Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  Back at the Vatican, on that day in 2002 as the cardinals debated other steps to remedy the crisis, Ratzinger suggested a day of prayer for the victims. It was a kind gesture, but the American cardinals faced a bleaker reality. Plaintiff lawyers in the civil suits using discovery subpoenas were gaining ever-deeper access to clergy personnel files, particularly therapists’ reports on the priest offenders, in trying to show how much bishops knew. Getting such documents in an Italian or Spanish court would be most unlikely. The more damaging the evidence, the greater the money (and prestige) lost to the church.

  As the cardinals’ meetings ran through a second day, the Americans wanted a show of solidarity with their colleagues from other countries. But as the final session at the Apostolic Palace ended in the evening of April 23, they had no consensus on why the crisis happened.

  As the American bishops in 1921 had resisted passing judgment on Boston’s cardinal O’Connell for his nephew’s secret marriage and misuse of money, so the hierarchs in 2002 avoided talk of Cardinal Law’s disaster. His Eminence had apologized as the meeting began. No need of punishment there; thus they turned to more pressing matters. Encased in their small Tower of Babel, the prelates and princes ran late for a news conference. Castrillón and Bertone drafted a communiqué in Italian; three English texts circulated—so many ideas to distill. When the briefing finally began that night, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., normally at ease with the press, faltered when asked why the document said nothing about laypeople: “I was looking for it … we had it in there last night.” Of Catholics in the pews who had watched the church battered and stained day upon day for nearly five months, the noted author David Gibson wrote: “No reference to their sorrow, their anger, or their possible role in ensuring that such a scandal would never happen again.”23

  The worst Catholic crisis since the Reformation produced a statement that endorsed celibacy as “a gift of God.” The cardinals and archbishops called on pastors to “reprimand individuals who spread dissent.” The Vatican would conduct a visitation of U.S. seminaries. Bishops would hold a special day of prayer for victims and work on a process to expel “notorious” priests from the priesthood. Many of them were already going to prison.

  “Where is Law?” a reporter asked. “Is he dodging us?” asked another. “I do not believe so,” said the other official at the briefing, Archbishop Wilton Gregory, president of the USCCB. “But I could not tell you why he is not here.”24

  Law flew back to Boston, expecting to resolve the lawsuits with the John Geoghan victims, hoping to salvage some of the standing he had built up in four decades and lost in four months.

  In the prosperous suburb of Wellesley, a group had formed called Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), which quickly drew several thousand members. They wanted to support the abuse survivors, affirm priests of integrity, and press the hierarchy for changes. Money was an emotion-charged issue. Joe Finn, a CPA long active on archdiocesan projects, worried about parishioners’ funds going for settlements. The archdiocese had an $18 million operating budget, of which $14 million came from the annual Cardinal’s Appeal. “They’re in steep decline,” Finn told VOTF members. “They’re already cutting like crazy … Look around! There are five hundred cases, five hundred. It’s nuclear winter here in Boston.”25

  Finn sought an opinion from a canon lawyer for the wealthy Bostonians who served on Law’s Finance Council. These were the people who worked the phones, raising the big money when the cardinal asked. Finn sent them the canonist’s opinion, which said they could veto a settlement. He added, “You guys have the power to say no.” When the Finance Council did just that at a meeting with Law, the legal negotiations hit a wall. A furious Mitchell Garabedian, the plaintiff attorney, accused his counterpart Wilson Rodgers of double-crossing the survivors. Cardinal Law, meanwhile, was in a stew, unable to approve a settlement and move on.

  The Boston agreement was in limbo when the bishops arrived in Dallas that June. The Binder spin-control team helped the USCCB planners orchestrate a drama of crisis-and-response. The bishops sat in a meeting room; journalists in a spacious reception hall watched by closed-circuit video as four abuse victims, in shaky voices, told the bishops about their lives. The bishops’ grim faces joined the harrowing prelude to a vote, the parliamentary procedure by which they adopted a youth protection charter. They pledged to remove any priest with a single past transgression, a “zero tolerance” policy that made international headlines and assured a bottleneck of dismissal cases for Ratzinger’s staff in the Sant’Uffizio. The bishops agreed to empanel advisory boards to field complaints against priests. The Vatican had already insisted that bishops and cardinals be excluded from the jurisdiction of the lay review boards. One justice standard for priests, a much softer one for bishops.

