Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  One asset stood out from the report: gold. “The Holy See owns almost a [metric] tonne of gold which in today’s volatile market would be worth some £15 million,” wrote Robert Mickens, Rome correspondent for The Tablet, England’s independent Catholic magazine, in 2008.36 “I have never seen gold as a separate line item on any financial statement,” comments Ruhl. “People tend to speculate, rather than invest, in gold, because the gold market is a yo-yo. Still, given the undervalued assets, we can’t tell how much the Holy See is worth.” The Vatican city-state and Apostolic Patrimony appear to be comfortably secured, but the secret profits from the Vatican Bank obscure any real “transparency” by the Holy See.

  Meanwhile, eight American dioceses, and the Northwestern province of the Society of Jesus, which includes Alaska, have tried bankruptcy filings to reduce what they would have to pay in lawsuits to abuse victims. As the reports on bankruptcy filings and the impact of civil litigation roll across the media screens, people wonder how a church so powerful could lose nearly $4 billion (embezzlements included) since 1965. The same bishops who recycled sex offenders have avoided a binding policy to secure Sunday collections. Church apologists say the huge settlements are unfair, but the Vatican’s failure to regulate bishops stems from a flawed system of justice.

  Corruption in the church is a reality as the wheel of history turns. Democracy has its history of nightmares too. The resilience of the church as a spiritual reality has produced a continuing force of pastoral care, relief work, and vital forms of assistance to the truly needy. “Look at what the church has done for direct services to AIDS victims in Africa, and disaster relief in Haiti and many countries as a first responder,” explains Sister Christine Schenk, a nurse-midwife with a long history of social activism in Cleveland. A pivotal figure in the latter part of this book, Sister Schenk continues: “The church is one of the few transnational entities that connects religious people to something that’s not about making a profit—helping the poor, educating and feeding people, healing the sick through health services by missionaries. You don’t see much about this on the nightly news, but these are daily acts of witness in Christ’s name. The church has a communications network to reach many of the world’s dispossessed, people on the outer edge. This is not like Microsoft. It is going where Jesus calls. As crazy as the Vatican monarchical system can be with its top-down political model, the Catholic network of genuine service providers has a global reach to the needy, a real record of doing good in the world.”

  The sacramental imagination, and an ethos of responsibility to those on the outer edge, gives many of us who are appalled by the scandals of church officialdom some cause to keep faith. Saint Augustine called justice a virtue that gives every one his due. Internal justice is what the church severely needs.

  Render unto Rome follows a line of reporting I began in Lead Us Not into Temptation (1992), a book that took seven years of research and exposed the contours of a national scandal. At the time, the scattered abuse cases available from Boston and Los Angeles persuaded me that if the internal documents of those archdioceses were ever released, a secret history of epic corruption would surface. Back then I doubted that such would ever happen. Journalists used my calculation of $400 million in losses from legal and medical costs for four hundred priests in covering the early phase of the crisis. The impact of the Boston Globe reporting in 2002 signaled more than a new chapter in an old scandal. Under public pressure, the bishops’ conference finally released data: 4,392 priests had abused youngsters between 1950 and 2002.37

  In 2004 I published Vows of Silence with Gerald Renner, the longtime religion editor of the Hartford Courant. In that newspaper we first reported on the Vatican’s failure to act on pedophilia allegations that trailed Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ. In 2008 I released a documentary film based on that book and updated research. Chapter 7 of this book goes deeper, exploring Maciel’s financial odyssey as a mirror on Vatican justice.

  Render unto Rome concludes an investigative trilogy on the crisis of the Catholic Church. Since my first reports in 1985 on a priest who traumatized the Cajun diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, I have followed an intervening path of cultural productions, jazz history, and a novel—works that draw a bead on life’s uplifting mysteries, particularly in my flood-resurrected hometown of New Orleans. These pursuits, I confess, have imbued me with a certain optimism about the human experiment. This cast of mind was a source of some amusement to Gerald Renner, who shares in the dedication of this book. Jerry died of cancer in 2007, at seventy-six. I thought of him often in this current round of work. He was a reporter of rock-solid integrity; he also savored good bourbon. He had a grand Irish heart and was one of the finest men I have known.

