Nun who blazed in casino with school money sentenced to one year in prison

Europe 1 with AFP 9:40 p.m., February 8, 2022

Thou shalt not steal: an octogenarian nun who embezzled more than $800,000 from the coffers of the Californian school which employed her to blaze at the casino and afford expensive tourist trips was sentenced Monday to one year in prison.

"I have sinned, I have broken the law and I have no excuse"

Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper, principal of Saint James Private Catholic School in Torrance, South Los Angeles, took a vow of poverty when she became a nun more than sixty years ago.

But she embezzled for years the checks and other payments intended for the school to finance her hidden vices.

“I have sinned, I have broken the law and I have no excuse,” the 80-year-old nun told the court, as quoted by the

.

For the nun, who belongs to the American branch of the Catholic order of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet, created in 1650 in France at Puy-en-Velay (center-east), the embezzlement she committed constitutes "a violation of his vows, of the commandments, of the law and above all of the sacred trust that so many people had placed in me".

Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper admitted her guilt in the scam last year.

Attempt to destroy compromising documents

It took an audit to uncover the fraud, which the principal of the Catholic school had tried to cover up by ordering her subordinates to destroy incriminating documents.

According to the

, when the Archdiocese of Los Angeles held Ms. Kreuper to account, the latter retorted that priests were paid more than nuns and that she thought she deserved a raise.

For his part, the nun's lawyer, Mark Byrne, pleaded an addiction to gambling and asked that his client be allowed to serve her sentence in the convent where she has been confined since the discovery of her embezzlement in 2018.