Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  20. U.S. v. Anton Zgoznik, case no. 1:06CR394-02, government exhibit 72-1. The U.S. Attorney’s office made available to me the CD-R of the taped conversation, and the transcript that was scrolled for jurors as the tape played during the trial. The transcript per se was admitted only as an aid for the jury. See also James F. McCarty, “Tape Evidence Splits Trials of 2 Charged with Catholic Diocese Kickbacks,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 9, 2007.

  21. Trial transcript, John Wright testimony, U.S. v. Anton Zgoznik, case no. 1:06CR394-02, August 27, 2007. All quotations from the proceedings that follow are taken from the transcript, unless otherwise indicated.

  22. James F. McCarty, “Juror in Diocesan Kickback Trial Wanted to Hear More from Pilla,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 5, 2007.

  23. James F. McCarty, “At Church Kickback Trial, ‘Roman Collar Amnesia,’ ” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 4, 2007.

  24. James F. McCarty, “Jury Now Has Diocese Kickback Case,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 28, 2007.

  25. Michael O’Malley, “A Fight for Churches,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 2, 2009.

  26. Diocesan Finances, 2008–2009, Key Diocesan Realities—a Context for Parish Consolidation, www.dioceseofcleveland.org.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Michael O’Malley and Robert L. Smith, “Parishes Get Bishop’s Decision: 29 Will Close and 41 Will Merge,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 15, 2009.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Diocesan Finances, 2008–2009, Key Diocesan Realities, www.dioceseofcleveland.org.

  32. O’Malley, “A Fight for Churches.”

  33. Michael Polensek, telephone interview with the author, October 22, 2010.

  34. Reverend Robert Begin, letter to Archbishop Pietro Sambi, April 6, 2009.

  35. Michael O’Malley, “St. Colman to Stay Open After Bishop Reconsiders,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 2, 2009. See also Michael O’Malley, “The Rev. Bob Begin, Known as the Rebel Priest, Wins His Latest Battle—to Keep St. Colman Church Open,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 15, 2009.

  36. Tom Roberts, “Cleveland Diocese Shaken by Seismic Shifts,” National Catholic Reporter, May 9, 2009.

  37. Tom Roberts, “Scranton’s Bishop Martino Stepping Down,” National Catholic Reporter, August 28, 2009.

  38. Tim Townsend, “The St. Stanislaus Saga: Is Resolution Imminent?” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 1, 2010; Tim Townsend, “After Years of Discord, Status of St. Stanislaus’s Is Coming to an End,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 31, 2010.

  39. Malcolm Gay, “Renegade Priest Leads a Split St. Louis Parish,” New York Times, August 13, 2010; Joseph Kenny, “St. Louis Parish Rejects Archdiocese’s Proposal,” Catholic News Service, August 24, 2010, in National Catholic Reporter.

  40. Joan M. Nuth, Ph. D., “The Story of a Church,” unpublished. Nuth, a systematic theologian at John Carroll University in Cleveland, sent the essay to Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio in Washington, D.C., on April 18, 2009. The essay appeared in the parish’s online newsletter, which has ceased circulation on the Internet since the parish was suppressed.

  41. Court of Appeals, Third District, Seneca County, Kansas St. James Parish of Ohio, et al. Plaintiffs-Appellants v. The Catholic Diocese of Toledo in America, et al., Defendants-Appellees, case no. 13-08-19.

  42. Rachel Dissell, “Final Mass at Downtown St. Peter Catholic Church Leaves ‘An Empty Tomb,’ ” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 4, 2010.

  CHAPTER 11: THE DEBTS OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION

  1. “The Plot Thickens: Two Normas, Maciel, Consecrated and Quirece and des Andres,” March 25, 2010, www.exlcblog.com; Carmen H. Moreno, “Las familias de Maciel,” Quien, March 19, 2010.

