Monday, January 26, 2009

Financial Common Sense and You Tube

Rev. Ken Knippel let his parishioners at St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Brookfield know that over the past three years, nearly $128,000 was stolen from the parish. It appears that Father Leonard Van Vlaenderen was taking it from the weekend cash offerings before it was counted. Normally, cash offerings were around $775 before Van Vlaenderen came and when we would be gone on leave, but were aroud $330 when he was around. There are a few red flags here. 1) The money counters should have noticed this. How could they have not noticed such a difference. 2) The bookkeeper should have noticed this. 3) Their administrative services committee should have been given regular financial statements and they should have noticed this.

Unfortunately, only the audit noticed this. I suppose this is pretty damning evidence that our parishes in the Archdiocese need audits, if not yearly, on some sort of random cycle. The other option... all three points mentioned above and the people involved in each point should be trained. We do the same thing regarding training against sexual abuse, why not training against financial abuse.

On a completely different note, I see that that the Vatican has begun their own YouTube site on which they will regularly post videos at "http://www.youtube.com/vatican".

A Faithful Catholic

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