Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  It is a bankrupt church in more ways than one.49

  THE VIGIL MOVEMENT BEGINS

  A public Mass on August 15, 2004, at the greenery of Boston Commons, organized by Voice of the Faithful, drew a thousand people under a chilly, rain-darkened sky. Josoma and Bowers were among the five priests who celebrated the liturgy. “The Archdiocese of Boston has confused the mission of the church with the money of the church,” declared Bowers in his homily, pulling applause. “What we don’t have are bishops who have the courage to say why?”50 Bowers’s barb gave voice to the frustrations of people holding signs that said “Keep St. Albert’s Open”—referring to a Weymouth parish with 1,600 families that was debt free and had nearly $200,000 more in income than expenses.51

  Like the churches in Charlestown and Dedham, St. Albert the Great had in its pastor, the Reverend Ron Coyne, one of the fifty-eight signatories to the letter that called for Cardinal Law’s resignation. Like Bowers and Josoma, Ron Coyne had revitalized a parish that had been losing membership. The three priests oddly mirrored the role that the Vatican imposed on Archbishop O’Malley as turnaround specialists, albeit of parishes rather than a diocese. Coyne had the smallest building among five parishes in Weymouth; it also had no school. As outrage crackled among parishioners opposed to Reconfiguration, ten people in Weymouth announced on closure day, August 29, that they would not leave. They came with pillows and blankets and slept in the pews. “I feel very sad about it,” Coyne told the Associated Press. “It’s very unjust. [The archdiocese] saw new life coming into this parish and yet didn’t even take that into consideration.”52

  Within two days two hundred people had joined a list to maintain the vigil in rotating shifts. The parish filed a canonical appeal to the archdiocese.

  “We’re not going to drag people out of church,” the chancery spokesman said in the quickening media coverage. “The archbishop says let’s just be patient and work this out as Christians.” But Christians from the pews of St. Albert the Great raised $100,000 for legal fees and sued the archdiocese, claiming they owned the parish. “We now understand that we are the church and we are followers of Christ and not the archdiocese of Boston,” read a parish council statement, all but declaring a religious secession, or schism.53

  Archbishop O’Malley let the rebels stay in Weymouth’s priestless church.

  At St. Catherine of Siena, Peter Borré watched people groping for a strategy. They wanted to meet with the archbishop. Borré wondered how to expose the financial duplicity and use that information to force the archdiocese into reversing course. Bowers held more meetings with O’Malley, to no avail. As much as he liked Bob Bowers, Borré, with his corporate background, was a gritty realist on the dynamics of large organizations; he was skeptical that the idealistic pastor whom his mother-in-law adored had a real strategy. Bowers was a go-to figure for reporters, speaking truth to power in the media narrative. Borré saw the coverage affording leverage for dealing with O’Malley (or Lennon, as the power behind the throne) but only if a strategy pushed beyond the headlines.

  As autumn settled over Boston, Borré drove out to St. Thomas the Apostle parish in the town of Peabody where he had been tipped off that Lennon would make a rare appearance. People in pews, incredulous at the suppression order for their prosperous parish, were silent as the bishop rose to speak. With thinning black hair, a lean face, and a paunch traversed by the prelate’s gold chain, Lennon gave a cold recitation on the crisis. The deepening shortage of priests meant too few pastors to go around. Twenty-five percent of the parishes were not paying their assessments. But he’s closing some of the wealthiest parishes that paid proportionally more, Borré brooded. The archdiocese was having to cover extra costs of priests’ medical insurance, Lennon continued.

  A parishioner asked if they had a canonical right to appeal. Lennon stared, letting his silence seep in for effect. Finally, he said, “Don’t waste your time.”

  He does not want a canonical fight, Borré reported to himself.

