With several high-profile cases involving financial mismanagement by priests emerging in recent years, two researchers have found some surprising reasons behind clerical embezzlement — and, they told OVS News, financial pressure isn’t usually one of them, as their long-term data shows.
“I have a database of about 120 Catholic clergy frauds going back to 1963,” Robert A. Warren, assistant professor of accounting at Radford University in Virginia and a retired special agent for the Internal Revenue Service, told OSV News. “And every time a new one comes out, I get the court records and I read them.”
That research has enabled him and fellow academic Timothy Fogarty, professor of accountancy at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, to examine why a number of Catholic priests in the U.S. have, over the past six decades, skimmed parish funds for an array of unauthorized purposes, from vacation homes to gambling debts to illicit relationships (including, in the case of one Latin-rite priest, a woman he secretly married and several children).
In 2023, Warren and Fogarty published their findings in an article titled “Exploring Embezzlement by Catholic Priests in the United States: A Content Analysis of Cases Since 1963,” which appeared in the Journal of Forensic and Investigative Accounting.
In their paper and in phone interviews with OSV News, both scholars stressed that most Catholic priests do not engage in financial malfeasance. They also acknowledged that more research is needed — especially in partnership with the U.S. Catholic bishops — to better understand the risk factors for clerical theft and embezzlement.
But by reviewing some 95 cases spanning 1963-2020, and using court documents and a forensic model called the “fraud triangle,” Warren and Fogarty delineated a pattern of rationalization that enabled offending priests to justify their misuse of church monies — even when they had no apparent financial pressure to steal.
The fraud triangle hypothesis, developed through the work of American sociologist Donald Cressey and other researchers, holds that three key factors are usually present when a person commits fraud — “opportunity, pressure and then … rationalization” of the offense, Warren explained.
However, when it comes to applying the model to fraud by Christians, particularly Catholic priests, the fraud triangle “works really great for some dimensions, but not for others,” Fogarty told OSV News.
With parishes relying on regular weekly donations, often in the form of cash, “the opportunity element is both strong and obvious,” he and Warren noted in their article.
An overall culture of trust, informal accounting procedures, weak financial controls and the ability of parish priests “to override any controls that exist” all enhance that element, they wrote.
Yet the pressure factor of the fraud triangle doesn’t fully align with the cases the two surveyed, since “most priests, even though they do not take a vow of poverty, understand that their material need for food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and other basic (necessities) will be met by the Church,” they wrote.
In addition, Roman Catholic priests typically are celibate, eliminating any financial strain from marriage and family obligations, they noted.
And “while priests may have aspirations for advancement within the church, they do not face the prospects of job loss and its accompanying economic uncertainty,” Fogarty and Warren wrote.
In fact, the very nature of Catholic religious life, with its emphasis on voluntary poverty and humility, works to reduce financial incentives for theft, they said.
Of course, gambling, sex and substance abuse addictions can create severe financial pressure that could lead to malfeasance, they noted.
“It’s hard to find a rationalization with somebody who’s an addict, because if they’re an addict, they just want their fix,” said Warren.
Yet a closer look at the rationalizations used by clergy who had stolen, as revealed in the court documents Fogarty and Warren analyzed, showed that something else often drives fraud by priests: envy.
“Their peer group doesn’t become the other priests,” Warren told OSV News. “Their peer group are their parishioners.”
And the more financially secure those parishioners are, the greater the temptation to keep pace with those in the pews, he added.
“You don’t see people stealing from poor parishes,” Warren said. “I don’t think I’ve seen anyone (steal) at a parish that was destitute.”
But where parishioners have more discretionary income, “you see the lifestyles that people who are ‘less good’ than yourself are living, and it just doesn’t feel right,” Fogarty told OSV News. “Everybody kind of believes in some intuitive justice in this world: that you get what you deserve. And priests leading an exemplary life sometimes see themselves coming up short in that regard. When you see these other examples of people who are, let’s say, more morally suspect than you (are) having nice cars and nice houses and all this discretionary income, you’re probably saying, ‘What’s up with that?'”
Priests who do steal typically rationalize their actions through what sociologists call “moral licensing,” or a misplaced sense of entitlement incurred from doing good deeds.
“The theory is that if you do something good, it entitles you to do something bad,” Warren explained.
He likened it to excuses dieters often use when they want to cheat on their nutrition plan.
“Let’s say you lose 10 pounds; you’ve been working out (and) that entitles you to go get an ice cream sundae,” said Warren.
Fogarty explained that moral licensing is “a greatly underappreciated phenomenon in general,” and that “priests are a great application of it.”
“It’s in the nature of their job to help people and to guide them in their quests and through life,” Fogarty said. “You feel like you’ve kind of earned something, but then you look at what rewards you’re getting for it, and you feel like you’re coming up short. So it’s kind of like you’ve earned some credits you’re not cashing in.”
That attitude in a parish environment where “you see all this money laying around” can lead a disaffected priest to “believe that maybe you ought to enjoy some of it,” Fogarty said.
“I think to be fair that 99 priests out of 100 would just say, ‘Well, that’s the life I’ve chosen and I’m getting psychic rewards here, and I shouldn’t be thinking about those things,'” Fogarty stressed. “But every once in a while, one starts thinking about those things and starts saying, ‘I only have one life to live.'”
Warren said that several practical strategies, along with an honest recognition of inherent human frailties that lead to moral licensing, can help prevent fraud by at-risk priests.
“The first step to financial rigor is an audit,” and one should be conducted “every time a pastor is switched,” as well as annually, he said.
Warren also said that parish financial records must be “kept according to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles,” the industry standards to which publicly traded companies in the U.S. adhere.
“Make sure you have backup for everything” regarding parish financial transactions, he added.
Since “it’s very hard to safeguard cash,” parishes need to have “two sets of eyes on the money” or have it “locked up,” and should consider moving as much as possible to online giving, said Warren.
Parishes that struggle to afford on-staff business managers should consider “banding together” to hire them, or consider outsourcing bookkeeping and accounting duties entirely to a professional firm, Warren said.
Pastors “should have to file a financial disclosure with their bishops,” said Warren.
To further reduce the risk of clerical embezzlement, financial management should be incorporated into seminary formation, since priests generally emerge from the seminary with “very little training in finances,” Warren said. “You have to give them courses in accounting, finance, management, budgeting and maybe even HR (human resources). And they’ve got to master it.”
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