  CHAPTER 1

  BOSTON IN THE FAULT LINES

  Peter Borré was midway past sixty, and like most men who find domestic harmony, he had learned that women are usually right. This knowledge, gathered slowly, had taught him that it was useless to argue over certain realities.

  The condo he and his wife shared in the old Naval Shipyard overlooked sailboat slips nestled by a pier off Boston Harbor. The view extended to a grand sweep of the city skyline. During World War II, forty thousand men had built destroyers in the vast complex; now, as with many industrial zones of urban America, a large part of the shipyard had become an upscale housing project. On the walls of their home hung color photographs his wife, Mary Beth, had taken of flowers in Finland, carved doors in Marrakech, an arched footbridge in Tahiti—pictures from their travels.

  Borré had made his money in oil and gas, developing facilities to generate power and regional grids. He had a holding company for energy ventures. In the 1980s Borré had worked for Mobil on natural gas projects in West Africa and on marketing in Europe. Before that he had worked in government, starting in 1973 as an intelligence officer in the Energy Agency of the Nixon administration, advancing to assistant secretary for international affairs as Energy achieved department status under Jimmy Carter, capped by a year under Ronald Reagan. But all the geopolitical experiences and business savvy had left him without leverage to engage his wife, a Democratic Party activist, about her spiritual life.

  And so on Sundays, while Mary Beth watched Meet the Press, Peter Borré went to Mass with his mother-in-law, Rosie. Mary Beth had left the church well before the Boston Globe began its 2002 investigation of how Cardinal Bernard F. Law and a clutch of his auxiliary bishops recycled child-molester priests. The Globe ignited a chain reaction of media coverage in America that radiated to other countries, causing a crisis for which a frail and ailing John Paul II was in no way prepared. By winter of 2004, the media narrative on bishops concealing clergy predators began receding. The big story shifted to the Democratic presidential primaries, and a media frenzy over Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. Mary Beth Borré, forty-nine, had worked as a field organizer in Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection. She had no interest in the front-runner, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. She had once worked on Kerry’s annual fund-raiser, held on his birthday, which struck her as an act of outsized ego. Although addicted to news coverage, Mary Beth had tired of campaign work. In Boston, the “epicenter” of the abuse scandal, the church faced financial convulsions.

  Mary Beth and her sister, Claudia, had settled their dad, Bill Piper, into a nursing home near Claudia’s house in Winchester. After bouts of depression as the girls grew up, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, then dementia, in retirement. Mary Beth’s brothers, living in Delaware and California, had drifted from the church, and Claudia was a Unitarian. Mary Beth attended Mass once a year with her mother, at Christmas, as a gesture of continuity. She considered herself a spiritual person but despised organized religion.

  Rosie lived with Mary Beth and Peter at the condo for six months while searching for a new home in greater Boston. After she found a place near Claudia’s and the nursing home, Bill insisted on moving back in with Rosie.

  Peter was
seventeen years older than Mary Beth. Watching his response to the Globe’s coverage, she decided that his rarefied upbringing as an American in Rome, without exposure to nuns, had made Peter an Italian Catholic. He had an aesthetic idea of Catholicism in contrast to her more puritanical encounter with faith. Born in 1955, she was a high school senior in Hockessin, Delaware, when the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion. Inspired by Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, Mary Beth Piper, the ripening feminist, gritted her teeth at the elderly pastor’s sermons against abortion. Later, she realized that a younger priest in the parish rectory who had dyed blond hair and vestments that sported lightning bolts (sewn by his mother) was going through his own drama with the closet. At the time she was galvanized by the social changes running every night on TV news, the protests for civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, and against the Vietnam War. She bridled at religion classes about mysteries and the afterlife. She wanted to make sense of this life, now. The right to choose an abortion made sense to her and caused friction with her mother. They clashed when she tried leaving the house without a bra. “Mary Beth went from being a stick figure to an attractive girl who was well endowed,” recalled Rosie, who was fourth-generation Irish from New York and had her standards. Bill, a Presbyterian, was a more detached dad, a bit of the soft touch. The distance Mary Beth felt from the church widened in college as she got to know gay people.

