Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  Now in the autumn of his life, wearing dashiki vestments at Mass, LeDoux, with his mop of gray hair, was a charismatic preacher who welcomed jazz musicians to perform at liturgies. For some reason German tourists regularly showed up at his Sunday Mass, taking photographs in the side garden of the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, an exhibit with a large anchor and chains. In a neighborhood reeling from drug violence, LeDoux said the funerals for any family, regardless of faith. Many were too poor to pay for a wake. His sermons flowed with hope and wit. “Why do we welcome Mardi Gras Indians?” he said one Sunday. “Feathers, tambourines, war whoops. Mmm: we hear whoops of peace this fine morn. Scripture tells us, ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord.’ ” He smiled. “And that, my dear people, is what we now must do!”

  He lived in a shambling rectory filled with books and newspapers, a vegan dishing out dollars to homeless people and addicts who came knocking in the night. Many of them he knew by name. LeDoux wrote a column for the African American Louisiana Weekly. He was back at St. Augustine three weeks after Katrina, saying Mass. St. Augustine owed $227,000 in assessments—back taxes—to the archdiocese. Gentrification was edging into Tremé. After the flood, with whole swaths of the city devoid of people, real estate prices were soaring. Church, rectory, parish center, and a huge side yard were a developer’s dream.

  In early 2006 Hughes told LeDoux the parish had to close. The public announcement ignited a furor in Tremé. Activists occupied the rectory and church. The media coverage portrayed an aloof archbishop against a black neighborhood as the broken city tried to get back on its feet. In 2009 Hughes would be pilloried in satirical Mardi Gras floats, his visage mocked on the plastic cups that masked revelers dispense as carnival “throws”—a fate traditionally accorded to politicians on their way to jail.

  LeDoux was gone when Jacques entered the church in his robes to say Mass on Sunday, March 26, an act by which the parish would be formally closed, its members welcomed by a group from St. Peter Claver. In the fraught atmosphere, some parishioners wept, others seethed. Ten plain-clothes officers accompanied Father William Maestri, the archdiocesan spokesman, who would brook no dissent. When a nervous Jacques took the pulpit to give his homily, people stood and turned their backs; others waved signs in protest. As people began yelling, Jacques could not speak. Maestri made a slicing gesture under his neck, signaling to the cops that Mass was over. “I’m NOPD!” shouted an officer, hustling Maestri and Jacques into a car.6

  Hughes denounced “the sacrilege” and canceled Masses indefinitely.

  LeDoux, who was in the process of moving out, fired back, saying that police in church “reeked of racial profiling. You have racial profiling when you do not understand an ethnic group or a racial group, and you think that because they are upset, because they’re even a little angry, they are dangerous.”

  A French Quarter hotelier from one of the city’s prominent families, Michael Valentino, offered to spearhead a $1 million capital campaign, provided the parish stay open. Another parishioner, Jacques Morial, was a political activist whose father and older brother had both been mayor. He joined Valentino to meet with Father Jacques.

  “When you negotiate in a tense situation,” Morial told me later, “you assume the people sitting across from you have good information and a reasonable sense of how to proceed. Hughes would not get directly involved. Father Jacques was in way over his head; he had his plan to close parishes, no appreciation about the impact or really how to achieve it. I don’t think Hughes had any idea of the reaction or that making LeDoux leave would set off so many folk. Tremé has a history of being stomped, politically, by the city, and to make a move like that with so many people just getting back from Katrina, the timing could not have been worse. Look, I’m a parishioner and I’ve got an interest, okay? But if I were a neutral consultant, first thing, you look at the facts. A church built in 1842. Pride of the black community. A pastor everyone loves. Yeah, the guy drinks carrot juice. LeDoux’s eccentric. New Orleans is eccentric. But the city’s in the national media every day because of Katrina. The parish owes two hundred grand plus change to the archdiocese. So what do you do? Launch a national fund-raising campaign! Call Oprah, Bill Cosby, rally people who love New Orleans to help. We knew LeDoux would be essential for fund-raising—he’s a folk hero. Jacques wanted to pastor the two congregations. Hughes, from all I could tell, never thought about an alternative plan.”

