Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  Rewarding failure is so embedded in the good old boy culture of the ecclesial princes as to suggest that bishops think the church will always be rich. Demographics do not bode well for maintaining double standards. A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey found that Catholicism is still America’s largest single religion—about 25 percent of the population identify themselves as Catholic—but the numbers are in decline. The second-largest cohort polled, at 10 percent, consisted of ex-Catholics, people who left the church.2 The monetary losses in the Boston archdiocese with so many believers gone may be seen as a worst case or the shape of things to come. The pivotal group is women of child-bearing age; if they continue to leave, the church loses their children. The rise of an Irish American and Italian American middle class took several generations to achieve, but the early-twentieth-century migrations fostered a booming church. Although the influx of Latinos has thwarted a steeper Catholic population loss, today’s church is scaling back, struggling to provide care for aged clergy and nuns. As bishops shut churches against the people’s will, questions of financial ethics hover like black clouds.

  By the lights of apostolic succession, the American bishops’ youth protection charter of 2002 prevented lay review boards from investigating bishops. Cardinals, too, must be protected from the intrusions of justice. But the assumptions of immunity for prelates collided with Pope Benedict’s concern for the secularization of Catholic Europe. His agenda for evangelizing Europe and renewing the church ran headlong into the 2010 news coverage of clergy abuse cases and European bishops who concealed perpetrators, just as in America.

  The European bishops might heed a prescient American legal scholar. Patrick J. Schiltz published an article in America, the Jesuit magazine, in 2003. At the time he held a chair at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. Citing his background in doing defense work for dioceses in abuse cases, Schiltz wrote: “I must confess that the church will not restore my trust until it holds negligent bishops accountable for the incalculable damage that they have inflicted on the church.” Schiltz was writing as litigation began to surge, just as the second wave of Boston plaintiffs received an $85 million settlement. A billion dollars more in church payouts from other states was yet to come. Schiltz recommended a reverse-class-action strategy.

  The church should set up a national tribunal—a group of extremely well-respected people who are completely independent of the church—to arbitrate sexual claims against the church. A diocese that wanted to “opt in” to the system would invite victims who appear to be telling the truth about being sexually abused—which is about 98 percent of them—to use the tribunal. The diocese would essentially tell the victims that, if they forgo litigation and instead present their claims to the tribunal, the diocese will pay the victim whatever the tribunal decides is fair. Such a system would have major advantages for both victims and the church.

  Victims would be certain of getting compensation. The diocese would agree not to raise the statute of limitations or any other defense. In other words, the question before the tribunal would not be “whether” but “how much?” Dioceses would recognize that regardless of what the law says, they have a moral obligation to compensate victims fairly. Moreover, victims could get quick compensation. In the court system, cases often drag on four or five years …

  The most important benefit of this system is that it would let the church and the victim work together in a common cause—achieving a just and healing result—rather than pit them against each other through several years of litigation. Needless to say, there would be a lot of details to work out, but unless the church takes bold and creative steps such as these, it is in for a grim few years in the legal arena.3

  Schiltz was right about the grim legal arena ahead. Eight years later, lawsuits continue. Bishops in Europe could embrace his plan, reduce losses, and gain respect in the eyes of their followers and the news media. It might yet work in parts of America. Schiltz, who is now a federal judge, declined to be interviewed.

  Benedict XVI’s ascetic personality and history, as a cardinal, of punishing church intellectuals hardly suggest a reformer who would embrace Schiltz’s proposal; but as the annus horribilis of 2010 drew to a close, Benedict took a calculated risk with the Legion of Christ. He installed Cardinal Velasio De Paolis as papal delegate to the order—read: overseer. De Paolis is a canon lawyer, former secretary of the Signatura, and president of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, the office that audits the balance sheets and budgets of other curial departments. As he began the process of drafting a new constitution for the Legion, De Paolis had to locate its assets. Benedict was gambling that it was better to salvage the organization than to dismantle it, despite its many disillusioned ex-members and the opinions of six U.S. bishops who banned the Legion and Regnum Christi from their dioceses. The pope ordered an investigation of Regnum Christi. Benedict began prodding the Legion to compensate Maciel’s victims, especially older ones who no longer had legal recourse. Jeff Anderson sued the Legion in Connecticut on behalf of Maciel’s son for allegations of incest committed on U.S. soil. The Vatican has no mechanism for compensating victims per se, but the pope wanted the Legion’s coffers to do that; he was, in a way, acting like a judge pushing two parties to settle a dispute—a wise use of power. Bishop Ricardo Watty Urquidi of Tepic, Mexico, one of five apostolic visitators who had investigated the Legion for the Holy See, told reporters in Mexico on May 18, 2010: “We need, then, to take care of [Maciel’s] victims, as much inside as outside the Legion, and to compensate them for damages. This is something we all agreed on, and the pope accepted—just as he has been doing, and bravely so.”4

  The Vatican monarchical system has no separation of powers, nor a bona fide court system for criminal prosecution or property rights. Benedict in theory had the power to punish or call down cardinals, though to do so would violate the unwritten laws of apostolic succession. Benedict seemed ill-suited for the hard choices of reform during the debacles of 2010, as exemplified by his refusal to accept the resignations offered by two Irish bishops for their complicity in harboring predators. But his design that Legion assets be used to compensate victims, if achieved, would set a precedent. The Legionaries as a religious order are subject to papal obedience. To punish Sodano would be a greater act of justice.

