Christ the King Catholic Church in Tampa, Fla. offers daily Mass throughout the week, and five services on Sunday. Parishioners can enroll their kids at the parish school (awarded the National Blue Ribbon Award for Excellence in 2020), and their parish’s ministry page boasts a variety of service organizations, volunteer opportunities, and social events. To an outsider perusing the glossy parish website, there is no indication that it was defrauded of nearly $1 million by its own bookkeeper in 2023 and 2024. The woman, a lifelong parishioner, forged signatures on checks to fund a “lavish lifestyle,” according to a November 2024 Tampa Bay Times article, which reported that a U.S. district court had sentenced her to over two years in federal prison.
The Times quoted Christ the King’s pastor, who said that it was neither the theft nor the amount that most upset his parishioners, but “rather the identity of the perpetrator.” Being betrayed by one of their own was a feeling he likened “to a member of one’s own family stealing from you and for no good reason.”
Tampa’s is only one such story in recent years, as financial fraud has beset various Catholic parishes around the country. Both lay employees and clergy have been found responsible in financial scandals, which mostly fly under the national media radar, since the stories tend to be (literally) parochial in nature. A 2023 article in The Journal of Forensic and Investigative Accounting reviewed ninety-five cases of Catholic priests embezzling from parishes. Although the cases in question occurred between 1963 and 2021, the authors found that 75 percent took place since 2000.
As in the church child-abuse scandals, bishops tended to rehabilitate and reshuffle priests who had committed financial misdeeds, moving them back into church life. A Nevada priest convicted of gambling away parish funds in 2012 moved to another diocese to serve as head of human resources—after serving a thirty-six-month federal prison sentence. The review found that these cases tended to be crimes of opportunity, but also the by-products of institutional negligence and naivete, of creaky, archaic systems and processes, and often of good, old-fashioned disorganization.
In part to respond to this crisis, several organizations have arisen to provide consulting for parishes, so that not all the tasks of keeping the books—or overseeing those who do—fall on priests alone.
“Without eyes on the books, the books can get away from you very quickly,” said Meg Heller, a business development specialist at St. Joseph Financial Services. I interviewed her last year for a magazine piece on the role of lay volunteers in the Church, in which overstretched priests often rely heavily on unpaid, often underappreciated labor. Her non-profit charitable organization was founded in 2018 to advise Catholic parishes, schools, and other organizations and to help them update their financial administration systems.
Bringing in an outside organization to oversee and manage these processes may help prevent a future Christ the King scenario. Robert Warren, an author of the Journal of Forensic and Investigative Accounting case review, said in a 2024 interview with Catholic outlet The Pillar that a “separation of duties” is an essential preventive internal control against parish financial fraud. That separation includes “making sure that the employee with access to the accounting records [does] not have access to the assets.” While Warren and his co-author, Timothy J. Fogarty, note at the end of their article that most dioceses were reluctant to cooperate with their review, parishes and dioceses in California, Michigan, Louisiana, and Indiana seem to appreciate what St. Joseph Financial Services is offering, and have come on board as clients.
Father Patrick Hyde is a Dominican priest and business school student at Notre Dame. “One of the challenges of the priesthood, and especially of being a pastor, is that there are increasing responsibilities and expectations for which the priest is simply not formed,” he said. According to Hyde, the priest is the CEO of the parish when it comes to financial management and all its complexities, everything from developing and maintaining budgets to setting in place protocols for tracking and reporting revenue and expenses. “My background,” Hyde said, “both as undergrad and obviously as a graduate student of theology, is not in administration leadership or business or management.”
Most Catholic seminaries do not provide practical, hands-on training in administration to future priests. That part is learned on the job after ordination. “The ideal is that you would have a pastor who is teaching you when you are first out of the seminary and in a parish,” said Hyde. “If a pastor is a micromanager or has an outdated style, it may be effective for him and for that particular ministry, but it may not help the priest who is learning those things.”
Hyde said the struggle to grasp financial administration can complicate what it means to be a pastor in the first place. “It feels like so much of your time and your energy is dedicated to things that on the surface have very little to do with the advancement of the Gospel.”
Hyde acknowledged that dioceses often have financial controls against fraud, but said he sees a lot of priests who struggle to enforce them. “There can be a way in which the priest feels like, ‘Well, I don’t know how to do this,’” he said. “‘I need a bookkeeper, but I don’t know. I don’t feel like I have the time to read the diocesan controls policy.’ But, you know, we actually need to keep track of these things. And so it’s very easy for a lot of priests to just feel overwhelmed.”