  Father LeDoux moved to Texas. The parish gained a reprieve, conditioned on its meeting future benchmarks. Jacques remained at St. Peter Claver. Hughes installed a new pastor, Father Quentin Moody who refused to let Mike Valentino, who had already made donations, serve on the Finance Council. Looking back on the fiasco of being stiff-armed for trying to raise money, Valentino told me, “For months after that I went to Mass and sat in the front row, just to let Moody know I was there. I kept asking myself, Who are these guys? We could have raised $2 million in twelve months. But the campaign never started. How could I assure donors where the money would go?” Valentino’s plan for a full architectural restoration was aborted; by 2010 the rectory had been renovated, but Valentino no longer went to church. “I didn’t want to fight battles in my own parish or be a source of acrimony in trying to help. The whole thing was such a failure of leadership, failing to do what could have been done. My core faith is intact but I’m disillusioned and have no regular parish.”

  The archdiocese in a 2010 report on Katrina’s financial impact cited $287.9 million in total property loss of which $235.9 million had been recovered. More than half of that, $125 million, came from insurance; $64 million came from FEMA reimbursements; and $47 million came from gifts and donations from other dioceses and Catholic Charities USA.7 The unrecovered loss was $52 million. Although the pie charts and columns put numbers in broad categories, the essay and data fell far short of a fully audited financial statement. Bruce Nolan of the Times-Picayune noted that the church was “severely underinsured against flood [damage] … with only $29 million” in coverage.8

  In an urban area that had sustained heavy flooding in 1994 and 1995, and had mass evacuations from hurricanes in the years leading up to Katrina, why cancel flood insurance? The policies were backed by federal funds and reasonably priced. “They were having cash flow problems—not enough parishes sending money to Walmsley Avenue [the chancery headquarters],” explains a prominent pastor. “They realize now that canceling those policies was a huge mistake.”

  The minutes from a February 26, 2007, closed meeting of Hughes and his priests’ council offer an instructive look at the subsequent closure of two financially stable parishes, where vigil protests arose. Our Lady of Good Counsel, in the historic Garden District, was on the National Register of Historic Places. The parish council leader had a pledge of $300,000 for an endowment if Hughes would reverse the closure; he refused. In the wake of the battering media coverage from the St. Augustine events, the priests’ council minutes are devoid of financial or infrastructure planning: “The whole plan is a pastoral plan that deals with the parishes, social service and the schools that will be looked at again at the end of April. Part of the layered look involves [the chief financial officer] looking at the financial pieces to see what it’s going to cost us to put this plan into effect and what’s going to happen with all the buildings and real estate involved.”9

  “The whole plan” was never disclosed to the public. The minutes continue, oblivious to people in pews, but fearful that a process without any cost-benefit analysis or impact assessment might be discovered by the press: “The Archbishop asked for the strictest of confidentiality to avoid sabotaging the process with media coverage before the plan is finalized. If forced to deal with damage control the fear would be that final decisions could not be made in the atmosphere that they would want to be made.”

  Professor of Accountancy Jack Ruhl of Western Michigan University analyzed the archdiocese’s public disclosures: “The 2009 Financial Report included a compilation report by a local CPA fi
rm that states: ‘We have not audited or reviewed the accompanying Summaries … and … do not express an opinion or any other form of assurance on them.’ The CPA firm goes on to say that the archdiocese ‘elected to omit substantially all of the disclosures required by generally accepted accounting principles.’ In other words, the CPA firm performed only compilation services for the archdiocese, checking the numbers for mathematical accuracy.”