  A National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People, composed of twelve prominent laypersons led by outgoing Oklahoma governor Frank Keating (a former prosecutor), would conduct hearings and produce a report. The bishops hired the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to gather the data on the perpetrators, victims, and costs to the church. The bishops were still under a harsh media spotlight, but to their credit, they had responded with apologies, a vote, and a plan.

  Back in Boston, assets were under scrutiny. The Boston Herald found a value of “nearly $160 million in land and buildings that are not being used by the church.” Jack Sullivan and Eric Convey reported that the assets were “a fraction of the archdiocese’s total property holdings, estimated at $14 billion.” The archdiocese, “land rich and cash poor,” had the advantage of a hot market in real estate for residential developments.

  In nearby Brookline, the archdiocese has closed two churches, including St. Aidan’s, where slain President John F. Kennedy was baptized and served as an altar boy. The church and rectory, valued at $2,880,200, has been targeted by the archdiocese to be rehabbed for condominiums including nine high-end units mixed with affordable housing.

  On West Roxbury Parkway in Brookline, the former Infant Jesus church, which was consolidated with St. Lawrence, sits empty as does its well-kept four-bedroom rectory in the upscale neighborhood. The buildings are valued at $1,512,400 … In Newbury, developers have been clamoring to buy a former church assessed at $3.34 million.26

  Mindful of Law’s warning to write no articles, an angry Father Bowers told a Globe reporter of “this feeling of disgust and betrayal … I don’t think any of us understood the role of the church—whether it was denial or incompetence. I think the jury is still out on that.”27 The Globe Spotlight Team had spent weeks reading the clergy files before publishing the first report. As the news rolled out in episodes, public response rose against the church. Bowers accepted the hierarchy’s old-boy network as politics: friends helped their pals. And priests had flaws. But recycling sex criminals like Paul Shanley (whose superiors knew he had endorsed “man-boy” love) staggered Bowers’s imagination.

  Sitting in the pew with his mother-in-law, Peter Borré watched Bowers struggle in response to people’s outrage. Borré’s curiosity was growing, too. How did a “land rich” church manage its assets?

  Bowers knew many priests demoralized by the scandal’s impact on the church they helped make. But his overtures to his neighboring pastor, Father Dan Mahoney at St. Francis de Sales, to steer school-age youngsters to St. Catherine, had failed. Mahoney, a generation older, was focused on his own parish. Bowers had pulled together a cadre of serious volunteers, mostly women. A Townie who had done time for drugs and been clean for seventeen years ran the daily AA meetings. Despite his parishioners’ anger, Bowers had stabilized the finances, though he had paid no assessment to the archdiocese.

  Law was in his own scramble. The archdiocese typically covered operating shortfalls by tapping a line of credit at Fleet Bank, borrowing in summer and fall, repaying in winter or spring. Cash flow rose between Christmas and Easter, when the parishes took in more. “Donations to the annual Cardinal’s Appeal usually a
rrive in two bursts,” the Globe reported. “In late May and early June after the Appeal is launched, and in late November and December when many donors are looking for tax deductions.” With cash flow deeply down, the archdiocese in late September mortgaged the cardinal’s estate with the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic insurance group, for $38 million.

  Much of the initial advance will be used to retire a short-term $9 million debt to Fleet Bank, part of a $17.5 million unsecured line of credit that was shut off by the bank earlier this year. Another portion of the Knights of Columbus loan will be used to complete the new Shaughnessy Family Center, a social service center serving low-income families in South Boston.

  Church officials say the sluggish economy slowed donations in recent years and that the trend has been exacerbated by a downturn in the stock market and the sexual abuse scandal that erupted in January.28

  The Boston Priests’ Forum was in its own crisis. Formed in 2001 by three clergymen concerned about issues of isolation and overwork, the forum had become an ad hoc support group; its membership surged to about 200 out of 1,250 priests in active service, as the scandal intensified. The forum discussions got past commiseration: the priests were incensed about the betrayal they felt. Bowers felt an aching irony. Like a benevolent lord, Law had put him under no pressure for the unpaid church taxes. But the cardinal who had given him the best job of his life had sold all the priests down the river.

