Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  The meeting with Vaca took place at Mercy College in midtown Manhattan, where Vaca was an adjunct professor. The two men sat in a conference room. “He embraced me in a manly, Mexican way and was about to kneel down in asking my forgiveness,” Vaca recounted. “I said no, and had him sit at the head of the table, and I to his immediate right.”

  Corcuera struck him as relaxed, seemingly kind. Vaca called him “Álvarito,” a Latin term of endearment. He assumed an avuncular role, asking the younger priest about his background. Corcuera recalled his youth in a Legion school, inspired by Maciel to join the order. He had gone to seminary in Orange, Connecticut, when Vaca was a superior. (The campus was recently on the real estate market, as the Legion began downsizing.) Vaca did not remember Corcuera from those years; he had worked with many seminarians before leaving in 1976 to join the Rockville Centre diocese. “You were nice to me,” said Corcuera. He explained that when he became superior general to succeed Maciel, in 2004, the election came as a surprise for him.

  “Well, Maciel trained you for the job,” Vaca clarified.

  Corcuera insisted he was elected at an open chapter, not handpicked by Maciel. “I asked point-blank if Corcuera knew about Maciel’s abuses,” Vaca told me. “He said no. I said, ‘You knew he sent money to the ladies,’ meaning the mother in Madrid, Norma and her daughter. He said, ‘I learned after 2004.’ He didn’t give a specific date on when he learned it, and I didn’t press him.”

  After letting Corcuera talk for an hour or so, Vaca recounted how Maciel had abused him and other seminarians decades ago; how he had pulled Maciel, passed out on morphine, from drowning in a hotel bathtub in Tetuán, Morocco, in 1957, the year Corcuera was born. “He felt ashamed. He hung his head, whispering, I do believe you. He put his face in his hands,” said Vaca.

  Corcuera told Vaca that Legionaries were circulating his 1976 letter denouncing Maciel, naming the twenty other seminary victims. If that was true, it marked a striking shift from the summer of 2009, when two Legion priests in Rome told me that the seminarians were still being taught about Maciel’s heroic life.

  Vaca accepted his apologies, adding, “But this is not a solution.” He insisted that the Legion provide fair compensation for the harm and damages to him and other victims. Corcuera replied that the Legion in Rome had formed a committee to explore the issue. He asked Vaca what he thought would be fair compensation. Refusing to name a figure, Vaca told him to look at what American dioceses had paid in victim settlements. Vaca had a deeper issue: how the order had engaged in “slandering me” while defending Maciel. “Think about that. Come up with an amount. I’m not going to tell you how much.”

  The website LegionaryFacts.org began posting defenses of Maciel—and criticism of the accusers—after the 1997 Hartford Courant report exposing Maciel’s abuse of Legion youths. Father Owen Kearns, publisher of the Legion-owned National Catholic Register, derided the victims for “a coordinated conspiracy to smear Father Maciel.” Kearns on LegionaryFacts.org had called Vaca “a proud, status-conscious man angered and disappointed at his professional failures,” who had wanted “greater power in the Legion.” But Vaca had resigned in his 1976 letter to Maciel.

  Vaca had been a counselor for disabled students at York College in the City University of New York, on the fourth year of a five-year tenure track position, when he was terminated in 1999. He believed the Legion’s “attack on my credibility and character” caused the college not to renew the contract.

  LegionaryFacts.org came down from the Internet in 2006 after the Vatican punished Maciel. Four years later, Kearns issued a general apology to Gerald Renner and me for criticizing our Hartford Courant report, but he did not name any victims.

  Corcuera and Vaca said cordial good-byes. The Legion superior promised to work on the compensation issue. At his request, Vaca provided names and contact information for Maciel’s victims in Mexico.

