Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  Amid the black emotions of his ebbing life, the women appeared: Norma Hilda Baños and the daughter she had had with Maciel, twenty-three-year-old Normita. “I want to stay with them,” said Maciel. According to the account in El Mundo:

  The Legionary priests, alarmed by Maciel’s attitude, called Rome. [Father] Luis Garza knew right away that this was a grave problem. He consulted with the highest authority, Álvaro Corcuera, and then hopped on the first plane to Miami and went directly to the hospital.

  [Garza’s] indignation could be read on his face. He faced the once-powerful founder and threatened him: “I will give you two hours to come with us or I will call all the press and the whole world will find out who you really are.” And Maciel let his arm be twisted.86

  The priests got Maciel to a Legion house in Jacksonville, Florida; he reportedly grew belligerent when Corcuera tried to anoint him, yelling, “I said no!” According to the reporters, he “did not believe in God’s pardon,” an opinion to which his biographical facts lend large support, but for which, in truth, we have no proof. What mattered to the Legion as he died was sealing the history known to insiders of his financial arrangements for Norma Hilda, with whom he had begun a common-law relationship in Acapulco in about 1980, and their child, Normita. Later on he moved them to Madrid and provided financial security.

  Upon his death, the Legion said that he went to heaven.

  In Cuernavaca, Mexico, Maciel’s three sons saw the news of his death on TV with their mother, Blanca Lara Gutiérrez, whom he had met and wooed in 1977, when she was nineteen and he, at fifty-seven, told her he was an agent for the CIA. He had been out of touch with that family for several years.

  CHAPTER 8

  BORRÉ IN ROME

  Peter Borré’s strategy of drawing the Vatican into responsibility for Boston parish closings registered in March 2006. Cardinal Castrillón responded to the parishioners’ appeals by writing Bishop William Skylstad, the USCCB president (whose Spokane diocese had taken bankruptcy protection because of abuse litigation). With no reference to Boston, Castrillón’s message was clear.

  Your Excellency:

  This Congregation deems it opportune to write to you regarding the closure of parishes in the dioceses of the United States, since in recent times certain dioceses have wrongly applied canon 123 CIC and stating that a parish has been “suppressed” when in reality it has been merged or amalgamated.

  A parish is more than a public juridical person. Canon 369 defines the diocese as a “portion of the people of God which is entrusted to the bishop to be nurtured by him” … In this light, then, only with great difficulty, can one say that a parish becomes extinct.1

  The proceeds from closed churches should follow parishioners to the “enlarged parish community.” But the Boston archdiocese wanted church assets to sell and plug the deficit. For Borré it was all very simple: Castrillón was covering his ass. Officials in the Congregation for the Clergy were advising the Boston archdiocese on how pastors of parishes shutting down could “voluntarily” surrender funds. Castrillón’s chief concern was not the injustice of suppression orders, but how to help Seán O’Malley meet his financial needs.

  Other prelates secured closures predicated on fleeting media coverage. On a February night in 2007 Borré bedded down in a pew of Our Lady Queen of Angels in Harlem in a show of solidarity with forty people at a vigil. The next day, with the vigil established, he caught an evening shuttle to Boston. A few hours later police officers responding to Cardinal Edward Egan’s office hauled off the leaders, most of them women, releasing them after the archdiocese locked the doors.2 Egan, a Chicago canonist trained in Rome, had come to New York from the diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut. In a 1997 deposition over an abuse case and his recycling of perpetrators, Egan, in trying to contain financial damage, actually testified, “Every priest is self-employed.”3 Three years later he went to New York, with 2.5 million Catholics, after the death of Cardinal John O’Connor. “New York Catholicism was practically an Irish-run Establishment overseeing a mosaic of stable ethnic enclaves,” wrote the religion writer David Gibson.