  The weight of the scandal bore down on Bowers just as he was discovering the ideal of peace. Peace was measured by the presence of justice—what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “love in calculation.” To follow Christ in service of the poor was giving love its calculation. Bowers, at age forty-two, was learning the pursuit of that love in the marginal parish where pockets of people who had money made spiritual community with the Other. The chance to live it, he would reflect, with people who were hungry, were aliens, did drugs, lived in violence and fear. It was far from the image of church we so often lived, but it called out the best in the people and in me. His own cardinal and several assistant bishops had squandered innocence, the seeds of peace. Twisted lies from men: power and control. Submerged in the muck of covering it up and protecting what was unspeakable. God, how they turned it all so sour and sick!29

  On December 9, 2002, Bowers joined fifty-seven others in the Boston Priests’ Forum by signing a public letter, telling Law he was “so compromised that it is no longer possible for you to exercise the spiritual leadership required for the church in Boston.”30 News coverage of the letter was like a shot across the bow. Four days later, at a private audience with John Paul, Law resigned as archbishop of Boston.

  For the Vatican, the resignation of America’s most powerful archbishop, who nevertheless remained a cardinal, meant that whoever followed Law had to be a superb pastor and a good manager. To fill the breach until the new man was named, Rome installed a fifty-five-year-old auxiliary bishop named Richard Lennon with the title of Apostolic Administrator. Untarnished by the scandal, Lennon was loyal to Law, who had basically made him a bishop. Dick Lennon had a prickly personality and among priests was not exactly beloved. But he worked hard and had a commanding sense of his role in achieving whatever needs to be done. As he monitored the negotiations with the plaintiff attorneys, Lennon was drafting a plan for widespread parish closures.

  Three days before Christmas, in words aimed at the 552 victims and their attorneys, Lennon announced he was surveying church properties to put on the market “as soon as possible, so we can show our commitment” to resolve the lawsuits; liability coverage by insurers Kemper and Travelers would cover a substantial portion, according to the Globe.31

  With all that liability coverage, wondered Peter Borré, why sell property?

  Bowers wondered how the struggling parish he had come to love would fare in Lennon’s plan. He asked for a meeting with Lennon, to no avail.

  RECONFIGURATION DAYS

  The son of a suburban deputy fire chief, Dick Lennon was six foot two; he had grown up a sports-loving kid but with a stutter so severe he rarely spoke in class, fearing humiliation. He entered Boston College, majoring in math. In 1967, after his sophomore year, he entered St. John, the diocesan seminary next door to BC in Brighton. Social protests that jolted campuses in 1968 hit St. John, too. Some seminarians clamored for direct involvement with the ghetto in Roxbury; others wanted the traditional path of enclosed study. Liberals clashed with Cardinal Cushing; half the seminarians soon left. Coming out of those years, Dick Lennon fell in love with canon law. He pursued it the hard way, teaching himself avocation-ally, from his studies in theology and the master’s he would earn in church history. He read voluminously in church law, amassing a library of three hundred books. Dick Lennon lacked the stylized polish of clerics educated in Rome, but having conquered his stutter, he could take whatever life threw in his way. In 1998, after a decade of parish work, the autodidactic canonist was plucked by Cardinal Law to be his canonical adviser. In 1999 Law named him seminary rector. In 2001 he became an auxiliary bishop. Within the priestly society he was known for his cold candor.32

  Determined to salvage his parish, Bowers put out feelers to rent some of the unused space in the large rectory. A law firm said yes. A cell phone company approached him about installing a tower behind the steeple. Bowers was thrilled! Let the private sector subsidize the school! Build an endowment, offer scholarships to worthy children. But then he hit a wall. The chancery told pastors to make no new contractual agreements until Bishop Lennon’s parish Reconfiguration was done. No law firm rental, no cell tower revenue.

  Faced with the hard demographic realities of Charlestown—three parishes with reduced populations, school-age children at parishes up the hill eschewing the neighborhood school—Bowers and the principal reluctantly made spring 2003 the last semester for Charlestown Catholic Elementary School, the one Cardinal Law had told him to save.