  A full set of audited financial statements means the assertions of management have been tested by experienced auditors. They contact the banks to make sure a given entity actually has funds on deposit. “Since the New Orleans Financial Report was not audited,” continues Ruhl, “there is no assurance at all that the numbers bear any resemblance to reality. The Financial Report does not include any notes, which would tell about activities such as bond issues and impending litigation.” Perhaps the archdiocese found its way out of the Katrina debt by a 2007 bond issue. Ruhl, who came across the bond issue information through his own research, explains that although the 2009 Financial Report has no mention of it, the archdiocese, working through the Louisiana Public Facilities Authority, issued $69,150,000 of municipal bonds in 2007. As of June 30, 2009, the Archdiocese had an outstanding liability for $68,130,330 of these bonds.

  In 2009 Hughes insisted on church property rights, prevailing on Mayor Ray Nagin to order police officers into the two vigil parishes, Good Counsel and St. Henry (which had cash reserves of $150,000). The spectacle of NOPD beating down a door at Good Counsel and arresting people from both parishes was like a whiplash to many people. At his retirement press conference in 2009, Hughes apologized to the community for any harm he had caused. His successor, Archbishop Gregory Aymond, began a dialogue with the two parishioner groups, allowing limited use of both churches, searching for a solution to reconcile the protesters to the archdiocese, with some role for the two dormant parishes.

  THE VATICAN TAKES OVER THE LEGION

  In June 2009 Borré met again with his contact in the Secretariat of State. He laid out the main points of the eighteen-page Request for Mediation, the terrible damage done to neighborhoods and people of faith when a viable parish was closed because of its immediate material value to a bishop. Negotiating a solution for the Boston archdiocese would likely have a national impact and, if handled fairly for the vigil groups, would position Cardinal O’Malley as a peacemaker, a prelate with the vision and leadership to uplift a demoralized community. This would mean the “peaceful demobilization of the vigils and the quiet withdrawal of the Boston appeals at the Signatura.”

  The Vatican official absorbed what Borré had to say and presented the position of the Secretariat of State. The letter’s fundamental issue was outside the competenza (area of responsibility) of his office; however, he arranged for Borré to meet another Vatican official. As these conversations unfolded, Borré was following the news from Cleveland, aghast as Lennon repeated the destruction he had wrought on Boston.

  Carlo Gullo determined that the only remaining avenue for the vigil parishes’ canonical prospects was a direct appeal to Pope Benedict.

  As one of the handful of canonists licensed to take appeals to the highest level of the Apostolic Signatura, Gullo had the right to send a document to the Holy Father. He had never done so before, but the professor and practitioner of canon law in Rome, who had little experience of America, had absorbed through Borré a metaphysical sense of the people utterly devoted to their sacred spaces at a time when many European churches, for all of their grandeur and iconic presence in the historical memory, drew sparse crowds at times of Mass. The secularization of Europe, a “post-Christian” society, had become a strand of the media narrative. Benedict’s cry against moral relativism was a call for Christian Europe to assert its integrity. Certainly, reasoned Gullo, a movement of Catholics to protect their churches would have meaning for His Holiness.

  But by Holy Week of 2010, Benedict XVI had suffered a spectacular loss of respect in public opinion as the abuse crisis came home to Europe, “with scandals convulsing Ireland, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy and Austria,” writes Andrew Walsh, a scholar and former journalist, in a detailed account of the media coverage.10 The media was relentless on Benedict, particularly the New York Times, which quoted the Vatican correspondence provided by Jeff Anderson on Ratzinger’s soft-glove treatment of the Wisconsin priest who had abused dozens of deaf students. The credit Ratzinger had gained as a cardinal for taking responsibility of the abuse cases in the CDF teetered against the weight of past decisions, marked by inertia. The pontiff who as cardinal had stood in judgment over theological adversaries, forcing them to answer questions, had no answers to give, and so fell silent.