  2. George Weigel, author of a 1998 biography of John Paul, was among the pope’s advisers at the Vatican during the 2002 abuse crisis. Weigel portrays the pope as a victim of Maciel’s deception in The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (New York, 2010). Weigel argues that John Paul was poorly informed by Vatican officials in 2002. In response to the pounding international media coverage at the time, John Paul issued a statement that condemned clergy predators yet left room for redemption of those priests (see chapter 3). The inconclusive nature of that document mirrored his ambivalence on the issue. John Paul was one of the great popes and a towering figure of the twentieth century, but his failures of church governance were substantial. By bending over backward to absolve John Paul of responsibility in the abuse crisis, Weigel avoids—indeed, distorts—the historical record. In 1984 Father Tom Doyle wrote a forty-two-page summary of the abuse crisis, as it unfolded, for his boss, Archbishop Pio Laghi, the papal nuncio, who sent the information to Rome. In Vows of Silence (New York, 2004), Gerald Renner and I tracked the escalation of scandals in the 1990s, particularly the case of Cardinal Groër of Austria, whose 1995 retirement amid a flood of allegations we now know caused great tension between Ratzinger and Sodano over the Vatican’s tight-lipped response to Groër’s history of sexual abuses. Weigel (unlike Jonathan Kwitny in his biography Man of the Century) ignores the well-documented record of John Paul’s passivity and inaction for years before he was weakened by Parkinson’s disease. By failing to cite the interviews Maciel’s victims gave to us and other journalists, Weigel approaches Maciel as if the public accusations had no merit until they became testimony with the CDF investigator, Monsignor Scicluna, whose sessions began the day John Paul died. By avoiding the public record on Maciel during John Paul’s lifetime, Weigel silences himself on Cardinal Sodano’s machinations and why Ratzinger waited eight years before ordering an investigation. Ignoring the evidence, Weigel places John Paul above fault, citing only the “incapacity and weakness on the part of the Pope’s subordinates, who ought to have had, when circumstances demanded it, the courage to lead according to the pattern he had set” (p. 514). Regarding the abuse crisis, that “pattern” is the issue. Weigel does not identify those subordinates, which is not surprising. Hagiography is no handmaiden of history; however, a valid case for sainthood cannot be made without confronting the factual reality, and human failings, in the life of a given candidate for sainthood.

  Weigel treats Maciel as a master of deception, the pope as his victim. On page 552 of The End and the Beginning, Weigel in footnote 139 says that he interviewed Maciel on February 19, 1998. This is remarkable. Maciel avoided journalists for most of his life; after the 1997 Hartford Courant report he gave an orchestrated statement to Jésus Colina, the Regnum Christi editor of Zenit, the Legion news service, for the book Christ Is My Life (2003), which constituted his self-defense. Weigel actually got Maciel to talk a year after the Hartford Courant report of February 23, 1997, that put his victims on record. What did Weigel ask him? What did Maciel say? For years thereafter, Weigel’s endorsement of the Legion was prominent on the website LegionaryFacts.org, which defended Maciel against his putative enemies, the victims. In 2009, when the news broke on Maciel’s daughter, Weigel used the First Things website to call for a Vatican investigation of the Legion. Better late than never, Weigel was also engaging in a personal form of spin control, positioning himself against his previous support of the order and his own record of whitewashing history.

  3. A June 2010 editorial in New Oxford Review, “The Double Life of Marcial Maciel,” quoted Podles as saying that Groër “had molested almost every student he had come into contact with for decades.” In response to my e-mail about his source, Podles wrote on November 20, 2010: “A German homosexual web site claimed that Groer had molested almost every student (1,000+) that he had come into contact with. I asked Cardinal [Christoph] Schönborn about this claim, and he said that Groer had made strong homoerotic gestures to most of his students, but that the gestures did not extend as far as penetration.”

  4. John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, Apostolic Letter, to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone, May 22, 1994, www.vatican.va.

  5.
See in particular Paul Lakeland, The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church (New York, 2003).

  6. Garry Wills, Papal Sin (New York, 2000), p. 190.

  7. Eugene Kennedy, The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality (New York, 2001), p. 66.

  8. Marco Politi, “The Church’s New Age of Dissent,” The Tablet, March 21, 2009.

  9. Ibid.

  10. “MG Critical Path” study, no author or release date given.

  11. Avery Dulles, “What Distinguishes the Jesuits?” America, January 15, 2007.

  12. “ ‘Psalter of My Hours,’ the Work Plagiarized by Maciel,” Catholic News Agency, December 18, 2009.

  13. U.S. Federal Court, Minnesota District, case no. 0:04-CV-02895-RHK-AJB, Sellors v. Legionaries of Christ et al., filed June 4, 2004, http://www.mnd.uscourts.gov/. See also Giselle Sainte Marie, “Gospel Charity Cuts Both Ways: Lifting the Veil on How the Legion Builds Their Kingdom: The Familia Saga,” www.regainnetwork.org.

  14. Albert Camus, “The Almond Trees,” Lyrical and Critical Essays (New York, 1968), p. 135.

  15. Jason Berry, “Legionary Founder Said to Father a Child,” National Catholic Reporter, February 3, 2010.

  16. U.S. District Court of Oregon, case no. CV 02 430 MO, John Doe v. Holy See.

  CHAPTER 12: ANOTHER CALIFORNIAS

  1. Jill Hodges, “Attacking Abuse: Lawyer Finds His Niche Suing Authority Figures in Abuse Cases,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 20, 1991.