  But now those old-time Catholic communities were spreading out to suburbs while new, poorer immigrants back-filled city parishes that had fewer priests to staff them and little money to support them. Churches and schools would have to close, creating a sense that after 200 years of surging numbers and clout, New York Catholicism had become a mature industry, religiously speaking, and was facing a discouraging phase of downsizing …

  O’Connor’s popularity was owed to the fact that he never denied anyone who came begging for a new program or for him to halt the closing of an old parish and he left the archdiocese with a $20 million-a-year operating deficit and an infrastructure that needed a serious overhaul. During his tenure, O’Connor blew through tens of millions in reserves. “O’Connor spent like a drunken sailor,” as one priest said.4

  Not so Ed Egan. The cardinal who adored opera courted donors at small fund-raisers by playing piano. Egan wouldn’t dream of emulating O’Malley by posting archdiocesan financial statements. “Do we want to leave ourselves open?” Egan mused to the Times, rolling his eyes. “Oh, what fun people could have.” Church officials said Egan had erased the deficit, paying down $40 million of internal debt at $3 million annually, but there was no way to check.5 When Egan suppressed Our Lady of Vilnius, a Lithuanian parish in Manhattan, he called in the pastor, told him his church was being padlocked as they spoke, and that ended the 107-year-old parish.6 Bad news would pass.

  Three Boston area parishes that filed canonical appeals to Rome had been occupied twenty-four hours at a time since 2004, despite Clergy’s rejection of their requests. Two other parishes had had their appeals rejected by the Boston archdiocese for failure to file in thirty days; their appeals never went to Rome, but people slept in the pews anyway, making five vigil parishes in 2006.

  For an appeal to the Apostolic Signatura the groups needed well-positioned counsel. Borré saw that only twelve people were qualified as advocates at the Signatura listed in the Holy See’s Annuario Pontificio. Only two lay canonists had the standing to bring a recourse, or ultimate appeal, to the Holy Father. One was Martha Wegan, the Austrian who had filed the 1998 case against Maciel in Ratzinger’s tribunal; the other, Carlo Gullo, an Italian, taught canon law at Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, which was affiliated with Opus Dei. (Gullo insisted to Borré he was not an Opus member.)

  Born in 1942 in Tuscany, Carlo Gullo was married with four grown children. After law school at the University of Messina, in Sicily, he had taken a canon law degree from the Gregorian in 1968. Canon lawyers gained a role in Italy’s legal system with the 1929 Lateran Pacts by which Mussolini gave the church authority over marriage in civil affairs. Divorce was illegal until the 1970s; dissolving a marriage required an annulment. In 2002 the Pontifical Lateran University had seven hundred students pursuing degrees in canon law, most of them laywomen and laymen. Canonists could earn $20,000 or more by resolving property issues in complex annulments.7 Gullo practiced with his daughter, Alessia, one of the youngest advocates admitted at the bar of the Signatura. She also oversaw the computer system in her father’s home office.

  “Dottor Borré”—Doctor—was the salutation in Gullo’s e-mails, while Borré’s opened “Egregio Avvocato,” Distinguished Attorney. In their get-acquainted conversations, Borré spoke Italian, since his counterpart did not speak English. Alessia, who was conversant in English, occasionally assisted on arcane points of law. In the exchanges with Gullo, Borré was summoned back to his Latin studies as a schoolboy in Rome, for Gullo wrote his briefs in Latin. On the telephone Gullo spoke so softly that Borré at times strained to hear. Gullo was an elegant voice in explaining how hard it was to reverse an archbishop’s decree. But, it had happened some years ago when a Chicago parish persuaded the Signatura to overturn a suppression by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Borré asked if he could read the decision.

  “This i
s classified,” Gullo replied gravely.

  Borré was curious about the give-and-take among the cardinals and judges during Signatura proceedings.

  “I have no idea,” said Gullo.

  He explained that it was forbidden for the advocates to be in the room when the judges met. The Signatura had twenty-five canonists, most of them cardinals (including Egan of New York) on its board of consultors. The Rome-based judges, led by the prefect and assisted by the court secretary and a “promoter of justice,” constituted a tribunal called the Congressio, which screened appeals to determine which should go to the full bench. The Signatura covered administrative decisions of other tribunals and congregations. Parishioners who might travel to Rome would never be admitted to a session; nor were they allowed to read the briefs in Latin submitted by parties other than their advocates.

  Borré pictured Dante’s arrival at the river in the Inferno and the sign saying “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here!”

