Former Delray priests Francis Guinan (left) and John A. Skehan are accused of misappropriating $8.6 million from their church.

The Rev. Frank Guinan, Skehan's old friend and his successor at St. Vincent, is expected to surrender to police later this month, after completing a vacation in Australia.

The two men are accused of using hundreds of thousands of parishioners' dollars for themselves and friends, for drinking, gambling, real estate investments and travel.

The Skehan-Guinan case exemplifies a major problem with financial guidelines:

It is almost impossible for the diocese to know if its parishes are following the rules.

"The parish priest is his own little domain," said Peter Amann, head of the Palm Beach County chapter of Voice of the Faithful, a Boston-based group that advocates for financial transparency in the Catholic Church.

Amann and others who observe church governing practices, both local and nationwide, say that unless someone complains or some other alarm is raised, then parish priests - both the honest ones and the occasional dishonest ones - can go on for years with little oversight.

Since the Skehan-Guinan story broke, Bishop Vincent Barbarito, his chief financial officer and other diocesan officials have insisted that there are rules in place to prevent financial abuse by priests or their staffs.

But in practice, a pastor holds far more power over parish finances than the diocese.

Church officials must rely on the integrity of priests to report church income honestly, to protect the cash in the collection baskets and to use donations and bequests as they were intended.

The diocese requires each parish to have a finance committee of parishioners, to act as guardians of the money given by the faithful.

During the 40 years Skehan ran the parish, St. Vincent achieved its goals for the annual Diocesan Services Appeal, which pays for social services, education, missions and administration.

The goal for the Diocesan Services Appeal is set based on the parish annual offertory collection.

The parish also donated a large share of the diocesan educational endowment - $3.4 million of the $10.3 million fund.

"If your parish is in the black and you're paying your bills, and nobody's complaining, they tend to ignore you," said Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and author of books on how the Catholic Church is organized and governed. "If you're putting money into the bank, they're not going to ask questions."

Whatever the outcome of Skehan's and Guinan's criminal charges, the stakes for the diocese are just as high financially as they are spiritually.

Scandals cost diocese

It is possible that diocese-wide donations may falter again, as they did after pedophile scandals caused the removal of two Palm Beach bishops, J. Keith Symons and Anthony O'Connell. Major Catholic donors demanded more transparency in finances and other matters.

Diocesan finances for 2005, posted before the incidents at St. Vincent, included a deficit of $468,000, according to literature for the diocesan services appeal.

There was also a deficit in the diocese property and liability fund, including $4.8 million in hurricane damage claims, $2.7 million in property and liability claims and $1.1 million for premiums and other expenses.

St. Vincent parishioners rallied after the news broke about Skehan and Guinan, attending Mass in large numbers and giving more money the weekend after the allegations surfaced than the one before.

The ultimate effect on St. Vincent's financial health remains to be seen. In the past, the parish has always met its goal for the diocesan services appeal, according to the diocese.

So far this year, the parish has collected $196,000 toward its goal of $210,000, which must be raised by February, when the 2006 campaign ends.

In the end, it was an anonymous tip from a parishioner, and a scheduled diocesan audit, that brought scrutiny to St. Vincent's finances.

Honesty taken on faith

The relationship between a bishop and his priests is both delicate and politically charged.

No matter how stringent the rules for parish financial practices are, it's politically difficult to enforce those rules, said Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

"One of the impacts of the priest shortage is that priests are irreplaceable. So it's hard for a bishop to discipline a priest," Reese said. "A bishop's got enough problems to deal with."

This can leave only the integrity of the pastor and his staff as a safeguard, a system which works by and large, but may have failed at St. Vincent.

"The greatest temptation of the clergy has always been the idea that you're God," Reese said. "The pastor is the guy who makes all the decisions, unless people start complaining."

Parishioners at St. Patrick Church in Palm Beach Gardens did complain about Guinan's financial management, first to Guinan, who was pastor there for 16 years, and later to diocesan officials, who told them that a diocesan audit found nothing out of the ordinary in Guinan's management of the parish finances.

Most parish priests are not taking money from their parishioners, Reese said. But if a crooked pastor is determined to divert parish money or deceive the diocese, it can be done, Reese said.

"If you lie, you can cover your tracks," he said. "You can say we spent $100,000 on construction."

Parishioners as screen

That's where the parish finance committee becomes the first line of defense, Reese said.

Unlike a diocese, which may be miles away, parishioners can see whether workmen are on the premises - and presumably ask hard questions of the pastor.

A finance committee can be anything from a strong monitor to a rubber-stamp for a hands-on pastor, Reese said.

