A Bishop and Priests Arrested for Having $600K in Stolen Money Hidden in the Walls
Source – A group of Catholic priests in Brazil have been arrested, accused of embezzling £426,000 of church donations, funeral fees and fundraising cash.
The Bishop of Formosa, Jose Ribeiro, along with five clergymen and three lay people were detained in prison in Goiás this week charged with stealing over 2 million reais (£426,000) from church funds.
A police raid on one of the priests’ home saw officers prise open a false wall in to find some £19,200 in plastic bags hidden in a secret storage space.
It’s alleged the money was stolen over a three-year period from tithes, donations, fundraising events and from fees collected for ceremonies such as baptisms and weddings.
Phone taps uncovered the alleged web of deceit with conversations apparently revealing how the group laundered the money by purchasing a cattle ranch, a lottery agency, mobile phones, luxury cars, designer watches and gold chains. Large amounts of cash in foreign currencies were also found.
How’s this for a nice story to hit you over the head the day after Palm Sunday? Just 24 hours from parishoners around the world watching the Passion acted out. Seeing Jesus betrayed. Jesus condemned. Jesus sacrificing himself for the human race. While Bishop Ribeiro was eyeing the collection plate and wondering if there’d be enough in there to afford the Beemer with heated leather seats and the SiriusXM package.
Hiding cash in the walls is just such an OG move. Like Johnny Depp in Blow. And you have to admire them spending some of that stolen loot on watches and jewelry, since this is the week Judas sold the Son of Man down the river for 30 pieces of silver. So while these evil, conniving larcenists were turning people’s devotion into a Ponzi scheme, at least they were not without a sense of religious irony.
And the worst part is this is nothing new. I heard a great point made by Dan Carlin on his history podcast. And that is, for most of human history, the worst atrocities have been committed against devout people by people even more devout. And Catholicism didn’t get to be the biggest church in the western world without doing the bad stuff better than anyone else. The Inquistion. Torture executions. Public beheadings. The orphanage in my ancestral homeland of Tuam in County Galway where they found the mass grave of 800 babies put there by the nuns. The clergy pedophilia epidemic. In fact, now that I think of it, if you tear down the wall of a bishop’s house in Brazil and the worst thing you find is a few hundred thousand dollars in cash, we kind of dodged a bullet. It could’ve been much, much worse.
I like my parish and have no intentions of leaving the Church. But once again, they don’t make it easy to stay.