  2. Peter Slavin, “Jeff Anderson, Jousting with the Vatican from a Small Law Office in St. Paul,” Washington Post, April 19, 2010.

  3. U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Division, case no. 10-CV-00346-RTR, John Doe 16 v. Holy See, April 22, 2010.

  4. Laurie Goodstein, “Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys,” New York Times, March 24, 2010.

  5. Kim Ode, “On a Crusade,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 26, 2010.

  6. David Schimke, “True Believer,” St. Paul City Pages, April 16, 2003.

  7. Tim Townsend, “Abuse Scandal Puts Victims’ Group Back in the Spotlight,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 20, 2010.

  8. Jason Berry, Lead Us Not into Temptation (New York, 1992), pp. 281–86, 371–73.

  9. Daniel J. Wakin, “Catholic Priest Who Aids Church Sexual Abuse Victims Loses His Job,” New York Times, April 29, 2004.

  10. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York, 2006), p. 360.

  11. Ibid., pp. 359–65. On Western Sequoia, see Ron Russell, “Taj Mahony,” New Times (L.A.), December 20, 2001.

  12. Msgr. Francis J. Weber, Cathedral: Our Lady of the Angels (Mission Hills, CA, 2004), p. 69.

  13. Steve Lopez, “The Amazing ‘Teflon Cardinal,’ ” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2002.

  14. The testimony cited is drawn from Lopez, “The Amazing ‘Teflon Cardinal,’ ” unless noted otherwise.

  15. Testimony cited in Jason Berry, “Church in Crisis: Mahony, in Legal Battle, Insists Church Has Right to Secrecy,” National Catholic Reporter, March 18, 2005.

  16. Margaret Leslie Davis, Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny (Berkeley, CA, 1998), p. 277.

  17. Msgr. Francis J. Weber, A History of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and Its Precursor Jurisdictions in Southern California, 1840–2007 (Los Angeles, 2007), pp. 9–11.

  18. George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano, Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York, 1993), p. 71.

  19. Davis, City of Quartz, pp. 330–31.

  20. Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church (New York, 1997), p. 258.

  21. Msgr. Francis J. Weber, His Eminence of Los Angeles: James Francis Cardinal McIntyre, vol. 1 (Mission Hills, CA, 1977), p. 237.

  22. Msgr. Francis J. Weber, “Historical Reflections,” in Days of Change, Years of Challenge: The Homilies, Addresses, and Talks of Cardinal Timothy Manning, ed. Francis Weber (Los Angeles, 1987), p. 107.

  23. Kevin Starr, Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990–2003 (New York, 2006), p. 17.

  24. On Hawkes’s financial control, see Thomas J. Reese, Archbishop: Inside the Power Structure of the Roman Catholic Church (San Francisco, 1989), p. 190. How priests feared Hawkes is from a background interview, Los Angeles, November 2009. On Hawkes’s probate, see Superior Court of California, Los Angeles County, P702033, filed October 17, 1985.

  25. Los Angeles Archdiocese, Report to the People of God, February 17, 2004, lists Hawkes with two accusers. Demarco’s client makes a third. Terence McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org explains further: “The archdiocese no longer has the list on their site, though they pretend to—they deleted the list, and only post the introductory essay now, without saying that the Report is bowdlerized. See our brief explanation of this situation with links at: http://www.bishopaccountability.org/AtAGlance/lists.htm.”

  26. Weber, Cathedral, p. 102.

  27. Ibid., pp. 105–6.

  28. Joseph Claude Harris, “Paying for Parish Programs: Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” unpublished, July 2001.

  29. Manny Vega, conversations with the author, Los Angeles and Pasadena, June 2005; screening of videotape of Vega’s life prepared for settlement negotiations under the auspices of attorney Ray Boucher. Tom Kisken, “Officer Battles Personal Crime,” Ventura County Star, April 27, 2003, is an exceptional report.

  30. Berry, “Mahony in Legal Battle.” The quotation in question was from an earlier Los Angeles Times article. The legal narrative in this part of the chapter is drawn from the National Catholic Reporter coverage.

  31. Jeffrey Anderson, “Behind the Robes,” L.A. Weekly, March 18, 2003. He is no relation to the attorney.

  32. Glenn F. Bunting, Ralph Frammolino, and Richard Winton, “Archdiocese for Years Kept Accusations from Police,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2002.

