Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  The bishops, monsignors, and priests who came to dinner were cultivated men whose intelligence impressed the boy. One visitor, Auxiliary Bishop John Wright from Boston, was a large, heavy man who enjoyed his wine and the discussions of American politics, Italian politics, and Vatican politics. Wright later became a cardinal at the Vatican and prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy.

  Postwar Italy was a bleeding chaos of embedded Fascists, the largest Communist Party in Western Europe backed by Soviet Russia, a resurgent mafia in the south, and the Christian Democrats, a party supported by Pope Pius XII. The leader of the Christian Democrats, Alcide De Gasperi, had been an outspoken anti-Fascist before the war; he was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1927 and released to the custody of the previous pope, Pius XI, in 1929. De Gasperi spent the next fifteen years basically living in the Vatican Library. “Catholic, Italian and democratic, in that order” was his motto.7 In 1945, as one of the first postwar prime ministers, he led a church-sponsored party with little organization apart from Catholic Action, a movement that Pius X had launched in 1905 to unite lay activism and the hierarchy’s agenda. The little social cohesion left in postwar Italy lay with the 65,000 parish priests serving 24,000 parishes in 300 dioceses. Another 200,000 religious order priests and nuns staffed schools, hospitals, and charitable organizations.8 As De Gasperi guided the Christian Democrats through three governments in as many years, dozens of parties were vying for power. The Truman administration braced for Italy’s 1948 elections. “The American intervention in Italy was large and well-coordinated, very much the work of an ‘efficient machine,’ ” wrote U.S. intelligence historian Thomas Powers.9 “Cash, lots of it, would be needed to help defeat the communists,” observed journalist Tim Weiner in a history of the CIA10—an estimated $10 million, according to the CIA station chief in Rome. Thus, Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder decided

  to tap into the Exchange Stabilization Fund set up in the Depression to shore up the value of the dollar overseas through short-term currency trading, and converted during World War II as a depository for captured Axis loot. The fund held $200 million earmarked for the reconstruction of Europe. It delivered millions into the bank accounts of wealthy American citizens, many of them Italian Americans, who then sent the money to newly formed political fronts created by the CIA. Donors were instructed to place a special code on their income tax forms alongside their “charitable donation.” The millions were delivered to Italian politicians and priests of Catholic Action, a political arm of the Vatican.11

  Between the CIA and U.S. relief projects, America poured $350 million into Italy during the twelve months before the April 18, 1948, election. The Vatican Bank, which was founded in 1942 under Pius XII to consolidate the Holy See’s finances during the worst of World War II, became a conduit for funds to the Christian Democrats. Pius “provided 100 million lire [$185,000] from his personal bank,” writes John Cornwell, “a sum of money apparently raised from the sale of U.S. war matériel and earmarked for the Vatican to spend on anti-Communist activities.”12 The 1948 parliamentary elections were the first under Italy’s postwar constitution since the fall of Fascism.

  “The fate of Italy depends upon the forthcoming election and the conflict between Communism and Christianity, between slavery and freedom,” declared Cardinal Francis J. Spellman of New York. On Vatican orders, Spellman entreated Italian Americans to write to relatives in the old country. Spellman, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, and the golden boy Frank Sinatra made radio broadcasts for De Gasperi’s party.13 The Vatican pulled out all the stops, “even to the extent of swinging open the doors of convents and marching cloistered nuns off to the polling places to vote for Christian Democrat candidates,” reported journalist Nino Lo Bello.14 The Christian Democrats won by a heavy margin in an election that also secured the party’s narcotic dependency on CIA money. “The CIA’s practice of purchasing elections and politicians with bags of cash was repeated in Italy—and in many other nations—for the next twenty-five years,” writes Weiner.15

  At the soirees that the Borrés hosted or attended, U.S. diplomats, Italian politicians, and businessmen mingled with Vatican officials, bankers, and film directors. Peter, a pampered only child, grew up in that milieu.