  Corcuera’s very presence signaled the influence of Benedict and Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the canon lawyer at the CDF who had worked for two years taking the testimony of the aging men Maciel had coerced as boys, hearing their accounts of oral sex, sodomy, and masturbation rituals. As part of its “takeover,” the Vatican was prodding the Legion into a position similar to that of many bishops who clenched their teeth and wrote large checks to lawyers representing abuse survivors. As the Vatican, in its soft-glove way, pushed the Legion toward financial reparations, in Rome, Jeff Anderson filed suit against the order on June 16, 2010, in Connecticut, on behalf of Raúl González Lara, Maciel’s older natural son from Mexico, who alleged a long history of incest and emotional distress by his father, with certain episodes taking place in America.17

  SUING THE HOLY SEE

  Ironically, as the Vatican was prodding the Legion on the issue of compensation to Maciel’s older victims, the Holy See was arguing that it deserved immunity from a case Jeff Anderson had filed in Oregon. He had named the Holy See as one of the defendants.18 The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act set limits on whether a foreign government can be sued in U.S. courts; it restricts intervention by the White House and State Department. The priest in question had a record of abusing youths in his native Ireland before his transfer to America. Anderson and his Oregon cocounsel William Barton argued that civil responsibility extended beyond the religious order leader and local bishop to the Vatican. The Holy See hired a California attorney, Jeffrey Lena, to defend the case. Lena’s motion to dismiss failed; the Oregon court ordered discovery. Lena appealed to the federal court, which sided with the state court. Lena petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a hearing.

  The lawsuit asserted that the Holy See—the government of the sovereign monarchy, as opposed to the Vatican as administrator of the city-state—engaged in widespread commercial activity and control over its religious servants. The discovery request drew upon the research of the departed priests Patrick Wall, Tom Doyle, and Richard Sipe.

  Each Bishop keeps track of how much money it obtains for the Holy See through the Peter’s Pence solicitation … Plaintiff made requests of information about Quinquennial Reports. These reports are required by the Holy See to be sent every five years from each Bishop and each religious order superior. The Holy See requires that the document list the financial well-being of the diocese … [Religious orders] must detail for the Holy See the financial condition of the Order, including all property acquired, whether any gains or losses have been sustained, whether there is debt, and whether all temporal goods of the Order and each of its provinces is administered according to the Canons.

  In 1947 the Vatican updated the requirements for the Religious Orders’ Quinquennial Reports. In addition to the financial disclosures, it also required the Religious Orders to answer whether any of the religious members had sexually abused any of the younger students in their care. It also required the Religious Orders to answer if they had taken precautions against the dangers of priests sexually abusing children.19

  Marci Hamilton handled Jeff Anderson’s appellate briefs on constitutional issues. Hamilton holds an endowed chair at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. An author and a prolific writer on legal issues, she specializes in religious issues that bear upon the First Amendment. Her husband is Catholic; several years after their son’s baptism, she learned that the priest who performed the ritual had been removed for child abuse. When Hamilton read the petition to the Supreme Court in the Oregon case, she told Anderson, “The arguments are weak, I wouldn’t dignify it with a response. Jeff Lena’s trying to buy time.”

  Briefs to the Supreme Court can take a year or longer before a decision is issued on whether the court will hear the case. “Then we get a letter from the court, which they rarely write, requesting our response,” Hamilton told me. “It was one of the easiest I’ve written. There is no need for the Supreme Court to hear this; the issue is state law, not a federal issue. The Court normally would have denied the request for review at that point, but the justices wanted more. After they got
our response, they asked for the Solicitor General’s views. Then I got a call from the Solicitor General’s civil division: they want to meet face-to-face. Now it’s political.”

  The Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, a former Harvard Law dean, was on President Obama’s short list for the next available Supreme Court seat, and subsequently won appointment.

  Hamilton had written the plaintiff motions challenging Cardinal Mahony’s claim of “formation privilege”; she prevailed at every level, save for engineering the enforcement of the decision in California courts. As a young attorney, Hamilton had clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor; she was seasoned in Washington’s mores and knew people in Elena Kagan’s office. Who exactly would be at this meeting? she inquired. “Just a few,” her contact said.