  St. Thomas was spared after a wealthy supporter of the parish made a large donation. Meanwhile, parishioners at seven other churches refused to leave when the doors closed. Cynthia Deysher, the forty-seven-year-old president of an investment consulting firm, was sitting in a pew of St. Anselm in Sudbury, wondering where this vigil would go, when a man sat down by her, introduced himself as Peter Borré, and asked if she would be cochair of a parishes council. Borré wanted to harness the vigils’ passive resistance into an energy the archdiocese could not avoid. Deysher, who had worked as a chief financial officer for three companies she helped steer to public stock offerings, was as unlikely as Borré to join a breakaway group. For years she had recorded the collections on software and made the weekly deposits.54 Joining St. Anselm’s 24/7 vigil rotation, Deysher thought Reconfiguration was a sham. “Catholics can be generous when properly inspired,” she told me later. St. Anselm, sitting on land worth a couple of million, had no debt and $600,000 in the bank. St. Bernard in Newton was worth $12 million, she reckoned.

  Deysher had a more short-range goal than Borré: to keep her parish open. Married, with daughters in high school and college, she wanted the archdiocese to recover. Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) had allied itself with abuse survivors, many of whom didn’t care if churches closed, while its leaders tried to engage bishops in dialogue. Borré wanted a more radical strategy of building pressure against the archdiocese with vigil protests, pushing in the civil courts over parish ownership, and taking their case to Vatican tribunals.

  As the pressure bore down on St. Susanna, a lady parishioner died with no provisions for burial. The family decided on a cremation. A few steps outside Steve Josoma’s rectory lay a garden; the family was delighted when he offered to inter the ashes in parish earth. With that burial, Father Josoma consecrated sacred soil. Now, St. Susanna parish had a cemetery. Soon after, parishioners gathered for two more funerals. Evicting people from a parish with a cemetery would cause more headaches for O’Malley, creating new issues under canon law. Josoma kept the information as a hidden ace should the closure order come.

  He wanted the living to have the same canonical rights as the dead.

  The St. Susanna parishioners’ presentation to O’Malley led to the granting of a three-year reprieve. The archbishop could rescind the order at any time. But a reprieve, supplanting the suppression order, eased Josoma’s stress.

  O’Malley signaled a bigger shift on October 3, 2004, by announcing a committee of eight prominent Catholics to review the closures and report back to him. The cochairs were Sister Janet Eisner, president of Emmanuel College, and Peter Meade, the board chairman of Catholic Charities and executive vice president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts. With a “review” of Reconfiguration, O’Malley was cutting bait on Lennon. “I would be surprised if the archbishop didn’t reconsider some [of the closures],” Meade told the Globe.55

  Peter Borré and Cynthia Deysher formed the Council of Parishes on October 14, 2004, with seven churches in vigil, asking “the process of closing parishes to be suspended; for closing decrees to be revoked; and to cooperate with Archbishop O’Malley in addressing archdiocesan concerns.” Doris Giardiello, who had spent sixty of her seventy-five years at St. Therese church, slept on the altar in her beige winter coat.56 Harking back to sit-in protests of the Southern civil rights era, Boston’s vigil members, with their pillows, sleeping bags, and cell phones, put their sacred spaces in conflict with the archbishop.

  AGONY OF AN ARCHBISHOP

  “I have a plan,” Archbishop O’Malley had told Bowers on the phone.

  As before, Borré drove his pastor to the chancery and waited outside, unwilling to sit in the foyer. Now, on a luminous autumn day, Mary Beth Borré’s beloved Red Sox were battling into the World Series and her candidate, Senator Kerry, was in a close race with President Bush. If the hard-luck Red Sox could do it, anything was possible. Borré was pleased when O’Malley appointed David Castaldi, a former chancellor of the
archdiocese (and Harvard Business School classmate of Peter’s), to chair a Reconfiguration oversight committee. Lennon now faced two groups authorized by O’Malley.

  Father Bowers sat opposite Archbishop O’Malley, who explained that he had decided to close all three churches in Charlestown and consolidate them into a single parish. “A fresh start,” said the prelate; however, it would require all three pastors to resign. Bowers did not want to resign, but he was wiped out emotionally and physically; he took heart that the archbishop had embraced his advisory group’s recommendation of a planned phaseout. “Did you get the other two pastors to resign?” Bowers wanted to know.

  They had indeed agreed, O’Malley assured him.

