The Truth About Money
You do not have to even take your shoes off to feel it. The ground beneath us is rumbling. It is a shaking from the bodies of immigrant
Catholic grand and great-grandparents of this and other Diocese(s) rolling in
their graves. And I don’t blame them one
bit. They came to this country in many
cases with barely the clothes on their backs.
They worked in factories and on the farms for days on end and hours more
than 40 a week to build a new life here that mattered, that had dignity, honor,
meaning, and sanctity. They sweat and
sacrificed to establish homes, families, and churches. They treated their pastors like princes on
pedestals for the role they were to serve in the faith community. Often they sacrificed the luxuries of life so
that the church, too, would have a bright future with a “nest egg” being set
aside for days to come.
And here it is that very money, donated and saved at quite a
personal cost – in some cases akin to the Biblical story of the Widow’s Mite –
is being laid out in extravagant amounts to do WHAT?
I know you too are asking this question: WHY such huge, pre-emptive, it seems,
pay-outs relative to the diocesan scandals?
Before I attempt to reason an answer to that seemingly rhetorical
question, I will say what the money WILL NOT, indeed cannot do:
1)
Money will not restore lost innocence to the
victims. There is no applicable price
tag on the sexual, spiritual, physical, and emotional health of the human
person.
2)
Money will not adequately compensate:
a.
A child for his/her victimization
b.
A family for its heartache
c.
A psychologist for having to help unwind the
emotional mess, should a person be brave enough to seek counseling
3)
And Money certainly won’t relieve a predator and
his allies from culpability and guilt.
4) Money cannot serve as a retroactive “evangelization tool.” No one who left the Church because of this morally outrageous situation will return to it because the Institutional Church somehow miraculously appears generous by giving out money. That ship has sailed.
A And for those who still find it in their hearts to gather with faithful people to pray on a weekly basis, the money/pay-out seems just one big confusing and outrageous decision … made by many bishops across the country in response to litigation and fears thereof. Tell us it won’t come from Sunday collections, as if that makes it all good. You are decisively robbing our grandparents and expecting us to be okay with that.
As I slip my gypsy turban on and
take out my proverbial crystal ball, I will tell you the future:
A)
We already know these scandals have bankrupted
the diocese across the USA. No news
there, but wait …
B)
Now this leeching of money from the individual
parishes will weaken each parish’s ability to function … and survive.
C)
The responsibility will roll to “we the people”
to do all the raffles, bake sales, spaghetti dinners ad nauseum to keep our
parishes in the black financially. We
don’t mind supporting our parishes, but we DO very much mind cleaning up
someone else’s MESS from a systemic failure of oversight and accountability.
I find it disgustingly ironic that the first area of
ministry to suffer in the wake of the scandals is actually YOUTH MINISTRY. For example, the Faith centers closed. Or was that because they were ministering to
high school students in neighborhood-based centers as stand-alone ministries that
helped kids but didn’t always “feed” bodies and envelope dollars back into
local parishes. It’s all about the kids,
until it’s not.
Weekend retreats, where we the laity did our best work with
teens, were cut down to day-only events.
Retreat centers closed. Pastors
that didn’t know what a good youth minister did wouldn’t even pay a living wage
to get it started back then. Few want to
touch youth ministry with a ten-foot pole as it is. I want to acknowledge that the GOOD priests
are suffering, and probably afraid to be falsely accused (which has happened at
least three times now that I am aware of).
And yet the online newspaper doesn’t update the 2018 List of those with
Credible Allegations in order to restore the reputations of those falsely
accused. Newspapers, in whatever format,
exist to sell news. Bad news sells. Restoration of dignity gets lower left corner
of page 4, three sentences.
Oh, and lastly,
D)
If you think we’ve seen a vocational crisis in
the past 20 years, you haven’t seen anything yet, baby I tell you. The only three things I recall during my
lifetime that generate strong vocations to the priesthood were: (1) the youth conferences at Steubenville;
(2) adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in parishes; and (3) the entire papacy
of Saint Pope John Paul the Great as he reached out to the youth of the world
with clarity and relevance, inviting them to throw open wide the doors to
Christ. If we lose the ability to
reach our youth with Biblical relevance and pure faith, the whole thing is
going to go belly-up.
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