  On a snow-shrouded day in March 2010, Hamilton caught the train near her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and on arrival at Union Station met Jeff Anderson, his associate Mike Finnegan, and Bill Barton from Oregon. They went to the Justice Department and in the room found thirteen people, she recalls. “They had obviously been meeting before we arrived. Kagan was there, with her chief deputy Edwin Kneedler. So was Harold Koh, the legal adviser to Hillary Clinton. He’s a former Yale dean. The agreement going in was that only I would discuss the case. For two hours they grilled me as if I was going through oral arguments on the merits, even though the ostensible reason for the meeting was to discuss whether the Court should take the case. The genius of Jeff Anderson is that he chose Oregon to sue the Vatican. Oregon has the best state tort law in the country. The only issue to this case was state law. If you get hit by a car driven by a foreign official in your state, you can seek redress. It’s the foreign government—and not the officials—that is liable. The officials can create the liability but don’t pay out of their pocket.

  “Kagan was not as intensely engaged as Koh,” says Hamilton. “Koh was trying to push the envelope to find a way to make the case about something other than state law. He seemed to be searching for a federal rule that would be the subject of this case and even control all cases against the Holy See. It just was not there. My assumption is that this was another example of how the Clintons do politics. Bill Clinton was the most pro-religious administration since Grant tried to Christianize the Indians … I kept saying, This is an issue of Oregon state law.”

  After Kagan’s nomination, the acting Solicitor General, the Justice Department, and the State Department sent an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court, arguing that the case should go back to the federal appeals bench for having misunderstood Oregon tort law.20 The Supreme Court did not accept the argument; the case was slowly moving forward as this book went to press.

  BORRÉ AND THE NUNCIO

  As Carlo Gullo sent ideas and draft passages for the appeal to Pope Benedict via e-mail, Peter Borré’s contact through the Secretariat of State, after several meetings, suggested that Borré might wish to meet with an archbishop who did have interest in these issues, as they fell in a general sense within his competenza. This was Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio to the United States.

  In April 2010, as he caught a flight from Logan Airport to Reagan National, Borré realized that he was on the last leg of his journey: I keep trying to find something redemptive in the plight of the Roman Catholic Church, whether in Rome’s congregations, which I have frequented, the many American dioceses which I visit, or the dozens of Boston parishes where I have assisted. But today I see wreckage all around, a deepening despair among good people, prelates and laity, a widening divide between the flock in the pews and the hierarchical superiors.

  The Congregation for the Clergy had denied every single parishioner appeal against parish closings of which he was aware during the last decade, including the seventy-five of which he had direct knowledge. The Signatura had denied every one of the eleven parishioner appeals from Boston with the same Olympian language in as many decrees. Lawyers for abuse victims were clobbering the church in America because of arrogant decisions by bishops, most of them dating back many years, while in Rome a legal arrogance blunted the very people the church so desperately needed, people who loved the faith and gave in its support—people now spending funds to save their churches. These weren’t abortion activists with hidden cameras.

  For all of his fuming about church reformers seeking dialogue with bishops, Borré had started thinking about Seán O’Malley, his own archbishop. “Why don’t you try to talk to him?” his wife, Mary Beth, the political consultant, said one day. The thought of bipartisanship, a consensus of some kind, appealed to him. Do what Congress can’t: sit down, talk it out, find a real solution.

  Borré was convinced that O’Malley had no idea how to rebuild the finances. The money was going down because people didn’t trust the leadership. Law had begun that poisoning; Lennon worsened it. If O’Malley would show some flexibility on the closed parishes, Borré was willing to help swing the public relations his way. But he knew the cardinal considered him an adversary, if not an outright enemy. As the cab dropped him at the stately embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, opposite the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory, Borré realized that any endgame to benefit the cause he had advanced would probably rely on the man he was about to meet.

  Pietro Sambi had wavy silver hair and a firm handshake. As they stood in the foyer, lined with oil paintings of popes and a photograph of the nuncio presenting his credentials to President Obama, Borré knew that he had previously been the Holy See’s envoy in Jerusalem, a diplomatic minefield.

