Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  When he sat down with Castrillón, the Franciscan prelate with a vow of poverty needed a huge pump of money. He also faced “the alienation of church property,” the canonical term by which the Third Office in the Congregation for the Clergy processed bishops’ appeals to liquidate assets.

  The American bishops at their June 2002 conference in Dallas voted to request approval from Clergy to raise the threshold for permission to sell property from $5 million to $10.3 million. For property or assets below that level, a bishop could sell as he saw fit. (For dioceses with 500,000 people or fewer, the threshold rose to $5 million.) The Vatican approved the measure, and also agreed to adjust the threshold to inflation, such that in 2009 for large dioceses, it was $11.4 million.10

  According to a former Congregation for the Clergy staffer who spoke on background, the procedure for selling expensive property calls for the bishop to evaulate the assets with his Finance Council, then ask Clergy for the authority to sell, explaining the use for the proceeds. O’Malley knew he had to win trust of the Finance Council that had rejected Law’s request for the victims’ settlement.

  Cardinal Castrillón and his staff faced three issues. For them, the first question was whether selling assets would harm the Boston archdiocese’s ability to function. A question arises: how does the Vatican know what might disrupt any archdiocese if it sells property? Barring a flood of information from people, reports or documents from a diocese, Clergy staffers rely on what the bishop tells them. In O’Malley’s case, the Boston crisis had generated press attention even in Italy. Lennon was deep into research on available property.

  The second concern in the Congregation for the Clergy was that the bishop have a valid plan for use of the funds from the property sale. In Boston, the plan seemed clear: to compensate victims. The last issue was in this case the toughest: if the Boston archdiocese needed substantially more than $10.3 million, was it just and prudent for the Vatican to grant approval?

  Priests who work at rarefied levels of the Roman Curia know that they are acting for the Holy Father. They take seriously the idea of apostolic succession—that the bishops they meet are spiritual descendants of Jesus’s apostles. In the milieu of a religious monarchy, the priests in those offices use ornamental courtesies in calling a bishop “Excellency,” a cardinal “Your Eminence,” even employing elegant terms in the third person, as I learned in July 2009 on seeking an interview in Rome with the former St. Louis archbishop Raymond Burke, the prefect of the Apostolic Signatura. “This is not possible,” explained a cleric in cool, soft cadences at the other end of the phone. “His Grace is away.” Ah. Did they call him “Your Grace” back in Missouri?

  For all of the fawning attention Curial staffers give bishops, the Third Office priests in the Congregation for the Clergy understood “the alienation of church property.” Their duties included safeguarding the rights of the dead.

  Generations of Catholics who had donated money, land, art, buildings, or made provisions in their estates to benefit a parish or diocese, slept now in sacred soil. Many were buried in cemeteries behind their family churches. Canon law honored their intentions as souls. Clergy’s Third Office had to ensure that their property and gifts would not be wrongfully liquidated.

  O’Malley refused interview requests for this book. So did Bishop Lennon. So did Cardinal Castrillón, who left Clergy in 2006 for another Vatican office (and has since retired). Monsignor James McDaid of Clergy, who was an assistant to Castrillón and his successor, Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, rebuffed my requests in Rome for interviews with himself and Hummes.* Nevertheless, two other men knowledgeable of Clergy provided insight on O’Malley’s meeting in 2003. This information is also buttressed by a Vatican canon law proceeding. The Congregation for the Clergy occupies an upper floor on Piazza Pius XII just off St. Peter’s Square. In Cardinal Darío del Niño Jesús Castrillón Hoyos, O’Malley found a welcoming ally, a man wrapped in the elite assumptions of apostolic succession.

  CARDINALS AND POLITICS

  Born in 1929 in Medellín, before the provincial city became synonymous with drug cartels, Castrillón was a young priest with a great talent for languages. He earned a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, another in religious sociology at the University of Louvain, in Belgium, and at age thirty-six became a bishop back in Colombia. A champion of the homeless in the diocese of Pereira, he walked the streets to feed abandoned children. The boom in cocaine commerce gave Castrillón a Machiavellian slant on power. The media showed him blessing a restaurant owned by a drug mobster. “In fact, his relationship with the traffickers was complex,” writes Elena Curti of The Tablet. Castrillón materialized in a milkman’s outfit at the home of Pablo Escobar, the most wanted man in Colombia, “and persuaded him to confess his sins.” At a 1984 meeting of Latin American bishops, she writes, Castrillón

  said he had accepted cash from Escobar’s drug cartel for charitable purposes. He justified his action by saying that by taking the money he stopped it being used in illegal activities such as prostitution, and said he had warned the donors that giving money “would not save their souls.” But, later, as Archbishop of Bucara-manga (1992–1996), he made several public statements against corruption in Colombia, unafraid to embarrass local and national officials and politicians.11

  Accepting dirty money for higher good meshed with Castrillón’s idea of the Catholic hierarchy abiding by its own supreme law. In 2001, when a French prelate received a three-month sentence for having sheltered a pedophile, Castrillón posted on Clergy’s website a letter in which he praised Bishop Pierre Pican of Bayeux-Lisieux: “I rejoice to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and all the other bishops of the world, preferred prison rather than denouncing one of his sons, a priest.”12

  When he met with O’Malley in 2003, Cardinal Castrillón greeted a younger bishop who faced a taxing crisis of so many victims, foretelling huge losses. His natural instinct in the fraternal culture was to help. The Holy See would not provide financial help to the archdiocese—that was unthinkable. The Vatican in 2003 was running a deficit of $11.8 million on a $250 million operating budget. Peter’s Pence donations of $55.8 million helped defray the loss.13 So did whatever funds the Vatican Bank delivered in its secret subsidy to the pope. For O’Malley, the situation was vastly more severe than that in Fall River a decade earlier, when the Knights of Malta had deep pockets. Law’s arrogance left a fund-raising nightmare. The size of the settlement figures being bargained, well north of $50 million, explains why two Italian cardinals joined O’Malley and Castrillón later: Angelo Sodano, the secretary of state, and Giovanni Battista Re, the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops.

  Cardinal Re, a renowned workaholic with a toothy grin and booming voice, had done eleven years as sostituto in the Secretariat of State. In that job overseeing daily operations, Re had enjoyed access to John Paul without need of appointments. Now, in his post overseeing the world’s bishops, Re no longer had the turnstile to John Paul. He worked through the Curia’s channels.14

  Sodano, at age seventy-five, was the more imposing presence. With square-set shoulders, sagging jowls, and thick glasses, Sodano as secretary of state functioned as the Holy See’s prime minister and, internally, as a de facto chief of staff. In the nine congregations, or dicasteries, that are roughly akin to cabinet departments, each prefect had autonomy; the foreign minister fell under Sodano. In the dozen years he had overseen the Curia, Sodano was a bullish alter ego to John Paul on foreign policy, which the pope had guided via his own close hand until his final illness.

  Born in 1927 in Isola d’Asti, Piedmont, Sodano was one of six children. His father had been a Christian Democrat elected to Parliament in the 1948 elections, serving until 1963. After attending the local seminary, Sodano earned doctorates in canon law and theology from Pontifical universities in Rome. At age thirty-two he joined the Vatican diplomatic corps. In 1978, after several Latin American postings, he was named papal nun
cio in Chile amid one of South America’s worst dictatorships.

  Chile had a history of economic stability and democratic governance when President Richard Nixon, in 1970, reacting to the election of Dr. Salvador Allende, a Marxist, told CIA director Richard Helms, Make the economy scream, in order to upend Allende.15 The CIA had entreated Christian Democrat leaders in Western Europe to pull out the stops in helping the Chilean counterparts defeat Allende. A CIA report says that a leading Italian Christian Democrat (his name redacted) “saw no point in risking his reputation in a lost cause.”16 Allende won in a plurality. Nixon authorized $10 million for the CIA to disrupt the economy.17 Three years later, a CIA-supported coup by General Augusto Pinochet drove Allende to shoot himself as troops stormed the presidential palace. Pinochet authorized kidnapping, torture, and murder of Allende supporters to solidify power. Military men took over universities and censored the press. Several prominent Chileans critical of the regime who were living abroad were murdered. Pinochet sold off public services in a free-market strategy inspired by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The regime moved 28,000 poor people from scattered areas into slums that ballooned to 1.3 million people.18

  In 1978, when Archbishop Sodano arrived as nuncio, the labor unions were surviving with the help of Cardinal Raúl Silva Henriquez.19 Center-right bishops were relieved Allende was gone; Silva and a few others pressed for human rights.20 Chile’s agony put in high relief Latin America’s chasm between traditional bishops, focused on personal piety, and the more activist bishops influenced by liberation theology’s idea of structural sin. The 1968 continental bishops’ conference in Medellín endorsed “a preferential option for the poor.” Castrillón was hostile to liberation theology; Sodano was in the same camp. John Paul II and Ratzinger, reacting to Communism as a monolithic evil, equated Soviet bloc dictatorships with the liberationists’ Marxist analysis of plantation-based poverty. But as journalist John Allen has learnedly written, older European currents shaped the Latin American theology, too.21 Scripture discussions permeated the Christian base communities, small groups of priests, nuns, and lay folk active in South America’s slums. Ratzinger investigated Father Leonardo Boff of Brazil in his tribunal and in 1985 imposed a yearlong “silence.” Six years later he banned Boff as a theologian. “Ecclesiastical power is cruel and merciless,” Boff bristled after quitting the priesthood.22

  “It is in the poverty and exploitation of the Third World,” writes Paul Collins in The Modern Inquisition, a study of the CDF under Ratzinger,

  where Boff finds the Church to be most truly itself. For him … it is only through reflection on living experience, on the “stuff” of history, that the Church can discover God’s will for itself.

  For Ratzinger, the Church transcends history. It is not the Jesus of history who provides the CDF’s prefect primary theological focus. It is the risen and ascended Christ who stands in splendour outside the world-process, both as saviour and judge, who is the fundamental focus of Ratzinger.23

  By 1980 more than eight hundred priests and nuns had been murdered by Latin American death squads. As Ratzinger punished more theologians like Boff, Sodano befriended the Pinochet family; he appeared at a televised rally where Chile’s dictator denounced the church in his speech. In vetting bishops, Sodano promoted men supportive of the regime.24 In 1986 a group called the Vicariate of Solidarity asked the Chilean bishops’ conference to have Sodano recalled to Rome: “For a long time now, numerous communities have been demanding this. Hundreds of priests and nuns have also asked for this. The people know of his ‘reports’ to Rome and of his excessive attachment to the military regime … We do not see in him diplomacy, but rather complicity.”25 Sodano stayed on the job. The quality of John Paul’s intelligence on Chile from Sodano will be one of history’s black holes until the Vatican releases the information he sent.

  When John Paul embarked on his historic 1987 trip to Chile, Pinochet faced rising international pressure. A Vatican priest, Roberto Tucci, coordinated the trip. En route, John Paul told journalists, “To the Gospel message belongs all the problems of human rights, and if democracy means human rights then it also belongs to the message of the Church.”26 The pope added, “We will find a system that is dictatorial, but one that is transitory by definition.”27

  As the motorcade entered Santiago, huge crowds chanted, “Our brother, Pope, take the tyrant with you!” People held signs naming loved ones who had disappeared. John Paul met with opposition leaders and members of all parties in a gathering that Sodano organized.28 Sodano also helped Pinochet maneuver the pope onto the presidential balcony for a photo op that sent a chilling message to people traumatized by the dictator. But a countermessage rose when crowds flooded into a Mass in the same stadium where fifteen years earlier troops had rounded up and slaughtered Allende supporters. The pope heard “speaker after speaker who complained of censorship, torture, and political murder,” wrote Jonathan Kwitny. “Crowds burned barricades, threw rocks, and taunted police.” John Paul praised Chilean priests seeking justice, denounced the brutality, and called “suffering for the sake of love, truth and justice … a sign of fidelity to God.” His voice rang out as the police used roaring water cannons to drive people back: “Love is stronger … love is stronger.”29

  Chile was close to restoring democracy, in 1988, when Pinochet gave Sodano a medal as the nuncio returned to Rome. His ease with Latin strongmen helped the United States in the invasion of Panama. President Manuel Noriega, estranged from the CIA for his ties to drug cartels, took sanctuary in the Vatican embassy. Sodano persuaded him to surrender. U.S. authorities flew Noriega to Florida, where he was tried, convicted, and put in a federal penitentiary.30

