Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  And the Clergy Benefit Trust in contrast to that is for—

  Well, the Christmas and Easter collection monies flow into the Clergy Benefit Trust. They flow out of that trust either to the Clergy Medical Hospitalization or to the Clergy Retirement Disability Trust, and occasionally for special needs of priests for medical that wouldn’t normally be covered under the plan, the Clergy Benefit Trust would cover that.

  The Medical Hospitalization Trust is essentially a checkbook. It’s the device that literally pays the bills.

  Another part of the organizational structure, the Clergy Fund Advisory Committee, had its own priest-secretary. Gordon bore down on Smith.

  Is there a dollar limit when the committee must be consulted before any expense is made?

  I’m not aware of any dollar limit …

  Has the Clergy Benefit Trust been used to pay loans to priests to retain counsel when they’ve been involved in legal matters?

  Not to my knowledge.

  Which trust would produce loans to priests to retain counsel when they’re involved in legal matters?

  As far as I know, there’s only one trust that has ever made any loans to any priests, and there isn’t a specific trust for legal matters. The Clergy Assistance Trust makes loans to priests who need them, and they are Boston priests only … It could be somebody’s mother died and needed to be buried. It could be, you know, any kind of family-related, personal issue. There isn’t any restriction that I know of that describes what kind of assistance they can get.7

  Smith was describing a shell game: the money starts out beneath one shell, the Clergy Benefit Trust, after the two big dollops of contributions from the pews at Christmas and at Easter. From the Benefit Trust, a line of money slides over to the shell called Medical/Hospitalization Trust, which “is essentially a checkbook” used to pay for, among other bills, the psychiatric facilities where the child molesters were sent, at least the portion of charges not covered by ordinary health insurance. A separate Medical/Hospitalization Trust suggests a need beyond standard coverage. When legal expenses arose, the Clergy Benefit Trust shifted the funds to another shell, the Clergy Assistance Trust, for “any kind of … personal issue,” Smith testified. “There isn’t any restriction.”

  Unaware of Smith’s deposition, Peter Borré pounced on the chancellor’s line from the Pilot article: “Every dollar … used exclusively for the needs of priests.”

  How exclusive, he wondered, did those needs get? And at what cost?

  The case of Paul Shanley was vexing. Father Shanley moved to California in 1988, in good standing courtesy of his seminary friend Father John McCormack, who was destined to become a bishop for his chancery work. Shanley had a seventeen-hundred-page personnel file with sexual allegations to boggle the mind. After a stint at a mental hospital, he left the archdiocese early on a $1,000-a-month pension to become a weekend priest for the San Bernardino diocese. Shanley also bought a half interest in a Palm Springs hotel known for gay sex parties. He lived there part-time; his co-owner was another exiled Boston cleric, a recovering cocaine addict. Arrested in 2002 and extradicted to Massachusetts, Shanley was tried and imprisoned for crimes from years gone by.

  “It is horrifying to see up close the psychic damage allegedly inflicted by Paul Shanley,” Maureen Orth wrote in a Vanity Fair article before the trial.

  I have spoken to nine accusers, whose ages at the time they claim they were abused ranged from 6 to 21. A number have become alcoholics, some have developed suicidal tendencies and post-traumatic stress, and one has undergone electroshock treatments … What is truly alarming is how closely their stories resemble one another, according to their ages when they were abused. Shanley allegedly lured the youngest children with games such as strip poker, the younger teens with the pretext of examinations of their penises during puberty, the older youths with an invitation to use his body to get over their fears of homosexuality. He apparently was a master of manipulation and cunning.8

  Cardinal Law, Bishop McCormack, and the church bureaucracy concealed Shanley’s sexual career, one cover-up begetting another, until they sent him as a “supply” priest, a part-timer, to San Bernardino. In 1989 Shanley’s friend McCormack flew out to discuss things. No way did they want him back in Boston. “Thank you for your kindness during your brief visit to the wild west,” Shanley said in a letter that nearly grinned. McCormack acceded to his request for a boost to $1,890 a month. The archdiocese eventually put $2,500 down on Shanley’s legal fees before the endgame trial.

