Pressure from the pews

THE revelation that the Dublin Archdiocese — the country’s largest with over one million registered Catholics — is close to financial collapse is likely to be mirrored in other parts of the Church in Ireland.

I say likely because it is hard to pin down exact figures when it comes to the Church’s finances. What we do know for sure, however, is that the Church has spent a lot of money compensating victims of sexual abuse and that the value of investments have plummeted.

It isn’t just the handling of allegations of clerical sexual abuse that has seen the Church adopt a veil of secrecy. The internal consultation document obtained by The Irish Catholic newspaper that sheds such revealing light on Dublin’s financial crisis was never meant to see the light of day. Church leaders would likely have been much more circumspect if they had expected the document to make its way into the public arena.

While most parishes do publish annual financial statements, little is usually known of the exact financial health — or otherwise — of the Church in Ireland as a whole.

Abuse payouts have cost the Church here dearly in recent decades. But it’s hardly the whole picture. While Dublin has paid out some €13.5m in settling abuse allegations diocesan accounts also show that the Church in the capital — much like the state — has simply been living beyond its means.

The cost of administration, to take just one example, has risen by a staggering 500% in less than ten years; 2009/2010 accounts show that the diocese is spending just shy of €4.8 million a year on central administration. In 2002/2003 the figure was just over €1m. At the same time, the diocese spent €23m on salaries and wages while only collecting €18m from collections for that purpose.

Few dioceses have the same financial outlay as Dublin but neither do they have annual collections counted in the tens of millions.

As well as payouts for victims of sexual abuse by priests, smaller, mostly-rural dioceses have taken a hammering as bank shares have fallen through the floor. Shares in Bank of Ireland were once thought of as prudent investments by the Church and dioceses and parishes poured millions into such shares content with the modest but consistent return.

At their highest value in February 2007, the shares traded at €18.70, but yesterday they were trading at a pitiful 9c.

Cardinal Sean Brady’s Armagh Archdiocese holds 409,000 Bank of Ireland shares which have plunged from a value of €7.6m in 2007 to just €38,810 now. The Diocese of Raphoe in Donegal also suffered heavy losses with a €7m investment in BoI now worth less than €30,000. Meath Diocese has seen a stake worth €10m fall to €48,000.

The recent Cloyne Report into the mishandling of abuse allegations in the Cork-based diocese offers a fascinating forensic glimpse into accounts there. Judge Yvonne Murphy revealed that many abuse payouts came — bizarrely — from an account known as the “parochial house upkeep fund” which, as the name suggests, had been intended to renovate priests’ houses.

This points to an obvious problem with the Church as it is currently constituted — a lack of transparency and openness. Parishioners in Cloyne, even if they had been privy to a statement of accounts, could reasonably expect as the “parochial house upkeep fund” depleted that it was being spent on exactly that, renovating parochial houses, rather than compensating the victims of crimes by abusive priests.

Hard-pressed priests in the parishes will often grumble that they too are kept out-of-the-loop when it comes to matters financial and have neither information nor influence on how a diocese or bishops conducts financial affairs.

The recurring theme emphasised by priests and people to the Pope’s special investigators while they were in Ireland earlier this year was the need for greater accountability. We’ll have to wait until next year for their final report but let’s hope the plea for further accountability from Irish Catholics will go further than the field of clerical sexual abuse. There is a crying need for a forum in the Church in Ireland for lay people, priests and religious to make their voice heard to those in authority and to take some active part in deciding how the Church should engage with modern society and how the Church should spend the money it has collected from the people in the pews.

One proposal under discussion in Dublin is a levy of between €3 and €12 per year on every Catholic household. In the absence of some meaningful transparency, it’s hard to imagine families already burdened by the effects of the recession feeling any enthusiasm for such a levy, especially since the money would be going to the diocese rather than local pastoral needs. After all, the battle cry of the early American revolutionaries against British rule was “no taxation without representation”.

Will Irish Catholics echo that plea and force their leaders to listen to their voices?