‘Bishop of Bling’ Forced to Resign After Spending $43 Million on House

If you’re an artist, the “Bishop of Bling” nickname may work to your advantage. If you’re an actual bishop, maybe not so much.

Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, a 54-year-old Catholic bishop in Germany, earned the nickname through a series of remarkably expensive – and tasteless – purchases relating to his residence. The expenditures, totaling nearly $43 million, fly in the face of Pope Francis’s recent messages of austerity and focus on poverty reduction.

Fortunately, the expenditures finally caught up to this Bishop of Bling, and Francis suspended the bishop last October. On Wednesday, the leadership of the Catholic Church in Germany unveiled a 108-page report detailing the exact expenses associated with the suspended bishop – leading Tebartz-van Elst to hand in his resignation on the same day.

The former bishop, who will be relegated to a low-profile position within the church, released a statement the next day taking responsibility to the massive and gaudy purchases. His handling, he wrote, was “in many respects a disorderly, unfocused and primarily a personally-driven management position.” However, he also noted that he was “not an authority in the area of church management, as my qualification is in pastoral theory.”

Apparently, due to that lack of “authority in church management,” the bishop was unable to discern that spending $2.38 million on bronze window frames, $235,000 on a spiral staircase, and $1.61 million on the palace’s assorted aesthetics was likely not a good idea. Apparently, you need a background in budgetary study to realize that such expenditures probably fly in the face of the whole camel’s-eye theory on wealth and eternal salvation.

The whole list of the bishop’s expenditures is worth a read-through, if only to appreciate just how terrifically terrible he must have been in “church management” to burn through so much cash. Fortunately, he’ll have plenty of time in the future to think about how he could have better allocated his funds. And he’ll get to do it in the peace and quiet of the ignominious life he’ll find himself leading moving forward.

Image by Christliches Medienmagazin via Flickr

Casey Michel is a graduate student at Columbia University, and former Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteer. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and Talking Points Memo, and he has contributed multiple long-form investigations to Minneapolis’s City Pages and the Houston Press. You can follow him on Twitter.