Mass attendance in the Diocese of Steubenville is high, “and the priests there that I’ve met have a kind of missionary sort of zeal,” Fernandes told the Register.
“But there aren’t as many people in the region and not as many Catholics in the region,” Fernandes said. “… The economic forces outside of what’s happening within the Church have direct implications.”
The diocese has about 50 parishes but only 31 priests, Fernandes said, and a significant number of the priests are elderly.
Steubenville’s recent woes
The Diocese of Steubenville has taken financial hits during the past several years.
A plan announced in 2007 to replace the diocese’s cathedral fizzled after the bishop at the time decided the debt would be too risky. Eventually, even a plan to renovate the current cathedral announced in 2013 was abandoned in May 2018 when the diocese discovered that high-ranking officials for years had diverted funds that were supposed to pay income taxes and payroll taxes to the federal government.
In July 2020, David Franklin, former longtime comptroller of the diocese, pleaded guilty to federal charges while admitting he failed to pay the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of the diocese $2.7 million between 2004 and 2016, instead embezzling about $300,000 for himself and diverting the rest. Franklin was sentenced to one year in federal prison.
As a result, the diocese had to pay the Internal Revenue Service $2.7 million in back withholding taxes and payroll taxes plus $1 million in interest on the late tax payments.
In April 2021, Monsignor Kurt Kemo, former vicar general of the Diocese of Steubenville, pleaded guilty to a state charge of embezzling $300,000 from the diocese. Kemo was sentenced to six months in jail.
The former comptroller and the former vicar general — whom a lawyer for Franklin described as “close,” having been friendly for years — diverted the withholding and payroll tax funds into an off-the-books diocesan checking account that other diocesan officials didn’t know about.
Kemo used the slush fund to pay for trips, meals, clothing, credit card bills, and flying lessons, among other things, according to court documents in Franklin’s federal criminal case in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
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Kemo also used the account to pay unaccounted-for bonuses to 10 other employees of the diocese, according to a December 2020 sentencing memorandum Franklin’s lawyer produced in Franklin’s federal criminal case.
In an unrelated matter, in July 2022, the Diocese of Steubenville settled a lawsuit filed by a woman impregnated by a pastor, then-Father Henry Foxhoven, during a sexual relationship that she said started when she was 16. The woman initially sought $1 million; the settlement amount was not announced.
Foxhoven was sentenced to 12 years in prison on three counts of sexual battery in November 2018. Pope Francis dismissed Foxhoven from the clerical state in March 2020.
Three months after the lawsuit settlement, in October 2022, the head of Steubenville Diocese at the time, Bishop Monforton, announced his interest in merging the diocese with the Diocese of Columbus. Monforton cited declines in population and priests.
Negative reaction from people and priests in the diocese led Monforton to abandon the merger talks in November 2022, a week before bishops at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ fall meeting were scheduled to discuss them. In September of this year, Pope Francis transferred Monforton, 60, to auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Detroit, where he began as a priest.
Economy and demographics