  In 1990 Father Richard Lennon was advancing up the chain of command as Vicar for Administration when he certified Shanley as a “priest in good standing” for San Bernardino. Cardinal Law placed Lennon and McCormack as facilitators for the in-house response by which administrative clergy, called “delegates,” monitored priests who got in trouble.

  MEMORANDUM

  TO: Father Lennon

  FROM: Father McCormack

  DATE: February 14, 1994

  RE: Reverend Paul Shanley

  Recently, Paul Shanley changed his address from San Diego to Palm Springs. Would you please inform the appropriate offices of this change of address:

  Reverend Paul Shanley

  970 Parocela Place

  Palm Springs, California 92264

  The knowledge of this address is for internal use only. It is not to be made public.9

  The thousands of pages from Boston church files that became available through the grind of legal discovery were scanned and organized for ready retrieval on the Internet by Anne Barrett Doyle and Terence McKiernan as they gathered documents from many dioceses at BishopAccountability.org in the town of Waltham. Barrett Doyle and McKiernan were stocking the raw materials for journalists, historians, and anyone else on the inner workings of the hierarchy. When Lennon began as Apostolic Administrator, the acting bishop of Boston after Law, he told reporters in a press conference the week before Christmas 2002 that he had “no involvement” in the case of a recently accused priest, although, as the Boston Herald soon reported, he had attended a long meeting about the cleric.10 The Globe unearthed Lennon’s role in handling a pathological priest named John Picardi, in which he showed exquisite concern for ecclesiastical life as a law unto itself:

  [Father John] McCormack recommended that Picardi be allowed to serve temporarily in the Paterson, N.J. diocese after treatment at a counseling center. McCormack told the Paterson diocese only that Picardi “admits to a sexual incident with an adult male in Florida.”

  In New Jersey, Picardi faced another accusation in 1995, in which he was alleged to have inappropriately touched a fifth-grade girl. It was then Lennon became involved, urging that Boston, and not Paterson, take up the charge against him.

  In the September 1995 memo, Lennon appeared to express concern that allowing the Paterson diocese to investigate might cause a scandal. “Opening such an investigation runs the real risk of negative fall-out both for Father Picardi and for the Church,” Lennon wrote.

  On October 6, 1995, Law received a memo from another aide, the Rev. Brian Flatley, noting that Picardi had admitted to the 1992 rape. “However, we allowed him to return to ministry in Paterson after that incident … Because of this, according to Father Lennon, canon law does not allow us to use this incident to keep Father Picardi out of ministry now.”11

  The review board Law impaneled to scrutinize men like Picardi advised against a job in ministry and suggested the priest ask the Vatican to be laicized. Picardi balked. And why not? No policeman or prosecutor had gone after him. Law and Lennon sought a compromise by which Picardi went to the Phoenix diocese. But as news of his past overtook him, Picardi was suspended from the priesthood in 2003.

  Lennon under Law shouldered two functions that gave him an exceptional lens on money and the church’s response to clergy sex offenders. As Anne Barrett Doyle and Terry McKiernan later wrote on BishopAccountability.org:

  • In the mid-1990s, he was the facilitator for the [so-called] Clergy
Fund. In this role, he worked closely with Cardinal Law’s abuse delegates and paid out reimbursements for psychiatric treatment of accused priests, travel expenses for priests going to treatment centers for assessments and in-patient care, and travel costs for the abuse delegates, when they traveled to St. Luke Institute and Southdown to participate in assessments.

  • During the 1990s Lennon received Status/Address changes for every diocesan priest, so that he could maintain the “clergy cards” that contain priests’ assignment histories. He also maintained cards listing the assignments of order priests who worked in the archdiocese. As a result, Lennon knew every instance of promotion and demotion, what priests were unassigned and on administrative leave, and what priests had been “lend-leased” to other dioceses. This information, combined with the abuse payment information that he also handled, provided Lennon with unique and extensive administrative perspective on the abuse crisis in Boston.12

  In spring of 2005, as Peter Borré became a person in the news, Lennon’s background was far from fully surfaced. Borré got a call from Father David Burke. Well into his eighties, sixty-three years a priest, and the pastor of the high-end St. Pius X parish in Milton, Burke was piping hot upon learning that his parish was slated for suppression. Father David Burke lived in a fourteen-room rectory. Borré took his seat in the wood-paneled study at a conference table sufficient in size for twenty-four people. Seated across from him, Father David Burke said, “I’d like to go downtown and punch O’Malley in the nose.”

