The Catholic Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn is poor but not insolvent, Archbishop Mark Coleridge says.
Appealing
for financial support in his Lenten letter, he said normally the
Catholic Church in Australia was asset rich and cash poor.
But Canberra
and Goulburn tended to be asset poor and cash poor.
It had no
investment portfolio and depended entirely on the Catholic Development
Fund for its financial survival. With the annual return from the
well-performing fund, ''we are breaking even and no more''.
''I
might add that there is no well concealed bottomless pit of Church funds
from which we can draw if necessary. We survive almost totally on what
people give.''
The Canberra Times reported in December the
Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn was in difficult financial straits
and parish priests were being asked how they intended to rectify the
position.
Mass attendance has almost halved over the past 15 years.
Archbishop Coleridge said this had obviously affected the Church's
income.
''Many of those who are still coming are on fixed incomes
or receiving a pension, and this too has its effect on giving. In
general, people are giving now what they gave 10 or 20 years ago, even
though costs have risen considerably in that time.''
In December,
faced with an increasing shortage of priests and money he said, ''We
have too many masses at the moment, and this may not be realistic in
such a mobile society.''
But the diocese had to plan for growth, not
diminishment.
In his letter, Archbishop Coleridge said one of the
paradoxes of the archdiocese is that, on average, the rural parishes
gave more per capita than the parishes of Canberra.
''This has remained true even through the last decade of drought that has been so devastating to farming.''
The
impression at times in the ACT was that Catholics gave with great
generosity through the 1960s and 1970s to build churches and schools as
Canberra grew.
''But once the churches and schools were built,
there was perhaps a sense that the job was done and that the need to
give had dwindled. Now we need a new giving in order to meet the
challenge of building the future ... Securing our finances for the
future is a task that belongs to us all.''