NEWS STORY: Bishop Says He is Not Warring with His Predecessor

c. 2000 Religion News Service VICTORIA, British Columbia _ The new Catholic Bishop of Victoria insists he’s not publicly airing a multimillion dollar financial mess he’s inherited to hurt the reputation of Remi De Roo, the retired liberal bishop he replaced last year. “There’s no battle between me and Bishop Remi De Roo,” Bishop Raymond […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

VICTORIA, British Columbia _ The new Catholic Bishop of Victoria insists he’s not publicly airing a multimillion dollar financial mess he’s inherited to hurt the reputation of Remi De Roo, the retired liberal bishop he replaced last year.

“There’s no battle between me and Bishop Remi De Roo,” Bishop Raymond Roussin said in an interview, referring to commentaries in Canada’s national media and angry speculation in his own diocese of Victoria.


“People are editorializing on things that are totally false: that I’m a right-wing bishop and he’s a left-wing bishop. That’s so off the mark. I continue to respect the man for so much that he’s done.”

Roussin replaced De Roo, who has an international reputation for supporting social justice causes, last February, when he reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Roussin said he’s been forced to openly address some financial decisions made during De Roo’s tenure “that did not go well, and from the beginning should have been looked at more closely.”

The Victoria diocese released a statement earlier this month saying the canonical arm of Canada’s Roman Catholic church will hold a commission of inquiry into a series of bad investments and loans that have cost the diocese $12 million (Canadian).

The commission, called the National Tribunal, will investigate whether diocesan officials during De Roo’s tenure followed proper church procedure in a series of financial dealings involving Arabian horses and Washington State development property.

The diocese also will be consulting with lawyers to see if “any legal actions for damages or restitution are appropriate,” said the statement.

It said a series of problematic transactions began in the diocese in the late 1980s, all of them linked to a Seattle lawyer named Joseph Finley who invested in horses.


The statement also noted the diocese has been forced to sell some of its real estate to help pay off the debt incurred as a result of the failed investments.

Roussin said he talked to De Roo about the problems at Christmas, “but he didn’t say much about it. And I didn’t feel comfortable pushing it at that time.” De Roo has been on a speaking tour in the United States for the past two months.

The diocese’s four-page statement details how the problems began in the late 1980s when, on the advice of Finley, the diocese purchased a $30,000 interest in a limited horse breeding partnership known as Lakeview Arabians.

Although the statement does not mention her name, it has been learned that the diocese’s retired chief financial officer, former missionary Muriel Clemenger, who is also a horse lover, was central to the transactions with Finley.

The statement said the diocese’s joint venture with Finley and Lakeview Arabians “proved to be unsuccessful and, apparently due to some changes in U.S. tax laws, the entire breeding industry in the U.S. moved into troubled times.”

The statement goes on to explain that the “Bishop of Victoria,” which is the legal name of the corporate entity controlling the diocese’s assets, decided even after the deal flopped to “assist” the financially strapped Seattle lawyer by lending $2 million to him and a related company, Swiftsure Farms.


“Neither Mr. Finley nor Swifture Farms repaid their loans to the diocese,” the report said.

None of the questionable transactions, the diocese’s statement said, had been recorded in its financial logs.

After Roussin arrived at the diocese last year and discovered the financial mess, he decided the diocese could not afford to continue paying the mortgage costs associated with one of the deals involving land in the United States. That has led to foreclosure proceedings against the diocese.

Finley could not be reached for comment and his office phone in Seattle is disconnected.

Francis Morrisey, a specialist in canon law at St. Paul’s University in Ottawa, said the Vatican has put in place a “generally scrupulous system of checks and balances” to make sure money put into collection plates by the world’s 1 billion Catholics is handled prudently.

But Morrisey said multimillion dollar blunders can sometimes get through the church’s safeguards as appears to have happened in the Victoria diocese during the tenure of De Roo, as well as in Quebec, where three people were charged last year with defrauding two groups of nuns of $20 million. In the United States, in the diocese of Santa Rosa, Calif., the bishop is stuck with millions of dollars in debt incurred under his predecessor.


DEA END TODD

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