  “Ah, Father, you don’t really mean that.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. You’re not Irish.”

  But it was Lennon, Borré pointed out, who had designed Reconfiguration. “Seán is the archbishop,” snorted Burke. “He can’t hide behind Dick.”

  Burke went to the chancery and threatened to lead his parishioners in a vigil. They lobbied with petitions, bumper stickers, and letters, the sum of which had some impact. St. Pius X was taken off the Suppression list before its vigil coiled into action. Two years later Burke suffered a stroke. He was in a coma when Borré visited the hospital, and he never regained consciousness.

  When they first met, Burke had given Borré a copy of Lennon’s letter to the priests on the status of clergy finances. The five-page letter, written in December 2003, is addressed “Dear Clergy Fund Member.”13 Three pages of figures and a copy of what Lennon called the Clergy Fund report were attached. (The individual priest was a beneficiary of the various trusts. Lennon used a generic term: Clergy Fund Member.) Intrigued by the date, Borré created a spreadsheet, realizing that Lennon, who reported to O’Malley, knew where dubious numbers were buried.

  In the letter, Lennon explains how the various funds that benefit Boston’s clergy function. He makes clear that the Clergy Benefit Trust “pays for those clergy who are in special circumstances … or who are in between assignments and so do not have a stable source of income” (my emphasis)—an oblique reference to the predators put out of commission, some few of whom, like Geoghan and Shanley, ended up behind bars. Borré read the letter hungrily, realizing that in those last days of 2003 Lennon was immersed in researching property values for the parishes to be suppressed come spring.

  Lennon’s letter deals at length with new procedures for co-payments and matters on health insurance. A passing reference to the $600,000 decline in donations amid the scandal chalks it up to “quite simply two bad years.”

  The letter avoids any discussion of how the parishioners’ donations to the annual fund for the clergy retirement needs were actually spent. Instead, Lennon cites an earlier letter by Father Mark O’Connell, facilitator of “Clergy Fund”—a generic, umbrella term. O’Connell had soberly reported

  the same issues that have plagued every financial entity of the Archdiocese; namely, the effects of the poor economy, the huge increases in health care cost (most especially prescription costs), and the financial effects of the Clergy sex abuse scandal. I can assure you that these funds are a high priority with Bishop Lennon, but all of us need to be prepared to face this difficult issue in the near future.

  “Not all is bad news,” resumed Bishop Lennon, with property and liquidity high in mind. “In fact, I believe I can give you good news concerning some of our past investments in Real Estate.”

  Clergy Funds purchased [an unnamed] home in Pocasset, Massachusetts for $1,750,000.00 in June of 1999. Also in May of 2001, the Clergy Funds purchased Our Lady’s Hall in Milton, Massachusetts for $1,900,000.00. Finally, the Clergy Funds made a loan of $4,150,000.00 as part of the re-development of the St. John of God Hospital in 2001. It was thought at the time that this project would house Senior Priests, however, upon further reflection the Advisory Committee have [sic] decided to go in a different direction.

  In David Smith’s deposition he stated that his power as chancellor, or chief financial officer, had a limit of $1 million on which he could sign a check involving property. Any disbursal above that—and final approval on big-ticket issues—resided with Cardinal Law. As Lennon composed his 2003 letter, Law had been gone a year, not yet promoted to Rome. Six months earlier Lennon had stepped down as Law’s interim successor. The time frame is important, for the aforecited paragraph implies that Lennon had a major hand in real estate transactions. In his letter, Lennon then turns to the seven-month period in which he had interim control, after Law’s resignation, in December 2002:

  As Apostolic Administrator, I authorized the sale of two properties that had been bought, and I concurred with the Advisory Board to end our involvement in the St. John of God project. As a result of these actions, the Clergy Funds have recovered all of its original investments and have made a profit as well. The home in Pocasset sold for over $2,550,000.00 and after expenses the Clergy Funds realized $2,433,073.00 for a profit of $683,073.00. Our Lady’s Hall was sold for $3,300,000.00 and after expenses realized $3,135,000.00, for a profit of $1,235,000.00 Finally, we received all of the $4,150,000.00 back from the St. John of God investment, plus interest totaling $521,054.30. All of this money, totaling $10,239,127.30, has been returned to the original Trusts they came from. (emphasis added)

