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January 3, 2006
PERSONAL ATTENTION Most Reverend William S. Skylstad, President U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 3211 Fourth Street, N.E.
Dear Bishop Skylstad:
I am writing this letter with little hope it will elicit the response I believe our Lord would expect of one of His disciples. Indeed, based upon my past experience, I realize those charged with responsibility for screening your correspondence might well refer this letter to an underling who will take it upon himself to either deep-six the letter or reply with the kind of disingenuous verbiage I have received in the past. Nevertheless, I feel a moral obligation to my fellow Catholics to make the effort.
The subject of my concern is church revenue protection which, at the parish level, is virtually non-existent. In what has been an unsuccessful 16-year effort to correct that intolerable condition, I have presented the case for effective revenue protection measures to each of your predecessors dating back to Bishop Pilarczyk. This present effort is different, however; since I last corresponded with your immediate predecessor, Bishop Gregory, I have had two articles published in the Catholic periodical New Oxford Review, and I am presently working on a third article which will draw upon the themes of the first two and, in effect, clearly and firmly establish responsibility for the lack of secure procedures squarely in the lap of the USCCB. The first two articles (The Second Greatest Scandal in the Church and Post-Deposit Embezzlements) are available for download at my website: ChurchSecurity.info.
In light of the above, Bishop Skylstad, I strongly and respectfully encourage you to have a member of your staff download the referenced articles for your review. Between the two, you will have a clear picture of the case I have been fruitlessly attempting to make for the past 16 years. I firmly believe anyone who reads those articles with an open mind can only reach one conclusion: that an immediate, Church-wide overhaul of the way funds are handled at the parish level is a moral and fiscal imperative.
That brings me to the crux of past evasions and roadblocks: the Conference’s authority to mandate uniform standards upon its member dioceses. Canon Law provides a mechanism for obtaining Vatican approval for Conference-wide mandates that then only require two-thirds approval of its members. If you take the position that the members will not approve Conference-wide security measures, you are (in effect) saying most bishops prefer to keep parish revenue highly vulnerable to theft. For more on that, see my January 20, 2004 letter to then USCCB President Bishop Wilton Gregory.
In any event, I look forward to hearing from you after you have had time to fully contemplate this critical issue.
Most sincerely, [signed M. W. Ryan] Michael W. Ryan
enclosures (2)
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Bishop Skylstad never responded. Subsequently, correspondence was had with Bishop Skylstad’s successor, Francis Cardinal George. For the particulars of that exchange, click on the “Cardinal George” hyperlink in the menu on the left. |
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