The financial review was merely a trigger. It was a procedural audit, not meant to crunch the numbers but only to make sure there were proper mechanisms in place to do so. But at the same time, and apparently by happenstance, one of the St. James families needed a copy of an old tuition check. “When we got that check,” Monsignor Meyers said at the meeting, “it was noticed that the endorsement on the back was not for the St. James School account.… It was an account that nobody knew about.”

Meanwhile, Sister Mary Margaret was acting squirrelly, he told the families, asking for some files to be changed and such. “Some strange things began to happen as she got ready for the review,” he said. So a forensic auditor was called in to comb through the books.

That all happened in May and June of 2018. Six months later, the auditors still couldn't offer a final number. The $500,000 figure is what they've managed to sift from a single checking account going back to 2012, officials said at the meeting, prior to which detailed bank records weren't available. But that particular account was opened in 1997, and Sister Mary Margaret was there a decade before that. “Does it go back ten years?” Meyers asked at the meeting. “Or 15 years? Or 20 years or more?”

And was that the only account? Why would it be? One parent told friends she hunted through old checks and found at least five more account numbers she considered suspicious. And what about the cash, all those fives and tens and twenties swirling through casino nights and festivals and raffles, thousands upon thousands of dollars in small bills?

At the meeting, Marge Graf, the diocesan lawyer, conceded cash was “a significant other issue.” Yet she also seemed genuinely surprised to see so many angry parents show up. As several of those parents pointed out that night, a layperson who looted a half-million from a school would be in handcuffs, and probably perp-walked for the cameras, too. But two nuns allegedly do it, and no one even calls the police? St. James informed the Torrance Police Department, but not until six months after the fact, and initially declined to file a criminal complaint. (That changed 11 days after the meeting. Moreover, bank fraud is a federal crime, and the alleged misappropriation is possibly being investigated as such. In April, a spokesperson for the archdiocese referred me to a prosecutor in the Major Frauds Section in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. That office declined to comment. In any case, by May, no one had been charged with any crime.)

The matter was to be handled internally. Church auditors, and independent auditors hired by the church, would investigate, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet would make restitution, and Sister Mary Margaret and Sister Lana would suffer “canonical sanctions,” a phrase uttered with tremendous ferocity but amounting to, according to Graf, really strict probation, albeit without the inconvenience of court supervision and a criminal record.

“I'm trying to be extremely transparent, candid, and open with you,” she said. “And yet I understand, and I hear, those of you who say, ‘That's not enough,’ or ‘That's not how I feel,’ or ‘That's not what I want played out.’ So understand, I hear you on those points.”

“They teach you: Thou shalt not steal,” Jack says now. “But then, you're supposed to forgive.” He sighs. “But wait a minute, they stole from my kids.”

But hearing is not the same as understanding. The meeting roiled for two hours, parents and alumni questioning, probing, venting. Their anger was fed not by vengeance but betrayal. “My daughter wanted me to speak tonight,” one woman said, “because we had to take her to a counselor to try to explain how people who made them walk the line…people who've been holding them accountable their whole lives, have done nothing but lie to them.”

And what of remorse? Does it count if you wait until you're caught? Does it matter if someone else reads it from a letter?