The Diocese of Scranton has earmarked $3 million to help parishes struggling with overwhelming debt. It’s part of an extensive “Debt Reduction Program for Distressed Parishes” outlined in Thursday’s edition of The Catholic Light. To be part of the program, a parish must meet a litany of requirements, including owing the diocese at least $300,000 and being able to demonstrate the debt was the direct result of parish subsidies for Catholic schools.
The $3 million may not go as far as it sounds. The diocese did not release data on individual parish debts, but a quick comparison of need versus money available can be gleaned from data released by Meitler Consultants when that firm scrutinized diocesan schools in 2006. One of the “key findings” in Luzerne County was that, in 2005, there were loans totaling $3.2 million in the county’s parishes that were “considered unserviceable.”
Add to that more than $1 million that county parishes had failed to pay as part of their diocesan assessments – an annual commitment set by the diocese – and Luzerne County alone has more debt than the new $3 million available for debt forgiveness. The diocese covers 10 other counties in Northeast Pennsylvania.
The plan requires a market value appraisal for all parish properties and a business manager appointed to oversee the finances of a parish that is deemed distressed. Along with owing the diocese $300,000, a parish must also “have a pattern of borrowing, or is unable to pay diocesan assessments that would eventually lead the parish to a distressed status.”
Bishop Joseph Martino will appoint a review board “to assist parishes whose debts to the diocese are not being serviced in a timely fashion and that wish to participate” in the program. The parish must draw up a recovery plan approved and monitored by the review board.
Under the plan, the diocese will “write off one dollar for every two dollars the parish pays toward its debt.” Existing loans will be made interest-free, and the parish will be exempt from the diocesan parish assessment for three years.
That doesn’t mean the parish gets out of paying other costs collected annually by the diocese, including money for the self-insurance program run by the diocese, priest medical insurance and priest pensions.
The debt-reduction plan comes on the heels of the comprehensive parish restructuring project launched last month, dubbed “Called to Holiness and Mission: Pastoral Planning in the Diocese of Scranton.” That project is intended to include every parish in the diocese, with each parish forming a “core team” that will review the parish’s status and recommend changes.
There also will be parish “cluster teams” working in different regions, and a diocese-wide planning commission that will make recommendations to the bishop. The entire process is slated to conclude with Martino announcing a final decision on all proposals in January 2009.
Thursday’s Catholic Light had a “questions-and-answers” article that included the query “Hasn’t everything been decided already?” Many critics contend that when the diocese conducted a review before restructuring Catholic schools this summer, the decisions had actually been made before the review ever started.
The response to the question in Thursday’s Catholic Light was that “No decisions have been made about the future of any parish in the Diocese of Scranton.” The article repeated that promise in answer to another question about the fate of church buildings if a church closes.
When parishes consolidate, “all the assets and liabilities usually go to the newly formed parish, not the Diocese of Scranton,” the article notes, adding that no property can be sold without the bishop’s permission.
In a third article related to parish finances, the diocese outlined new “best practices” protocols for how parishes handle Mass collections. The protocol calls for a count team of at least three unrelated persons to count the money and conduct other checks to make sure everything is above board and accurate, including providing adding machine tapes, double-counting money and bundling it using bank wrappers initialed by the counters.
The new policy also says parishes “should purchase keyless security bags with plastic locks which contain control numbers for each Mass.” That control number must match a similar number on the count sheet used for that Mass.
Acknowledging that some parishes with small membership and low rates of volunteering may have trouble finding three unrelated people willing to count the money after each Mass, the protocol suggests the locked bags be stored securely until a count team can meet.
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