It helps if the committee members are experienced in business practices and know how financial matters should be handled.

"I don't want to sound like I'm blaming the parishioners, but - nobody noticed?" Reese said.

Audits can be either superficial or exhaustive, Reese said. In-house audits, conducted by staff, are far less complicated and expensive than outside audits, which can take months and large fees for expert accounting firms.

Ironically, strict measures of financial accountability can be costly.

"Bishops are reluctant to spend money on a finance office to audit parishes. Depending on salaries, it could mount up to a lot of money," Reese said.

"You could spend more money on the office than you would catch. Is it worth the money to catch somebody stealing money out of the collection?"

Some dioceses maintain pooled accounts of money from all parishes, with each parish's contribution earmarked and loaned back to it.

That system allows for economies of scale in terms of banking and other financial services.

In other dioceses, each parish manages its own money.

In practice, priests also are allowed a certain amount of discretion in how they run their parishes, Reese said.

Amann, also a member of St. Patrick when Guinan ran the parish, says that the bishop is the only person who can force parish priests into financial transparency. "He's a perfectly wonderful gentleman but he needs to step out of his comfort zone."

Though priests have ethical and behavioral guidelines to follow, and though bishops can exert certain controls, church finances ultimately come down to trusting that the priest and his staff will behave with integrity.

"It's not just the bishop, it's also these lay people who just trusted Father," Reese said.

Finances within different denominations

All parishes in the five-county Diocese of Palm Beach are required to have a finance council, as church law mandates. The diocese's new biennial audit system includes checking that each parish has a finance council that is functioning properly. The diocese also has a finance council, made up of the bishop, clergy members and laypeople. Since the diocese mandated audits, 30 have been completed in churches, missions and schools. Many parishes publish the amount of their weekly collections in theirbulletins. Parishes must provide the diocese quarterly and annual reports.

JEWS

Members of most temples and synagogues pay membership fees on a scale adjusted for several factors, including age and income. Membership fees pay about 40 percent of the budget at Temple Beth David in Palm Beach Gardens, Rabbi Michael Singer said.

Money also can be raised through fund-raisers.

Some cash enters the temple through the tzedakah box, to be used for the needy, who may receive a grocery card or other voucher, but not cash, Singer said. Rabbis often have discretionary funds meant to subsidize needy members.

The guidelines are kept specific to avoid the opportunity to abuse the fund. Rabbis who abuse their position can be brought before a religious court and, in extreme cases, lose the right to practice as clergy.

PROTESTANTS

Although Protestant churches may be governed either at the congregation level or by a regional or national council, most end up being independent of higher governance, said Jackson Carroll, professor emeritus of religion and society at Duke Divinity School. Though financial independence might leave room for abuses, they are relatively rare, Carroll said. This may be because 60 percent of Protestant churches have 100 or fewer members, he said, citing a recent study. When Protestant churches do not send money to regional councils, it is usually because they don't have the money or need it more urgently for their own projects rather than an act of rebellion, he said. In some denominations, having a pastor who lives well is a matter of pride for the congregation, he said.

EPISCOPALIANS

Parishes that are part of the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida have a thorough audit conducted by an outside auditor every two to three years, said the Rev. William Stokes, rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Delray Beach. The outside audit of his church has taken more than two months to complete. Churches in the Episcopal Diocese deliver about 15 percent of their income to the diocese.

MUSLIMS

Fund raising for mosques differs from mosque to mosque, said Ebrahim Moosa, a Duke University Islamic Studies associate professor. In most U.S. mosques, regular worshipers contribute by way of direct debit to a mosque fund to pay the expenses of the imam and costs to maintain the mosque, Moosa said. Parents pay a monthly fee for their children's Sunday school. Fund-raising events might cover further expenses or finance construction.

Clergy rarely raise money. Instead, a committee of professionals with some accountability handles such tasks. Some Muslim clergy also would see it as improper for them toraise money to pay their own salaries. They see that as the duty of the mosque management committees.

BUDDHISTS

Buddhist monks may be the most extreme in their avoidance of money, though their monastic orders have quite different practices. From the earliest days of Buddhism in India 2,500 years ago, monks have been forbidden from handling money. Buddhist monks originally lived entirely on what they received from laypeople, usually food, and so at least theoretically had no need for money, said Donald S. Lopez, a Buddhist and Tibetan Studies professor at the University of Michigan.

So individual monks rarely have much money, but Buddhist monasteries in Asia were often wealthy institutions that owned large properties, employed tenant farmers and even made loans to the laity, Lopez said. Most U.S. monks carry money, but the emphasis on simplicity remains.