anticipate impending disaster, but there’s plenty they can do to prepare and protect themselves from the worst.

Imagine opening the morning newspaper to discover your pastor has just been arrested for embezzling more than a million dollars from parish funds. This happened a couple of years ago in one wealthy New England parish. It turns out said pastor skimmed $87,000 to rent a Madison Avenue apartment in New York for himself and his boyfriend. He spent an additional $71,000 of church money on limousine service to and from the Manhattan pad. Another $257,000 was used to buy a swanky Fort Lauderdale condo for himself and his paramour.

That’s not all, folks. Before he was finished and whisked off to federal prison to think over his malfeasance for a few years, the purloining pastor racked up $140,000 in restaurant bills, which he called “job entitlement” in his testimony. (I want this guy’s job!) Furthermore, he spent $37,000 of the collection on furnishings for his digs, $51,000 flying his mother in for visits, and a whopping $515,000, most of which ended up in Father’s checking account, for “parishioners in need,” presumably to help the poor pewsters meet their yacht payments. All told, investigators uncovered $1.4 million in questionable expenditures. Can you believe a parish that wouldn’t even miss that much?

But wait, there’s still more. The parish bookkeeper, understandably suspicious of the leaky liquidity, allied with the parochial vicar and brought the issue to the diocese. The diocese initially put a lid on it (imagine that) and told the whistleblowers to lay off. Instead, the parish staffers hired a private eye to do the dirty work and uncovered the fleecing.

The diocese subsequently launched an investigation. In the aftermath the priest who brought the larceny to light ended up quitting, and the bookkeeper sued the diocese for harassment and threatening to take away her medical benefits. The diocese regrets the priest leaving and has denied the bookkeeper’s allegations.

Think this is out of the ordinary?

It is, gracias a Dios?.?.?.?sort of. But as Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say on Saturday Night Live, “Well, Jane, it’s always something. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.” Because of the trusting nature of church organizations, a lack of professional management skills, and in some cases just plain incompetence, the table is set for disaster in many of our parishes.

Church leaders rarely have training in business administration. Hiring practices are often haphazard or based on the “she seems nice” principle. Fingerprinting and background checks may weed out sex offenders, but they won’t stop someone from making a really stupid decision that will put the parish in jeopardy. As a result, the list of bad things that continue to happen to good parishes is pretty long.

Lead us not into temptation
A report released in 2006 by the Center for the Study of Church Management at Villanova University found that 85 percent of Roman Catholic dioceses that responded to a survey had discovered embezzlement of church money during the previous five years. And last August the e-newsletter of the lay reform movement Voice of the Faithful reported that since January 2006 it had tracked 79 cases of embezzlement within Catholic parishes and institutions totaling more than $30 million.

That means your parish and mine could be next. Should we be ready for that? You bet. It’s just way too easy for a priest or bookkeeper with paws on the purse strings to tap it for personal gain, and, people being people, we’ll sometimes fall to the temptation.

I remember years ago, before my conscience was fully aware of my own inner pirate, an old parishioner with no family left a bequest to the parish for a few hundred thousand. Like a lot of pastors, I was loathe to give up the diocesan cut, so I simply opened several parish “rainy day” accounts in some local banks. I, of course, was the signatory, and nobody knew about it except the executor of the parishioner’s estate—and he was Jewish. I eventually repented, reported the accounts to the diocese, and paid the cathedraticum. But I could’ve just as easily pocketed the whole kit and caboodle and retired to Florida.

I doubt I’m the only priest who’s ever had that idea. But how do you head off buccaneering the books? Centralized financial management on the diocesan level would be a start. But in some cases that may be putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse.

What every parish can and should do is call in the parish finance council, put them to work reviewing the parish finances every month, and then publish a monthly report in the bulletin. Not that every pastor is in the kitchen with the books, but financial transparency is a major building block of parish trust. And these days our parishes could use a little trust.

The case of the disappearing parish
With the falloff in vocations, aging clergy, and the ones that leave—not to mention the handful that end up behind bars—there is an obvious and well-known shortage of priests available to staff parishes. Bishops have responded in various ways, one of which has been to close or merge parishes. Has this happened to your parish? It did to one parish I know of in California. Here’s how it was done.

The bishop’s representative came to Mass one Sunday and announced that (1) the parish would be merged with the parish in the next town; (2) the beloved pastor would be reassigned elsewhere and the newly merged parish would be administered by a layperson; and (3) the newly formed parish would be given the name of a saint nobody had ever heard of. All this, by the way, would happen in two weeks. Additionally, a new church facility would be planned and built, which of course meant that the old building, the one built by parishioners’ grandparents, in which many of the folks had been baptized, received First Communion, married, and were now gathering with their children, would be abandoned.

Two weeks? Holy cow! For the parishioners it was, of course, devastating. They collectively felt like they had been kicked in the stomach. Why wasn’t there any consultation? What had they done to deserve this? Why weren’t they told beforehand? What was going to happen to them without a priest? And who was going to pay for the new church? These were issues that the diocese should have addressed with the people before any concrete decisions were reached.

The outgoing pastor didn’t help any. Along with never talking to his parishioners about the inevitability of this happening to their vulnerable parish, he openly bad-mouthed the bishop’s decision, the incoming administrator, and the merging sister community that had long been the hated archrival to the town’s high school football team. What a nightmare!

The pastor should’ve seen this coming and helped his parish to prepare. I remember when I was pastor of a growing parish and someone asked me about the possibility of a second priest being assigned to help carry the load. I realized then that many of the parishioners didn’t have a clue about how the clergy shortage was going to affect parish staffing. So I began to speculate openly about the chance that the next pastor might be a regional pastor with responsibility for several parishes, or perhaps even a deacon, religious, or lay administrator.

As it turned out, the next pastor was indeed a part-time presence because he had a full-time position with the diocese. But by then the parish was ready, having a strong pastoral council, several active community ministries, and an understanding that this was the direction we were headed. Several years later I happened to encounter a former parishioner who thanked me for preparing them for what was coming.