Church just shamed its congregants publically

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polki said:
I don’t know how it is in your diocese, but in mine the pastors are under an awful lot of pressure by the archbishop to collect so much $$ for each collection. It seems that to be kept as a pastor around here, you really have to have good financial sense and the personality of a salesperson sometimes!

Still, I don’t think singling people out and shaming them is the best way to handle things. However, it’s possible that your pastor was just doing what he was told to do.
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It didn’the sound like the pastor singled out particular people, but listed how their parish sat in relation to other local parishes.

Some of the other examples though did list that the annual giving for each family was listed in the parish. That was also a technique used in my area back in the late 70s. As might sound obvious, there were very few fans of having their annual giving listed in the parish bulletin in relation to everybody else’s.
 
Bonnie said:
About 10 years ago my sister-in-law’s pastor tried to shame her into giving more. He came to her house, ate her food, then said she couldn’t come to Mass until she started paying more. She went to a different parish after that.
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I’ve never heard of such a thing, and I think that’s just awful. I can’t even believe churches, Catholic or not, would do such a thing. The story of the Widow’s Mite comes to mind. And that pastor ate her food, then had the nerve to say she couldn’t come to church if she couldn’t give more? Just the sort of thing Jesus would have condemned, and rightly so. What if she was giving all she could?
 
EveningSkye111 said:
The bulletin on New Year’s Day had every family listed and then to the penny, the amount given the previous year. There were pages and pages of names with $0.00 next to their names.

This was from the 1920s through the 60s.

So I was a kid in the 50s and 60s and we HAD to turn in our donation envelopes every Sunday, even if we had no money to give. This was so the teacher could see if we went to church on Sunday or not. I was set to turn mine in one Sunday during the regular collection and mom grabbed it out of my hand and would NOT allow me to give an empty envelope.

I was sick, for sure, knowing that old Miss O’Connor would find out that I didn’t go to church.

I knew it was going to be a bad Monday.

It was.

The most I could ever give was ten cents. There were a few families in the parish who were pretty well off and their kids would usually give about a buck each Sunday. That was impossible for my siblings and I. We sure were given Hades each week for not giving what someone else thought we should give. It was embarrassing each week to hear how much your classmates put in the envelope.
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Seriously, didn’t people read the Gospel back in the good ol days?
 
I’d never give to a parish that did that, I would find some other more discreet charity.
 
fastenatingguy said:
When I was a child, the pastor of our Basilica published the weekly donations in the following week’s bulletin.

There would be categories of $1-$5, $6-$10, etc.

At the end was a “thank you for helping to build our parish” or similar.
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Our parish did that too, ( I remember it in the 1970s when i was a kid) but stopped some time ago. I’m glad they did. I never understand why they felt it necessary to publish parishioners individual contributions.
 
Indigo_Cardinal said:
“…and the sign said, ‘Everybody welcome, come in, kneel down, and pray.’ But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all, I didn’t have a penny to pay. So I got me a pen and a paper, and I made up my own little sign. It said, ‘Thank you Lord for thinking about me, I’m alive and doing fine…’”
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I really liked the Tesla version. 🙂
 
Sorry for three posts in a row:

I wonder if it was done in the past for tax purposes? Parishes now will give you a statement of your contributions, but maybe things were different then? 🤷
 
katpants said:
Our church just posted a chart with different donations from other parishes. Our parish is in the poorer part of town so I am not surprised donations are going down…

I am surprised they circled how little they got per member and wrote a rather snide remark.

Can they even do that?

Kat
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Among the many nonsensical protests of Martin Luther, he wasn’t entirely wrong about how money was treated by clergy. Granted, his gripe in that area was specifically about the liberal sale of indulgences for lining the clergymen’s pockets, but more broadly categorized, it was an overemphasis on who was giving and who was not, and how more could be gotten. So forgive me for being so bold, but parishes like yours, sadly, encourage men like Luther. The offer a defective image of our Church, and I wouldn’t wince an inch if the adminstrators were scandalized by the diocese or by Rome itself for their nonsense.
 
My first parish never spoke about money other than a yearly financial report. The bulletin did have the weekly totals and directed giving totals collectively.

The second parish I belonged to spoke about money almost every week, give & give. There always special collections for this cause or that cause. It felt as though we were at a fundraiser every Sunday.

In my current parish, the priest only speaks of giving when a group is doing a special collection for a certain charity they support, like a women’s pregnancy crisis center (pro-life of course). He never speaks of the weekly collection or the need for funds for the parish itself.

One of the reasons I left the second parish was due to asking for money all the time. I will support any parish I belong to the best of my ability. I try to give 5% to the parish and another 5% to charitable causes in the Catholic community.
 
The second parish I belonged to spoke about money almost every week, give & give. There always special collections for this cause or that cause. It felt as though we were at a fundraiser every Sunday.
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I hear you. There seem to be special collections held for something or other almost every week at the moment. I usually don’t bother contributing.
 
Thanks everyone! We hadn’t attended in over a year due to personal issues anyways, but this sealed the deal for sure. It was comparing the amounts to other parishes.

I’m thankful for the replies since I was upset myself. I haven’t chunked Catholicism but I for sure feel like this contributes to many of the Protestant arguments that “the church is all about money”. You can’t compare all churches based on one bad apple, that’s for sure.

Between the local parish here and the one in Georgia…not really impressed so far :confused:

Kat
 
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