Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  ALSO BY JASON BERRY

  PLAY

  Earl Long in Purgatory

  FICTION

  Last of the Red Hot Poppas

  NONFICTION

  Up from the Cradle of Jazz:

  New Orleans Music Since World War II

  (with Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones)

  Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of

  John Paul II (with Gerald Renner)

  Louisiana Faces: Images of a Renaissance

  (with photographs by Philip Gould)

  The Spirit of Black Hawk: A Mystery of Africans and Indians

  Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the

  Sexual Abuse of Children

  Amazing Grace: With Charles Evers in Mississippi

  Copyright © 2011 by Jason Berry

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berry, Jason.

  Render unto Rome: the secret life of money in the Catholic Church / Jason Berry.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Catholic Church—Finance. I. Title.

  BX1950.B47 2011

  262′.020681—dc22 2010051105

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53133-7

  Jacket design by David Tran

  Jacket photograph: Istock.com

  v3.1

  In memoriam

  Ariel Laforet Berry,

  child of my heart

  Gerald Renner,

  colleague and friend

  I am an old policeman guarding the gold reserves. If you tell an old policeman that the laws are going to change, he will realize that he is an old policeman, and he will do everything that he can to prevent them from changing … Once the new laws have become the Church’s treasure, an enrichment of her gold reserves, there is still only one principle: loyalty in the Church’s service. But this service means loyalty to her laws—like a blind man. Like the blind man that I am.

  —Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Prefect of the Holy Office, to Mario von Galli in The Council and the Future (1966)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE: PRINCES OF THE REALM

  1: BOSTON IN THE FAULT LINES

  2: ORIGINS OF THE VATICAN FINANCIAL SYSTEM

  3: SEEDS OF REVOLT

  4: THE VATICAN, THE VIGILS, AND THE REAL ESTATE

  5: ITALIAN INTERVENTIONS

  6: THE CASE OF THE MISSING MILLIONS

  7: FATHER MACIEL, LORD OF PROSPERITY

  8: BORRÉ IN ROME

  9: SECRECY AND LAMENTATIONS

  10: PROSECUTION AND SUPPRESSION

  11: THE DEBTS OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION

  12: ANOTHER CALIFORNIA

  13: AMERICA AND THE VATICAN

  EPILOGUE: BENEDICT XVI: POPE OF IRONIES

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PRINCES OF THE REALM

  The church stood at the bottom of Bunker Hill in Charlestown, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. Like much of Greater Boston, Charlestown was no longer hard-shell Irish. The wooden triple-deckers that housed large working families in decades past had become pearls for gentrification in 2004, despite the outlying streets that bore the scars of a drug economy.

  The social mosaic at St. Catherine of Siena parish delighted Rose Mary Piper. She was in the winter of life, with four children grown and grandchildren nearing adulthood. The range of people in the pews, so different from that of the predominantly white parishes she had known, touched her identity as one soul united with a greater body of believers. From the housing projects along Mystic River came Puerto Ricans and people from the Dominican Republic to Sunday Mass, with their Spanish songs and bilingual bulletins, worshipping alongside people with Irish roots and then more cosmopolitan Bostonians like her son-in-law, Peter Borré, who lived in a nearby condo.

  Rosie Piper knew the Latino women had it tough, like her ancestors who got off the ships from Ireland and made it in Staten Island, New York. To live is to change. When her husband was diagnosed with dementia, Rosie oversaw the selling of their home in Hilton Head, South Carolina. For most of their long marriage, Bill Piper’s career as a chemical engineer with DuPont had anchored them in Delaware. Rosie had enjoyed their time in the South. But with the realization that she alone could not manage his needs, she decided on the Boston area, where their two daughters had settled. Mary Beth, the rebellious one, no longer went to church; but her husband, Peter, attended Mass with Rosie.

  Every Sunday, Rose Mary Piper put a $10 check in the collection basket, a practice ingrained with time. Peter gave cash. The worldview Peter Borré carried from his navy years turned on just authority. You went to church, prayed for those you loved, asked forgiveness for your sins, and donated money because it was the right thing to do. Until the scandal rocked Boston neither of them thought much about church finances, how a given dollar broke down—what percentage went to parish costs, what part for the parochial school and to help the poor; how much to the bishop, how much to Rome. You gave money and let the priest and bishop handle it. The Catholic Church was holy, true, apostolic, and wealthy enough to help many of those truly in need.

  The revolution in Peter Borrés’s life began in 2004, when the Boston archdiocese imposed a sweeping closure plan on parish churches some months after a legal settlement with 552 clergy abuse victims. Cardinal Law covered up for child molesters, brooded Rosie Piper, and now they sell churches! Peter Borré, who led a comfortable life, was also offended, but he soon acquired a cold curiosity about the money. As Borré would learn, many American Catholics were riled about just stewardship: how bishops manage the finances. Huge legal settlements caused by bishops who recycled pedophiles, churches closed against the people’s will, continuing reports of priests or lay staffers who stole parish funds—all fed a deep sense of betrayal. In 2010 an upsurge of clergy abuse cases showed bad decisions by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger long before he became pope. As Benedict XVI met with victims and apologized, he nevertheless seemed detached, in a surreal way, from the obvious need for structural reform.