  The Vatican cannot be reformed without an independent court system to supplant the tribunals that cater to bishops. An international commission of Catholic constitutional scholars could craft a system to codify children’s rights, the preservation of parishes, and oversight of bishops. The alternative is a recurrent spectacle of parish-closing protests, while victims’ lawyers target diocesan assets, notably in Europe, with more shame heaped on the Vatican.

  The financial accountability of bishops is an issue that seems destined for more activity in the civil courts. Corporation sole—the bishop owns all—is an anachronism prone to abuse. When American parishioners have sought rights as beneficiaries to their churches, judges have largely bowed to canon law, as in the Ohio decision that gave ownership of St. James Parish in the town of Kansas to Bishop Leonard P. Blair of Toledo. The Ohio court allowed Bishop Blair to pay his lawyers from the parish bank accounts, close the church, demolish it, and put the land up for sale. And the parishioners’ recourse? A sovereign monarchy that bars them from sitting in the court, since there are no open arguments anyway. The Apostolic Signatura and the Congregation for the Clergy make a mockery of justice. As American judges learn how the Vatican system works, a few of them, perhaps even in Ohio, may emulate Mr. Ponsor of the federal bench in Springfield, Massachusetts, in recognizing religious property as a more complex issue of democratic jurisprudence.

  VATICAN BANK IN TROUBLE AGAIN

  The Institute of Religious Works, or Vatican Bank, has 40,000 account holders from among the members of religious congregations, and cardinals sit on its board of directors. Church officials over the years have said it should not be considered a
bank, but rather a massive trust to manage the capital of religious orders, relief organizations, and church charities, getting the best returns on funds invested, thereby promoting charitable and other works. But from its small suite in a medieval tower near the courtyard leading to the Apostolic Palace, IOR has also functioned as an offshore bank by virtue of its status in Vatican City, a sovereign state. Italy exerted little control after the Vatican paid a $242 million fine a quarter century ago to resolve IOR’s role in the money-laundering scheme involving Archbishop Marcinkus, Roberto Calvi, and Michele Sindona that caused Banco Ambrosiano’s collapse.5

  Monetary wire transfers is a serious issue for central banks of various countries in trying to thwart terrorist groups and organized crime. In September 2010, Italian authorities impounded $30 million in IOR assets on suspicion of money laundering and ordered an investigation of the IOR chairman Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and his chief deputy. It was a bitter pill for Tedeschi, an economics scholar, daily communicant, and Opus Dei member with an image of rectitude. Italy’s central bank flagged transfers from an IOR account in Credito Artigiano to JP Morgan Frankfurt for $26 million, and to Banca del Funcino for $4 million, for insufficient documentation under European Union laws. The Holy See stated it was “perplexed and astonished” that that information was available to Italy’s central bank. Tedeschi voluntarily spoke with prosecutors and pledged to work with the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to put the IOR in full compliance.6

  For all of its religious clients, and the funds it provides the Holy Father for his charitable uses, IOR had “an unknown number of private Italian account holders who use the Vatican as a tax haven,” according to the Financial Times. A month after the $30 million impoundment, Guy Dinmore reported that police in Sicily made six arrests linked to

  Father Orazio Bonaccorsi allegedly using an account in the name of the Vatican bank to help his father launder €250,000 ($350,000) he had obtained from European Union funding for an allegedly non-existent fish farm project.

  After passing through the account as a “charity” donation in 2006, the money allegedly returned to Sicily to be withdrawn by an uncle previously convicted for mafia association …

  “IOR cannot work like this any more,” an Italian official said. “People have used IOR as a screen,” he added. “What is behind the screen? That is the mechanism we are trying to dismantle,” he told the Financial Times.7

  The $30 million was in a state of banking limbo when the Holy See issued a statement by Pope Benedict on December 30, 2010, promulgating a law for the Vatican city-state “concerning the prevention and countering of the laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and the financing of terrorism.” The pope created a Financial Information Authority to ensure that IOR and all Vatican departments adhered to European regulations on money laundering. He named Cardinal Attilo Nicora, who administers the Vatican real estate and financial holdings, as its chairman. The Vatican appointed a four-member board of prominent academics in relevant fields to sit in Rome.

