A California nun will serve a year in prison for stealing $835,000 from an elementary school to support her gambling habit and touristic trips, AFP reported.
Although Nun Mary Margaret Kreuper, 80, had vowed to live a low-key life 60 years ago, she had stolen tuition checks and school funds to support her secret sins for years.
“I have sinned, I have broken the law, and I have no excuses,” Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper, the former principal of St. James Catholic School, told the judge, according to The Los Angeles Times.
She called her crimes “a violation of my vows, the commandments, the law, and above all the sacred trust that so many had placed in me.”
Kreuper belongs to the US congregation of Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet (CSJ) established in France, in 1650.
When an audit threatened to expose the scheme, the nun tried to mask her crime by asking employees to destroy incriminating documents. However, she eventually admitted embezzlement last year.
According to The Los Angeles Times, when she was initially confronted by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, she argued that priests were better paid than nuns and that she thought she deserved a raise.
Her lawyer Mark Byrne asked to allow Kreuper to serve her time at the convent, where she had been kept since her crimes were uncovered in 2018.
