High-life rev sez: Everyone does it! : New York Daily News
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned - but heck, so has everyone else.
That's the moral twist on a legal argument raised by a Catholic monsignor who's hoping to win a criminal dispensation from charges he stole $820,000 from his upper East Side parish.
Lawyers for Msgr. John Woolsey, the former pastor of St. John the Martyr Church, have told a Manhattan judge that priests like him have been hiding money from the Archdiocese of New York for years.
Parishes routinely shortchange Edward Cardinal Egan on the archdiocese's share from the Sunday collection - hiding funds in accounts beyond the eyes of church auditors, the lawyers said.
Woolsey's story, laid out in court papers seeking dismissal of a grand larceny indictment, is backed up by a longtime church bookkeeper and by an old pal, William Donohue, the outspoken president of the Catholic League.
"This has been going on for years. It's a way of life," Donohue told the Daily News. "He's one of the greatest priests I ever met in my life. To impute that this man would grab money out of poor boxes is outrageous and malicious. His integrity is being ripped off."
This is the second greatest scandal in the American Church today: money and greed.
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