  With his powers before the advent of O’Malley, Lennon pulled in a profit just under $2.44 million in real estate transactions for the interlocked “Clergy Funds,” which suggests another name for the controlling account, Clergy Benefit Trust. Not a bad profit. But the “good news concerning some of our past investments in Real Estate” obscured the bad news: the missing millions given by parishioners on those designated Sundays from 1986 until 2002. Substantial though they are, the real estate profits in Lennon’s seven-month tenure come to roughly six months’ donations by parishioners for the priests’ retirement, which averaged $4.5 million per year. Where had all the parishioners’ money gone?

  “By 2001, the Boston archdiocese knew of allegations against at least 190 priests,” states Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org. “Only about 25 of those cases had appeared in news reports before the Globe series in 2002.” By March 2002 the personnel documents that the newspaper and plaintiff lawyers made public listed some 80 clergy sex offenders, most of whom had evaded prosecution by going to treatment facilities before reassignment or departure from active ministry, with pension. That still left 110 priests, each one of whom was an expensive mess.

  Against the temptation to see Law as a high prince obsessed with secrecy, we must weigh the burden imposed on him and countless bishops by John Paul II on what to do with clergy sex offenders. Having spurned the U.S. hierarchy’s 1989 request for canonical power to dismiss those men, John Paul stuck the bishops with them. The laicization cases—which priests could and often did oppose—moved at a glacial pace through one or another of Rome’s congregations, until 2001, when Ratzinger consolidated the authority over them. Not only were the bishops handcuffed in defrocking the abusers, they also had to subsidize their living, medical, and legal expenses.

  The missing millions from the Clergy Benefit Trust in 2005 was a b
itter pill to the nearly eight hundred priests across the archdiocese who had served the church and pondered how they would retire in the coming years. Law had landed a basilica pastorship in Rome that paid $12,000 a month while the clergy troops endured the aftershocks of the abuse scandal, only to see good parishes close. Had Bernie Law sold out their retirements, too?

  A BISHOP’S WARNING

  For Bruce Teague, who was a chaplain at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston when the news broke, the memories rolled back of his surreal epiphany about church finances.

  In the summer of 1994, Father Teague had a parish in Springfield, Massachusetts, when he paid a valedictory call on his bishop. John Marshall was sixty-six and dying of bone cancer. Teague wanted to express his gratitude for the older man’s stance on a threshold issue. The monolithic Catholicism of Teague’s youth had splintered over the Vatican’s stance on birth control, homosexuality, and priests who abused youngsters. Teague found an ironic touchstone in Flannery O’Connor’s stories of backwoods Southerners bewildered by faith, spiritual outcasts holding a mirror to his own troubled church.

  When Teague was nine years old in Dorchester, a working-class parish of Boston, a priest molested him. It was 1956; his father was off in the navy, his grandfather had just died, his mother was pregnant, and the close attention from that priest at first made him feel special. For years he stuffed the sensations of guilt and anger; when the first wave of clergy abuse lawsuits hit in the early 1990s, Teague befriended abuse survivors. One day he went to the grave of the priest who had abused him, and said prayers of forgiveness.14 In those painful words to God he felt a cleansing. Bruce Teague enjoyed being a priest.

  As the bishop of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1970s, Marshall put a child molester back in ministry. When he abused again, Marshall yanked him; he persuaded the prosecutor not to take action; he approved the church lawyers’ grueling tactics to wear down the survivors who sued the diocese.15 The cases eventually settled with out-of-court payments. In the late 1980s Marshall went through a turn of mind. He lost trust in therapeutic facilities to treat clergy predators. He petitioned the Vatican to defrock one priest.16 In 1992 Marshall became bishop of Springfield. He confronted another scandal, another priest. This time he eschewed a litigation-by-ordeal strategy, which many bishops deemed a necessary evil to protect church assets. Marshall pushed for timely settlements; he met with survivors. “We have to do this out of justice and charity,” he had told Teague at the time.