Judy Valente reports on the finances of the Archdiocese of Chicago and its problems funding the Church's historic mission.
JUDY VALENTE: The Archdiocese of Chicago is wealthy. Its assets amount to more than $2 billion. Half of that is its endowment, which produces income the archdiocese uses to make up its operating losses, which last year were $23 million. Most of the rest of that $2 billion is in land and buildings. The land includes 40 Catholic cemeteries, which provide revenue from burial fees. The buildings, mostly schools and churches, provide no income -- just the opposite. Tom Brennan is financial director of the Chicago archdiocese.
TOM BRENNAN (Financial Director, Archdiocese of Chicago): It costs money to heat them, to light them, to keep the roofs in shape. And it's a huge, huge liability.VALENTE: Can you sell them?
Mr. BRENNAN: Not if we're going to continue our mission.
VALENTE: A mission that includes running the largest Catholic school system in the country.
School is out, but it's not a happy time at Holy Innocents Parish. That's because Holy Innocents is closing its doors.
It's one of 14 schools being shut down this year by the Chicago archdiocese. Not enough students, not enough tuition to keep it running.Mr. BRENNAN: Our primary mission is to serve people in need. The level of poverty ... the number of people in low-income housing, inadequate housing, and with inadequate health care is extremely large, and our resources are often inadequate.
VALENTE: This aging immigrant church on Chicago's South Side typifies the problems of a big urban diocese. A changing neighborhood with fewer Catholics. And a church building that was falling apart. In this case, the archdiocese kicked in $2 million for improvements. But the parish has more building space that it needs right now. This is the rectory.
(to Father Eyerman): At one time, how many priests lived here?
Father MATT EYERMAN (Pastor, Holy Innocents Parish): At one time it could have housed six priests.VALENTE: Now, Eyerman is the only priest. Only a third of the students here are Catholic. And the parish has had to hire salaried lay teachers because there aren't enough teaching nuns.
Father EYERMAN: This sort-of-vacant land here is the old convent. It was torn down several years ago.
VALENTE: Now they tore down the convent; they could tear down the rectory? And that's property to sell; somebody could put up a house here? They could earn money?
Father EYERMAN: The property's nice, but what are you going to do with this, put one house here? It isn't going to generate the kind of income that we need to either underwrite the schools or to get the Church out of the crisis it's in.VALENTE: This is where a diocese gets most of the money to meet its operating expenses -- from the Sunday collection.
Father EYERMAN: We collect the money and count it during the week, and we put it in the bank. No one is ever alone with the money. I'm not alone with the money and when we count it; I count it along with a parishioner.
It is the lack of openness about its finances that has brought the Church so much criticism. Although this archdiocese publishes an annual financial report, many others, including New York and Philadelphia, do not.
JOSEPH HARRIS (Budget Analyst): The Church does some reporting at the local level, some reporting at the diocesan level. It needs much more transparency, much more reporting and information on a regular basis, and it needs more decision-making sharing.VALENTE: In the 1990s, Chicago paid out several million dollars for settlements in sex abuse cases. Collections went down, but only temporarily.
Father GREG SAKOWICZ (Pastor, St. Mary of the Woods Catholic Church): People have then said to me, you have the money to pay for the lawsuits. But you go ahead in Chicago, and you close Catholic schools and Catholic parishes, and that's angering the people.
VALENTE: Ninety percent of what goes into the Sunday collection basket stays with the parish; the rest goes "downtown" -- that is, to the diocese. A struggling diocese will get no help from Rome. On the contrary, parishes take a special collection once a year for the Vatican. The American Church, so often at odds with the Vatican, is its biggest contributor.
As a sovereign state, the Vatican cannot be sued. But the nearly 200 dioceses in this country, each one a separate legal entity, can be. Where will the money for legal settlements come from?
VALENTE: Catholics continue to be critical and suspicious of the institutional Church, even as they mourn the closing of some of their parish churches and schools. Meanwhile, the archdiocese is trying simultaneously to fulfill its mission, make hard-nosed decisions about managing its resources, and prepare to meet the cost of lawsuits that may yet come.
