Bishop Richard Malone announces the results of the church's fundraising campaign at a news conference this morning.
Almost 9,000 parishioners, donating on average nearly $4,800 each, helped the Diocese hit its fund-raising target ahead of schedule. Bishop Malone says the capital campaign -- called "Strengthening the Heatbeat of the Church" -- was launched two years ago, before the economic slowdown took hold.
"We made that decision in the spring of 2008, not knowing what was coming financially around the world in fall of 2008, but we made the commitment and we continued on with it," Malone says.
The $40 million target, he says, was needed to support both the immediate and long-term needs of the church in Maine: "Parish improvements and programs, our vocations program, in which we work with and recruit young folks for the ministry, Catholic Charities Maine, Catholic schools, and Lifelong Faith Formation -- simply meaning religious education for children, teens and adults. All of these and other ministries of our church in Maine will all be strengthened."
Kristen Wells is with Catholic Charities Maine, which runs 26 programs throughout the state offering help to the elderly, as well as child-care services and food banks. This organization will receive 15 percent of the money raised -- almost $6 million dollars -- over the next five years.
The influx of money, Wells says, will enable Catholic Charities of Maine to boost its emergency services, "anything from fuel assistance throughout the winter or feeding people, or if they have other essential needs, for instance, even as simple as an air conditioner for an elderly person who has limited resources."
Another portion of the funds will go directly to the parishes that raised the money to spend as they see fit. For the most part, says Father John Skehan, pastor of three southern Maine parishes, this means repair and renovation. For example, St. Raphael's in Kittery, which raised about $450,000 in pledges during the campaign, needs of a lot of what he calls deferred mainteance.
"The roof was leaking so we've tightened that up, it's a slate roof, so that wasn't cheap," he says. "We need to look at some windows and some cracks in the foundations and some of those things. I find people getting excited knowing that we're taking care of our house, we're taking care of our property."
The parishes that took part in the fund-raising campaign will get back a quarter of the money raised over five years.
Bishop Malone says none of the money raised will go towards paying settlements in the priest sex-abuse scandal, which he says is covered by insurance. Likewise, he says, the costs incurred by the Diocese in its successful opposition to Maine's same-sex marriage law, which was defeated at the polls in November, had no impact on the fund-raising campaign.
The Diocese raised $550,000 -- over half of which came from its own coffers -- to oppose Question 1, and while Malone says this capital campaign has no connection to that, it does have implications for how the church will spend its money going forward.
"We've got to do a lot better educating of our Catholic faithful, about what the church teaches and why it teaches it, we found that out," Malone says.
"This is not a matter of education, but it's a matter of conscience," says Anne Underwood, who is with Catholics for Marriage Equality, which supports same-sex marriage. Underwood points to a survey published this week by the Public Religion Research Institute, claiming that 60 percent of American Catholics support relationship recognition for same-sex couples.
"These 60 percent of Catholics, the majority of them, know the church hierarchy's opinion, and what their teaching is about marriage equality," she says. "The reality is they're rejecting that opinon based on their own knowledge and experience of gay and lesbian family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers -- they're forming their own conscience."
Underwood says the church's stance on marriage is one of the factors keeping many Catholics away from Church.
Bishop Richard Malone, meanwhile, says one of the goals of this latest capital campaign is to bring in some of the estimated 70 percent of Maine's self-described Catholics who do not attend church regularly.