Render Unto Rome (13 page)

CHAPTER 3

SEEDS
OF
REVOLT

Peter Borré was no bleeding heart on the subject of poverty, but he believed in Christian duty. The low-rise projects off Mystic River were the largest concentration of public housing in New England. Borré realized that the pastor of St. Catherine of Siena, Father Bob Bowers, was about more than “reaching out” to the lowliest members of his flock. Bowers’s liturgies featured Spanish songs. Rosie Piper adored Bob Bowers, the pastor with a youthful face and graying hair who welcomed the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans as he preached about dignity. Borré liked Bowers’s energy for the parish, once a lost cause, now a blossoming place.

The parish named for Saint Catherine of Siena lay at the base of Bunker Hill Street. Midway up Charlestown’s long incline stood St. Mary parish, a Tudor Gothic gem, just past Monument Square and the obelisk that pointed like a needle toward the sky. Several blocks farther up, St. Francis de Sales was the most insular and rock-hard Irish of the three parishes.

Bowers organized a food pantry for hungry people and English-as-a-second-language classes taught by a volunteer Jewish doctor. Many of the unskilled workers taking ESL had no citizenship papers.
He runs a good church
, Rosie Piper told herself. She felt her $10 donation on Sunday was helping Bowers steer a parish full of life. Imagining Father Bowers thirty
years on, she wrote a $100 check for the spring 2003 collection for the clergy retirement fund.

Borré assumed that when the deal was struck on the settlements for the 552 clergy abuse victims, grown now and with gladiatorial attorneys, the church coffers would take a hard dent that the new archbishop would repair over time. He thought Bowers a bit of a sentimental liberal, but he liked his work and saw how hard he gave to the parish.

Warm and outgoing, with an easy wit, Bowers had been inspired by Dorothy Day’s radical witness in the Catholic Worker Movement, where activists lived at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. He liked the liberation theology of Latin America and had been active in a group assisting the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. Bowers drew his values from an ideal of Jesus as a peacemaker, and peace as a living force of hope.

Born in 1960, Bob Bowers had grown up in Greater Boston, an attorney’s son with three older brothers by whom he now had eight nephews. On graduating from Boston College in 1982 with a B.A. in philosophy, Bowers entered St. John, the archdiocesan seminary in Brighton. As a priest, his assignments had been in comfortable parishes where, with one exception, he had felt welcome. His previous parish had been in Milton, six miles outside of Boston.

Bowers had gotten his new assignment from Cardinal Law two days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Exhausted from the jammed prayer services in Milton, he entered the chancery in a daze from the endless TV loop of airplanes smashing into skyscrapers, spitting back balls of fire and smoke.

Law, then sixty-nine, with white hair and a thick girth, rose from his desk with a smile. Too young to call him “Bernie” as certain older clergy did, Bowers issued a deferential “Your Eminence.” Law was a Boston potentate at ease with politicians, bankers, and CEOs. But he had an emotional distance that many priests noticed, a self-centeredness that some speculated came from his background as an only child, seeing himself as the pivot point in most situations. In 1985, when Law was invested as a cardinal, several hundred Bostonians traveled to Rome. At a reception in the North American College courtyard, Law declared, “This is the strongest moment for the church since the Reformation.”
¹

Strong is one way to describe Law’s presence at the Congregation for
Bishops in Rome: he became the go-to prelate in choosing new men for the U.S. hierarchy. The prefect of Bishops, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, met with Pope John Paul II every Saturday; he saw the pope’s esteem for Law and acted accordingly.
²
Law, a maker of bishops, made monthly trips to Rome. In Boston, he made late-night hospital rounds, visiting sick people, taking time to chat with his chaplains. Law was generally benevolent toward his priests, but he had a strain of cold arrogance. At a clergy conference on canon law issues, Law interrupted a lecturer to declare, “Father, while I am in this archdiocese,
I am the Law!
”
³

Bowers’s previous encounter with Law had been in 1996, when the young priest asked to be reassigned; he shared a rectory with an alcoholic pastor whose rage made daily life toxic. Law sent him to Milton, where he thrived. But the old drunk had gotten under Bowers’s skin. “I want to share with you what it is like,” he had written in a
National Catholic Reporter
essay:

Some do not seem to know how to pastor or why. They prefer the title and the image, which is accountable to none. I have known them. I thought we were colleagues. I thought we would collaborate. I thought we would empower. I never thought we were better than anyone else. But I never thought I would be treated as less than others.

If you are not a priest, if you have never been a priest, you cannot know what I am talking about. I barely know myself. I know I am disappointed. I thought priests followed Jesus and made mistakes. I did not know it was a mistake to think all priests follow Jesus. There are indeed some who follow power. And they are a disappointment.

Does that sound harsh? I pause in my heart to laugh about it and to cry. Priests who will not share, cannot share love. Pastors and autocrats who know their word is law. Institutions long decayed that shut people out, out of Eucharist, out of authority, out of governance, out of a shared wisdom. They do not listen, except to denial. They don’t have to.

I wonder if they are afraid or hurt. But I no longer excuse it.

We are not crying about some “vocation crisis.” We are not whining about the work and the task. We are not complaining
about celibacy and sexual identity and the roles men and women play in the church. These things just add to the already burdensome experience of being disappointed. We just want to survive.
⁴

Cardinal Law wrote Bowers, demanding a letter to explain why he wrote the article. Bowers complied; Law then summoned him. Bowers’s genealogy included three cousins who had been nuns and a pair of granduncles who were priests. He unburdened himself, telling Law how his rectory experiences had fallen gallingly short of his seminary expectations—the drunken priest nearly attacked him in one of his stupors. He spoke about the chasm he felt from certain older clerics who were robed in pomposity. Law listened. When Bowers finished, Law said, “I ordained you once and I’d do it again.” That was it: issue resolved. Law had registered
his
message: No more troublesome articles, Father.

