JD shares about an arrest in Vatican City this week that piqued his interest. Then, in the wake of multiple examples of large-scale theft from American parishes, JD and Ed ask if the Church needs to change its attitude toward financial management.
This episode of The Pillar Podcast is sponsored by Seton Home Study School. Homeschooling with Seton provides an atmosphere at home where families can live an authentic Catholic family life and we see some of the fruits of this in the number of vocations coming from homeschooling families.
Learn more here: Boom in Religious Vocations…From Catholic Homeschoolers!
Okay, I haven’t listened to the whole episode yet, but JD is correct about Friday Night Lights, and Ed is wrong. And JD is absolutely correct that you need to give it more time; you could actually skip season 2 and just move on, it gets better. And it’s different than the movie, and much better.
Agree. Ed is correct that the Landry murder plot was terrible but the takeaway there is to forget about season 2 (writer’s strike year) and keep going. For sure.
I believe JD started to make a comment re: the embezzlement/fraud being common in small businesses or family businesses, and I do not have the stats, but this is somewhat true.
I've had direct experience in different organizations, some nonprofits and a closely-held private company. I've also seen it from the outside in family-run orgs. Usually nobody goes to the cops, but if the orgs are to persist, the person siphoning off money has to get cut out in some way, and the orgs put on more professional-type footing, with separation of duties, regular audits, etc. For the non-profits, they got boards of directors separate from the management of operations. They learned the importance of good governance and controls.
In some of these cases, it wasn't so much stealing as a divergence of visions -- it was founders feeling like they were entitled to certain compensation (this has to do with the non-profits), and others not agreeing. Sometimes it takes a parting of ways (and in this case, the founder left... and founded a new non-profit with a new vision, and it sounds like it's doing just fine. Nothing wrong with that.)
I don't know if there's some kind of "Here is a little best practices at different scales" package from some kind of "build your non-profit" org, but I know there are such things for towns....
...and I'm continuing this in a separate note, bc I jumped off your Florida story with a podcast of my own (and I don't know if this note will post... not sure of your policies on this):
https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/fraud-and-embezzlement-how-to-prevent
I tend to cover public finance issues, so I'm more interested when it goes wrong in towns and cities (states are a matter on an entirely different scale). My specialty is public pensions, and I've seen it go really wrong for some funds. (Been tracking that since 2008)
In the podcast, I point out the case of Rita Crundwell in Dixon, Illinois, a notorious case of a lack of separation of duties leading to a 20-year embezzlement to the tune of $54 million from a small town. It was amazing. The town was later able to claw back $10 million in sales of Crundwell's assets and $30 in lawsuits against the auditors and banks who never raised red flags against Crundwell in those decades.
I think JD is mostly right re. embezzlement. For 50 years grandfather ran a very successful antique lighting shop. He was a very competent and sharp man. At one point he caught his 2nd-in-command long-time employee stealing from the business. It has been happening for years, in secret. I’m not sure what the total amount was. But he fired him and it was pretty devastating, since this person was highly trusted. My grandfather had helped him with personal expenses and all sorts of things. They were friends.
So yes I can say this is quite common, and oftentimes the embezzlers are quite clever.
Just started listening but Ed, on a previous trip to Colorado, delivered a suitcase to someone in Aspen who lost it…sounds too much like the intricate plot to the original Dumb and Dumber
My exact thought haha
One of favorite books is The Always War about an American civil war over the right to the waters of the Great Lakes. Margaret Peterson Haddix, who is one of the best writers of tween fiction around.
I like the crossover between "some doll" and "no dames" towards the end there.
Thanks for a fine conversation on the long running problem of theft by trusted people. Like Father Walter Benz, who stole around $1.3 million from his Pensylvannia parish between 1972 and 1998. He wisely fessed up on his death bed, so we might guess that he dodged both earthy and heavenly justice.
Yes, small businesses suffer fraud at similar rates as Catholic parishes and usually for the same reason: a "trusted" employee is given too much financial control with insufficient oversight.
In the Buffalo NY Diocese, the same woman stole hundreds of thousand of dollars from both a parish and a small business:
https://www.wgrz.com/article/news/crime/woman-accused-stealing-from-church-medical-practice-arraigned-buffalo-crime/71-387449bc-a490-4fae-ada8-696275af3f70
How did this episode not get called "white collar" crime
I have not gotten very far into the podcast and apparently I am going to spend the rest of the morning mostly thinking about the phrase "sangre de Cristo" (recognizable immediately from the Latin cognate) although why it fascinates me in any language like a cat watching birds I cannot say.
My betting money for "the Colorado River was the last straw" scenario is on Arizona-California, not Colorado-Arizona (provoked by whatever, Arizona starts taking more water than agreed; things escalate; plenty of room for Nevada to get dragged in because they don't want to make up the shortfall). Both states need to have a real water interest as well as ideological differences.
And then some kind of 3rd party secession from the blue western states that have some ideological affinity with California, but have way too much of their self image wrapped up in "complaining about all the Californians moving in" to actually ally with them (WA, OR, CO)
there are too many Californians moving here, lol.
There are too many Californians moving to Arizona, too, which is why we need more water. We should be given the share based on how many people have moved here