And you know, the Catholic Church, in the early part of the 20th century, built an enormous amount of infrastructure - big churches, big schools. HEINZMANN: Yeah, and that's an issue that's not just a Chicago issue it's sort of nationwide in the Catholic community - is that Catholics have moved, just like a lot of people have moved. KING: I know when you started looking, you discovered that the church is facing some other very serious financial pressures that have complicated things. A lot of that land is being sold or has been sold already to fund abuse settlements. The church owns a lot of land both in the city of Chicago and out in surrounding areas where they were going to, for instance, build cemeteries someday. They say that all of the money that's used to pay down the debt from misconduct comes from selling assets. But one of the problems is that when money stays in the archdiocese and doesn't go into the trust, there is a little bit of a mystery of how it's accounted for. KING: The church has been dealing with a lot of lawsuits linked to sexual abuse by priests. So we have some window into the fact that the money isn't in the trust, but the exact reasons of why not enough money went into the trust remain a little bit murky. The trust itself has a - is a 501(c)(3), and so it has to file a 990 form - an IRS form. And there just remains sort of a question of why that money didn't end up in the trust.Īnd the archdiocese, Catholic Church and other churches - there's a limit to how much they have to disclose publicly about their finances.

Even if you count the bequests money, they're still short tens of millions of dollars. And some people wonder exactly where some of the money want.

There are people inside the church who have raised questions about the way that the archdiocese runs its accounting balance sheets. HEINZMANN: Well, a lot of the money went to parishes to solve problems locally at parishes. But you say it hasn't worked out with the trust. There's a distinction here - people pledging money versus people giving money. And that's just not the way it's worked out. But the main selling point of the campaign - the overall campaign back in 2013 was, if we get the money, we will put it in this trust. And the principal explanation they gave us - the archdiocese gave us was that too much of the money came in the form of bequests of a handful of very wealthy donors who made pledges as part of their wills.

They raised $427 million in pledges, but that trust only has $45 million in it. HEINZMANN: So six years later, as you said, they raised even more money. KING: Did that $150 million end up going to scholarships? - because it seems like it did not. The main thrust of it was to build $150 million long-term scholarship trust to fund Catholic - tuition for Catholic schools. So they went out in 2013 and build a giant capital campaign. And then people gave even more money than expected, right? And that was really starting to really affect the bottom line for the entire archdiocese. And what happens is, when a parish and a school can't make ends meet, they turn to the archdiocese for help. HEINZMANN: For a few years, they had started to run annual operating deficits that were in the tens of millions of dollars. KING: So what was going on with the church's finances in 2013 when it asked for all this money? And so now people are asking where the money went.ĭavid Heinzmann is a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. But since then, dozens of churches and Catholic schools in Chicago have closed anyway. Catholics ended up pledging even more than the church asked for. It said it needed $350 million to keep churches and Catholic schools open.

Six years ago, the Archdiocese of Chicago asked its parishioners for a lot of money.

Catholic see finance problems