Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  At the bishop’s mansion a nun ushered Teague into the parlor.

  Pallid and gaunt, Marshall sat in a commodious chair, propped up with cushions, an IV tube planted in one arm. Teague took a seat. Light came to the bishop’s eyes. After small talk, the priest thanked him for his sensitivity toward the survivors. Marshall nodded. There was a bigger problem, he rasped. Teague listened. Stirring in the pillows, the bishop leaned forward and growled, “Wait until the Internal Revenue Service gets ahold of us!”

  Teague had never heard a bishop speak so baldly about church finances.

  Money was a source of gossip and folklore among clergy, most of it not good. Priests in religious orders, like Jesuits and Dominicans, take vows of poverty. Diocesan clergy take no such vows, but with modest salaries, a car, housing, health insurance, and presumed pensions, they lived with comforts. Teague knew clerics who traveled well, with money presumably from family or generous friends. Priests were expected to be prudent in handling a parish’s money. Pastors with large parishes had laypeople to handle bookkeeping, paying bills, and other jobs. But with all the cash washing through collection plates, money required vigilance. Teague knew a pastor who had been responsible for two parishes; he borrowed from the first to pay bills at the second, creating a mess at both ends. In Springfield, Bishop Marshall faced other thorny problems. An accountant pilfered from a parish’s fund for staff Social Security taxes. Another pastor renovated his rectory with funds reserved for cemetery maintenance. Marshall intervened in both situations; he saw that the taxes were paid.

  Financial deceptions to race the blood of a dying bishop have come out in the open. Reform groups like Voice of the Faithful clamor for financial transparency; many bishops treat VOTF as enemies, alienating the kind of diligent Catholics that a diocese needs.

  Bishop Marshall’s admonition about money took on heightened meaning after the next bishop sent Father Teague to St. Brigid in Amherst. “The parish was bleeding money,” Teague told me. “A lot of renovation had been done to the interior of the church. Our income was about three thousand a week. I had been a college chaplain and knew nothing about running budgets. This was in 1996. We suddenly had a termite problem that needed attention—you’d be surprised, Amherst has a large termite population. Then the boilers started to go out, and right before Christmas a new boiler broke. My predecessor had raised a lot of money and left $100,000 in a surplus fund. But we had an old accounting system: there was no debt listed on the books. The window washer came to me at Christmas, he hadn’t been paid. A guy doing repairs on the organ was owed $1,000. All of a sudden a lot of bills were coming due … I thought my treasurer was handling everything. When I went through St. John Seminary in Boston, we never had an accounting course.”

  Catholic cemeteries sell a service called perpetual care, which guarantees the tending of a plot beyond the life of a family. Teague said that in his parish, which had a cemetery, “We couldn’t say for sure where everyone was buried. The caretaker dropped dead at fifty and left no records of who was where. So a former schoolteacher came in and did dogged research with funeral directors.”

  He paused. “You know, at one time being a pastor was like a sinecure. Older priests talk of the pastor taking the Christmas and Easter collections and dividing it five ways with the assistant priests. My home parish was built and paid off during the Depression. Cardinal Cushing wanted to take excess money from the parish to build new ones in the suburbs. My grandfather and a few others went to Cushing and said, Over our dead bodies. It’s so different today, with not enough priests to staff the parishes. Fund-raising is hard.”

  As the bills mounted against the chaotic record keeping he had inherited, Teague installed a software accounting system. “Only then did we realize what trouble we were in.” The parish owed the diocese $100,000 in assessments to the chancery office, which is not quite like dodging the IRS. For Teague, the unpaid assessments masked a larger problem. St. Brigid was not a poor parish. “But it reached the point where we couldn’t meet payroll. I had to let go of some people. I made a lot of enemies.”

  “But you walked into a quagmire,” I countered. Teague nodded. “My predecessor’s sin was a politician’s sin: taking care of his friends. He was a good guy to the poor, the sick, the elderly. He also spent $2,000 a month on food. He had lavish dinner parties in the rectory for priest friends.” Slowly, Teague stabilized the finances and linked the weekly donations to the parish operating expenses, using excess funds to pay down debt and keep anything extra on reserve. Resolving the bill to the diocese over long-deferred assessments was a problem Teague did not solve in his tenure.

  He was glad to take a chaplain’s job back in Boston for other reasons. In Springfield, the new bishop, Thomas Dupré, returned to ministry several priest-abusers Marshall had yanked. New scandals erupted.17 Then, in 2004, Bishop Dupré abruptly resigned and fled to Suitland, Maryland, where he checked himself into St. Luke Institute, a clergy psychiatric hospital that specializes in treating pedophiles. Two men accused the bishop of abusing them years before; their cases against the diocese eventually settled. After a long investigation the Springfield prosecutor decided against indicting Dupré: the statute of limitations had lapsed. Dupré lived at the clergy hospital in Maryland for five and a half years, until 2010, still a priest, still a bishop without a portfolio.

  Bishop Marshall’s deathbed warnings seemed prophetic as Teague reflected on the church’s struggles over breakfast in a café near Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center where he had worked for several years post-Springfield. The IRS had not gone after the church, but the financial problems had reached a crisis stage for the Boston archdiocese, which had deepening deficits and rising pension costs that were not covered.

