Priest speaks about buyouts

As the deadline for workers in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre to accept the buyout package they were offered approaches, questions among some continue to grow.

Many church employees, workers and priests alike, have been hesitant to speak out about the diocese’s plan. But recently, one priest from the Five Towns was willing to speak to the Herald about how he sees the diocese’s plan.

“Like most things, we all feel it would have been nice to have been consulted first before ideas were put out,” the priest said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We also feel that they should have laid out everything first, and asked people, would anyone like to help us out by not taking pension, by not taking healthcare, going on your spouse’s healthcare.”

The priest understands the diocese’s position, but feels that it should have tried a different approach before going straight to offering people a package—even if it was a good one.

“Instead of putting together a whole program first, if they had just said to people, ‘Look, we lost 40 percent of our investments, we really are going to have trouble the next three years paying our healthcare, our pensions and everything. We would like to consolidate some stuff, and it would help us out and help the church out if 100 people in the diocese would voluntarily decide to leave," he said. “And not even offer a package, just work it out with each person individually. Now, legally, I don’t know if you can do that. I’m just a little lowly parish priest, I’m not a financial wizard.”

Responding to criticisms that have been levied against the diocese, saying that it’s not doing the Christian thing by offering the buyout package to workers instead of finding other sources of revenue, the priest said that the diocese didn’t have much choice.

“The way it was done was probably nicer than the way most corporations would do it,” he said. “But it is a church culture, and people are not used to this.” The priest attributed much of the anger arising from parishioners to the fact that many of them never looked at the church in terms of a business before, and the fact that it has to deal with things like revenues and staffing is off-putting and upsetting to many.