  33. Larry B. Stammer, “One Church, Two Missions,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, August 25, 2002.

  34. Larry B. Stammer, “Mahony’s Top Chiefs All Resign,” October 31, 2002.

  35. Thomas P. Doyle, A.W.R. Sipe, and Patrick J. Wall, Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church’s 2,000-Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse (Los Angeles, 2006).

  36. On Stewart’s relationship with the archdiocese, see Ron Russell, “Taj Mahony,” New Times (Los Angeles), December 20, 2001.

  37. Berry, “Mahony in Legal Battle.”

  38. Jason Berry, “Telephone Interview with Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles on the Sexual Abuses in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles,” February 12, 2005, posted National Catholic Reporter, March 18, 2005, as a sidebar to “Mahony in Legal Battle.”

  39. Berry, “Mahony in Legal Battle.”

  40. Report to the People of God, February 18, 2004, in The Tidings, www.archdiocese.la.org.

  41. Jean Guccione, William Lobdell, and Megan Garvey, “O.C. Diocese Settles Abuse Cases,” Los Angeles Times, December 3, 2004.

  42. This section on Levada is based on my reporting for a profile of the archbishop, “The Man Who Kept the Secrets,” San Francisco Magazine, September 2005.

  43. Ibid., See also “Sipe Reports XX,” www.richardsipe.com; Court of Appeal of California, Second Appellate District, Division Eight, B198136, Doe v. Salesian Society, filed January 29, 2008.

  44. William Lobdell and Jean Guccione, “A Novel Tack by the Cardinal,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2004.

  45. Berry, “Mahony in Legal Battle.”

  46. Ibid.

  47. Jason Berry, “Cracks in the Wall of the Curia,” National Catholic Reporter, May 10, 2010.

  48. Jason Berry, “How Fr. Maciel Built His Empire, Part 2,” National Catholic Reporter, April 12, 2010.

  49. John Spano, Paul Pringle, and Jean Guccione, “Church to Settle with 45 Accusers,” Los Angeles Times, December 2, 2006.

  50. John L. Allen Jr., “Sex Abuse Settlement, t
he Pope’s Visit and Ecumenism: Cardinal Mahony Speaks with NCR,” National Catholic Reporter, November 30, 2007.

  51. Joe Mozingo and John Spano, “$660-Million Settlement in Abuse Cases,” Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2007.

  52. The AIB loan is referenced in a sidebar box, credited to the archdiocese. See Rebecca Trounson, “Parishes May Help Pay Sex Abuse Tab,” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2008.

  53. Weber, Cathedral, p. 227.

  54. Conor O’Clery, “Abuse Scandals Put Catholic Church in US in Cash and Manpower Crisis,” Irish Times, April 13, 2002.

  55. Ellie Hidalgo, “Archdiocese Outlines Financial Recovery Strategy,” The Tidings, March 14, 2008.

  56. United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of California, case no. 07-00939-LA 11, In Re: The Roman Catholic Bishop of San Diego, a California Corporation Sole, Debtor, Chapter 11, First Report of Expert R. Todd Neilson, CPA Pursuant to Appointment, dated April 30, 2007, pp. 165–66.

  57. Greg Moran and Mark Sauer, “Legal Experts Fault Bankruptcy Option,” San Diego Union-Tribune, September 10, 2007.

  58. Sandi Dolbee and Mark Sauer, “Judge’s Tears, Rebuke Close Case,” San Diego Union-Tribune, November 2, 2007.

  59. Trounson, “Parishes May Help Pay Sex Abuse Tab.”

  CHAPTER 13: AMERICA AND THE VATICAN

  1. Jeffrey Anderson, “Roger’s Nest,” L.A. Weekly, March 11, 2004. The Los Angeles journalist is no relation to the attorney profiled in the previous chapter.

  2. Peter Borré, “Request for Mediation,” letter to the Reverend Monsignor Pietro Parolin, April 7, 2009.

  3. Jerry Filteau, “Louisianans Face Long Recovery from Katrina, New Orleans Flooding,” Catholic News Service, August 31, 2005.

  4. Will H. Coleman, “The French Market,” in Frank de Caro, editor, and Rosan Augusta Jordan, associate editor, Louisiana Sojourns: Travelers’s Tales and Literary Journeys (Baton Rouge, LA: 1998), pp. 89–91.

  5. Randy J. Sparks, “ ‘An Anchor to the People’: Hurricane Katrina, Religious Life, and Recovery in New Orleans,” arranged and edited by Tracy Fessenden and Michael Pasquier, “After the Storm: A Special Issue on Hurricane Katrina,” Journal of Southern Religion, 2008, http://jsr.fsu.edu/Katrina/FrontKatrina.htm.