  As they exchanged amenities in Italian, he could see that Sambi was delighted to converse in his native tongue. The nuncio’s eyes lit up at the sight of Borré’s new iPad. He handed it to the archbishop, who pulled up The Divine Comedy. Knowing that Sambi came from the district of Romagna, next to Emilia, where Borré’s maternal grandparents had grown up, Borré casually mentioned that Cardinal O’Malley needed to cross the Rubicon.21

  “The river Rubicon runs through my village!” Sambi said, smiling.

  “Yes, Excellency, I know.”

  Sambi handed him the iPad. As they walked into his office, the nuncio said, “The cardinal thinks you’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

  Borré countered that hundreds of Catholics supported the vigil parishes, and many more people were in full sympathy.

  Sambi remarked that in Jerusalem, where he had previously been posted, most people knew what a given solution should be, but none were willing to set it in motion. Everyone there is guilty of the sin of pride.

  Sambi was voicing O’Malley’s view of Borré as an outsized ego who considered the vigil movement an extension of himself.

  Borré would rejoice if the cardinal would open five parishes temporarily as chapels. That would give the people a means to repair ties with an archbishop they never wanted to dislike. Borré at that point could willingly phase out. But he picked his words carefully. If the cardinal will follow through, I’m ready to resign and dissolve the organization. My first and strongest allegiance is to these five groups who are still in vigil.

  Borré explained that he wanted a peaceful but just solution. He was willing to cease his public activism. But for this to work, the cardinal needed to take the first step, a unilateral reopening of one of the vigil parishes.

  He assured Sambi that the Council of Parishes members would not react by gloating in the media, declaring a victory.

  The meeting ended on a warm note, Sambi agreeing to communicate with O’Malley. After an exchange of letters, Sambi agreed to see Borré again.

  Back to Rome, in early June, he worked with Carlo Gullo in refining the language of the appeal that would go to Pope Benedict, one copy in Italian, the other in English. This was for the benefit of Monsignor Peter Wells, who handled the English-language desk in the Secretariat of State and was a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Borré had never met Wells, but hoped he would give favorable commentary and recommend that the pope actually read it. In Rome it was no secret that the Holy
Father was deep at work on the second volume of his study of Jesus.

  The Boston archdiocese had just posted its financial statement. The Globe noted that the parish collections had declined 2 percent, while parish operating expenses rose 3 percent. The worst recession in decades was certainly a factor in the downturn; so was the continuing impact of the clergy sexual underground. “In all, the archdiocese has spent $145 million to settle 1,097 civil abuse claims, including 800 since O’Malley’s arrival in 2003,” reported Lisa Wangsness.22

  Accountancy professor Jack Ruhl, as part of his research on American diocesan finances, found, “The Boston archdiocese financials show a total operating loss for 2009 of $24,299,645. The change in net assets is analogous to bottom line net income in a corporation. This includes operating income or loss, plus other ‘unusual’ items, such as a gain on sale of land. The 2009 financials show a change in net assets, a loss, of $4,650,797. The total aggregate operating losses for the fiscal years 2004 to 2009 are $7,484,274.”

  Coming off such losses, the biggest problem facing O’Malley in his challenge to rebuild finances was the 30 percent decline in church attendance since 2002. The base of support was shrinking as expenses rose. O’Malley had made a forthright effort at transparency, posting detailed financial statements on the archdiocese’s website. “I continue to be optimistic,” noted Chancellor James P. McDonough in introducing the 85-page report. “We are making significant progress in improving our operations and will build on that success as we adjust our operating model and ministries to the realities of the present time.”23

  Peter Borré did not share the optimism. Besides the archdiocese’s operating losses, he saw the priest pension fund underfunded by $104 million. McDonough, a former banker, had taken a 10 percent salary cut because of the precarious finances; still, he earned $225,000. Borré’s long-ago Harvard Business School classmate David Castaldi saw nothing wrong with paying competitive salaries for the right people. Borré had no personal grudge against McDonough, who had been on the job for four years, but he thought it absurd to pay anyone that much money when the operation had such bleeding losses.