Guards charged in theft at Chicago cathedral

CHICAGO—Two former security guards at Holy Name Cathedral have been charged with burglarizing the historic church and stealing as much as $100,000 in collections, according to Chicago police.

Jarrell Patterson, 22, and Artemio Calderon, 25, were each charged Sunday night with one felony count of burglary. They both had worked for Monterrey Security, the cathedral’s sole provider of security for the past six years. But at the time of the burglary, only one of them was still been employed by the company.

Patterson and Calderon are accused of using a key to get into the church several times, unlocking a safe that stores collections money and taking cash, police said.

The men were captured on video, police said. The church at State and Superior streets—the seat of Chicago’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese—is under nonstop camera surveillance, a church spokeswoman said.

Detectives are still trying to determine the exact amount of missing money, but it initially was thought to be $88,000 to $100,000, authorities said.

The Rev. Gregory Sakowicz informed parishioners in an email on April 24 of the “very troubling news” that church leaders were doing an audit of the collections to determine how much money may have been stolen. “While researching a shortfall in offertory collections, the leadership of Holy Name Cathedral discovered evidence of repeated criminal trespass at the Cathedral offices,” the email said.

Over the past several months, church leaders had realized something was wrong when weekend collections were not meeting projections, according to a church spokeswoman. Church officials expected the cathedral, which serves more than 6,000 registered families plus tourists, to collect about $40,000 a week, or $2 million annually, according to bulletins posted on its website.

The donations are collected in a basket passed around at Mass, transferred into a sealed bag and stored in a safe in a locked room before being deposited at a bank.

When donations consistently fell short of projections, church leaders took a second look. In April, for example, the church recorded a deficit in projections every week that ranged from $15 to $5,000, according to bulletins.