A Wall Street Journal piece from last week takes a look at yet another scandal plaguing the Catholic church: the problem of clerics who misuse church funds. It's not just the Catholic church in which this happens, of course; it's a surprisingly common and costly problem:

In a new survey by the Center for the Study of Church Management at Villanova's School of Business, 85% of U.S. dioceses responding said that they had uncovered embezzlement schemes over the past five years. More than 10% reported that the amounts stolen exceeded half a million dollars.

[...] embezzlement is hardly a common sin among clerics--and laypeople can succumb just as readily. Yet the problem can seem widespread in the Catholic Church simply because of its size. With nearly 70 million followers, Catholicism is the largest denomination in the U.S. by far, with believers dropping nearly $6 billion a year into church coffers.

The encouraging part of the story is that, spurred by grass-roots organizations within the church, the Catholic church is coming to grips with the problem and is trying to increase financial oversight.

Most of the (Protestant) churches I've attended in recent years have made a pretty big point of keeping their offering collections and financial dealings as transparent and open as possible; I'm not sure how those practices compare to the way typical Catholic parishes handle financial information. But just in case your church can stand to improve its financial accountability, the phrase "embezzlement exceeding half a million dollars" should be a sufficiently scary motivator....