  Mussolini had given heavy state support to the 1930s Italian film industry. The dictator considered movies a powerful tool and ordered the production of proto-Fascist films for his propaganda machinery as he moved toward an alliance with Hitler.16 After the war, as American dollars rolled into Rome, Borré père did legal work for MGM and other American studios lured by the cheap production costs and solid studio infrastructure Il Duce had built. The CIA encouraged American studios to distribute films in Western Europe as a counter to Communist politics. As American producers became flush with lire, Italian law barred them from taking the funds out of local banks for conversion into dollars. With a mountain of money that the Americans had to spend locally, Italy’s postwar film industry rebounded as a Hollywood-on-the-Tiber. Charlton Heston won the 1959 Best Actor Oscar for Ben-Hur, and Peter Borré, who had just graduated from Harvard, earned lire as an Italian-English interpreter and gofer on the film’s set.

  The month after he had first arrived in Italy, seven-year-old Peter was enrolled in Rome’s most prestigious Jesuit school, Istituto Massimo. The alumni included Pope Pius XII. Peter admired the teachers for their strong-minded sermons and lectures, vaunting Rome as the capital of the Catholic Church, emphasizing each man’s responsibility to further the faith. The Jesuits stressed classical learning with a rigor that seems punishing by today’s standards. The six-day-a-week schedule began with Mass at 7 a.m. and ran until 2:30 in the afternoon. Lunch was thirty minutes. In third grade he was speaking good Italian, studying Latin and algebra; in fifth grade he added Greek and French.

  The school was in central Rome, near Piazza della Repubblica and Santa Maria degli Angeli (St. Mary of the Angels), a vast church begun in 1563 by Michelangelo within the ruins of the ancient baths built by Emperor Diocletian. Brown earth tones colored the shell, which opened into an interior of immense vaulted ceilings and light streams that washed the gigantic columns and multicolored marble floors. When Peter made occasional stops on silent afternoons, watching the people as they knelt in prayer, he drew a notion from the sheer size of the space, fortified by his school lessons, of his soul as a small but unique presence in the firmament. On trips to St. Peter’s Basilica he felt sorrow at Michelangelo’s Pietà, the statue of Mary in grief for the Son come down from the cross. Here was faith, close and true.

  He was fourteen when his father, though pleased with his academic skills and fluency in foreign languages, worried that he could barely write in English. And so his parents sent him back to New England for prep school.

  The first Mass Borré attended in the town of Andover appalled him. The church reminded him of some garish county fair; the priest so stressed the importance of contributing money as to seem a bumpkin. The beauty and size of Rome’s sacred spaces, inspiring his awe for a global faith, stood out in high relief from what he now took to be a religious backwater. He entered Harvard College at age sixteen. The disgruntlement over Boston Catholicism lingered through his undergraduate years; he was bored by sermons with all the Irish baggage that showed in the working-class people who heeded them and the homilies telling the faithful that they must pray, make confession, follow the rules, and give money. Borré’s idea of faith looked back on the urbane clerics at his parents’ dinners, the Jesuits with their emphasis on analytical thinking and a sacramental imagination shaped by the soaring beauty of Italian church interiors.

  He was too young to appreciate the mystery of Jesus, a radical who scorned the powerful and embraced the outcasts of society, or to understand how spirituality matures through suffering, prayer, and ritual memory.

  He felt as if he were living in a foreign country, and, of course, he was.

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  Many years after establishing his career in the energy
industry, and residing for long periods in Washington, D.C., and New York City, Peter Borré had come to enjoy the life he and Mary Beth made in Boston.

  Charlestown covers one square mile of a hilly peninsula cradled by the Mystic River on the north and the Charles on the southeastern side; the rivers converge at Boston Inner Harbor. The Borrés’ condo looked out on the steel bridge that links Boston’s North End to a neighborhood unusually rich in history.

