Death of a Brooklyn Parish, Part 5
In Part 4 of “Death of a Brooklyn Parish,” I wondered aloud whether DiMarzio et al used income from shuttered parishes in low-income neighborhoods to pay for the restoration of Brooklyn’s (future) Co-Cathedral. When I ask this, I am wondering aloud, because the answer to my question can not be obtained. There is no way for an outsider to really verify any wrongdoing because bishops will dissemble, justifying it by saying to selves and others that they are insulating the Catholic Church from harm. Protecting Mother Church from scandal is in their rule book. The structure of the Roman Catholic hierarchy has long been is designed to ensure that its crimes, holdings, spending, assets and income be shrouded in secrecy.
One of the reasons I choose to devote time to examining the demise of my own parish is that the dismantling of St. Augustine reveals so much, in microcosm, I think, about how the institutional church as whole operates. Bishops don’t really answer to anyone except the pope, and the pope is a busy man surrounded on all sides by a layers plausible deniability. This is how the Vatican clergy sex abuse/child rape crisis remained hidden for so long, and how the episcopacy has been so successful in maintaining the cover up.
With regard to fiscal matters; occasionally one sees a parish or diocese make public its budgets an annual reports, but I know from speaking with people who have worked in accounting at parishes and dioceses in Brooklyn and Manhattan, in New York City where I live, that these are often pro-forma, redacted and misleading. Understanding how money works and the institutional Catholic Church is critical to understanding how stripping parishes for parts can work.
I believe stripping of St. Augustine parish was systematic, and that the Diocese of Brooklyn likely has a procedural approach to shuttering and merging parishes. It has a boiling frog character. At first everything is normal and lukewarm. Then the heat gets turned up. It What’s that line Tessio says in the film The Godfather? “Tell Mike it was only business. I always liked him.” The hatcheting of St. Augustine was not personal. It was business. Lots of churches in Brooklyn have suffered a similar fate. I suppose the big question may be whether Catholics wish to financially support dioceses (and possibly parishes) that see them more as an envelope full of cash than as human beings.
I am often surprised to find out how many Catholics don’t know that parishes own neither the land on which they sit, nor the buildings in which they worship. That goes back to feudal times and is firmly enshrined in Canon Law. Parishes, in a sense, borrow the real property in which they worship, study and minister. Parishes may not pay rent, per se, but to squat is not by any stretch free. Dioceses expect and insist that they parishes pay their own costs of operation, payroll and upkeep. Any homeowner knows how extremely costly upkeep and repairs can be, and both are all the more costly when the “house” in question is a large 130 year-old building. The equity (re: real estate) rests with the diocese, but it falls to the people in the parish to pay for upkeep and keeping the lights on. (Hence, the frazzled pastor and the church boiler trope.) Maintaining an enormous antique church can break a parish, and, in the case of St. Augustine, that may explain in part what went wrong.
When the bell tower of our church became a deteriorating menace, the diocese did offer support, in the form of allowing the parish to skip out on one year of annual appeal contributions. (The repairs took several years.) To the best of my knowledge, parishes do not pay rent, but in various, ways, dioceses do demand payment from dioceses. The best example such a demand I can cite relates to the (aforementioned) annual diocesan appeal. A few weeks before the envelopes and mini pledge pencils appear in the pews, pastors at St Augustine used to announce the dollar amount the diocese had assigned for our parish —“the vigorish” as I called it. Anything above “the vig” our diocese promised, would go back into the parish. I am not sure how the Brooklyn diocese arrives at this dollar amount, but I believe Sunday per capita offerings and past giving influence the assessment, and I suspect behind-the-scenes research into net worth records and property values is sometimes involved.
One of the beautiful aspects about Catholicism is that one is not required to pay anything to take part in Mass and to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist, and I have always been proud of this tradition. Many Catholics attend Mass every week and don’t even register. When I supported our parish economically, I began to do so because I wanted to, not because of any attempt to sell me on the idea. (I no longer give the institutional Catholic Church money for reasons of conscience.) One of the signs, however, that a parish is perhaps a bit more interested in your “treasure” than in your time, talent or soul, is a hard-sell exhortation to “register.” Poor people rarely feel welcome in parishes that ask for money at every turn, and often poor families elect not to register. Back to the annual appeal. Often even the most principled pastors feel obliged to press even poor parishioners, to give generously to the diocesan appeal because they know that often, as is the case in Brooklyn, poor Catholics are the first to loose their parishes.
A parish that fails to offer a sufficient “tribute,” so to speak, to an ornery bishop can put itself in jeopardy. I believe lack of support for the bishop and his appeal may have been a factor in the decision to merge St. Augustine. DiMarzio has a bit of a reputation for liking money more than he should. Opus Dei, with which he is allegedly aligned, tends to have a focus on aquisition, and infiltrating financial institutions — so this analysis tracks. But again, there is no way to know for sure because all of these matters are draped in secrecy.
What I do know for sure, because it is well documented, is that DiMarzio lacks impulse control in certain situations, has temper, holds grudges, makes threats and makes good on his threats.
I know quite a few devout, “old school,” parishioners who refused to contribute to the diocesan appeal. They’d read the newspapers. They looked at DiMarzio’s columns in the diocesan paper. They DiMarzio was crooked. So they contributed to the parish, but stiffed the bishop.
Read “Death of a Brooklyn Parish,” Part 1
Read “Death of a Brooklyn Parish,” Part 2
Read “Death of a Brooklyn Parish,” Part 3
Read “Death of a Brooklyn Parish,” Part 4
Read “Death of a Brooklyn Parish,” Part 5
Read “Death of a Brooklyn Parish,” Part 6
Read “Death of a Brooklyn Parish,” Part 7