  “It’s not just the abuse settlements,” Teague said, sighing. “The mismanagement shouts out. They can’t guarantee us a decent life after we retire.” Teague, who was sixty-two in 2008, gazed out at the chilly windswept morning with a stoic’s resolve. “Dupré gutted the system that had a social worker in charge of the lay review board. He put two pedophiles in positions of authority. One working with annulment cases, the other in charge of the diocesan archives. An eighty-year-old priest came to live with me. He moved into the rectory, which guaranteed five meals a week and laundry cleaning. This guy left the previous rectory because he couldn’t get heat in the room, and the five meals were TV dinners. The reality is, if you’re betraying people on one level, you’re betraying them on another. In Boston the retirement program has gone belly-up.”

  Where did the money go?

  Teague shrugged. “Law divided the clergy pension fund for payouts on the abuse costs before the scandal broke in 2002.”

  Teague’s conjecture matched what many other people believed, though the release of new financial documents put more riddles over an easy answer.

  THE NEWS FROM ROME

  “The Globe made repeated efforts in Rome to get an explanation of the appeals process from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy,” Michael Paulson reported in early May 2005.

  An undersecretary at the office at first denied that the agency was involved with the parish closings; after the Globe pointed out that the agency’s secretary had signed letters to many of the closed parishes, the undersecretary referred calls to the secretary, who then referred calls to the prefect, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos. The cardinal did not respond to repeated requests for an interview made both by phone and in writing.18

  But in August, the Congregation for the Clergy ruled that the Boston archdiocese had erred in its canonical claim to the assets of eight parishes it had suppressed. Borré was delighted. “Within this archdiocese,” he told the Globe, in a jab at Lennon, the self-taught canonist, “they are improvising in the area of canon law, and they are doing as poor a job under canon law as they have done under Reconfiguration.” But under the Vatican’s royalist system of justice, even as Clergy ruled against Boston’s suppression, Cardinal Castrillón’s staff was he
lping O’Malley confect a way for pastors to voluntarily turn over parish funds to the archdiocese, putting everyone in compliance with canon law to ensure that the chancery got what it needed. O’Malley told Paulson of the Globe, “We’re glad that the Holy See seems to be supporting our situation and needs and is trying to suggest to us ways that we can achieve those needs.”19

  “Supporting our situation” was a genteel way to describe a tribunal system that swung behind a bishop to help him overcome its own decision against his property seizure. As those negotiations cleared a path of sorts for the plan to proceed, its author Bishop Lennon was feeling pressure from David Castaldi, chair of the Parish Reconfiguration Fund Oversight Committee. In choosing Castaldi for that task, Seán O’Malley had turned to a reformer with loyalist trappings. Castaldi was a member of Voice of the Faithful, the lay group many bishops loathed, but he had a long background with the church.

  Raised in small-town Indiana and a graduate of Notre Dame and Harvard Business School, Castaldi had founded, directed, and sold two biotechnology companies. He was “comfortably secure” when a priest in late 2000 suggested he interview for the job of chancellor of the archdiocese. Slender and bespectacled, Castaldi, then in his early sixties, had never met a bishop. Law impressed him; he took the job at a salary well below what he could have commanded: a way of giving back. He lasted eleven months. “Dave, this just wasn’t a good fit,” Law said in parting.

  A decade later, sitting in the airy lounge of a Beacon Street hotel, Castaldi spoke in measured tones. “It wasn’t a good fit, I suppose. I tried to be diplomatic but I offended people. For the cardinal’s residence, I insisted that petty cash follow good procedures; the nuns were used to no procedures. I wanted documentation and receipts as a basis for replenishing petty cash. They didn’t like that at all.” Castaldi evinced a wry smile and took a sip of Diet Coke. “We needed more space in the chancery. Good operating practices suggested that we use that scarce resource more wisely. You had to make decisions, but you’re in a clerical culture. I wanted a priest to have a smaller office. He insisted he needed a larger office. His space changed: he was offended.”

  Although Castaldi offered no defense of Law’s behavior in the abuse crisis, he spoke admiringly of Law’s response, after a zealot murdered someone at an abortion clinic, getting pro-life and pro-choice advocates to sit down and defuse tensions. “Law showed leadership,” resumed Castaldi, in his careful cadences. “And I wanted to instill better financial procedures. Compared to industry, procedures were not at an appropriate level. Maybe I didn’t have the right touch.” I asked, “What kind of procedures bothered you?” Castaldi raised his eyebrows, then said, “No one can approve their own expense reports. That doesn’t happen in private industry. I felt it had to change. The church had been run by priests, not laypeople with accounting degrees and business education. I didn’t fit into the clerical culture. More than the procedures I wanted to implement, I was abrasive to the culture in some respects.”

  He paused. “It has changed considerably under Cardinal O’Malley. O’Malley has an endearing personality, but he’s not charming, like Law was. The last thing Law would have done was sell the cardinal’s estate. Cardinal O’Malley gets criticized by VOTF, SNAP [Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests], and BishopAccountability, but he does things other bishops have been unable to do. They’re posting financial statements on the archdiocesan website. I think it relates to his ability to part with things.”

