80-year-old nun gets prison for stealing $835,000 from California elementary school

I last saw it with a friend’s bookkeeper, who I’d met a number of times and seemed like a pleasant and engaging working mom. They caught her when she’d stolen just over $60k. They also quickly discovered that she’d embezzled more than that from a previous employer and had pleaded out then on the condition that she never take another bookkeeping or accounting job again. One just never knows.

6 Likes

But if she hit it big…

1 Like

Especially given that, with someone like this, I fear for what crimes she committed in her ostensible job as nun.

When a friend should ever mention they went to Catholic school, to a person, they will relate some visceral, negative early-childhood experience at the hands of a Catholic nun. Typically some sort of psychological or corporal punishment, vastly inappropriate for a young learner who made a mistake and not a sin.

4 Likes

Mother Superior tried

4 Likes

But she couldn’t help seeing everything in black and white.

6 Likes

Nuns aren’t clergy. Neither are most monks.

1 Like

It depends upon the religion and the denomination. Certainly Buddhist nuns are ordained.

Additionally discretion for what one considers a sacrament and who is authorized to administer it.

Are exorcisms sacraments? Or only sacramental as in Roman Catholic tradition.

9 Likes

We’ll her vice was gambling, so I would actually say she was taking her vow pretty seriously.

3 Likes

Yes, but considering her age — actuarially speaking she died two years ago — putting her in jail for 15 years won’t accomplish much.

If she doesn’t die in jail (a real possibility in those 366 days), she’ll come out and her life will pretty much be over. It’s doubtful she’ll be hired to work at any reasonable paying job, or given any real responsibility. If she isn’t kicked out of her order while she’s in prison, then she’ll be the ward of her order and the Church. Let them cover the $30K+/year cost of room, board, and medical care, not the Taxpayer.

Sometimes mercy is a harsher punishment than vengeance.

3 Likes

Don’t be silly, KatP;

Everyone knows only Catholic nuns count!

/xs

9 Likes

The school was nun the wiser

10 Likes

Holy rollers gonna roll. :man_shrugging:

4 Likes

She had an accomplice:

Parents whose children attended St. James Catholic School in Torrance long believed that the campus was financially strapped.
Textbooks were 2 decades old. There wasn’t enough money for new basketball uniforms. When parents would ask, year after year, for an awning to shade their children’s outdoor lunch area, the principal, Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper, would respond, “How do you expect to pay for it?”
“We would be pressured into donating,” said Jack Alexander, whose three children attended the K-8 school from 2003 to 2016. “We were always told how little money we had and how the sisters were so poor.”
All the while, Kreuper and her vice principal, Sister Lana Chang, spoke openly about trips they’d taken to Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, parents said. The nuns lived together for years in a townhouse in a gated Torrance neighborhood and pulled up to campus in separate Volvos. Chang, they explained, had wealthy relatives who provided for them.

6 Likes

and there’s an in depth article in GQ, before the trial

5 Likes

“neither the church, the school, nor the archdiocese would be pressing charges; instead, they would “address the situation internally through investigation, restitution, and sanctions on the Sisters.””

One wonders what line was crossed such that the feds ended up taking their relatively token, but not unsurprisingly more than the church really wanted, interest in one of them; with the natural follow-up inquiry of whether the second fell below that threshold for some reason; or simply hasn’t finished being processed yet. I assume that the principal is the more likely ringleader; but $800k is enough fraud for two under ordinary sentencing standards.

(the tangent where she fires a teacher for reasons that look suspiciously like ‘cancer-havers are expensive’, then the district tries to argue that it’s legal because she can be classified as ADA-exempt; also goes straight into darker-than-expected.)

4 Likes

I think what would be more irritating would be if she was a dick to people all while being super hypocritical and committing grand theft. Maybe even stingy what the school spent money on.

But I don’t know any of that - maybe she was a super nice cool nun.

Christ, what an asshole!

1 Like

It’s a bit sexist to argue thhat women who want some sort of religious role in the catholic church should necessarily get paid shit wages (as monastics), while there is an alternative path for men (the priesthood) that skips that nonsense.

1 Like

According to the article posted above by @jerwin she was not the prototypical cool nun.

1 Like

If you read the article, you will note both the judge and some jury members buy into the 'She was a nun and a religious person and therefore must have been good".

She stole more money than many people make in a lifetime and worked hard to cover it up and had a pretty solid scheme to hide it which means she jolly well knew it was wrong over and above the fake religion thing.

If this so called church wants to assure their people are honest, do like civil service does for sensitive positions; Require financial disclosure and check things.

There’s basic tested rules for how money is handled to insure people don’t get “tempted”. Plus you bring in a trusted outside accountant to review things now and again.

I wonder if there’s any provision to revoke a charity’s status for being so stupid as to allow this to have occurred for a decade?

2 Likes