Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  Rosie Piper thrilled to the sermons of Father Bob Bowers, the forty-something pastor with silver hair who spoke buoyantly about mutual obligations and the parish as a place where all peoples met; he was learning Spanish and creating outreach programs that made her feel good about being Catholic. She found herself oddly moved on the day two adopted boys of a gay couple made their First Communion. Gay marriage was a leap she could not make in her own mind. She had voted Republican much of her life, but civil unions with benefits seemed right. With so many kids out on the street, hooked on crack and fighting with guns, she reasoned that the children of that couple at least had the advantage of family, even if it was a different kind of family: they had two men who loved them, brushed their hair, put them in nice clothes, and prayed with them in church.

  The society she found at St. Catherine of Siena, where “church” was greater than its rules, strengthened her sense of a spiritual home as she weighed the realities of her life against past expectations. Back in Delaware all those years ago, she had raised two sons and two daughters in the church, all of whom had left or detached from the faith. For some reason her eldest granddaughter, a University of Virginia undergraduate who had grown up in California, was a deeply devout Catholic. Rosie realized how much she had learned from her children, the tolerance they had taught her about a changing society—a tolerance sadly missing from the church she loved and which gave her spasms of agony. Those bishops! Hiding sex criminals! All that lying! Somebody ought to show those men what’s what!

  Attending Mass with Peter lent a measure of comfort to Rosie amid the reservoirs of patience she had to summon in dealing with Bill’s dementia. Her son-in-law with his European air could be brusque, even arrogant, but Peter had a good heart. She was glad he and Mary Beth had found each other.

  Peter Borré became active at St. Catherine of Siena by default. Since moving into the condo in 1987, he had logged hundreds of thousands of air miles on business. Now and then Mary Beth had gone with him, depending on the destination and her schedule. More often he was alone. On layovers from West Africa he had stayed most often in Paris, where he attended Les Augustins church. In London he sought out St. Martin-in-the-Fields, off Trafalgar Square. Back in Boston, he often made his way downtown to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. But his attendance was sporadic, several Sundays running, then a stretch away.

  Moving through his fifties, Borré had reached back for an essence of his earlier spiritual life, before the collapse of his first marriage. He blamed the divorce on his infidelity and the workaholic zeal of his thirties. In his twenties he had married the daughter of a European ambassador; she raised their son and two daughters during his time away. With a widening of his hindsight lens he had come to see those overlong travel stints as an escape mechanism. The divorce had left him riddled with self-disgust. In time, he cultivated a good relationship with his ex-wife; she had lived now for nearly three decades with a man on Martha’s Vineyard. Repairing the bond with his children had come slowly, not without pain. They were grown now, and he had several grandchildren.

  At Mass, he wanted to reclaim a spiritual equilibrium, the moral center he had lost. Nevertheless, each Sunday when the moment came to receive the Eucharist, the presence of Christ in the blessed wafer, Borré hung back. He sat in the pew as people moved past him into the Communion line.

  Borré had recoiled from the idea of seeking an annulment for his first marriage, a process that would have made him legal, as it were, for Communion. Many Catholics view the annulment process as revisiting the traumas of a divorce. From his father’s cynical take on the Rota, the Vatican court that held the final word on annulments, Borré thought the process was a racket. His father, as an American attorney well connected in Rome, had referred cases to canonists who had standing at the Rota; he had helped translate certain requests into Italian.

  “There was a lot of dinner table talk about how phony the whole thing was—false affidavits about mental reservations a spouse had before getting married,” recalls Borré. “It required a lot of collusion on the part of the other spouse, money changing hands in return for supporting affidavits. My dad had peripheral involvement in an infamous case. Lee Bouvier, sister of Jackie Kennedy, needed to annul her marriage so she could marry a Polish prince, Stanislaw Radziwill. It would have looked bad for the Catholic president to have a divorced sister-in-law who had been a maid of honor at his wedding. It was a sordid matter, but the Sacra Rota came through and Lee became ‘Princess Radziwill.’ She was in Rome a lot in the Swinging Sixties. She and the prince divorced in the 1970s. By then it didn’t matter as a political issue.”

