MINNESOTA
Canonical Consultation
04/23/2015
Jennifer Haselberger
Today’s online edition of the National Catholic Reporter features a story by Monica Clark about the arrest of Msgr. Hien Minh Nguyen, a priest and former judicial vicar of the Diocese of San Jose, on charges of fraud and tax evasion. According to the article, Msgr. Minh Nguyen was indicted for depositing parish checks, totaling $19,000, into his personal bank account, and failing to report over $1 million in income on his federal tax returns.
Much like the sexual abuse scandal uncovered by the Boston Globe in 2002, this arrest and indictment will come as no surprise to those involved in church governance in the United States. Since as early as 2007 bishops and Chancery officials have been warned that the ‘next big scandal’ in the Catholic Church would be its financial management, and those same individuals have been called upon to increase internal controls and other protections against misappropriation of funds and other fiscal mismanagement.
Much like the instructions for the handling of sexual misconduct by clergy, these warnings and suggestions have largely been ignored by those in governance in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis. And, much like the mishandling of accusations of sexual abuse, significant problems have arisen and then have been deliberately kept from the knowledge of the faithful. The most obvious example of this is the theft of more than $600,000 over a 17-year period by the former comptroller, Scott Domeier, through a scheme of graft and kickbacks. Although Domeier was finally removed from his position in 2012, the irregular accounting practices which he oversaw were hardly a secret. I originally raised concerns about them with the Archdiocesan CFO in 2009, only to be told to stay out of it. It was only when an outside vendor complained that the matter was dealt with.
Domeier was not the first lay employee of the Archdiocese (including the Catholic Spirit) to be charged for such crimes, nor is theft and other forms of fiscal misconduct limited to lay workers. Since the warning from the USCCB in 2007, the Archdiocese has repaid $30,000 taken from estate of a woman under the conservatorship of a parish priest, Father Corey Belden, to avoid prosecution of the priest, who apparently misappropriated the funds to fuel a gambling addiction. It froze parish accounts opened by a foreign priest who was using the parish’s tax ID number to ‘hold’ money that had been collected for charities and dioceses in Africa. In 2012, the Archdiocese conducted a parallel investigation to the criminal investigation by the Maplewood Police Department after Father Rodger Bauman accepted a personal gift of $120,000 from a 99-year-old former parishioner. The Archdiocesan investigation determined that Father Bauman had written out the check himself, because of the diminished capability of the man making the gift. And, in 2013, an internal investigation into an extortion attempt made against an Archdiocese priest (who was also involved in prostitution) turned up evidence that the priest had acquired significant assets, including property, through a scheme of double-dipping and having his parish reimburse him for personal expenses. To my knowledge, all these men remain priests of the Archdiocese.
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