Embezzled Heaven

I'm a cultural Catholic. And an atheist. But I was raised a serious Catholic - 16 years in Catholic schools, baby - and there are a couple of things I do admire about the Church. Stained glass. Gregorian chant. And the charitable work - much of it no-strings - that the Church does.

Turns out that a good deal of what's collected by the Vatican in their Peter's Pence appeal, its annual philanthropic collection, which is carried out at the parish level, isn't going to help the poor and downtrodden. It's going to fund the "moi charity." 

What the church doesn’t advertise is that most of that collection, worth more than €50 million ($55 million) annually, goes toward plugging the hole in the Vatican’s own administrative budget, while as little as 10% is spent on charitable works, according to people familiar with the funds.

The little-publicized breakdown of how the Holy See spends Peter’s Pence, known only among senior Vatican officials, is raising concern among some Catholic Church leaders that the faithful are being misled about the use of their donations, which could further hurt the credibility of the Vatican’s financial management under Pope Francis. (Source: Wall Street Journal)

Holy See? More like the Holy No See...

Of course, as Church scandals go, this is the least of the Church's worry. And it's by no means the only financial scandal that's on their plate. They're also in the midst of an "opaque real-estate investments" scandal. (Some of the investment money may have been taken from the Peter's Pence fund.) And "last month, the Vatican was suspended from an international network of anti-money-laundering watchdogs."

As we used to say in Latin class - four years! - "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who guards the guards? Ain't no one going to let the Catholic Church play custodiet when there's money involved.

And speaking of watchdogs, there are a number of watchdog groups that rate charities based on how much of the money they collect actually goes to do good vs. how much goes to adminstrative (including fundraising) costs. Good charities devote about 75% and more to their actual mission.  Bad charities, well, they're in the 10% range. (I read about one that used only 4% of its take to fund its mission. Why would anyone donate to such a "charity"?)

This is, of course, by no means surprising. The Church has been playing moral limbo of the "how low can you go" variety for years, decades, centuries. Still, it has to be disappointing to "real Catholics." For years, they've been urged not to focus on the bad things the Church has done, but on the good it does. Not to "throw the baby out with the bathwater." Turns out that there's not much baby in that bathwater.

When I was in high school, we were occaionally given the treat of all marching into the auditorium to watch some movie that the nuns wanted to see. Oh, occasionally there was something reasonaby good - The Last Hurrah with Spencer Tracy was one I recall. But mostly they were clunkers, such as a musical starring Mario Lanza. (Mario Lanza? Seriously? This at a time when serious girls listened to Bob Dylan, and everyone listened to the Beatles.)

One of the worst movies ever shown to us was something called Embezzled Heaven. It's about a simple peasant woman who sends all her cash to her nephew the priest. Turns out he's not a priest, as the simple peasant woman discovers when she pays a visit to "his" parish. Turns out, the nephew was a cad living the life on his aunt's largesse. 

Catholics being Catholics, she blames herself for giving her nephew the money in hopes that it would pave her way to a heavenly afterlife. Anyway, she scrapes up enough money to get herself on a pilgrimage to Rome, where her group is blessed by Pope Pius XII. Shortly thereafter, she dies, happy to have been blessed by the Pope, which she takes as her ticket to heaven.

This Peter's Pence scandal reminds me a bit of Embezzled Heaven. 

People need to trust but verify. Charity Navigator needs to start studying the Church, and the Church needs to be a bit more transparent about where those supposedly charitable donations go.

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A tip of the Pink Slip beretta to my sister Kath for sending this story my way.