  Gullo explained that if they proceeded in a Vatican process, the decisions would not come fast. The first stage of an appeal, read by the Congressio, involved a counteropinion from the Advocate for Public Administration, whose job was to defend the Congregation for the Clergy’s rationale. As it turned out, the canonist who filled that role in these cases was Martha Wegan. Borré assumed that Congressio canonists would not overrule Cardinal Castrillón’s dicastery. That meant filing a detailed appeal to the full bench. They were looking at an uphill slog to question the moral logic of parishes-as-assets before cardinal-jurists. Borré had no doubt of the resolve by people in their round-the-clock vigils.

  After a discussion of finances, Gullo agreed to a fee of 4,000 euros per parish, or about $6,000 under the exchange rates. Over time, ten parishioner groups from the Boston archdiocese took this route, which translated into roughly $60,000 for work that was likely to extend three years or longer. The fixed fee also covered an appeal against sale of a church, should the suppression per se be granted. Borré calculated the hourly rate at less than $100, which was affordable to the parish groups, and a form of leverage in driving up the cost to the Boston archdiocese each month a given church could not be sold. When the two men finally met in the winter of 2007, the appeals Gullo had filed in the preceding year were still pending at the Signatura; he would eventually have eleven Boston parishes as clients.

  Carlo Gullo lived on the third floor of an apartment building in an eastern suburb of Rome, several miles beyond Porta Pia, the sixteenth-century gate crowned with ornamental crenellations that stood as Michelangelo’s last monumental work. In 1870 Italian troops blasted through Porta Pia in seizing Rome from Pope Pius IX. As the bus passed the sight, Borré saw a bronze-and-marble monument to a Risorgimento rifle regiment that Mussolini had erected in 1932, a reminder of triumphal Rome.

  The night before, at dinner with a Jesuit who had taught him decades earlier in middle school in Rome, Borré vented about parishes being sold to pay for clergy crimes. “You Americans,” the old Italian grunted. “Always the sex!” But shutting these churches was driving away the faithful, insisted Borré. “If in ten years the American church is half its present size,” the Jesuit retorted, “we will be a better church.” Borré sized him up as a Ratzingerian, loyal to Benedict XVI’s view of a purified church, small, leaner, more obedient to orthodoxy, a view that conservatives cheered.

  Tall and slender, with a full head of gray hair, Gullo greeted him at the door. They sat in the book-lined office. In his soft, courtly voice, Gullo emphasized the importance of language in the petitions to convey a sense of the spiritual integrity in people occupying the churches. Gullo conceded that they were on a hard road, but the financial ethics intrigued him as an issue the Vatican offices had to confront. “You must put aside any notions of jurisprudence from Anglo-Saxon systems,” Gullo explained. Despite the strict time limits for appellants, the Vatican congregations and courts could take as long as they wished.

  Borré conceived the Council of Parishes as an organization capable of expanding as financial convulsions hit other dioceses; this was neither perverse nor wishful thinking, rather a realization that the Boston crisis turned on Lennon, then O’Malley, shielding information on Law’s mismanagement of money and predators—a system corroded by protection rituals. Catholics deserved honesty on church finances. Parishioners in Scranton and Allentown, New Orleans and Cleveland, among two dozen dioceses, contacted Borré in hopes of halting parish closures. Nationally, the large majority of parishes closed without great protest, as many churches had too few members. But where protests arose, they shone a spotlight on how bishops managed money with little or no accountability. Borré prepared folders with plastic labels, comparative information on different dioceses, accounts of media coverage, and a how-to explanation on filing a canonical appeal to the Congregation for the Clergy if the bishop did not respond in thirty days, and how the process worked up to the Signatura.

  Borré was careful not to offend Carlo Gullo by going on a tear about the injustices of American prelates. For Gullo, the Vatican legal system was a business, the structure in which he practiced his profession.

  At home, Mary Beth was amused when her husband, putting down his Latin dictionary, began speaking in Italian. At least he wasn’t yelling at TV news or stewing in boredom like some men who retire with little self-knowledge. Despite her estrangement from the church, Mary Beth had once gone to a Bible study class with Rosie, telling herself, I am doing this because I love my mother. Peter’s journey into church officialdom engaged her intellectually; she liked his focus on the property dynamics. She felt for the people sleeping in pews.