  The long process of trying to save the parish had left Bowers feeling like a piece of wood into which a screw has been driven so deeply as to make it split. His group had advocated a long transition guided by three pastors; this was the opposite. If I don’t resign, my parish closes, he brooded. If I do resign, all three pastors leave and one church will stay open. At least it creates a level field.

  O’Malley promised that the parish would not close for at least a year, that whatever melding of congregations into a chosen church would be handled by the new pastor. Exhausted and dispirited, Bowers took it as the best deal he could get. The archbishop wanted him to leave within a week. Bowers needed more time, both to pack and to prepare his flock for a hard transition. O’Malley agreed.

  Bowers approached the car, deep in thought. “How’d it go?” asked Borré.

  “I think it went pretty well. Seán hugged me at the end of the meeting.”

  Resisting the urge to bellow What the hell happened? Borré started the car, gently prodding for details. He felt a sinking disappointment at what he heard. Borré wanted St. Catherine of Siena to join the vigil protest. Bowers said the parishioners would have to decide for themselves. Borré’s disgruntlement rose on realizing that the force of fifty-eight priests who had signed a letter denouncing Law for concealing abusers would not carry into the realm of parishioners losing parishes. Law, after all, was gone. Bowers got the deeper message when he returned to sign the papers affirming the agreement. He asked O’Malley where he would go next as pastor. “You will not be a pastor for a very long time,” the prelate said gravely. “Many priests are angry with you.” It’s he who is angry with me, thought Bowers. He asked for a sabbatical and received it on the spot.

  Lennon refused to answer questions for David Castaldi’s group and stood aloof from the Meade-Eisner inquiry. With people bedding down in pews of eight parishes, O’Malley’s reform status was at risk.

  Then a hole broke in the dike. O’Malley released a letter on November 13, 2004, which carried an amazing tone of misery. “Closing parishes is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in forty years of religious life,” he wrote.

  I joined the monastery knowing that I would have to do difficult things for the rest of my life, but I never imagined I would have to be involved in anything so painful or so personally repulsive to me as this. At times I ask God to call me home and let someone else finish this job, but I keep waking up in the morning to face another day of reconfiguration.57

  A prelate calling reconfiguration “so personally repulsive” as to wish God to end his life made Peter Borré sit up. What an indictment of Lennon’s plan! A priest told Borré that Lennon learned of the letter when he read it in the Globe. If true, that signaled an even deeper breach between archbishop and bishop.

  O’Malley’s letter did not mention Lennon as it reiterated details of the crisis: an operating budget chopped $14 million in three years; a deficit of $10 million; a troubled stock market causing “an unfunded pension liability of $80 million”—lay employee and clergy retirement, both endangered.

  Many communities who meet their expenses do so by selling land and buildings and spending down savings. (In the last nine years parishes have sold 150 pieces of property mostly to pay bills.) Some people think that reconfiguration will mean a great surplus of money for the Archdiocese. Unfortunately, this is not true. I have asked the Finance Council to work on a strategic plan for the Archdiocese which I shall share with you. I am committed to financial transparency and to using our human and financial resources for the mission of the Church.

  Borré told the Washington Post he was “astounded by the depth of emotion.” Borré conceded that demographic changes meant some parishes had to go. “The question is what is happening to the archdiocese’s finances, and the answer is we don’t know.”58

  In search of a seasoned canonist in Rome, Borré obtained Annuario Pontificio, a thick book that lists dioceses alphabetically and Vatican offices with names, postal addresses, and phone numbers. It helped to know Italian. Unbeknownst to Borré, as he assembled names of practitioners in the Vatican tribunals, Cardinal Sodano and his nephew had a plan for shuttered American churches.

  *In October 2010 Hummes was succeeded by Mauro Piacenza, who soon became a cardinal.

