Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  In this truly very painful case, maximum discretion was given to the Excellent Archbishop of Boston [sic] so that he might save the archdiocese from monetary ruin provoked … by the sexual abuse crisis. It is in this context that all actions of this process of reconfiguration and “closing of parishes” are to be understood, not excluding the suppression of wealthy parishes, not excluding the suppression of parishes of maximum vitality.

  Viability must be not at the parish level but at the level of the whole archdiocese, not excluding the giving of goods of extinct parishes to the archdiocese.38

  “Maximum discretion” here translates as carte blanche to close and to sell. When O’Malley, the new archbishop, returned to Boston in 2003, Bishop Lennon had the authority to “alienate property.”

  Nothing of its scope had ever been done in an American diocese.

  That realization left a marked impression on Cardinal Sodano.

  SUPPRESSION

  Under canon law, when a parish merges with another, the funds of the closed church follow its members to the new one. But a parish that is “suppressed” by the bishop loses its building, land, bank deposits, all assets to the bishop-as-banker. Lennon wanted parishes with good land value, and surplus funds, for a strategic outcome: plug the deficit. Lennon was using suppression as foreclosure, a kind of Peter’s Pence enforced. The dead people whose gifts had built the parishes posed no opposition unless the living learned to penetrate thickets of canon law.

  Among the suppressed parishes, Infant Jesus in affluent Brookline had $4 million in the bank. An hour’s drive east of Boston in Scituate, the suppressed St. Frances Cabrini sat on thirty lush acres near the Atlantic, a real estate developer’s dream. Our Lady Help of Christians in the town of Concord had $800,000 in the bank, and the year before had opened a $1.3 million parish center.39 Lennon’s letter to the faithful said that O’Malley had ordered the suppressions, but on that issue the two bishops were joined at the hip.

  By Peter Borré’s reckoning, of the eighty-three parishes on Lennon’s list, twenty-four were financially solid with active parishioners. Borré, a hardened realist on assets that failed to deliver, was not alone in being offended at Lennon’s sloppiness: soak the rich, screw the poor, trample hard-toiling folk in the middle to raise funds for a debt-riddden chancery. Mayor Thomas M. Menino was upset. “This is the first I’ve heard of where the money is going,” he told the Globe. “Families have been going to these churches for years.” Massachusetts secretary of state William F. Galvin bristled at “a deceit to the people in the pews if the money is going to unknown purposes of the central fund,” which, indeed, it was.40 Borré concluded that two dozen parishes needed to close. Many parishes in the middle had issues that seemed soluble with enlightened leadership.

  From canon lawyers, Borré learned that an appeal had to be filed in the Vatican soon after a bishop’s rejection of the parish’s request that it be allowed to survive. With help from a kitchen cabinet, he began working on a document.

  For Father Bob Bowers, reality hit when the archdiocese sent a team to take inventory of St. Catherine of Siena parish property. They opened cabinets, took photographs, and made lists of furniture, other tangibles, icons, benches, and sacred items of the church. Meanwhile, a summons came from the chancery: Archbishop O’Malley wanted to meet with Father Bowers.

  In a series of trips to the chancery office in Brighton, across Commonwealth Avenue from Bowers’s alma mater, Boston College, he took comfort from his driver, Peter Borré, who offered moral support as the priest’s stomach churned like a fuel pump. Borré had no desire to sit in the foyer where the chancery priest had told him to go fuck himself, and so he waited outside.

  Father Bowers sat across a long table from the taciturn archbishop.

  “We have a problem,” said O’Malley.

  “We do, Archbishop. You need to come see the people in the parish.”

  No, came the reply. O’Malley had advisers guiding him through this difficult process, he explained. And he had to follow their advice.

  Silence fell between prelate and priest, a lengthening emotional distance: silence begetting silence. He wants me to obey, realized Bowers. He is a Franciscan. Obedience to superiors is their norm, an expectation of the communal life. We diocesan clergy can be more unruly. I am resisting something that is unjust, trying to persuade him to see what I see.

  The two men stared at each other. Bob Bowers, with his strain of flamboyance and supercharged enthusiasm, sat quiet now, as unmovable as his archbishop. The meeting ended as the next one began, some days later, layered in tension and thick with silence. O’Malley wanted Bowers to resign, take a new assignment, let Reconfiguration move forward. But O’Malley could not evict a pastor unless he committed a grave violation of church law. Fighting to keep his parish open, making an issue of it in the media, Bowers was attacking the plan—Richard Lennon’s work product. Still, that put him in O’Malley’s face.

  Bowers realized that Seán O’Malley was depressed.

  Other priests saw it, too. The leaden expressions and slow speech sparked speculation that O’Malley was taking antidepressant medication. O’Malley lived in a spartan room in the Holy Cross Cathedral rectory. His kindness and politeness were offset by reserve, a holding back of emotions. He had come to Boston as a healer and Reconfiguration had blown up in his face. He cannot understand why one of his priests will not agree with him, reflected Bowers. When he gave O’Malley the Charlestown consolidation report that his parishioner Val Mulcahy had sent to Lennon, the archbishop rebuffed the gesture.

  He said: “I want you to do what I’m telling you”—resign, take a new assignment. But that meant a death warrant for the parish where Bowers had planted heart and soul. Lennon’s plan ignored the research group’s advice on a long phaseout, fusing three parishes into one. The meeting ended in a stalemate.

  Bowers turned to Father William Leahy, the Jesuit president of Boston College, who assured him that he had sent the report to Archbishop O’Malley.

  PARISHES AS REAL ESTATE

  Priests in the fourscore parishes on the closure list confronted a maze of issues. Some pastors in neighborhoods with few parishioners and unmanageable debt accepted reality. The clustering process put stress on other clerics whose followers wanted to keep their parishes intact.

  Among the priests at parishes targeted for suppression, Father Stephen Josoma in Dedham had followed Bowers’s travails and decided on a different approach. Born in 1955 into a close-knit family, his father a technician at MIT, Steve passed boyhood summers mowing lawns with his Irish-born grandfather. The old man had done time in Galway Prison as a Sinn Féin rebel before shipping out to America in 1920. Josoma saw him as a landscape artisan. Each night the old man knelt in prayer, “not an in-your-face piety, just a peaceful guy with trust in the Lord,” Josoma recalled. “That stayed with me.” Of the twenty men with whom he began seminary, only Josoma became a priest.

  In 1997, at a church in Dorchester, he succeeded a popular priest “who had lived in a condo half the time while the parish ran up millions in deferred maintenance,” he recalled. Josoma and an associate priest “turned the finances around. The accountant warned us we had to cover the school deficit out of parish funds—$70,000. We achieved that. Next, we put in a cafeteria, a science lab, a library. We had an army of kids selling wrapping paper door-to-door. People saw that, they gave more on Sunday. We got the teachers raises. You can do a lot when the people are behind you.”

  Josoma put his popularity on the line when he clashed with real estate agents he accused of redlining sales to keep blacks out of Dorchester. The experience was so searing he took a one-year leave from ministry and lived with his folks. In 2001 Cardinal Law asked him to become pastor at St. Susanna in Dedham, a cohesive flock, largely white, that was absorbing Filipino families. Dedham sits on an island in the Charles River with a population of twenty-four thousand.

  “This parish was created by Cardinal Cushing in 1961 for his frie
nd Father Michael Durant,” Josoma said, smiling in the fading light of a winter afternoon. “In those days, churches were like fiefdoms. The other parish, St. Mary of the Assumption, is 125 years old and three times our size. They called it ‘the cathedral in the wilderness.’ Twenty-five hundred families stayed at St. Mary when this one opened. St. Susanna had 300 families and a rectory with three priests, a housekeeper, and a cook. Today, it’s me and Felix [the dog] for 850 families. At least half of our families come from outside of the town, mostly from neighboring Needham. We’re a bit staid, perhaps, but more family-friendly.”

  A wave of foreclosures hit Dedham in 2008. The parish food pantry fed rising numbers in an area where the idea of hunger belied the image of leafy New England lanes. Josoma’s popularity in drawing parishioners from a nearby town tracked a national phenomenon of Catholics seeking a spiritual allegiance beyond the neighborhood.

  Lennon’s plan called for St. Susanna members to join St. Mary while the archdiocese took St. Susanna’s money. How would that go down with people who had already bypassed the “cathedral in the wilderness”? Just off Highway 128, Josoma’s parish sat on eight sylvan acres adjoining an animal rescue preserve, buffered by wetlands of the Charles River. The road past the church curled into a wooded cluster of homes. Like the Scituate parish on thirty prime acres near the sea, St. Susanna’s acreage held proverbial rubies in its loam. The parish sent $10,000 a month in assessments to the archdiocese.

  “The bishops’ pedophilia cover-ups appalled me,” explained Josoma. “After Law left, Bishop Lennon as Apostolic Administrator met with the priests and said we were $10 million in debt for lay employees’ pensions because pastors had not sent funds to the chancery. I was thinking, Ten million dollars? How could the chancery have let this happen? Within a year, the first time Archbishop O’Malley spoke, [the debt] was $25 million. What is going on here?”

  St. Susanna, with neither debt nor a school, was growing. St. Mary, the much larger parish, had a $1.6 million debt for renovation costs, which it had been paying down with help from the $25,000-a-month rental of its school building to a private academy. When the 2004 clustering order came down, the two parishes sent a joint statement outlining their services and finances. The larger church had 1,930 people attending five Sunday Masses; St. Susanna had 640 people at three Masses. But the smaller church, debt free, was on a surge of growth, with 20 percent more members than in the last year.41

  Josoma and the other pastor, the Reverend John A. Dooher, prepared the March 8, 2004, joint statement on clustering. They recommended that neither parish close, even though as Josoma explained, “That was not an option given us.” He clashed with Dooher until the day the report was due because “it omitted mention of St. Mary’s million-plus debt. Dooher told me, ‘The diocese knows what we owe.’ I told him the Reconfiguration committee didn’t know that.”

  But Dooher was being considered for the hierarchy. Josoma made a political calculation not to spotlight what he knew of Dooher’s track record with financial management lest it seem an attempt to thwart him from becoming a bishop and backfire on Josoma’s efforts to save his parish. Dooher’s church had a $101,129 annual deficit. The school had lost its tenant. The lower level of the church had cut off heating to save money—and developed mold. In 2007 the new pastor reported that the $1.2 million debt to the archdiocese would be more than halved with a $675,000 sale of land to the town of Dedham.42 By then, the pastor who left the debt behind had become Auxiliary Bishop Dooher.

  “Politics of the club,” said Josoma drily. “And why are we in a mess?”

  Amid the clustering debate, one of St. Susanna’s deacons, a Harvard-educated attorney, told Josoma the suppression order was “a cash-grab.”

  Josoma secured an appointment for himself and ten parish leaders with Archbishop O’Malley and Bishop Lennon.

  They had done background research on the Santa Fe, New Mexico, archdiocese, which raised about $8 million to pay its share of a $25 million abuse settlement in the early 1990s. Archbishop Michael Sheehan asked parish leaders to help. Through heightened donations and parish property sales, the group provided close to $2 million, while avoiding widespread closures.43 Sheehan’s predecessors had allowed predators in treatment at the Servants of the Paraclete facility in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, to do weekend parish work, where they found fresh victims. The Paracletes’ standards were so shoddy that litigation drove them out of the treatment business in New Mexico. Archbishop Robert Sanchez resigned in 1993 when his sexual relationships with young women and teenage girls made news. His replacement, Sheehan, had come with his own baggage from the Dallas diocese, where as seminary rector he ignored warning flags on one Rudy Kos, whose ex-wife had warned church officials of his psychosexual problems. Kos, as a seminarian, had guardianship of a teenage boy who stayed some nights at the seminary, where Kos abused him. Sheehan testified that he had not met the boy. “I just considered that a personal matter, that Rudy was an adult and could take care of it.”44 Kos was ordained. Eight youths in well-to-do parishes and Kos’s ward later sued him and the diocese for abuse. The 1997 jury verdict of $119 million was a stunning rebuke of Bishop Charles Grahmann, whom jurors singled out by name for his oversight failures. As often happens in large verdicts, the plaintiff attorneys agreed to a lower settlement—$31 million—to avoid a lengthy appeal.45 Perhaps the Dallas debacle made Sheehan wiser. In Santa Fe, he worked with pastors and lay leaders in choosing property to sell and fund-raising to pay for settlements.

