News

Monday, 20 December 2010 07:41

A nun who stole from her workplace to fund her considerable gambling addiction highlights the hypocrisy of the church that staunchly opposes gambling.

The church has ever been embroiled in controversy and hypocritical stances against what it sees as the amoral actions of the populace. While church groups everywhere have come out in force this week to oppose the online poker proposals by Senator Harry Reid's, one of their very own members has been caught stealing from her employer to the tune of approximately $1.2 million to pay for her gambling habit.

Sister Marie Thornton is a nun who was working at New York's Iona College between 1999 and 2009. She has just been accused of the embezzlement of funds from the school where she was able to falsify accounts and produce contrived invoices due to her being in charge of their finances.

Thornton was a regular visitor to casinos in Atlantic City where it is assumed the bulk of the money was spent. This is in direct contravention of strict church edicts that prohibit all forms of gambling and highlights the human side of an otherwise rigid and intolerant establishment.

Officials of Iona College claim to have recovered a substantial portion of the embezzled funds. They claim to have also altered the oversight laws, which is not unlike that which Senator Reid is attempting with the Internet gambling industry.

It comes as no surprise that all attempts to legalise and regulate any form of gambling tend to bring out the usual church groups in opposition. Yet it is the members of that very establishment that are often the worst offenders of the very moral issues they fight to uphold. There have been several instances to date where church members have become involved in gambling of one form or another and the perpetrator abused their position of authority to carry out the very act that they hypocritically set out to oppose.

The proposed legislation that Senator Reid is attempting to get passed into the law would actually make it harder for problematic gamblers to become entangled in gambling addictions. If the church could see the benefits of regulation and legislation in controlling what is currently an unregulated and uncontrolled market, they might not be so opposed to its passing. The bill would use existing technology to make sure that people's spending limits are upheld, which does not exist currently in the unregulated and uncontrolled market.