Catholic Laity Urge Vance to Launch Racketeering Investigation into U.S. Bishops
Victims of predator priests slam Cardinal Robert McElroy for covering up satanic ritual clerical sex abuse
Prominent lay Catholics are calling on Vice President J.D. Vance to investigate the U.S. bishops under the provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) — a law first used to prosecute the Mafia in the 1970s.
“We request that a RICO investigation be undertaken into how the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) dispersed funds received from USAID,” a cohort of Catholic scholars, journalists, and victims of clerical sex abuse wrote in a March 8 letter to Vance, who also is Catholic.
“Investigating the Church will not be easy; it has a long record of lack of transparency and refusal to cooperate with law enforcement,” the signators warned. “Catholic laity have little to no means to correct the leaders of our Church. It has only been only through civil and criminal lawsuits that justice has been achieved.”
They offered to help the government in its RICO investigation, noting: “We have access to some whistleblowers about how the USCCB and the NGOs have misappropriated the money entrusted to them.”
DOGE Unearths “Obscene” Funding for Bishops
The signatories noted that the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already “discovered that an obscene amount of funds has been given to the Catholic Church through its various organizations to help settle refugees and immigrants.”
“How many illegal immigrants did they assist?” they asked. “Did any of the funds end up in the hands of cartels who are involved in criminal behavior such as sex trafficking and the smuggling of Fentanyl? What did they do to protect vulnerable children and women?”
Rachel Mastrogiacomo and Wiesław Walawender, both victims of clerical sex abuse who signed the letter, said they are calling for the RICO probe so that other innocent victims can be protected from predatory priests and prelates.
RICO makes it illegal to acquire, operate, or receive income from an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity or to be part of one involved in a series of racketeering offenses, even if those crimes were perpetrated by others in the group.
A person or entity can only be found guilty under RICO if there is evidence of a “pattern” of illegal conduct, defined as committing at least two criminal offenses over 10 years. Offenses under RICO include human trafficking, sex abuse, and embezzlement.
During a RICO investigation, the government can seize the assets of the enterprise being investigated. If found guilty, the organization can be fined up to three times the profits generated from its illegal operations.
Church Incapable of Delivering Justice
“The bottom line is that we are ashamed of the bishops and, like in sex abuse cases, we know that justice cannot be achieved within the Church,” Monsignor Gene Gomulka, a clerical sex abuse investigator, former Naval chaplain, and coauthor of the letter, told The Stream.
“The way the bishops failed to accept responsibility for what happened to the countless “lost” migrant children is similar to the way they covered up the sexual predation of minors and vulnerable adults in their dioceses,” he said. “It may be years before it is known how many hundreds of thousands of migrant children may have been abused or harmed as a result of the failure of the bishops and Church employees to ensure their secure movement and safety.”
Catholic Charities USA (CCU), the domestic charity wing of the U.S. Catholic Church operating under the jurisdiction of the U.S. bishops, received nearly $1 billion from taxpayers via the Biden administration to facilitate illegal immigration, The Stream reported in September. In 2019, Catholic Charities paid its president $521,554 and its CFO $310,000, according to Forbes.
The USCCB candidly admits on its website that it “engages with the federal appropriations process to obtain the maximum amount of funding needed to support the U.S. refugee program, which provides both overseas assistance and resettlement services to refugees.”
Financial documents show that government grants for CCU nearly quadrupled after Biden took office in 2021, with most of the funds directed to the charity’s immigration services — especially its operations near the southern U.S. border.
In February, the USCCB sued the Trump administration after it suspended $65 million in federal funding to the bishops’ charities involved in the resettlement of refugees.
Sex Abuse Victims Protest Cardinal’s Appointment
Meanwhile, Mastrogiacomo and a group of protestors demonstrated outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on Tuesday during Cardinal Robert McElroy’s installation as the new archbishop of Washington. Mastrogiacomo has accused McElroy of covering for her abuser, Fr. Jacob Bertrand.
McElroy did not remove the predator priest until he’d presided over the San Diego diocese for more than a year, when he learned Bertrand was being prosecuted. Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests called McElroy’s installation as archbishop of Washington “deeply troubling,” saying that the move leaves victims “feeling retraumatized.”
In July 2016, A.W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist, former priest, and author of Celibacy in Crisis: A Secret World Revisited, hand-delivered a 13-page letter to McElroy warning him about former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s homosexual predation of seminarians. McElroy ignored the victims and refused to meet with Sipe.
However, in an interview published by the leftwing National Catholic Reporter on March 10, McElroy insisted that he had met Sipe twice but refused to further communicate with the priest when Sipe began making “hearsay claims without providing verifiable evidence, including about now-former cardinal and retired archbishop of Washington, D.C., Theodore McCarrick.”
Sipe’s claims were proven right, and the Vatican defrocked McCarrick in January 2019 for predatory homosexual abuse of seminarians, including soliciting males in the confessional.
The letter to Vance describes McElroy as “the poster boy for Church advocacy of open borders.” During President Donald Trump’s first term, McElroy called upon community organizers to “disrupt those who would seek to send troops into our streets to deport the undocumented,” it noted.
In January, the prelate attacked Trump’s new immigration agenda after Pope Francis appointed McElroy to the prestigious bishopric, stating that plans for a “wider, indiscriminate, massive deportation across the country” would be “incompatible with Catholic doctrine.”
While RICO has been used to target organized crime, white collar crime, and crimes committed by corporations and nonprofit organizations since President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1970, plaintiffs have used RICO against the Catholic Church on multiple occasions in cases related to clerical sexual abuse.
In 2019, victims of clergy sex abuse filed a RICO suit against the Diocese of Buffalo, Jesuits, parishes, and high schools for a “pattern of racketeering activity” that permitted and covered up clerical sexual abuse. The lawsuit named serving Bishop Richard Malone and his predecessor, Bishop Edward Kmiec.
“The U.S. bishops knew that the invasion of our southern border by illegal immigrants should never have been allowed to happen,” Gomulka said. “History will show that the Catholic bishops and NGOs like Catholic Charities — motivated by financial gain — helped to create the greatest humanitarian crisis in U.S. history.
“Many Catholic laity are ashamed of their money-grabbing Church officials and have called upon the Trump administration to hold them accountable for every penny they received. If it means prosecuting them and putting them behind bars for misappropriation of funds, then so be it.”
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.