These cases tended to be crimes of opportunity, but also the by-products of institutional negligence and naivete, of creaky, archaic systems and processes, and often of good, old-fashioned disorganization.
Church leadership is increasingly aware there is a problem. “Dioceses are becoming more intentional about the way in which they supervise finances,” Hyde said. His own superior in his religious order is the person who sent him to business school in the first place, and he said he knows of two Franciscans and a Norbertine in his class.
Hyde has gotten a hand from a management organization called Amazing Parish. Two lay businessmen founded Amazing Parish for Catholic pastors in 2013, right around the election of Pope Francis, whose papacy is focused on the church’s evangelizing mission. “The Catholic Church is still hyper-local in some ways,” said Tim Glenkowski, Amazing Parish’s executive director. Amazing Parish’s founders determined that the United States’s seventeen thousand local parishes are “outposts of the Church’s mission,” Glenkowski said, since for most Catholics, “the majority of their experience of the Church is through their local parish.”
Amazing Parish works with pastors, parish employees, and congregations to help them think strategically—in organizational parlance, to take parishes “from maintenance to mission.” According to founder Pat Lencioni’s vision, parishes must no longer function as cookie-cutter Catholic Church franchises, but as entrepreneurial ventures. The Amazing Parish model takes pastors through a process of identifying outdated initiatives and programs that are sapping the parish of time, energy, and money, and discerning where they might invest those things instead to more effectively meet their congregation’s needs.
Glenkowski uses the example of a priest he knows who is responsible for four parishes in rural Iowa, with the farthest parish an hour and a half drive away. It can be isolating, particularly for younger priests, many of whom report burnout, loneliness, and feeling underprepared for parish administration. “Anybody in business knows this,” he said, “Real success in a business is a team sport.” Glenkowski pointed out that Jesus knew this, too. Christianity’s founder had a core leadership team of twelve, which he eventually expanded to a missionary group of seventy-two that he dispatched in teams of two.
It is tempting to describe Amazing Parish as a Catholic version of McKinsey, teaching priests how to run their parishes like Fortune 500 companies. But Glenkowski insists his organization is interested in empowering both the priest and the congregation to establish clear and open lines of communication that will, in the long run, save money, time, and souls. The advantage is more than just another set of eyes on the books. “I see management consulting really as dealing with more the smarts of a business, typically,” he said. Instead of observing and offering recommendations, Amazing Parish embeds coaches within parishes to help priests and laity form productive, collaborative relationships. They emphasize soft skills, things that don’t necessarily fit on a slide deck, “recognizing the importance of culture and health in addition to smarts,” he said.
Other companies are helping create efficiencies for Catholic organizations. FinalSite is a software company that offers tuition, enrollment management, and data analysis to diocesan Catholic schools. Like parish priests, Catholic school principals don’t always have the time to pore over spreadsheets and think about enrollment, teacher hiring, and tuition hikes. The word “transparency” comes up a lot in a discussion with Morgan Delack, FinalSite’s chief of staff. It is something she said that their automated data analysis allows Catholic schools to provide to parents. “There’s a new generation of parents now,” said Delack. “If there’s a tuition increase or there’s a change that impacts them directly, they would like to know why that is. And if the school is not able to say, well, your tuition is increasing by this amount and here’s why we had to do it, then it leads to distrust.” The archdioceses of Seattle and Philadelphia are both clients of FinalSite.
The medieval and early modern Catholic Church in Europe relied heavily on confraternities—lay organizations that functioned under the Church’s aegis and leveraged devout Catholics’ professional expertise, providing charitable and social services in the community. Rather than a parish functioning as all things to all people, the laity rose up to fill the gaps, especially during the Reformation, when trust in the clergy was at a low point.
Of course, in every generation, the Devil finds his way, even into the rectory. In 2025, the Church in the U.S. is not selling indulgences and phony relics, but just last year, a Pennsylvania priest was charged with embezzling tens of thousands from his parish to fuel a Candy Crush habit. “If you look at a lot of the reasons that the laity don’t trust the church,” Glenkowsi said, “it’s because of, like, the latent dysfunction that exists too many times, that is never addressed adequately or properly. We don’t always look like the Gospel.” By harnessing the latest technology and administrative management philosophies, organizations like FinalSite and Amazing Parish may, then, represent a return to the past, one in which the laity helped or even saved the clergy—from themselves if not from Candy Crush.