  A POPE OF IRONIES

  As the years of prosecuting theologians sink into his past, Benedict XVI stands as the pope of ironies. The cardinal whose tactics drove Hans Küng to compare him to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (“he fears nothing more than freedom”) must, as pope, balance the agenda of moral absolutes with the politics of restraint.8 In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky uses the inquisitor’s cameo to condemn the church for abandoning Christ: Jesus appears in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition. The sinister monk who has been burning heretics puts Jesus in a cell and lays on a cynical lecture about power and why the fearful masses must be subdued. Jesus stands silent. Then, in a sublime gesture of forgiveness, Jesus kisses the inquisitor and leaves. For Dostoyevsky, the Church of Rome will betray the conscience of Christ anew.

  Ratzinger-as-prosecutor peers over Benedict’s shoulder, repulsed by the structural sins and crimes. The pope, as chief pastor, must weigh flexibility for the greater good. Does he fear a faith unmoored by prosecutions let loose?

  Creating a commission to clean up the Vatican Bank, like the punishment of Maciel and takeover of the Legion, suggests a pope gaining confidence with his powers. The powers are supreme. How far should he go? To let the likes of Cardinal Sodano simply age and slip away is a passive sign that justice is a ritual of half measures. The pope cannot be an authentic voice for peace, affirm the dignity of human life, and preach the values of a greener planet if people see that Vatican justice is a farce. Will justice sink beneath the weight of popes forever bound to the hubris of apostolic succession? Questions hang; a hungry people wait.

  The miracle is that the Eucharist endures.

  NOTES

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The many interviews for this book involved countless follow-up calls and e-mails; to have listed each interview as a citation was impractical. Most direct quotations are not cited as footnotes. I have kept background sources, who spoke with assurance of anonymity, to a minimum; but investigative reporting, particularly at the Vatican and in high levels of the Catholic Church, relies on some sources with careers to protect, hence their insistence on not being identified. The notes list a small number of interviews that were germane to specific points like a published citation. Many of the news articles and documents cited in this book can be found in the online library archive www.bishopaccountability.org.

  PROLOGUE: PRINCES OF THE REALM

  1. Hans Küng, The Catholic Church: A Short History (New York, 2001), p. 181.

  2. Message of Pope Paul VI, Celebration of the Day of Peace, January 1, 1972, www.vatican.va.

  3. Luigi Accattoli, When a Pope Asks for Forgiveness: The Mea Culpa’s of John Paul II (Boston, 1998), p. 96.

  4. Ibid., p. 118.

  5. James Gollin, Worldly Goods (New York, 1971), p. 492.

  6. Sam Dillon and Leslie Wayne, “Scandals in the Church: The Money,” New York Times, June 13, 2002.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Brian Ross, “Archbishop Settles Sex Assault Claim,” Good Morning America, May 23, 2002.

  9. Tom Heinan, “Rome Endowments to Honor Weakland,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 22, 1997.

  10. Rembert G. Weakland, A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop (Grand Rapids, MI, 2009), p. 341. Weakland’s account of the legal settlement with Paul Marcoux—whom I interviewed as part of the ABC News investigation—is a study in self-pity, riddled with inaccuracies.

  11. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987), p. 214.

  12. Douglas MacMillan, “A Business Plan for the Catholic Church,” Business-Week, September 30, 2008.

  13. The Catholic Church in America—Meeting Real Needs in Your Neighborhood (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2002), pp. 13–14.

  14. Harris provided his opinion in a telephone interview after extensive dialogue on his interpretation of data.

  15. Harris utilized the data from Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). He explains: “Estimates for the total parish Offertory collection for the years 2002 through 2006 were calculated as follows. CARA annually collected Offertory collection data from members of the International Catholic Stewardship Council (ICSC). In addition to estimates for the Offertory collection, ICSC members also provided estimates of the number of households by diocese. The response rate for these data requests was approximately 65 percent. The data were organized according to a structure of seven geographic regions: Northeast, South Atlantic, South, Great Lakes, Midwest, Mountain, and Pacific. We first developed an average household donation by diocese for every responding diocese. The regional average statistic was then multiplied by the number of households in a diocese that did not report Offertory collection data. The reported data and the calculated data were added together to form an estimated total Offertory collection for every diocese in the region. The process was repeated for all re
gions to form an estimated Offertory collection for the fifty states and the District of Columbia.”

  16. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The Nature and Scope of the Problems of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2004), p. 105, table 6.

  17. Joseph Claude Harris, “The Sexual Abuse Scandal in the United States: What It Cost” (unpublished, 2010). Harris draws his data from annual studies on data related to the abuse crisis by CARA.

  18. In a personal communication with the author, Mary Gautier, Ph.D., of CARA explains a discrepancy: “Dioceses are not consistent in what they report to The Official Catholic Directory, which is the only source of those data. If a diocese merges three parishes into one, it should report that it has closed three parishes and created one new parish. Too often, they do not report this accurately.” A “new” parish formed by a consolidation of existing ones, however, is not the same as a church developed and built to be a Catholic parish.