  Still, many Catholics who go through annulments experience a feeling of cleansing; they can also remarry before a priest. The annulment involves a fee to the diocesan chancery, meeting with a canon lawyer, answering a lengthy questionnaire on causes of the divorce (with more intimate detail than many civil courts require), then the long wait to hear back from Rome. The escalation of annulments granted to American Catholics since the 1980s stirred suspicion at the Vatican. “The United States has the largest tribunal system in the world,” a Vatican canonist told me during an interview in Rome in 2002. “To say that people were unqualified begs the issue. The U.S. tribunals violated grandly—terribly—the annulments of marriage.”29

  No one knows how many divorced Catholics remarry without annulments and take Communion. Most priests have no idea who in the Communion line may have canonically stained back pages nor a punitive inclination to use church law in withholding the Eucharist. Peter Borré, a prodigal son returned to the church, stuck to his guns. Eschewing the “cafeteria Catholicism” of those who selectively follow church rules, he knew that by church law his second marriage was illicit. For all of his misgivings about annulments, he sat in the pew with his core of obedience, unable to shake a sense of being unworthy, an ironic law-and-order Catholic at Communion time, believing in the divine essence of the church and salvation in Jesus Christ, waiting, as if in Dante’s Purgatorio, for absolution on some distant day.

  All men, though in a vague way, apprehend

  a good their souls may rest in, and desire it;

  each, therefore, strives to reach his chosen end.30

  After Senator Kerry gained the nomination, Mary Beth was working in the garden of their Florida vacation home when the idea of George W. Bush getting reelected filled her with nausea; she telephoned a friend in the Kerry campaign to say, “I’m in.” In short order she went to work in the Florida field organization for the presidential campaign.

  Peter, gathering information about the archdiocese’s financial problems, was in a slow burn. For to him, the numbers did not add up.

  CHAPTER 2

  ORIGINS OF THE VATICAN

  FINANCIAL SYSTEM

  On July 22, 2010, the Vatican announced a $250,000 gift by Pope Benedict XVI to rebuild a school in Port-au-Prince that had been lost in Haiti’s horrific earthquake.1 The Holy Father’s international role in helping “the least of these” arose in the last century. But the Holy See is not a wealthy country like one of the Arab oil states. Its largesse relies on donors, large and small.

  Peter’s Pence is the Vatican’s most important collection; it is taken once a year in late June, in parishes across the developed world. Promoted as the pope’s fund for his assistance to people in dire need, Peter’s Pence in 2009 took in $82.5 million.2 Despite the Great Recession, the figure marked a nearly $7 million boost from 2008. Peter’s Pence is by no means the only stream of financial support to the pope. In America, for example, the Papal Foundation (whose board members commit to paying $1 million over ten years) supports church projects in poor countries, under Vatican guidance, with gifts that range from $15,000 to $75,000, as listed on the foundation’s website.3

  Although the annual yield of Peter’s Pence is published, how the Holy See uses those funds, the charitable outlay, is much less clear. A small office in the Secretariat of State in Vatican City tabulates the donations, s
ends letters of thanks to donors, and routes funds to other offices for disbursement. I sought information on Peter’s Pence spending from the USCCB press office, which referred me to the Washington, D.C., office of the papal nuncio, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, who did not respond. In Rome, Alessandro Speciale, a correspondent for GlobalPost, the online foreign news service, reports: “A significant part of it goes to bishops from poor dioceses when they meet the pope in their ad limina (every fifth year) meetings and discuss projects they have for schools, hospitals, student grants, etcetera. Part of the money is channeled to an office called Cor Unum, part of it is spent directly by the Secretariat of State and part of it [is spent] through [the] apostolic office, which apparently deals mostly with Rome and Italy. Part of it is also used for the personal charity of the pope.”4

  Of the three major outlays of Peter’s Pence funding, only Cor Unum publishes annual data. Cor Unum has several projects. The Sahel Foundation founded by John Paul II deals with agriculture and erosion; the Populorum Progressio assists indigenous peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2009 Cor Unum reported an outlay for emergency relief of $1.87 million in twenty-five countries; $2.3 million in general assistance for projects in forty-five countries; $2.3 million through the Sahel Foundation in nine countries; and $2.13 million spent in twenty countries in the initiative for Latin America and the Caribbean.

  Cor Unum’s four allocations—roughly $8.65 million—account for 10.5 percent of the $82.5 million collected through Peter’s Pence. The Vatican has not released figures on how it spent the rest of Peter’s Pence in 2009.

  International philanthropy by the pope is a recent phenomenon in history. Across the last century Peter’s Pence proved pivotal to the Holy See, but the money’s major role was not to help the needy but to plug Vatican operating deficits. In 1985, a year after the Holy See agreed to pay three banks $242 million to resolve Vatican Bank complicity in the collapse of Roberto Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican Bank was unable to cover the Vatican operating deficit of $39.14 million. “The deficit has been mainly covered by the Peter’s Pence and other free offerings to the Holy Father, which amount to $36,927,811,” noted the General Final Balance Sheet.5

  On November 18, 1987, Cardinal John Krol of Philadelphia spoke to a Vatican economic commission about the Holy See’s finances. A son of Polish immigrants, Krol was confident and socially conservative, but at the same time, in following the U.S. bishops’ line against nuclear arms, a critic of the Reagan defense policy. Krol also raised major funds for the Polish resistance, thereby cementing good ties with John Paul II. That day in 1987 he complained of the Roman Curia’s expanding bureaucracy. The Vatican city-state met its expenses, but the Curia ran way over budget. “None of these offices has anything to do with the IOR, sometimes called the Vatican Bank, which is truly a service agency operated autonomously under the direction of some cardinals and a director,” said Krol, elliptically. (IOR stands for Istituto per le Opere di Religione—Institute for Religious Works—otherwise known as the Vatican Bank.) Krol omitted Archbishop Paul Marcinkus’s role in allowing IOR to launder mob money for Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi. Sindona had died in prison, poisoned, and Calvi had been found hanging from a bridge in London.6 A native of Illinois, Marcinkus used diplomatic immunity to evade Italian subpoenas by staying inside Vatican City. When the storm passed, Marcinkus moved to Arizona and passed his sunset years playing golf. In the Vatican style of exquisite courtesy to hierarchs, Krol on that day in 1987 spoke not of the financial debacle caused by Marcinkus but of its prosaic offshoot: the Vatican operating deficit.

  Traditionally, Peter’s Pence is to be collected for the Holy Father’s charities, but with the reduction of the income and the increase of costs, a move was made first of all to take money from the Peter’s Pence, and eventually to take all of the revenue from Peter’s Pence. The Holy Father does receive, when people visit him, gifts of money. The gifts that are not earmarked for specific charities, also became available and were used to cover the deficits. As of this stage, the reserve—if it can be called that—is insufficient to cover the anticipated deficit.7

  Krol did not want charitable donations sent to Peter’s Pence from the various national churches diverted to cover salaries or costs of the Curial bureaucracy. On a 1987 budget of $132.6 million, the Holy See overspent by $63.8 million. “The resulting shortfall was covered by support from Peter’s Pence amounting to $50,299,858.32,” reported the 1987 Statement of Income and Expenditure. Moreover, $13.5 million came from “other sources … including the limited resources of accumulated reserves which have now been completely exhausted.”8 Krol was blunt on the matter of charitable money: “The Peter’s Pence money must go back to the pope for the needs of the poor.”9

  In 1991 Cardinal Edmund C. Szoka, who had left his post as archbishop of Detroit to oversee Vatican City finances, told a conference of U.S. bishops that the Holy See’s operating deficit was $86.3 million. “He said the practice of using Peter’s Pence to help cover Vatican deficits, adopted as a matter of necessity in recent years, ought to stop,” reported Catholic News Service.10 Sandro Magister, the distinguished religion correspondent for Rome’s L’Espresso, offered new insight in 2009. “Money is also sent by the religious congregations and foundations,” he wrote. “According to a confidential [2007] report that the Vatican sent to the dioceses, these contributions amounted to $29.5 million.” Magister zeroed in on a second source of funding for the pope, the Vatican Bank. Twenty years after the scandal, Magister echoed Krol:

  In March of every year, in fact, the IOR makes entirely available to the pope the difference between its income and expenditures the previous year. This total is kept secret, but it is believed to be close to the Peter’s Pence. At least this was the case in the four years for which figures were leaked [before Italy adopted the euro]. It came to 60.7 billion Italian lire in 1992, 72 billion in 1993, 75 billion in 1994, and 78.3 billion in 1995. During those same years, the Peter’s Pence was just slightly above these amounts.

  Given this state of affairs, 2007 should have brought Benedict XVI for his “charity” a sum total of about two hundred million dollars.11

  The Vatican budget ran a deficit of about 2.4 million euros in 2007. “Chopped liver, by comparison,” mused Magister.

  “For many years the Vatican also subsidized the diocese of Rome,” explains Jesuit Father Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Center and author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church. “Now the diocese’s budget is separate and doing well under Italy’s tax check-off system, which allows every taxpayer to approve a payment to the church,” Reese told me. “Even some Communists mark the box on their tax forms because they trust the church with their money more than they trust the state; so the Italian church has more money to donate to the Vatican. The sex abuse crisis may change that.”

  The Vatican Bank is an “off-the-books” asset: no accounting on the Holy See financial statement, nothing on the bank’s profits, losses, or how much it gives the pope. Peter’s Pence, however, powered papal finances before the Vatican Bank ever existed. As this charity evolved, it propped up the Vatican through decades of war and convulsions in Europe. The Vatican financial system is a product of charitable donations harnessed for capitalist investment.

  THE WORLD OF PIO NONO

  In 1849, when Catholic Church membership in America stood at 5 percent of its size today, the bishops collected just under $26,000 to help a financially crippled pope. The international funding drive revived a tradition called Peter’s Pence. French Catholics led the benefactors until the late nineteenth century, giving way to the American church. But the 1849 American gift to Pius IX was substantial for the time. American Catholic support for Peter’s Pence—particularly from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston—rose with the tides of Irish, Italian, and other European immigrants settling in the cities. In the 1870s, with his papacy afloat on these donations,
Pius IX railed against the unified Kingdom of Italy, demanding the return of a massive farming territory to the pope as an absolute monarch. As wrangling over the Papal States dragged on, Peter’s Pence fed Vatican investments in Rome’s booming real estate market.12

  When the dispute over the lost territories was finally resolved to the Vatican’s benefit, on the eve of the Great Depression, the Catholic Church in America stood as the Holy Father’s chief benefactor. U.S. bishops raised money with the power of politicians, sending streams of support to the Holy Father.

  The financial links that spanned the Atlantic were strained even before the global credit crisis erupted in 2008. At the onset of Benedict XVI’s papacy in 2005, American dioceses were reeling from financial losses in the sex abuse cases. Bishops who faced mass lawsuits had resorted to bankruptcy filings in Portland, Spokane, San Diego, Tucson, and Davenport, Iowa (and later Wilmington, Delaware, and Milwaukee); they looked for no Vatican bailout. The money ran to Rome, always had. Still, Roman Curia officials monitored the bankruptcies and litigation losses. Under a 2002 agreement with the Vatican, a bishop seeking to liquidate assets over a value threshold of $5 million (or $10.3 million, depending on the size of his diocese) needed approval from the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome.13

  Habits of the heart can defy easy explanation. Behind the financial ties lay a strange romance between New World faithful and the Old World’s last sovereign monarchy, robed in messy Italian politics. But when the Vatican needed money, Catholic America delivered. The Vatican’s financial dependency stood apart from the lawsuits and government probes over the last decade, in America and Ireland, that disgorged shocking church files on predatory priests. As the outlines surfaced of the church’s greatest crisis since the Reformation, Pope John Paul II stood passive, other than to occasionally apologize or scold the media. In 2002, when clergy child-sex cases provoked an international scandal, John Paul, ailing with Parkinson’s disease, blamed therapists for misleading bishops; Vatican cardinals blasted the media and lawyers. To concede failure by the pope was unspeakable, if not unthinkable.