The only thing worse than corruption and abuse is finding out that those charged with preventing and stopping it knew and still did nothing.

That is what happened in West Virginia, where the state’s only Catholic diocese is reeling now from sexual and financial misconduct scandals. Parishioners tried to warn seniors church leaders in both the United States and the Vatican about disgraced former Bishop Michael J. Bransfield’s extravagant — and possibly illegal — spending habits, according to the Washington Post. The parishioners were ignored.

The paper reports:

Senior Catholic leaders in the United States and the Vatican began receiving warnings about West Virginia Bishop Michael J. Bransfield as far back as 2012. In letters and emails, parishioners claimed that Bransfield was abusing his power and misspending church money on luxuries such as a personal chef, a chauffeur, first-class travel abroad and more than $1 million in renovations to his residence.

One parishioner, Linda Abrahamian from Martinsburg, West Virginia, wrote in 2013 to the pope’s ambassador to the U.S., “I beg of you to please look into this situation.”

No one listened. It would be another five years before Bransfield resigned in disgrace, outed by a personal aide.

Parishioners provided the Post with emails proving efforts were made to warn leadership about Bransfield’s suspicious and possibly illegal behavior, including his use of church funds to finance his extravagant, luxurious lifestyle. Following a separate report in June that revealed Bransfield also raided church coffers to make questionable payouts to fellow clergymen, including those who have accused him of sexual abuse, parishioners approached the Post with questions and theories about why their complaints went ignored for all those years.

“We felt like there was something up,” a Charleston, West Virginia, woman, Kellee Abner, told the paper. “It is difficult to understand how all the attempts to expose conduct in the diocese could have been ignored by so many for so long.”

It was not until 2018, when former Bransfield aide Monsignor Kevin Quirk wrote a letter to Baltimore Archbishop William Lori outlining the bishop’s misconduct, that change finally came to West Virginia.

“It is my own opinion that His Excellency makes use of monetary gifts ... to higher ranking ecclesiastics and gifts to subordinates to purchase influence from the former and compliance or loyalty from the latter,” Quirk said in a letter obtained first by the Post.

Bransfield resigned in 2018, maintaining all the while that he did nothing wrong. His close aide Monsignor Frederick Annie also resigned that same year. Later, in June of this year, Quirk and yet another Bransfield aide, Monsignor Anthony Cincinnati, resigned from their posts in the West Virginia diocese.

It is a good start, but it is obviously not enough. Their resignations do not address the much larger question: Why did parishioners’ warnings and questions go ignored all those years?

Well, consider the following passage from the Post’s report: “At least four senior clerics outside West Virginia who received parishioner complaints about Bransfield also accepted cash gifts from him, more than $32,000 in all …”

Those same recipients, Archbishops Peter Wells and Lori and Cardinal Raymond Burke, deny that the gifts influenced how they handled parishioners’ complaints.

I would like to believe them. I am not sure why I should believe.