  During Law’s seventeen years in Boston, he had reduced the archdiocese from 402 to 357 parishes, without great protest. But Bishop Lennon entered a minefield. The Cardinal’s Appeal had raised only $8 million of the needed $17 million for archdiocesan operating expenses. Through the winter of 2003, as lawyers wrangled over the victims’ settlement, Lennon surveyed the topography of Catholic Boston—a church infrastructure in the city and outlying towns crisscrossed with map lines of money. What could be closed could be sold. The proceeds from sales would allow the church to regain its financial footing.

  In a city with neighborhoods steeped in tribal loyalties, closing a given church cut deep into social cloth. In “Southie,” as South Boston is called, St. Augustine Elementary School was a bedrock for families of cops, firemen, and blue-collar and city workers. St. Augustine’s Cemetery, with a Greek Revival chapel, was the city’s oldest Catholic graveyard. A Southie pol once quipped he would be buried there because “I want to remain politically active.”33

  But as older people who had raised large families died off, many of their children moved away, and Southie, like Charlestown, had a shrinking core of old Irish mixed with poor people in projects and the incursion of upscale couples, some without children, who were renovating buildings, laying on a patina of gentrification. “Sixty-one percent of South Boston residents have lived here less than five years,” reflected Brian Wallace, Southie’s representative in the statehouse. “The majority of them have no children … and the number of students going to Catholic schools is rapidly declining.”34 St. Augustine’s, with 158 students in grades K through 8, relied on a $100,000 subsidy from the archdiocese. The pastor, Monsignor Tom McDonnell, was a Southie institution, and he had good ties with the cardinal. Law had forgiven a $328,000 parish debt on its unpaid assessments in 2000.

  Three years later, in May, as Bishop Lennon remapped the infrastructure, students went home with notes to their parents: St. Augustine Elementary was closing. “This was a decision that came out of the parish,” a priest-spokesman for the archdiocese stated. Because of declining enrollm
ent and rising repair costs, “the parish didn’t believe it could go on any further.”

  Not so, said one of the parents, Anne Spence. The archdiocese “kept vehemently denying that the school was closing. Then, all of a sudden, here’s a letter—the school’s closed, goodbye, don’t bother coming back next year.”35

  In the bitter protests that followed, parishioners screamed at the aging pastor, Monsignor McDonnell, for selling them out. Parish leaders plunged into emergency fund-raising; two city council members and a state senator met with a poker-faced Lennon to pitch a turnaround plan. Brian Wallace went separately to the chancery with a colleague to meet Lennon. Wallace knew the church had a money crisis, but Lennon’s closure on an unsuspecting pastor had hung McDonnell out to dry. In the chancery Wallace took his seat opposite the Apostolic Administrator. Lennon glanced at his watch. “You have five minutes.”

  “Five minutes?” snapped Wallace. “Here’s five seconds!” And with that the state representative walked out.

  Whatever honeymoon Lennon had had with Catholic Boston soured in the media coverage over the St. Augustine closure. Bitterness over Law’s betrayal spilled out in cascades at Lennon.

  When Seán O’Malley settled in as archbishop in the summer of 2003, Bishop Lennon retreated from the spotlight. O’Malley, with his white beard, serene demeanor, and soothing tones, had the persona of a peacemaker. He met with abuse survivors to advance the healing. The archdiocese agreed to the $85 million legal settlement for the 542 abuse survivors; the threat of bankruptcy receded as the archdiocese and Boston College moved toward the sale of the cardinal’s estate. But O’Malley minced few words of his own on the depth of the financial crisis. On February 13, 2004, Lennon wrote to Boston priests explaining that Archbishop O’Malley “has deliberately chosen the canonical procedure of suppression, rather than merger.” A suppressed church would close, its assets going to the archdiocese. The assets of a church that merged with another parish would follow parishioners to the new church. Lennon’s letter asserting that the archbishop had “deliberately chosen … suppression” suggested that O’Malley was a joint designer of the Reconfiguration blueprint. The archbishop set a March 8 deadline for leaders from eighty regional clusters to recommend which churches in their groupings should close.