  The Curia took the foredoomed stance of attacking the messenger. L’Osservatore Romano scored the media for “an ignoble attempt to strike at Pope Benedict and his closest aides at any cost.” But the Vatican had no youth protection charter, as the American bishops had adopted in 2002, nor did the Holy See have procedures that might penalize the world’s bishops. Cardinal Walter Kasper of Germany bravely distanced himself from the Curia in telling La Repubblica, “We have to seriously clean up the church.” But for Benedict to “clean up,” he had to change the assumptions of apostolic succession; and if he opened the bishops to a judicial overview on their tolerance of predatory clerics, what would happen to bishops accused of misusing money?11

  If a single episode framed the moral relativism of Benedict’s papacy it came at Easter Mass, on April 4, 2010, in St. Peter’s Square when Angelo Sodano, now dean of the College of Cardinals, preached a defense of the pope. The faithful would “rally close around you, successor to Peter, bishop of Rome, the unfailing rock of the holy church,” he declared. The cardinal who had pressured Ratzinger not to prosecute Maciel in John Paul’s time now said soothingly, “We are deeply grateful to you for the strength of spirit and apostolic courage with which you announce the Gospel.” With a backhanded barb at the press, Sodano continued, “Holy Father, on your side are the people of God, who do not allow themselves to be influenced by the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials which sometimes buffet the community of believers.”12

  Sodano on Easter executed a 180-degree shift from being a paid champion of Maciel to a shield of the beleaguered pope. “What we are dealing with now is a cultural battle: the pope embodies moral truths which people don’t accept and for that reason the shortcomings and errors of priests are used as arms against the church,” Sodano told L’Osservatore Romano. “It was not the fault of Jesus if he was betrayed by Judas. Nor is it the fault of a bishop if one of his priests sullies himself with grave crimes. And certainly, it is not the responsibility of the pontiff.”13

  Here was the logic of apostolic succession draped in pearls of self-righteousness: Maciel as Judas to the Christ-like Sodano!

  “There is absolutely no strategy, and I say that as a friend of the pope’s,” an American bishop, unnamed, told the author and PoliticsDaily correspondent David Gibson.14

  But there was a strategy, of some inchoate sort, for handling the Legion of Christ. On May 1, 2010, the Vatican issued a statement that excoriated Maciel for a double life “devoid of any scruples and authentic sense of religion.” Thus had he managed to sexually assault young boys for so many years. “By pushing away and casting doubt upon all those who questioned his behavior, and the false belief that he wasn’t doing harm to the good of the Legion, he created around him a defense mechanism that made him unassailable for a long period, making it difficult to know his true life.”15

  Not a word on John Paul’s blind praises of Maciel after the accusations.

  The Vatican would be naming a special envoy to help the Legionaries “purify” the good that remained in the order, for a “profound revision” necessary to carry on.

  The language denouncing Maciel was strong, but how would the Vatican exert the high moral purpose that Benedict called the church to follow on a cultlike operation such as the Legionaries?<
br />
  Eleven days after the announcement Father Álvaro Corcuera, the superior general, traveled from Rome to New York City for a four-hour meeting with Juan Vaca. Vaca was the first to denounce Maciel, naming victims’ names, in correspondence to the Vatican in 1976, 1978, and 1989. He had settled in Long Island. The twelve-year psychosexual entanglement with Maciel, which began when he was twelve, had caused him to study psychology after leaving the priesthood, trying to determine “where sickness ends and evil starts.” Trim and hale, with thinning hair and a resonant voice, Juan Vaca had a gentlemanly Latin demeanor. He had made a career as a college teacher and guidance counselor, married late, and had a teenage daughter he adored.

  Corcuera denied my interview request. A Legion spokesman, Jim Fair, said, “He did meet with Vaca, and others in Mexico, as part of his outreach.”16

  That outreach was another twist in Pope Benedict’s lurching road toward justice, now that the Vatican had taken control of the strange organization. Corcuera, age fifty-three, came from an upper-middle-class Mexico City family; he had been a frequent guest at the Apostolic Palace when the Legion was sending money to the papal secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz.