Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  The Boston archdiocese was generous to people at the top. The secretary of education earned $292,500, according to the Globe. Parochial school enrollment had dropped from 50,000 students in 2007 to 46,000 in 2010.24 As parishes strained to support schools, the top educator earned $42,500 more than the superintendent of New York City’s public schools, which had 1.1 million students. The associate superintendent of Boston parochial schools earned $176,000. Why such salaries with money leaking like a sieve?

  When Borré returned to Washington for his next meeting with Sambi, he was angry about the archdiocesan finances. He gave a memorandum on the matter to the nuncio, whose interest piqued at the numbers and analysis. Sambi the diplomat kept his thoughts close to the vest as he absorbed the information. Borré’s idea on reform began with restoring priests’ morale; but mobilizing them to help shore up finances turned on changes at the top and slashing big salaries.

  Father Bob Bowers, once the pastor at Borré’s now-dormant parish, had taken a leave of absence from the priesthood in 2005. Bowers had gone through a long disillusionment before joining the Paulist Center, just off Boston Commons, as an outreach minister to disaffected Catholics who were inching back toward the faith. Disillusioned with Vatican officials as “very, very old men who can’t grasp what’s happening,” Bowers nevertheless wanted Pope Benedict on the job, to work for healing. His own job was to “help people deal with conflict better, help them realize that forgiveness sets them free and that letting go can make them whole again.”25 Since the bruising loss of his parish, Bowers’s goal was “never to get people to return to participation in the church. My goal is very simple: to listen. That is where God is.”26

  Borré, who had been out of touch with his former pastor, was ambivalent about reconciliation after six years of pushing at the rock of church officialdom. Sitting with Sambi in the nuncio’s office in Washington, Borré wanted the Boston archdiocese to slash the six-figure salaries at the top and shed jobs that were not necessary. Here was a religious charity swimming in red ink.

  Sambi listened. He read the document carefully as Borré reviewed the high points. Borré’s blood was racing as he compared St. Frances Cabrini parish in Scituate, with all that rich waterfront acreage, the good people in their sixth year of vigil now, and the St. Peter parish in Cleveland, where the people had let Lennon take over the building, splitting off to form a new parish, taking their priest with them. Were these examples of schism, offered Borré—of people splitting from the church in breakaway sects, like the Society of St. Pius X? He left it there for Sambi to chew on.

  This is the legacy of Bishop Lennon, he told Sambi. The disasters of Reconfiguration were a huge factor in the sapping of money from the Boston archdiocese. He was doing the same thing in Cleveland.

  “Lennon is protected,” said Sambi.

  “By Cardinal Law?” replied Borré.

  The slight shrug said it all.

  Law protected Lennon so that Law’s disastrous handling of the money would be sealed away.

  After a third meeting with Sambi, Borré saw little chance that O’Malley would make a first move, or any reciprocal gesture. Lennon, however, had become an issue for Sambi, as the nuncio told him of angry letters from priests in Cleveland. Sambi said he would authorize an apostolic visitation, an investigation of Lennon by another prelate. The lesson of Boston was that if priests revolt against a bishop, his chances of survival go down.

  The larger lesson that Peter Borré carried out of his final meeting with the nuncio was that the power structure did not know how to change. So many well-educated Catholics who had the skills to rebuild a listing church were shunned by bishops fearful of facing the failures of the hierarchy. The scandalous handling of money was symptomatic of a larger institutional breakdown. The layers of denial in the Romanità mind were as thick as stone. This came home to Borré in the elegant language of understatement to which he had become so accustomed in Rome, via an e-mail to him from Archbishop Pietro Sambi:

  It is necessary to make known to the Cardinal [O’Malley] that your activity, perhaps undertaken in an erroneous manner, was not a struggle against him, but a manifestation of attachment to the Church, and to which She represents your faith in God … As proof positive of this, dissolve the organization and make yourself available to the Cardinal, who has a mandate from God to guide our Church, to collaborate with him for the purpose of holding open the greatest possible number of churches, as the presence of God in the community and the city. We are certain that this is also the innermost desire of His Eminence.

  Perhaps some breakthrough with O’Malley might in time be possible, but dissolving the Council of Parishes without a quid pro quo was not in Borré’s deck of cards.

  In the fall, on another trip to Rome, Borré drew encouragement from a priest in the Congregation for the Clergy who told him to continue with the parishioner challenges of their churches’ relegation “to profane use.” Puzzled, he replied that if parishes were closed, wasn’t the raising of a canonical issue like “profane use” little more than arguing over a cadaver? No, said the cleric. He explained that a bishop had the power to shut down a parish for any just reason, but the bishop’s authority to reduce the church to profane use (nonreligious status) and to order that it be sold could be challenged. The bishop needs a grave reason, the priest emphasized. In Italy the attitude was not to sell a church unless it was falling down. Italy had closed parishes in villages, but the churches remained churches. A priest might visit once a month, say Mass, baptize infants. The church had limited use, but the larger church wanted to maintain its presence by keeping these small churches.

  In the first week of 2011, a different legal shift was registered in a U.S. federal district court. After the diocese of Springfield, Massachusetts, closed Our Lady of Hope Church, the city council through its Historical Commission gave the church protected status to halt its demolition. The diocese sued the city, arguing that its rights under canon law had been abrogated. Judge Michael A. Ponsor ruled in the city’s favor. “This lawsuit places the court at the intersection of two important, protected rights: the right of a religious entity to manage its places of worship in accordance with church law without oversight by secular authorities, and the right of the larger community to have a role in the preservation of a beloved landmark that was once a church,” the judge ruled. The city council had taken action after the diocese had demolished another church, St. Joseph, “without really an opportunity to protect that church, which was of great historical significance to the city’s French immigrants and culture,” the city attorney, Edward M. Pikula, told the Springfield Republican.27

  The diocese had accused the city of “religious gerrymandering,” but a spokesman said the bishop would not take further action on the site until the Vatican ruled on the parishioners’ appeal of the closure. Judge Ponsor, it seemed, had echoed the logic of the Congregation for the Clergy priest who endorsed the maintaining of old churches in Italian villages.

  Fourteen parishes in the Pennsylvania diocese of Allentown had pressed appeals at the Congregation for the Clergy, expecting first to be denied and then to appeal to the Signatura. Meanwhile, Sister Christine Schenk had learned that fourteen parish appeals in Cleveland filed at the Congregation for the Clergy were on some sort of standby.

  But in early 2011, Borré’s strategy, carried out on the many trips to Rome—meeting with officials in Clergy and the Secretariat of State, working with Gullo in generating appeals to the Signatura—was bearing fruit. In January, Cardinal Raymond Burke, the prefect of the Signatura, in a speech to a gathering of clergy from England and Wales, said that closing a church should only come “as a last resort.”28 In early March, Congregation for the Clergy overruled the diocese of Allentown, Pennsylvania, on the shuttering of eight parishes out of the fourteen that had appealed. “It does not bring the parish back to life, but it puts on the table what could be a workable compromise: to physically reopen the locked-up church as a Catholic place of wors
hip,” Borré told the AP.29 He was feeling good about three other Clergy decrees that allowed as many churches to stay open in the diocese of Springfield, Massachusetts. At the same time, eleven of nineteen parish appeals to Clergy had decisions to reopen their doors as churches, if not as operating parishes. The distinction between sacred and profane use had become leverage against a real estate sale, although the bishop was under no order to send a priest to say Mass. Seven closed parishes in Boston had appeals at Clergy protesting the relegation of their churches to profane use. Cleveland parishes had fifteen appeals pending. In the six months since Borré had last seen Sambi, Lennon had become more beleaguered.

  Pope Benedict refused to intervene in the cases after the appeal by Carlo Gullo. Yet to Chris Schenk it was clear that Rome was searching for a response to the rising tide of people protesting the church closures. She had had many cordial dealings with bishops over the years, even prelates who did not share FutureChurch’s agenda. She knew those men had to show their obedience to the Vatican even when they did not agree, as in endorsing a celibate priesthood while the worsening shortage of priests forced them to close churches. But with so many outcries from the grass roots as people demanded that their sacred spaces not be shuttered and sold, the signal sent to Rome was that bishops had not shown pastoral leadership. In Cleveland the various groups had sent thousands of letters to the nuncio in Washington. Sambi told a Cleveland priest that he had gotten more letters from Cleveland than any other diocese. Schenk knew that St. Patrick parishioners had sent three thousand letters in one day.

  These stirrings of pluralism were part of a larger shift. An investigation, or “apostolic visitation,” of the women’s religious orders had been ordered by Cardinal Franc Rodé in Rome. Even if the women who led their congregations had not known Rodé was a loyalist to Father Maciel and the Legion of Christ, they would have resisted questions about their finances. The investigation did little to hurt the nuns, with no great Roman show of power. Someone at the Vatican realized that if you lose the nuns, you lose a big piece of the American church. Bob Bowers telling the New York Times that “very, very old men” in the Vatican were deeply out of touch was more than a display of courage by a gutsy priest who had lost his parish. Bowers was saying what Catholics could see: the Vatican had no mystique of religious elitism or even the shield of secrecy to combat the media coverage of clergy child molestation cases and the complicity of cardinals like Sodano and Castrillón. American bishops could not shelter Vatican letters from the subpoena power of lawyers like Jeff Anderson.

  Chris Schenk had changed her view of letter-writing campaigns. Several years before, FutureChurch members had written letters to Rome about the need for opening ordination beyond the male-only celibacy law to preserve access to the Eucharist; the advancing shortage of priests meant that Mass attendance would drop—the data pointed toward exactly what came to pass. In the 1990s pastors who circulated appeals in their churches, seeking a change in the celibacy law, had generated two thousand letters to the Vatican. The letters went to Bishop Pilla, who held a stance of silent passivity as the priest shortage deepened.

  The parish-closing protests galvanized deeper issues of spiritual integrity and money, striking the central nervous system of the church. Archbishop Sambi responded to many of the people who wrote to him. “He sent a letter to one parishioner with information about how to appeal,” explains Sister Schenk. “The nuncio is the pope’s eyes and ears in America. It is a serious issue when fifty parishes are closing in Cleveland while many of them are solvent. Cleveland is a heartbeat of the church in America. How can leadership maintain credibility while it threatens the very lifeblood of the church?”

  The Reconfiguration plan that Lennon had grafted onto the Boston archdiocese backfired on O’Malley. In Cleveland it backfired on Lennon. Neither bishop knew how to change course: the issue for them was submission by the people to the selling of churches, upholding their authority and preventing further disclosure on Cardinal Law. In Boston, people voted with their feet; financial losses deepened. In Cleveland, Lennon defiantly said final Masses at parishes he suppressed with police escorts. Was this a sign of Christ on earth?

  “I grieve for the capacity of the clerical system to denigrate basic human rights,” said Sister Chris Schenk. “As Catholics we are supporting a wall of corruption with our money, whether we want to or not. Our job is to do something about it or risk being complicit. It’s not enough to say, ‘The bishop—or pastor—will handle things.’ Lay leaders, particularly good Catholic businessmen, have to recognize what this corrosive secrecy is doing to us and be part of the solution. I think Mike Ryan’s plan to safeguard the collections must be implemented from the parish to the diocese, up to the USCCB and Peter’s Pence. We need transparency.”

  Well, sure, I countered. But how does “transparency” happen in a power structure afflicted with such rot and inertia? In 2010 Italian authorities had impounded funds from the Vatican Bank for alleged money laundering. An investigation of the bank by Italian authorities was under way as Pope Benedict made apologies to clergy abuse victims; but he retreated into a cocoon of silence as cardinals in his Curia were exposed for shielding pedophiles or facilitating schemes to profiteer off church sales. With his hands dirty from the Follieri scandal, Sodano had scoffed at the abuse crisis in an Easter sermon. Popes, cardinals, and bishops betraying human rights are more than mere cracks in a power grid, I told the good nun. How much worse could it get?

  “With Cleveland I cry and lament,” she replied. “And yes, I get depressed; however, this will lead to something better for the universal church. I always go back to Saint Paul: ‘But where sin abounded, grace abounded even more’—Romans 5:20. God finds a way to bring good out of evil. That is the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. This is the core of my Christianity. Jesus stood against unjust authority. We push against the rock of injustice in our own church. Evil does not have the final word.”

  EPILOGUE

  BENEDICT XVI: POPE OF IRONIES

  In 2008 the global economy plunged, thanks to titanic greed on Wall Street. Investment bankers created an arcane vocabulary of credit swaps, derivatives, and mortgage-backed securities to mask a riverboat gambler’s monopoly on the table money. For years, bankers donated heavily to well-chosen political troughs and reaped rewards with the dismantling of federal regulatory practices, a legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression. In gutting oversight standards, particularly at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations abetted a bankers’ gambling culture in which only the risk was missing. Wall Street built a wall of fictional value on assets gleaned from the buying and reselling of mortgages in a bonanza of easy lending. The wizards pulled bonus money off the top. When the housing bubble popped, the wall of assets crumbled. Lawyers—expensive ones—materialized from the dust to keep executives out of prison. The U.S. Treasury under President Bush and President Obama used taxpayer billions to save banks and revitalize lending. By 2011 credit was still tight, unemployment was high, the national debt had soared, but the recession appeared to have passed. The bonuses still flowed like wedding wine.

  The Catholic Church’s financial convulsions are another take on the spoils of deregulation, but the church fisc was never regulated much to begin with. The Vatican Bank is not included in the Holy See’s financial statements. How much of Peter’s Pence actually goes to the needy is a mystery. So is Allied Irish Bank’s role in American dioceses that struggled to pay abuse settlements. Was AIB a pass-through for Vatican funds to help certain dioceses while others had no such advantage?

  Politics is the movement of money. Every system has its players. The Vatican deemed Cardinal Sodano a descendant of Jesus’s apostles. Certain congregations were his to manipulate for Maciel and Follieri. The scheme in which Follieri routed at least $387,300 to the Vatican Bank would have destroyed Sodano’s career in a democracy, if not sent him to prison. Follieri pleaded gu
ilty to money laundering in New York. How did the money circulate after it entered the Vatican Bank? Was it, in a legal sense, laundered? Stepping down as secretary of state, Sodano became dean of the College of Cardinals.

  The church financial system resembles a constellation of medieval fiefdoms in which each bishop manages his fisc ideally to serve his people but with an eye riveted on Rome. Few dioceses subject their finances to robust auditing. Every five years the bishop sends a secret statement to the Vatican, which has scant interest in “transparency.” The culture of passivity by which most Catholics receive the sacraments and give their dollars is a bedrock. As long as the people ask no questions about their money, the bishop can ban reformers from church grounds. The issue is not faith but fear that people might see where the money goes.

  The beatification ceremony of John Paul II slated for May 2011 was an ironic way of avoiding that pope’s call for “the purification of memory.” Why beatify a pope whose faith in Maciel and myopia on the abuse crisis left a trail of human wreckage? The rush to spectacle cannot airbrush facts from history.

  The Catholic Church’s great problem is structural mendacity, institutionalized lying. The church that fosters Christian witness through the values of peace and reaching out to the world’s poor is also saddled with bishops who, like Father Maciel’s Legionaries, cannot criticize their cardinals, and with cardinals who fail to uphold the human rights of children. Under heavy media pressure, the U.S. bishops in 2002 adopted a youth protection charter. “In 1985 I didn’t know anyone else who had been molested by a priest,” says Barbara Blaine, the founder of SNAP. “Today, bishops have removed hundreds of predators from ministry. Survivors who speak up are more likely to be believed and to receive sympathy from parishioners and compassion from church officials. Secrecy is still a top priority for bishops; but the church has safe-touch programs for children. Teachers and lay workers are taught to report inappropriate behavior. The climate is safer for children and better for survivors who report abuse.” Yet, as Blaine points out, the hierarchy’s concealment of perpetrators is still a reality. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, three years after the youth charter was adopted, put an accused pedophile back in ministry over warnings from his advisory board. The priest reoffended, went to jail, the archdiocese paid heavily to the victims—and Cardinal George was elected president of the USCCB.1