  David Castaldi’s parish had deferred maintenance issues, including asbestos, which prompted his support for the decision to close the parish. But the process of meetings to reach that end had been poorly handled. Although he liked Lennon from their past dealings, when he approached him for information on the Reconfiguration oversight work, Lennon resisted. “He interpreted the charter I negotiated with him very narrowly,” explained Castaldi. “Lennon stopped trusting us … All hell was breaking loose with the vigils. He told me, ‘There is no good way to close someone’s church. Do it quickly, get it over with, and things will go back to normal.’ ”

  Castaldi’s committee found a $12 million shift from Reconfiguration money to the Central Fund; they objected to the use of the proceeds from church sales to fund operating costs.20 Outgoing chancellor David Smith’s comment on the 2005 financial statement had been somber:

  The Central Administration of the Archdiocese is not sustainable in its current form. While we do have liquidity, we have little left to sell, and we are faced with substantial obligations. In spite of reductions in force of nineteen percent since the beginning of the abuse crisis, our Central Administration, in an effort to maintain services at pre crisis levels, has operated with deficits each year. As you will see, those deficits were funded with borrowings, property sales and, in the last two years, with parish reconfiguration assets.

  O’Malley was boxed into a corner. An unwritten law of the apostolic succession holds that one bishop does not overtly criticize another, and an archbishop should preserve the reputation of his predecessor, particularly a cardinal. O’Malley could not bring himself to state publicly that Law had mismanaged the money, stuffing money into written-off loans for clerics’ legal fees and writing checks for the expensive psychiatric facilities. One hundred and ninety priests put out to pasture had cost the archdiocese for their legal, medical, and stipend costs, while proportionally fewer priests performed the banal but crucial job of raising a parish’s money. As much as Seán O’Malley found Reconfiguration a nightmare, he would not violate an unwritten law of the apostolic succession and open the relevant documents of those accounts to public accounting, lest it invite scrutiny of his predecessor Law. Even if he disliked Lennon, as many believed, O’Malley needed to know what Lennon knew. And part of O’Malley’s unwritten job description was protect Bernie Law.

  O’Malley had become a cardinal as he opened a realm of transparency in the late winter of 2006, releasing substantial data and annual reports that revealed $330 million in assets, against debt of $346 million. “We’re not trying to keep secrets from people,” he told a press conference. “We’re trying to use the limited resources we have for the mission of the church.” He won praise from Cynthia Deysher: “We’ve never seen this level of financial disclosure from the archdiocese before.”21 O’Malley had restored the trust with certain of Boston’s heavy hitters, like Jack Connors, a public relations executive who was raising money for the parochial schools.

  Castaldi had a more benign view of the pension crisis than Borré. By his lights, the Clergy Retirement/Disability Trust was fully funded in the late 1990s. “The money could go for other uses,” he explained. “The stock market started going down in 1999 and continued through 2005. At the same time, clergy health and housing benefit costs were going up … When I was there, laypeople were not involved in decisions about priests. We were not consulted. That needed to change. I participated in lay trust funds and health issues, but not oversight of clergy trust funds.”

  The failure to invest the annual donations was a serious mistake. Still, Castaldi concluded, “I see no sign of misappropriation of assets.”

  But the documents on how clergy funds were spent from 1986 to 2000 were not available, according to the archdiocese. I asked: “So how do we know what happened?” Castaldi nodded at the question, and said, “Those are the detailed transactional documents. That’s not a big surprise. You don’t keep those documents forever.” On the mystery of what those documents held—how much to the legal, therapy, housing, and early retirement costs of the several score child abusers Law had eased out—Castaldi had no answer. The problem, he averred, was more complex than absorbing costs of bad priests. “The culture in the club indicated lots of good things to help people. It’s instinctive in priests. The money will come from somewhere. That mentality builds in structural deficits, and it’s hard to get them under control. The abuse crisis put the club at the tipping point.”

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

  The
Reconfiguration saga took a new turn on November 16, 2006, when the archdiocese sold an East Boston parish, St. Mary Star of the Sea, for $850,000 to Michael Indresano, a commercial photographer. Twenty days later he resold the property for $2.65 million to a Brazilian-led evangelical sect, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Indresano had presented a plan to the archdiocese’s real estate office to develop a photography studio, six condos, and a parking lot, but the sale contract did not preclude him from changing his mind, which he did quite soon, pulling in a $1.8 million profit for the flip.22

  The new church owner had sparked a huge controversy in Brazil in 1995, when a pastor “repeatedly kicked a statue of the country’s patron saint on national television, prompting condemnation of the UCKG by the Roman Catholic Church,” reported Laura Crimaldi of the Boston Herald. The church’s founding bishop “owns one of Brazil’s largest television stations, as well as radio stations, newspapers and a soccer team.”23

  Peter Borré sent a letter of protest to the papal nuncio in Washington, D.C. David Castaldi promised further inquiry by the Reconfiguration oversight committee. Cardinal O’Malley, in a deft move, appointed a retired judge to conduct an investigation and write a report on what went wrong.