  Since the harrowing struggle of Benedict XV during World War I, the role of the pope has enlarged, dramatically, from that of a supreme religious leader to that of an international advocate for peace. Following the Great War, a succession of popes emerged as moral statesmen on the global stage, slowly distancing themselves from a history of anti-Semitic views within the church and calling for dialogue and diplomacy over armed conflict, particularly in the nuclear age. The evolution of the papacy as a force for peace took a major step in 1958, when John XXIII, who as papal nuncio in Istanbul during the war had helped save Jews, abolished the phrase “treacherous Jews” from the Good Friday liturgy. He greeted a delegation of American Jews with an echo of the Old Testament account of Joseph in Egypt: “I am Joseph, your brother.”1

  His successor, Paul VI, made a point of often saying, “If you want peace, work for justice.”2 Even Pius XII—the focus of an ongoing debate among historians and Jewish leaders about his reticence during World War II toward condemning Hitler and the Nazis—was revered in postwar years as a voice of peace. Pius’s questioned legacy results not just from revisionist historians. Ironically, John Paul II raised the expectations for a church more honest about itself in his call for “the purification of the memory.”3 A champion of human rights in t
he political sphere, John Paul in his many apologies for past church sins cited “sufferings inflicted upon Jews,”4 though he mentioned no pope by name.

  In his last dozen years, John Paul damaged his own legacy on human rights by failing to appropriately acknowledge the victims of clergy child abusers and to act forcefully on the clear signs of a criminal sexual underground in clerical culture. Benedict XVI inherited a Vatican tribunal system averse to punishing bishops who were sex offenders or complicit in concealing them. By failing to show resolve as a ruler and bring the worst bishops to justice, Benedict has invited scrutiny of the Vatican’s legal system, such as it is. Vatican offices have largely rubber-stamped bishops’ financial decisions. How that Vatican legal system functions is the central theme of this book.

  Render unto Rome follows a series of property and financial decisions that link certain American bishops and Vatican officials; the book further examines how Father Marcial Maciel, the greatest fund-raiser of the modern church, became its greatest criminal. In following these narrative lines I have taken a deep look at the handling of church assets in Boston, Cleveland, and Los Angeles, interlaced with events from other dioceses and a recurrent focus on the Congregation for the Clergy, the Vatican office that monitors how bishops sell property. A key official in Clergy recently assisted a profiteering scheme on the sale of U.S. churches. A central figure in that scheme, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, was Vatican secretary of state for fourteen years under John Paul and slightly more than a year under Benedict. Sodano was also a tireless supporter of Father Maciel. The cardinal refused to be interviewed; however, FBI findings on the business dealings of his nephew were of great help, along with other sources, as I put a viewfinder on Sodano and his machinations. Nipote, in Italian, is the root word for “nepotism.”

  I have drawn a timely insight from Worldly Goods, James Gollin’s 1971 book on Catholic Church finances. Gollin reported that the American church held between 50 and 60 percent of global church assets, but much of it lay in property that could not be sold. “Adding up the total wealth of the church is a game,” he observed. “The essential thing is to understand how the wealth is managed.”5 As I have learned, that management varies greatly from one bishop to the next.

  With 1.2 billion members, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest organization in the world, the most populous single entity that operates nearly everywhere. It is also a vastly decentralized church, with power invested in individual bishops. No matter how much a bishop relies on advisory boards or staff, his authority looks to Rome. Each bishop answers to the pope through officials in the Roman Curia. Few Catholics questioned this monarchical arrangement until the bishops’ strategies to conceal sexual abuse unraveled in lawsuits, allowing the press to expose a netherworld of pathological secrecy.

  “I’m constantly amazed by how little information some dioceses have on their finances,” Patrick Schiltz, the dean of the University of St. Thomas Law School in St. Paul, Minnesota, told the New York Times in 2002. “They are like mom-and-pop operations.”6 Schiltz has since become a federal judge. Words like that from a legal scholar who had done defense work for dioceses in abuse cases hinted at a deeper dissatisfaction shared by many prominent Catholics.

  “The church should open up its books,” Erica P. John, an heir to the Miller brewing fortune and a major philanthropist, also told the Times. “We want transparency.”7 A family foundation established by John’s late husband had been a bedrock supporter of Milwaukee’s archdiocese when she discovered, in May 2002, that Archbishop Rembert Weakland had used $450,000 in church funds in 1998 to pay off a disgruntled male lover from years before.8 Weakland was closing parishes at the time, citing a need for fiscal pragmatism, while his lawyers negotiated the secret settlement; he was also steering $1.5 million to Rome for an endowed chair in social teaching in his name at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and a $500,000 chair in liturgy and music, courtesy of an archdiocesan fund that relied on the John family foundation.9 In a 2009 memoir, Weakland noted: “I knew that people’s allegiance was primarily to the parish: their Catholicism was identified with it. The closing or merging of parishes would almost certainly reduce the number of practicing Catholics.”10 Weakland, who had a remarkable history of recycling child molesters, commissioned a $100,000 bronze relief for Milwaukee’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist that gave honor to Saint John, Saint Anne, and himself.