  In the Boston chancery, Josoma and ten parishioners cited Santa Fe as an enlightened response to financial crisis. O’Malley and Lennon listened. St. Susanna’s group argued the benefits of transparency. Josoma said the jump from $10 million to $40 million in archdiocesan debt was hard to fathom. Where had the money gone? O’Malley was quiet. Lennon cited greater deferred maintenance of church properties, a sharp downturn in donations, rising pension costs. The group gave the bishops a packet of information with charts and graphs to bolster their stance that a vibrant parish need not be closed.

  Josoma asked O’Malley if he would come celebrate Mass at the parish.

  “I don’t want a media circus. I thought this meeting would suffice,” the archbishop demurred.

  “These are two different realities,” replied Josoma.

  And then, as agreed upon with his parish council, Father Josoma offered Archbishop O’Malley four acres of the church land—prime real estate—at a value which they calculated at nearly $2 million.

  “It’s not about the money, Steve!” yelled Bishop Lennon, slamming his hand on the table. The group of parishioners stared.

  “Nice to know it’s not personal,” replied Josoma.

  For it was exactly about the money, as everyone in the room knew. But in the fog of diplomacy, no one wanted to embarrass Lennon. O’Malley, having said little, closed the meeting on a promise to consider their views.

  Josoma believed in the church teaching that a diocese existed to serve the parishes. Now it seemed the archdiocese was trying to suck money from its churches. When an archdiocesan inventory team arrived to catalog objects in his church and rectory, Josoma saw his volunteers go numb; he said to the men with clipboards and cameras, “If you want to loot us you’ll have to come later. You must leave now.”

  DEPTH CHARGES FROM THE HINTERLANDS

  On July 6, 2004, the Portland, Oregon, archdiocese, facing new lawsuits after a $53 million settlement for a hundred abuse claims, filed for Chapter 11 protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. “Parish assets belong to the parish,” stated Archbishop John Vlazny. “I have no authority to seize parish property.”46 Several weeks later, the Tucson, Arizona, diocese filed for Chapter 11 protection, but did not echo Vlazny’s position. The Spokane, Washington, diocese followed suit that December, after spending $400,000 on public relations.47 In that case, Nicholas P. Cafardi, a canon lawyer and the dean of the Duquesne University Law School, gave an affidavit that sent a booming echo to suppressed parish
es in Boston. “Neither the bishop nor the diocese is the owner of parish property under the Canon Law,” stated Cafardi. “The bishop can only dispose of parish property with the consent of the pastor.”48

  By opening the “estate” of dioceses to these courts, defense attorneys hoped to remove parish property from the base of assets. Yet in Portland and Boston, as in Chicago and many smaller sees, such as New Orleans, the bishop was a corporation sole, a juridic person who owned all parish and church properties (excluding schools and universities). Portland defense lawyers argued that Vlazny held “bare legal title,” meaning canon law restricted his selling rights, and religious freedom in the U.S. Constitution barred tampering with a bishop’s authority. In Spokane plaintiff attorneys argued that as a corporation sole, the bishop held all the assets that were fair target for victims’ compensation.

  An editorial in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent weekly, scoffed at the bishops’ legal gambits:

  The arguments made by the diocese of Spokane and Portland bring to mind Marx’s (Groucho’s not Karl’s) famous question: Are you going to believe me or your own eyes? The niceties of canon law aside, power in the U.S. church, ownership, if you will, clearly resides with individual bishops in their dioceses. That power is wielded benignly by some, less so by many, but it is disingenuous to say that it doesn’t exist. Bishops answer to Rome, and, presumably, to God, but not to their pastors and certainly not to the people in the pews.