Vatican asks for financial details of all English, Welsh parishes

Published: 2006-10-16

LONDON (CNS) -- The Vatican has asked for the financial details of every Catholic diocese in England and Wales, months after church bureaucrats left a bishop 10.2 million pounds (US$17.8 million) in debt. Archbishop Faustino Sainz Munoz, papal nuncio to Great Britain, has asked heads of dioceses in England and Wales for evidence to show that their accounts conform with canon law as well as British civil law. In March, Bishop Patrick O'Donoghue of Lancaster, England, apologized to churchgoers after he discovered that his central administration had been "eating up" money belonging to parishes and trust funds without permission. The Vatican's Congregation for Clergy now wants to make sure that the scandal is not repeated, said Archbishop Sainz. In an Aug. 4 letter to the bishops -- leaked in October to The Tablet, a British Catholic weekly -- the archbishop said the congregation wished to be informed of "the financial structures and of the situation ... in every diocese." The Lancaster case arose out of confusion between civil law, which treats a diocese and its parishes as a single unit, and the church's Code of Canon Law, which sees a parish as a distinct body within the diocese with its own money and assets.

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