  In 1630, ten years after the first pilgrims reached Cape Cod, a brig carrying Puritans sailed out of England. John Winthrop, in a famous shipboard sermon, urged his followers to pull together in “patience, and liberty … [so] that we shall be as a city upon a hill.”17 Henry VIII’s break with Rome had launched a state church from which Winthrop’s followers soon split. They saw the pope as an anti-Christ and came to view Church of England liturgies as too much like the Mass.18 Winthrop’s people became separatists who spurned any official faith. Charlestown, briefly, was the capital of the infant colony, but Winthrop’s idealized city gave way to a Bible Commonwealth as people settled across the Charles along the larger landmass girded by water. Roads followed farms, and villages mushroomed into the townships of a New England society bound by the Puritan covenant. The Congregational churches they fostered would each govern its own affairs, each choose its own pastor and spare interiors shorn of stained-glass windows and icons.19

  The Massachusetts Bay Colony hatched its own pressures for conformity that sparked hysteria and executions in the Salem witch trials. Mid-seventeenth-century Charlestown “was breaking out of such isolation, becoming a trading center for the region,” writes J. Anthony Lukas. “The less it resembled Winthrop’s model, the more seductive became the memory of that archetypal New England town, harmonious, consensual, cemented by a single faith and devotion to a common cause.”20 On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere galloped through Charlestown to warn of the British troops advancing on Lexington. In the ensuing battle—the first in the War for Independence—Charlestown and Roxbury, which lay across the river to the south, formed a dual front. Fifteen thousand colonists took arms against five thousand soldiers for the Crown. At Bunker Hill the colonists lost 138 troops to 226 British dead. Most of Charlestown went down in flames. Yet in 1810 Charlestown had nearly five thousand people and was the state’s third-largest town when the national navy opened a harbor shipyard. Builders began crafting vessels out of felled trees. In time, Charlestown became a neighborhood of Boston through annexation.

  Compared with its seventeenth-century mission to California, the Catholic Church came late to Massachusetts. In the 1790s two French priests began proselytizing among pockets of Irish settlers and in the Indian villages of Maine, where earlier Canadian clerics had visited. Boston’s first Catholic Church was built in 1803, a parish of mostly Irish surnames; the construction funds drew Protestant support, notably a $100 donation from former president John Adams. He had sent a consul to Rome, establishing a relationship with the Holy See short of full diplomatic ties. Boston’s first bishop, a Frenchman, came in 1808.

  A generation later, the bedraggled people who stepped off swollen ships from Ireland planted fear in the mind of Boston’s fading homogeneous society. Bunched into shanties, clapboard houses, and brick tenements on back streets, the Irish scraped along the margins. In the late summer of 1825, local hooligans rampaged through Irish warrens, shattering windows, smashing furniture, driving the Boston Advertiser to decry “disgraceful riots.” Charlestown drew its stability from the shipyard and Protestant artisans, merchants, and farmers. In October 1828 Catholics paraded behind a robed bishop to lay the cornerstone for a church. In 1830 people from Ireland numbered 8,000 in a city of 61,392.21 Irish rowdies cavorted and fought near the docks.

  In 1834 a nun wandered out of Charlestown’s large Ursuline convent, where sixty young ladies studied under a dozen Parisian-trained Irish sisters. In a state of mental collapse, the woman ended up at her brother’s house; she returned to the convent apparently of her own accord. As gossip coiled through the town, a Congregationalist minister named Lyman Beecher whipped up emotions already fed by lurid newspaper stories of the “kidnapped” girl in the nunnery. He accused the pope of wanting to colonize the Mississippi Valley. Town selectmen marched to the convent, demanding entry to investigate; a mob overran them, drove out the women, and set the place on fire. As the convent burned down, drunks fed a bonfire with books and furniture, dancing about in nuns’ habits. Boston Protestants expressed outrage, but few rioters were arrested. A sham trial ended with no one convicted. In 1836 another mob torched most of the Irish neighborhoods. Violence ripped through Irish ghettos of New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit as roiling nativist fears targeted people who had fled deep hardship back home.22

