The bottom line: will church finances be the next scandal?

The release later this month of a much-anticipated survey quantifying a half-century of clergy sexual abuse of minors is sure to be another blow to American Catholics, even as it serves as a necessary purgative for a lingering crisis that surfaced more than two years ago. In a wise effort to prepare his audience for the bad news, Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and prime mover behind the report, has warned that the total number of priests and victims tallied in the report will be "startling" and "painful."

Yet the February 27 survey of most of the nation's 195 dioceses, produced by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, will also reinforce the fact that the scandal has two interconnected natures--one sexual, the other financial. Not only will the report detail the number of priests accused of abusing minors and the number of victims over fifty years, it will also put an overall price tag on the debacle. Some believe the bill could approach or even surpass the billion-dollar benchmark that has been floated by the hierarchy's toughest critics.

Whatever the tally, the gross figure will certainly stick in the minds of U.S. Catholics, who for the past two years have often focused their fury on the enormous amount of money, much of it supplied by lay people, paid out to cover up cases of abuse. This is not to say that Catholics care more about money than about clerical sexual abuse. Rather, the fact is that aside from donating money, Catholics feel virtually powerless to affect the course of events within their church, and the scandal revealed that those donations had been used in ways that wound up subverting, rather than building up, the church.

Catholics are now focusing on fiscal accountability as a priority in restoring trust in the church. Polls consistently show that eight in ten Catholics rate church financial reform as a top concern. Just as important, both conservatives and liberals agree on this issue, making it one of the rare areas of convergence in a polarized church.

"Clearly one of the byproducts of the sexual-abuse scandal is the recognition that the church needs to be financially accountable, and that's not going to go away," said Charles Zech, an economics professor at Villanova University and the leading authority on church finances. "Too often there is a lack of detail and frankly a lack of respect for Catholic lay people, who are very well educated and deserve to know what is going on."

The problem is that while the scandal has prompted the bishops to take unprecedented--some would say draconian--steps to halt sexual abuse in the future, few practical steps have been taken to make the church more financially transparent. The 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People adopted in Dallas bound bishops not to sign confidentiality agreements with victims (except for "grave and substantial reasons brought forward by the victim/survivor"), yet everything else about diocesan and parish finances remains as obscure to most Catholics as the rubrics of the Tridentine Mass.

Reforms must go beyond matters of legal settlements to include a wholesale change in the way funds are accounted for in the church. A failure to reform the church's financial policies would present an enormous risk to lay morale at a time when the credibility of the institutional church is at an all-time low. This is not just about the laity looking over the pastor's shoulder. Sadly, there are plenty of examples of lay people absconding with church funds. Rather, this is about averting the next church scandal, and prevention must happen at the parish as well as the diocesan level. The stakes are huge, in terms of faith and the amount of money involved.

It is often noted that, as in few other places, money is fungible in religious organizations--and Catholics today are dealing in serious money. The latest survey, by researcher Joseph Claude Harris, indicated that American Catholics put $5.8 billion into the collection basket in 2002. Combine that with the various government grants the church receives for other projects, and one quickly realizes that dioceses today are sprawling, multitiered corporations that often have annual budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite this size and complexity, there is no mechanism in place for publicly accounting for these monies, or for doing so in a way that is remotely intelligible to the average parishioner.

In June 2003, for example, the Philadelphia archdiocese issued a financial statement detailing expenditures of $334,449,037, and reporting a $7 million deficit that it chalked up to investments that were "negatively impacted by the financially challenging times." But since it was the first time in nine years the archdiocese had released a financial statement, there was no point of comparison to make any independent judgments on the overall fiscal health of the Philadelphia church.