  The abuse scandal darkened Peter Borré’s thought field, presaging a slow shift in his views. When the early 2002 reports in the Globe uncovered Law’s mishandling of one priest, then others, Borré fumed about “a few bad apples.”

  “It’s about time,” retorted Mary Beth.

  Borré listened as she recalled the late 1980s, the early years of their marriage, when he had been traveling on business and she worked in an AIDS crisis program as the epidemic hit Boston. While counseling victims of the retrovirus, Mary Beth Borré heard stories of priests who shunned those seeking solace. She knew that for all of its hard-line stance on homosexuality, the church had a large closet of gay priests. Some of them were trying to help AIDS victims, but others held back, avoiding any involvement. She also heard from men with the virus who said that they were abused by priests as teenage boys. Many of her colleagues were ex-Catholics and ex-Jews, divorced from church or synagogue; they joked with one another about religious guilt as they followed a deep Judeo-Christian impulse to help people dying of the mysterious disease.

  Fourteen years later, when Cardinal Law’s world exploded in a scandal of covering up abusive priests, Mary Beth Borré figured he had it coming. As the scandal became the topic of everybody’s conversation, Peter Borré registered his wife’s surgical insights and brooded about the church internal.

  On September 18, 2002, the plaintiff attorney Mitchell Garabedian and his associate William H. Gordon secured a $10 million settlement for eighty-six victims of one priest, John Geoghan.1 As the press coverage made reference to an earlier line of legal actions, Borré wondered how much the archdiocese had paid to settle claims in the late 1990s that were handled by Garabedian, and by a high-profile attorney at another firm, Roderick MacLeish Jr. (a grandson of the poet Archibald MacLeish). The attorneys had resolved cases for some seventy victims out of court, but with stipulations by the archdiocese that muzzled the survivors—the agreements sealed church documents from public view. Still, with so many cases, information surfaced in legal filings that drew the scrutiny of Kristen Lombardi in the weekly Boston Phoenix. Lawyers for the Globe asked the court for access to documents. Overruling church lawyers, Judge Constance Sweeney granted the request, which opened the gates for an epic investigation in 2002.2

  Globe reporters excavated a criminal sexual underground involving dozens of clerics, based on the church personnel files surrendered to the subpoena demands by victims’ lawyers. The media narrative seemed to crest when Cardinal Law resigned as archbishop shortly before Christmas in 2002.

  But events charged on in a high-stakes legal war. On September 9, 2003, the church pulled back from a threatened bankruptcy filing to embrace an $85 million settlement with 542 victims. Law was down in Maryland, living with a community of nuns. “The agreement marked the dramatic conclusion to Archbishop Seán P. O’Malley’s all-out push in his first weeks in Boston to bring closure to the abuse cases,” the Globe reported.3

  Seán O’Malley, a Capuchin monk with a snowy beard, was fifty-nine and the bishop of Palm Beach, Florida, when he received the papal appointment as Boston’s archbishop. Wearing sandals and a brown robe with a rope belt, O’Malley cut an image quite the opposite of Law’s imperial persona. No one blamed O’Malley for the crisis, but donations had plummeted by 43 percent in the preceding year, from $14 million to $8 million in 2003.4 O’Malley faced huge barriers to restoring trust—and cash flow. In a letter issued on January 9, 2004, O’Malley announced that one-seventh of the archdiocesan buildings needed upgrading, a cost pegged at $104 million. The church had to assess its properties and streamline workings of the infrastructure. On February 2, 2004, O’Malley in a speech on the archdiocesan TV station revealed that the church faced a $4 million operating deficit and a $37 million loan from the Knights of Columbus to be repaid: “This has nothing to do with paying for abuse settlements, but has everything to do with providing vital services.”

  Nothing to do with abuse settlements, Borré repeated to himself.