  The celibacy law, which any pope could make optional, has become an expensive yoke on the church. Since the 1960s many more men have left the priesthood than entered, most of them to marry; the priesthood has also acquired a vast gay subculture. The number of seminarians has plunged by 85 percent. One-fifth of America’s 17,958 parishes have no priest. A key rationale in the eleventh-century papacy’s imposition of celibacy was to prevent the children of priests and bishops from creating dynasties; the church was trying to secure its territories and a role for its legal system in European society. Ending clerical marriage was “an essential precondition for the liberation of Church property from lay control,” writes the historian James A. Brundage.11 Today, bishops have liquidated assets at a numbing pace to pay victims of priests who should have been prosecuted but mostly went to expensive treatment centers.

  In the 1950s, the ratio of priest to parishioners was 1 to 650; today, it is 1 to 1,600.12 Most priests strive to give the Gospel meaning in their parishioners’ lives. They are also the parish fund-raisers; the priest shortage has escalated financial pressures and losses. Pastors rely on lay staff, many of whom have families and real salary needs, unlike priests and nuns of yesteryear.

  A true financial profile of the church is elusive. Few dioceses post complete financial statements, nor does the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which has a large building and staff in Washington, D.C. In 2002 the USCCB released a report that calculated $5.6 billion from Sunday collections, and all parish revenues of $7.6 billion.13 Financial analyst Joseph Claude Harris, author of The Cost of Catholic Parishes and Schools, has studied the available figures on Sunday giving from people like Rose Mary Piper. “The largest church in the world has no definitive data on its American collection yield,” states Harris. “A complete portrait of church financials would include all revenues and expenses. We have only a portion. Maybe there isn’t a big demand. If every bishop wanted the information, the USCCB would do it.”14

  Harris revised the 2002 Sunday collection figures, using updated metrics on the number of U.S. Catholic households. For 2002, the year the abuse scandal became a national media narrative, he calculated the Sunday collections at $6.102 billion. In 2003, as the scandal coverage worsened, the weekly contribution rose by $38 million, to $6.140 billion. In 2004 there was an increase of $207 million to $6.347 billion. In 2005 the giving rose by another $194 million, reaching $6.541 billion. And for 2006, the last year for which Harris has data, he tallied an even greater jump, of $441 million, to $6.982 billion.15

  An escalation of $880 million to the Sunday baskets during the worst religious scandal in American history is a testament to Catholics’ faith “in the church”—but not in its power structure. A USA Today poll in June 2002 found that 89 percent of Catholics thought that a bishop who recycled a pedophile should be removed. Apart from Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, few complicit bishops “stepped down.” The increase in donations (in cash and other assets) suggests that Catholics looked past guilty bishops to support parishes and programs they wanted to preserve. But the abuse crisis was unrelenting.

  Between 1950 and 2002 the church paid $353 million in victim settlements, legal defense, therapy for victims, and treatment for perpetrators, according to a study commissioned by the bishops. Insurance carriers paid $218.5 million, for a combined cost of $571.5 million.16 The chain reaction of reporting ignited by the Boston Globe in 2002 caused many more victims to seek redress. Church expenses for 2002 through 2009 were $1.42 billion. The total cost (including priests’ treatment) from 1950 through 2009 was $1.775 billion. The
average annual loss (or expense) for the most recent seven-year period was $203 million.17

  How does an organization recover from losses of this magnitude?

  The short answer is by selling property; the long answer is through deficit financing.

  The Roman Catholic Church in America is undergoing the most massive downsizing in its history. A religious infrastructure built up over the century between the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy is liquidating assets at a startling pace. Abuse cases alone do not explain the “national fire sale” of bishops selling churches, to quote a notable critic, Peter Borré.

  Since 1995 the bishops have closed 1,373 churches—more than one parish per week for fifteen years. As new parishes go up in suburbs, many old enclaves of Irish, Italian, and East European immigrants turn into ghettos.18 As the European ethnics found more affluent environs, poor people of color moved into streets on a downward spiral. Cavernous churches face steep maintenance costs; parish schools are put to other uses. If a grim inevitability drives some church sales, few bishops relish abandoning at-risk neighborhoods where churches historically served as anchors for poor people in a hard struggle to keep afloat.

  In every diocese, the parishes pay an assessment charge to the bishop, a fee of between 5 and 15 percent of the collection, based on revenue stream, operating costs, and ability to pay. Wealthier parishes pay more. The fee (which has a Latin name, cathedraticum) is a tax the parish pays the diocese. In this realm, the bishop is both tax collector and central banker. The diocese pools the assessment fees to earn interest; when a parish falls behind on payment, the bishop can charge interest for the late charges. He can devise ways for wealthier parishes to cover costs for poorer parishes. He can forgive poor parishes’ assessment debts or charge interest until they are paid up. He can lend money to parishes for their projects at interest. He can send funds to other dioceses or foreign countries for causes he supports. The bishop also raises money for capital campaigns as suburbs expand or structures face renovation.