By Joseph Mani
Whenever a scandal or scam among the clergy comes to light, the apologists for the Church point out that a few rotten apples do not make the whole basket of apples rotten. They point out that for every Varghese, Mulakkal and McCarrick there are ten priests, bishops and cardinals who live exemplary lives dedicated to the service of God and man.
They are absolutely right. I have never believed that anecdotal evidence is a sufficiently strong base to make a generalization.
Every time a clergyman is caught with his pants down (literally) or with his hand in the till we clamor for his scalp. But this is no permanent solution. How many bishops and cardinals can Pope Francis ask to step aside? For every Mulakkal and Alencherry that the Pope defrocks, five others will crop up or will be unearthed. The Pope will be spending all his time chasing erring clergymen.
If we want misbehavior by the clergy to stop, we need to look at the possible causes or circumstances which lead to the wrong doing.
In this article I would like to deal with the financial scandals among the clergy, not focusing on any specific case but on the root cause.
As a hypothesis, I suggest that the financial misdeeds by the clergy are because of two reasons 1) The Edifice Complex which many in the clergy seem to be suffering from and 2) The Secularization of the religious vocation.
The Edifice Complex
Soon after a new parish priest takes charge, one of his first thoughts seems to be “What can I build now?” He builds a convent because he needs some nuns to take care of church services. Once a few nuns come, they find they do not have enough work to occupy themselves. So a school is built which the nuns run.
A school needs children and children have be delivered. Soon a hospital is built with a large maternity ward. More and more land is bought and more and more buildings are constructed. Before you know it, your Parish Priest has become more of a real estate developer than a shepherd of souls. You seldom find him in the parish, he is more likely to be found at the sub-registrar’s office or at a construction site.
And the priest, like God in Genesis, looks at everything he has built and he finds it very good.
If the convent, school and hospital already exist, the Edifice Complex urges the priest to expand the existing church building or even demolish it and build a larger and grander church, even when the number of church attendees is coming down and this vast space will be used only for a few hours in a week.
Then there is the insistence on having our own church. Periodically there are conflicts among Malayalee Catholic groups outside Kerala – one group wants to continue with the Latin-rite church while another group wants a new Syro Malabar-rite church though both belong to the same Catholic Church. To paraphrase Woody Allen: If a time comes when there are just two Syro Malabar Catholics in the city, one would turn to the other and say “I want to build a separate Syro Malabar Cnana Catholic Church.”
We spend a few million of people’s money on building a “Dwelling Place for the Lord” when millions of the Lord’s children have no dwelling place.
The 2018 global Multidimensional Poverty Index released by the UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative says that about 1.3 billion people in the world live in multidimensional poverty. That is more than the whole Catholic population of the world.A Supreme Court appointed panel has found that more than 90 percent of the urban poor in India have no roof over their head. They sleep under bridges, on railway platforms and on footpaths.
An NSSO survey has shown that about 80 percent of the rural poor households and 60 percent of urban poor in India have less living space per person than mandated for a prison cell. More than a million of God’s children live in the Dharavi slum in Mumbai alone and many of them go to bed hungry including children.
‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018’ report says that more than 50 percent of the world’s “wasted children” (child underweight for his/her height) and more than 30 percent of the world’s “stunted children” (child shorter than his/her age) are in India. Given this grim picture, are we justified in spending millions to build a palace for the Lord?
As an aside: The church or cathedral is built with people’s money. But once it is built, the people who are co-owners have practically no say in its running. The priest and the bishop treat it as their personal property. The parishioners who gave their money to the priest do not even get a discount when they want the priest to say a Mass-for-the dead.
It is nice to have architectural monuments, but should our priests and bishops be the modern-day Pharaohs and Shah Jehans? Did they receive holy orders to become construction engineers?
If the priest spends all his time going from house to house, place to place, country to country to collect millions for his new palatial church and supervising its construction, where will he have the time to feed those who are hungry, clothe those who are naked, console those who are sick and visit those who are in prison? But isn’t it what Jesus wanted all Christians, specially his ordained ministers, to do?
(I have dealt with and suggested alternatives to this ‘church-building’ mania among the clergy in greater detail in my book BEYOND GODS AND SCRIPTURES, p. 135 ff)
Related to and combined with the Edifice Complex is the next factor.
Secularization of the Religious Vocation
Look at the irony: The Church bemoans that there are so few vocations these days. Seminaries are closing down because there are few takers. Many are called but most do not want to be chosen. These few who agree to be chosen take vows of chastity, poverty and obedience and spend many years in a seminary studying philosophy, theology, Church history, pastoral care and cannon law, and then they spend the rest of their lives in book keeping, teaching mathematics or as tour operators.
Let me give some actual examples to illustrate this point. A priest is the financial controller of the diocese when a lay person with a CA can do a better job. A former parish priest is now looking after the diocese’s properties. Another priest claimed that he was the greatest Cannon Law expert in the country, but spends most of his time sorting out the administrative problems of the diocesan scholarship scheme. Some priests are busy organizing pilgrimage-tours.
An Indian Jesuit priest is an astronomer in Michigan. Some nuns are full-time occupied shuttling between their convent and the Railway Station and Airport receiving and seeing off nuns coming from other convents in India and abroad. These nuns joined this Congregation to minister to the poor and the destitute and ended up as taxi operators!
Many years ago the Carmelites appointed a lay person as the director of Rajagiri College in Kerala; the Jesuits have recently appointed a non-Catholic as the Principal of St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Others should follow. Why should priests and nuns spend their lives running schools and colleges in metros which are mostly catering to the privileged?
After Independence, Nehru realized that private industrialists would not be interested in setting up infrastructure projects which require huge investments and have long gestation periods. So he built massive PSUs, “Temples of Modern India”. Now we realize that the business of government is not business and are going for disinvestment of PSUs.
Similarly a century ago no one was interested in spreading education. The Christian missionaries took the initiative to build schools and colleges. And they did a great job. But today there are others who can do as good or even a better job.
Certainly the ‘missionary’ schools and colleges are some of the better ones. But not necessarily the best ones. The IITs, NITs, IIMs and IISc are not rum by priests and nuns. Are the alumni of Christian institutions imbued with nobler values than those of other institutions?
My point is that there are others who can do an equally good job. More important, these others will not be inclined to do the work for which religious people took their vows. Do priests and nuns believe that they can pass on the message of Jesus better through the binomial theorem than by ministering to the poor?
It is true that running a prestigious school or college does mean a lot of money and a lot of power. But is it for money and power that they became priests and nuns?
Power corrupts and when power is combined with a lot of money there is the temptation to be financially corrupt. There is a saying “If the box is open, even a saint will steal.”
So if the Church wants to weed out financial corruption among the clergy, it should remove priests, bishops and cardinals from all secular occupations and make them concentrate on spiritual service, unless the secular occupation is in the service of the poor and the marginalized who have no one else to come to their aid.
I know of priests and nuns who do this and I salute them. Except in such cases let Caesar’s people look after Caesar’s job and God’s ministers look after God’s work. It is not enough to pray “Lead us not into temptation”, the Church should remove the temptation.