  A fungus that ravaged Ireland’s large potato crop led to mass starvation and a diaspora of 3 million people between 1845 and 1870.23 Thirty-nine percent of people born in Ireland no longer lived there by 1890; most of the emigrants fled to Britain, North America, or Australia. In the decade after 1846, ships bearing 130,000 Irish arrived at Boston. “Our country is literally being overrun with the miserable, vicious and unclean paupers of the old country,” the Bunker Hill Aurora railed in 1848. As the Irish crept up from harbor streets toward triple-decker apartments on Bunker Hill, Protestants were moving back toward Somerville or across the bridge into Greater Boston. In 1880 the archbishop began a system of Catholic schools for Boston.24 As Charlestown became heavily Irish, Boston’s Italian population doubled, between 1881 and 1886, to 220,000. When Peter Borré’s grandparents put down stakes in the 1880s, the Irish outnumbered the Italians three to one. Charlestown in the early 1900s was still heavily Irish.

  Boston in the late 1930s used federal funds to build a housing project close to the Mystic River in Charlestown. The demolitions phase burdened St. Catherine of Siena’s pastor with the task of “reconstructing a parish which was depopulated and nearly obliterated,” according to a parish history. “On his shoulders came all the misery and distress of seeing hundreds of his faithful parishioners forced to leave their homes and dispersed throughout greater Boston.”25

  Charlestown after World War II was still largely Irish and working class. A culture of young Townies clashed with the cops and gangs from other neighborhoods. Charlestown lay in a congressional district that in 1946 drew twenty-nine-year-old John F. Kennedy as a candidate; handsome and rich, he lived in a fine hotel on Beacon Street. Kennedy downplayed his patrician gloss by shaking hands after dawn with shipyard workers and climbing the stairs of triple-deckers to meet stay-at-home mothers, emphasizing his service in World War II. Kennedy presented a check for $650,000 on behalf of his family to Archbishop Richard Cushing for a hospital in Brighton to be named for his brother Joseph Kennedy, who had gone down in a plane in World War II.26 JFK won over a large share of Townies in winning the election. In April 1961, he welcomed fellow members of the Bunker Hill Council of the Knights of Columbus to a reception on the White House lawn, where they thrilled at “jawing with their President.”27

  Cushing became a cardinal and legendary fund-raiser as Boston Catholics gained prosperity. By 1967 he had overseen $300 million in construction projects, which included three hundred elementary or high schools, plus eighty-six new parishes. His insurance plan for archdiocesan property “saved his parishes ten million dollars in twenty years,” according to a biographer.28 Cushing donated $200,000 to assist renovations of a church in the hometown of Pope John XXIII and $1 million to help build a Catholic university in Taiwan.

  By the mideighties, when Bernard Law became cardinal, black and Latino families had arrived in a new wave of immigration; the Charlestown housing projects took on a racial stigma. Whites who could afford to had been moving out since the midseventies, when a federal judge issued busing orders to desegregate Boston public schools, making Charlestown a flash point of white protests. As the white flight started to ease, younger people with good jobs began renovating the old apartment houses as spacious dwel
lings for smaller families. A short walk down the hill along the Mystic, an Irish drug mob homed in on poor streets, planting addiction and fueling crime in the ethnic mix. The Naval Shipyard put a gentrified edge to a neighborhood where three parishes lined the incline with less than a mile between them. A financial crisis had silently encroached under Cardinal Law, unbeknownst to Peter Borré as he and Rosie sat in the pews of Charlestown’s poorest parish on a Sunday morning in 2004.

  OPENING HIS LENS

  After entering Harvard at age sixteen and graduating in 1959 with a degree in history, Peter Borré joined the U.S. Navy. He spent three years as a naval officer. In 1963 he earned a master’s in international economics from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Quarreling with his father, he refused to attend law school, but earned a second master’s, in international finance, from Harvard Business School. The navy was his pivotal experience, a grounding in the discipline, teamwork, and chain of command on a ship as a system that worked. Three institutions shaped him: the U.S. Navy, the Catholic Church, and Harvard, in that order. Navy life formed a link in his mind with the church, a global institution that had weathered wars, scandal, and its share of crooked popes. The church’s mission was of divine origin. Men could screw up anything.