  CHAPTER 5

  ITALIAN INTERVENTIONS

  By the fall of 2003, with John Paul II fatigued and bloated from his treatments for Parkinson’s disease, Cardinal Sodano exerted greater power than ever in overseeing the Roman Curia. “The scandals in the United States received disproportionate attention from the media,” Sodano announced. “There are thieves in every country but it is hard to say that everyone is a thief.”1

  Earlier in the year, as America prepared for war with Iraq, papal representatives sent warnings about an invasion. Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration’s national security adviser, stated that she didn’t understand the Vatican position. As the standoff mounted between President George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, Sodano told Italian journalists, “The Holy See is against the war; it’s a moral position. It’s certainly not a defensive war.” He added a dose of pragmatism: “We’re trying to provoke reflection not so much on whether it’s just or unjust, moral or immoral, but whether it’s worth it. From the outside we can appear idealists, and we are, but we are also realists. Is it really a good idea to irritate a billion Muslims? Not even in Afghanistan are things going well. For this reason we have to insist on asking the question if it’s a good idea to go to war.”2

  Hours after the first missiles smashed down on Baghdad, John Paul denounced the war as “a defeat for reason and the gospel.”3

  Rice visited the Vatican on February 8, 2005, in her new position as secretary of state and met with her counterpart, Cardinal Sodano. The Boston church closings and the bankruptcy cases of five other dioceses had become a greater issue for the Curia since Archbishop O’Malley’s 2003 meetings at the Vatican. After discussing Iraq and the Middle East, Sodano surprised Rice with a bald request: that the Bush administration intervene against a class action lawsuit that Louisville attorney William F. McMurry had filed against the Holy See in federal court in Kentucky, seeking damages for all victims of clergy sex abuse. Rice told him the Constitution prevented such a move by any administration.

  Several attempts to sue the Vatican on other issues had failed under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. “Sodano’s decision to raise the matter with Rice suggests concern in Rome that sooner or later its immunity may give way, exposing the Vatican to potentially crippling verdicts,” wrote John L. Allen Jr. for National Catholic Reporter.4

  Sodano’s ham-fisted design on diplomacy was all of a piece with his response to the abuse crisis. Realizing that dioceses were unloading assets, in many cases to pay their share of litigation, Sodano persuaded the silver-haired Cardinal Castrillón to appoint Monsignor Giovanni Carrù as undersecretary of the Congregation for the Clergy. Carrù, who began work on November 1, 2003, had specialized in catechism in the Turin diocese, in Sodano’s native Piedmont, in northern Italy. A man of warm and genial ways, Carrù was physical, putting hands on people’s cheeks, giving the affectionate hug, an effusive Italian friendliness, explains a priest well versed in Clergy’s inner workings.

  Cardinal Castrillón was
not pleased, this cleric explains. Castrillón felt Carrù was inflicted on him. Carrù, this source surmises, would have been happy as a bishop in his small diocese, but in his affable, simple way Carrù did what he was told. He liked to be important. The cleric describes Carrù in meetings, impatiently waiting for them to end, saying, And now we are done?—when often, no, they weren’t done, and discussions stretched on: after all, it was the Vatican. Monsignor Carrù as undersecretary led the closing prayer before they scattered for lunch.

  As third in command, Carrù was a traffic manager for Clergy’s mail, faxes, and documents from the world’s dioceses, bishops, and priests who had business with the congregation. Clergy’s internal offices dealt with priestly discipline, catechetics, and patrimony, meaning property. Carrù took a special interest in the Third Office’s alienation of church property. His patron, Cardinal Sodano, took special interest in his nephew, Andrea Sodano, whose company Carrù helped with leads on church property as it came on the market.

  In the long history of American Catholics bailing out the Vatican, it was perhaps inevitable that some shrewd Italian would see profit escalators in shuttered New World churches. To that end, Andrea Sodano, a structural engineer from his uncle Angelo’s hometown, Asti, had a front man who could have come out of central casting.

  Enter Raffaello Follieri, with cheeks like a cherub, a tousle of brown hair, and deep, dark eyes. In November 2005, the twenty-seven-year-old Follieri was leasing a two-story $37,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan’s Olympic Tower; his foundation touted vaccinations for poor children in Latin America. Raffaello thrilled to the halo of celebrity circling his airplanes-to-everywhere romance with the movie star Anne Hathaway. Since her breakout role in The Princess Diaries, dark-haired Annie (as Raffaello called her) had made Follieri famous. The paparazzi and tabloids seized on their episodes in society. They were part of a New Year’s Eve soiree at a Dominican Republic resort with Bill and Hillary Clinton among the guests.