  Two months later, the Red Sox had wrapped up spring training when O’Malley approved the sale of the mansion on a hill in Brighton where Law had lived like a lord, with a staff trained to call him “Your Eminence.” The cost for the cardinal’s estate and forty-three acres: $107.4 million. The buyer was the neighbor across Commonwealth Avenue: Boston College, a pearl in the crown of Jesuit higher education.5 By virtue of the size of its student body and faculty, and the scope of its graduate programs, BC should have been called a university, but BU had gotten there first. Nevertheless, in a city synonymous with Irish Catholicism, Boston College had a force of loyal alumni (many of them with Italian and Portuguese roots) who had produced an endowment that exceeded $1 billion. To Catholics outraged by Law’s reshuffling of predators, selling the mansion carried symbolic weight. The palazzo of the cardinal who had resigned his archbishopric in shame joined the infrastructure of a Jesuit college that stood for a church with intellectual moorings and a focus on social justice.

  Seasoned in the ways of oil companies, Peter Borré began thinking about an archbishop in the role of a CEO. If forced to do butcher’s work, the prelate must be adroit enough to avoid spattering blood on the floor. Red ink was rising around Archbishop O’Malley. Following the news accounts, Borré knew the archdiocese was holding back information. His mind raced. Where did the money go? What is O’Malley’s plan? Is he leveling with us? How bad is it?

  Those questions might have hung in some cerebral side pocket, throwing cold shadows on his golden years until the day Peter Borré, the very opposite of a radical, got mad at a priest. When that happened, Mary Beth, who had wondered how her husband, with his complex molecular composition, might occupy himself in retirement, saw the swell of dark, silent anger and knew immediately they were in for a ride. Peter Borré was not a man to yell, yet she knew that despite his elegant manner, he was just the kind of Italian who would fight.

  FAMILY VALUES

  Mary Beth married her college sweetheart in 1976 at a guitar Mass. “It probably didn’t seem like a concession to our families,” she said, sighing, decades later. “If we’d only been a little older, when society accepted people living together, the relationship might have ended with a lot less anguish. I was surprised when my mom actually said that to me much later on.” They divorced after four years—no children. Mary Beth was done with the church, done with religion. Too many of the moral teachings struck her as invasive, politics of the body, insensitive to ordinary people as they sought intimacy in life. She earned a B.S. in marketing at the University of Delaware.

  In 1986 she
was working for an oil company in Houston when friends introduced her to Peter, who was in town on a business trip. With dark hair going silver at the curls, a charming wit, and a razor-sharp mind, he made an immediate impression. He had three children from his first marriage, which had ended several years before. When Mary Beth told her mother she was taking a trip to Paris with her new (forty-eight-year-old) boyfriend, Rosie caught a train to New York to meet the man. She took note of his flawless manners and the silken gesture of slipping cash into the palm of her cabdriver.

  He proposed after three months.

  They married in 1987 at the Harvard Club in Boston.

  Despite the French surname, Borré’s forebears were Italian. His paternal grandfather, Agostino, was born in 1871, the year after nationalists captured territories long controlled by the papacy. In the convulsions of Italian statehood, Giuseppe Agostino Borré emigrated from Zerba, a mountain village in Piacenza province, north of Genoa, “at the urging of his brother Ernesto, who had come in 1882. Both came at about age nineteen and became chefs,” explains Marie Roth, a cousin who researched the family lineage.6 His maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Balboni, came from a village in Emilia in the Po Valley. Starting out as a pushcart peddler of fruit and vegetables, he ended up with a grocery store.

  Born in Boston in 1938, Peter was a boy when his father, Peter senior, a lawyer and an army veteran, hired on for an American rebuilding project in Italy, in advance of the Marshall Plan. In August 1946 the family moved to Rome. Boxes bearing the remains of U.S. soldiers were stacked at the airport awaiting shipment home. The boy asked about the boxes. His father answered, gently telling him about the war. His mother, Mary Albina, had completed a teaching degree and then gone to Harvard, earning a master’s in English. She befriended the aging philosopher George Santayana (who famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) during his sunset years in Rome.