I am sure Bernie Madoff knew he was a con artist whose motives were entirely self-serving. I am equally sure that Fr Bergman believes it's AMDG all the way at St Thomas More. But I think there is an area of overlap, insofar as Madoff (mis)led his "investors" to believe that they were part of a small in-group who were lucky enough to have been invited to place their money in his hands.Sins dealing with money can be traced to the "greed" we see in the Catechism. But greed doesn't simply refer to Ebenezer Scrooge-style miserliness. Pope Francis has linked greed to careerism, which isn't an observation original to himself.
The accounts I've seen of Madoff's life suggest he grew up a very ordinary kid who at some point got the urge to be important, perhaps a reaction to what he saw as his very ordinariness as an adolescent. The money was probably secondary to the need to have the power and prestige it gave, which is certainly a motive covered in the Catechism. In my post yesterday I suggested there was a continuum where Fr Bergman's ambition stopped and Madoff's began, but I think it's the same continuum.
What Fr Bergman appears to be doing, if it's not directly hurting his parishioners (although it continues to disturb me that the failed store enterprise has clearly damaged Dr Evanish, his benefactor), it nevertheless seems to me to constitute a breach of faith. The offerings we make as parishioners are brought to the altar during mass, after all, and they need to be treated with reverence and respect. I don't think Fr Bergman is doing this with the faithful donors at St Thomas More Scranton.
If Fr Bergman's motive is not to acquire stockpiles of wealth, I'm less certain that his goal isn't to be the prestigious "bright spot" that he's frequently called in the US-Canadian Ordinariate. But he's doing it by proposing projects like a parish school that he can't realistically support -- indeed, there's still a question whether he can continue to heat and maintain the physical plant he has.
Fr Bergman has a repeated pattern of saying, “we need money from you now because the money we thought we’d have didn’t come in.” Our diocesan pastor promotes the idea of “sacrificial giving”, recognizing that you have to give enough that you have to forego something else. Having begun to adopt this view, I’m recognizing that it requires prudent and careful budgeting. What can we forego? What can we postpone? But then it becomes a real breach of faith for the church to say “Whoopsie! We thought this harebrained scheme would bring in half a million, but now it won’t! You good people have to fill in the gap!” We make a sacrificial pledge in good faith only to discover the church is not operating on the same premises.
This to me would be grounds to go looking for a new parish. I did this once as an Episcopalian in response to irresponsible financial planning. Given the likelihood that there probably are grounds at least here and there for Ordinariate parishioners to say “OK, Cranmer goes only so far, we’re going to look for a reverent diocesan mass” (I can vouch for the fact that these exist), what keeps people from doing this? My regular correspondent suggests (emphasis mine),
Everyone has made a financial miscalculation at some time; this is quite different from Fr Bergman's repeated and apparently cheerful announcements that once again commitments have been made, expenditures have been allocated, with no concrete expectation that the money will be forthcoming. The fact that apparently no one has called him on this is disturbing. The ostensible appeal of the Ordinariates is that one leaves the fractured denominational milieu and joins the One True Church, yet the mindset remains that of a small beleaguered group doubling down on whatever strategies the local leader deems significant. No doubt this reflects historical betrayal and heartbreak but I personally feel one must offer that up. Some no doubt are recuperating from parish ruptures in the near past as some opted for the Ordinariate and others walked away.It seems to me that Mr Murphy at Ordinariate News has generally served as an enabler for this sort of dysfunctional attitude, not least by giving Fr Bergman a frequent platform for his self-promotion.