  “Why am I doing all this?” Borré said aloud to his wife one day.

  “You’ve got parts of your skill set you’ve never used,” she replied.

  He rolled the idea over, wondering why it was so.

  CHAPTER 9

  SECRECY AND LAMENTATIONS

  The road that led Peter Borré to Cleveland ran from Boston to Rome and back again. The big Ohio diocese was mired in a financial scandal when he met Sister Christine Schenk. Chris Schenk had been working for years to expand ministry as parishes lost priests; she anticipated the day when bishops would sit down for practical discussions on how to rejuvenate the church by allowing married Catholics and women to become priests. In 1991 the Cleveland diocese had accurately forecast a decline of 480 priests to 340 within the decade, as part of a 40 percent drop since 1970.1 History had taught Sister Chris that Rome would accept change when reality was clear to everyone else.

  Schenk and Father Lou Trivison founded FutureChurch in 1990 after an eight-month study on the impact of the priest shortage by Trivison’s Church of the Resurrection in Solon, an affluent Cleveland suburb. The motto was: “We love the church … We’re working to make it better!” Years later, as the Boston vigil movement radiated into the heartland, the agenda was well in place:

  FutureChurch, inspired by Vatican II, recognizes that Eucharistic Celebration (the Mass) is the core of Roman Catholic worship and sacramental life. We advocate that this celebration be available universally and at least weekly to all baptized Catholics.

  FutureChurch respects the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church and its current position on ordination [of celibate males only] and advocates widespread discussion of the need to open ordination to all baptized Catholics who are called to priestly ministry by God and the people of God.2

  Beloved by his parishioners, Lou Trivison had good ties to Bishop Anthony Pilla. The bishop allowed FutureChurch to seek out supportive pastors for its workshops and speakers. At any time Pilla could have halted the group, though at the cost of a broken friendship with a priest he liked. Independent groups, like religious orders, need a bishop’s approval to meet in parishes.

  Born in 1932, Tony Pilla had grown up in an Italian neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side. Pilla graduated from John Carroll, the Jesuit university in Cleveland, then went to St. Charles Borromeo, the diocesan seminary. Short, wit
h dark hair and bedroom eyes, he was a popular bishop, the hometown boy made good. The affable Pilla was politically astute; he served in the midnineties as president of the national bishops’ conference. While never endorsing such ideas, Pilla seemed unthreatened by optional celibacy or women priests. He was resolutely pro-life and a critic of nuclear arms. Pilla’s great concern was dying neighborhoods. Cleveland was a case study of the rust-belt economy in existential panic.

  Founded in 1796 on Lake Erie near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, the port town grew into a city as railroads expanded the navigational arteries to carry coal, crops, and timber. From a core of 1830s Irish settlers, the church had a growing German community in 1846 when the pastor Peter McLaughlin got involved with a choir girl and “proved himself a cad,” notes a diocesan history, “declaring the woman had seduced him!”3 The new priest, Maurice Howard, set tongues wagging over the housekeeper, a young female cousin. Protesting his innocence, Father Howard wrote: “Thank God, I am succeeding with my people here … there is neither card-playing, dancing, party or frolic.”4 Cleveland diocese, founded in 1847, spun off from the Cincinnati archdiocese.

  Shipyards and iron plants burgeoned after the Civil War. John D. Rockefeller’s oil refinery controlled 90 percent of U.S. refining capacity in the 1890s. His mansion was one of many on fabled Euclid Avenue.5 Working families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from south central Europe, and there were pockets of black people. Settlements in the Haymarket district followed “village chains” in southern Italy, clustering families and folkways in urban enclaves. St. Anthony of Padua church, built in 1887, held yearly celebrations of patron saints of villages with bands, fireworks, and cuisine. The parish had ten thousand Italian residents in 1900, the year that the First Catholic Slovak Union was founded.6 Serbs, Croats, and Poles enriched the urban mosaic; tribal loyalties formed around the parish. “Even a street merchant, whose jaded mare was dragging a wagon through the muddy street, cried his wares in Czech,” recalled a blacksmith of his 1889 arrival. “And it truly did look like a Czech village … Children, chickens, ducks, dogs and cats ran about, and there was not a blade of grass to be seen.”7