  In 1991 Sodano became secretary of state. Of all the cardinals in the Curia, why did John Paul choose one so close to a dictator with bloody hands, a surreal contrast to the papal stance of peaceful nonviolence? The pope bypassed Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, an adroit diplomat on arms control, human rights, and a protégé of Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the outgoing secretary of state. Casaroli had spent decades negotiating with Eastern bloc officials to ease the persecution of Catholics behind the iron curtain.31 For his part, Sodano called diplomacy “an instrument of dialogue, aimed at defending and promoting the rights of Catholics and favoring international relations.”32

  Behind those vanilla words lay a strange reality, according to Giovanni Avena, a priest-turned-editor of Adista, a liberal Catholic news service. “Casaroli had great diplomatic skills; he presented the church in a sober, businesslike way,” Avena told me in Rome. “Casaroli thought Sodano was dumb. They sent Sodano to Latin America and he muscled his way, making friends with the worst right-wingers. John Paul clashed with Casaroli over how to deal with Communism. The pope wanted more hard-line resistance. Silvestrini was an heir to Casaroli. Sodano is a foot soldier, not a thinker. He was put there [as secretary of state] as manager of the Curia. He is perfectly gray.”33

  By “gray,” Avena meant a calculated neutrality capable of turning colors on a given issue. John Paul, famously bored by Curial politics, had in Sodano a firewall from the inner wrangles and a militant anti-leftist for conservative governments and donors. John Paul was famously bored by finances, too. The Vatican Bank scandal erupted in 1982, when Italy’s largest bank, Banco Ambrosiano, collapsed under $1.2 billion in bad debts brought on by a Cosa Nostra money-laundering scheme that utilized the IOR under Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. John Paul allowed Marcinkus to use diplomatic immunity as a latter-day prisoner of the Vatican. It fell to Secretary of State Casaroli to admit an “abuse of trust” to Italian state investigators; he negotiated a $242 million payment in 1984 to resolve the IOR fine.34

  In 1990 John Paul summoned Cardinal Edmund Szoka of Detroit to manage the city-state. “When the budget’s finished in November we go over it for about an hour,” Szoka told the biographer Kwitny. “He can’t look at all these details. I keep him aware of what’s going on and how we’re doing.”35

/>   A pragmatist, Szoka called more than one hundred presidents of the national bishops’ conferences to a first-ever meeting on April 8, 1991. As they sat in red velvet chairs, Cardinal Szoka explained that two decades of Vatican deficits had hit a record $87 million. Without assigning quotas, he asked them to help. In one of those cameos of democracy that lend irony as icing to church politics, the bishops took a vote, and of course agreed to send more. An extra $8 million arrived in 1992. In 1993 the Holy See actually ended with a surplus; Peter’s Pence also hit $67 million that year.

  Vatican Bank “funds are primarily used by John Paul to bolster the Church in poor countries,” papal biographer George Weigel wrote. “It is not unusual for the IOR to get a call from the papal apartment in the morning, saying that the Pope needs a certain number of envelopes containing $20,000 or $50,000 by noon—gifts to bishops from Africa, Latin America and Asia.”36 The bank that did not exist on the Holy See annual report produced cash on demand for the pope.

  After Cardinal Sodano became secretary of state, he assumed the lead role in an IOR oversight commission of five cardinals; he also managed the Curia’s heavily Italian bureaucracy. “There has been created a certain mystery about the Roman Curia,” Sodano observed in 1992, “but those who are inside it see it as a brotherhood.”37

  When the brotherhood embraced Archbishop O’Malley in the summer of 2003, John Paul was in a deepening decline from Parkinson’s disease. Cardinal Castrillón presumably wanted Sodano’s approval for a major transfer of wealth. The Vatican cardinals gave O’Malley the nod to exceed the $10.3 million threshold in the “alienation of church property.” This decision was borne out in a Vatican document that emerged many months later, after Peter Borré spearheaded canon law appeals by nine Boston parishes seeking to halt their closures. The Congregation for the Clergy rejected those requests. The parishes appealed to the Signatura. In that proceeding, one Martha Wegan, a veteran practitioner in Vatican tribunals, filed a brief as the advocate for the Archdiocese of Boston. She wrote: