Lavish living by Catholic hierarchy is moral corruption | National Catholic Reporter

I cringe when I see the Roman rituals - the lordly rites.  I know how the priests and nuns who educated me lived: nothing like that.  If it is even possible for the Catholic Church here to regain its moral stature modesty, not pomp, will be the path. - gwc
Lavish living by Catholic hierarchy is moral corruption | National Catholic Reporter
by Michael Sean Winters
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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries in this country, Catholic bishops were leaders of their mostly immigrant communities, and people took pride when their bishop built a grand house for himself. The cardinal's residence in Brighton, Massachusetts, was a magnificent Italianate affair, more like the Livadia Palace of the tsars in Yalta than a New England manse. I once stayed at a B & B in San Francisco that had been the archbishop's house, and it was quite grand. Chicago's cardinals lived in a mansion that famously has 19 chimneys. But Cardinal Sean O'Malley sold the mansion in Brighton and moved into the cathedral rectory, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone lives in an apartment on the campus of the cathedral in San Francisco, and Cardinal Blase Cupich lives in the rectory at Holy Name Cathedral. This must become the norm, not the exception.

The irony is that the mansions — indeed the entire infrastructure of the church in the U.S. we know — were built with money from the people in the pews.

The report on Bransfield exposes a deeper kind of corruption, one that worries me more than the fact that a particular bishop spent too much on booze and fresh flowers. In our time, bishops, like university presidents, must spend a lot of their time sucking up to rich people and raising money. They learn how to host them at their homes in style and which restaurants are posh enough for high-dollar donors. The boards of our Catholic institutions are populated with wealthy Catholics. The connection with the working men and women atrophies. Soon, large building projects by Catholic organizations are built with non-union labor, a bishop learns a little too much about high-end wines, the concerns of the wealthy become the concerns of the hierarchy, and the situation of the working class is increasingly remote. "I come to proclaim good news to the upper middle class and the uber-rich" said Jesus in Luke 4, or something like that.