Bowers left the chancery on a wave of ambivalence.

Fluent in Spanish, Law was a strong advocate for dark immigrants who came to Boston. The son of a U.S. Air Force officer, he was born in Mexico and moved often with his parents. Elected president of his black-majority high school class in the Virgin Islands, Bernie Law went to Harvard, and on graduation entered the seminary. As a young priest in Mississippi during the 1960s, he championed the civil rights struggle and became a monsignor at the Jackson diocese, striding on the good side of history. After working in Washington, D.C., for the bishops’ conference, he became a bishop and spent several years at the head of a small diocese in Missouri. In 1984 Pope John Paul II named him archbishop of Boston, an area of 144 towns and cities, with nearly 2 million Catholics. Law announced that the archdiocese would cover the maternity costs and handle adoption for any unwanted pregnancy. After he became a cardinal in 1985, far fewer people called him Bernie. He liked “Your Eminence.”

His absolutism on abortion and on gay relationships did not endear Law to liberals. But he forged ties with Jewish leaders in an ecumenical spirit, and was a visible advocate for poor people, regardless of their citizenship. Catholic conservatives bridled when he gave Communion to pro-choice senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. He backed Congressman Joe Kennedy’s annulment request, to remain a Catholic in good standing after his second marriage. Kennedy’s annulment took on a ten-year odyssey through the Vatican courts, before it was stunningly
revoked, after a well-documented appeal by his former wife, Sheila Rauch Kennedy. She dissected the process in a 1997 memoir,
Shattered Faith
. After her position was vindicated, she called the process “very dishonest … The way it is used in American tribunals, it can be anything—a bad hair day, your goldfish died, you weren’t playing with a full deck when you married twenty years ago. And people defending [the marriage], usually women, have been belittled.”
⁵

In sermons Law tended to elongate his vowels, a high sign of gravitas. Socially, he had silken charm. But the side of Law that had to have things his way showed in 1992, when he lashed out at media coverage of James Porter, a notorious ex-priest whose crimes caught up with him, at great cost to the Fall River diocese, as Porter went to jail. In a rare rupture of self-control, Law declared, “By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the
Globe
.”
⁶
But his private side showed traces of doubt. In 1998 Law agreed to sit for an artist named Channing Thieme who was preparing an exhibition called Boston Faces. Thieme, a non-Catholic, approached him with a natural curiosity; they bantered in the two sessions as he struck a formal pose. When she returned with the finished picture, Law was delighted. What’s the toughest part of your job? she asked.

“Judgment—the decisions I must make,” he replied. As if peering ahead in time to some dark pit, Law added, “That is the half of it. The other half is the judgment I must one day face myself.”
⁷

Smoke was still rising in Manhattan from the rubble of the Twin Towers as Bob Bowers sat once more with Cardinal Law, saying that he
liked
the parish in Milton he had served for nearly six years. Law told him that St. Catherine in Charlestown was struggling to survive. Bowers’s assignments had been in middle-class to upper-crust parishes; he had dreamed of working for the poor in the spirit of Dorothy Day. Law had been quietly closing several parishes a year where population shifts had left churches too empty and impoverished to survive. “Save the school,” Law told him.

“Is the parish a sinking ship?”

“That parish will never close,” Law declared.

Law handed him an envelope and keys. Bowers left with his new assignment. Not a word had passed between them on the parish assessment, the tax each parish pays the diocese based on its average collections. Unpaid assessments accrue interest. Law had forgiven the assessments of several
poor parishes in the past. Bowers never gave the chancery taxes a thought. He was bound for the front lines—to stabilize a parish, to save a school.

St. Catherine of Siena was the poorest of the three parishes within a square mile; the other two were nearly all-white. Bowers’s three-story rectory of twenty-eight rooms (with suites for five bedrooms) was an underutilized relic from an era of abundant priests. Nuns who once taught the students, drawing no salary, were gone; the school was scratching by with 120 students, most of them white. After making inquiries, Bowers learned that about seventy-five kids from the parishes up the hill went to parochial schools outside Charlestown. Dominican and Puerto Rican families who made up a third of his parish were too poor to afford school tuition, yet the parish’s image hindered white recruitment for the school.

The church had gone through several pastors. “One guy had been arrested for beating up a housekeeper at a previous parish,” recalled Bowers, “and the guy after him was so introverted he couldn’t light a fire. I inherited a disaster.” He grinned. “It was a dream assignment.” The Sunday liturgies coalesced around a rainbow of people, about a third of them old Irish with local roots, another third Hispanic and mostly poor, the others upper income like Peter Borré from the storied Naval Shipyard.

The world tilted on January 6, 2002, the Feast of the Epiphany, when the
Globe
Spotlight Team, led by Walter V. Robinson, began reporting how Law and his circle of former auxiliary bishops had played musical chairs with child molester priests over the previous sixteen years. The articles rained down like lightning bolts on Bowers and pastors across the metropolitan area, jarring them and laypeople even more so with indignation about what Law and the assisting bishops had done.

Many priests were depressed; after each new report, they felt humiliated standing on the altar. The numbers at Mass began to drop; outrage in the pews was palpable. Law made public apologies. But as the plaintiff lawyers advanced and the
Globe
dug deeper, Cardinal Law in the media narrative became linked with the victims. Like an army inching up Macbeth’s hill, the survivors were pushing toward a reckoning with his power, his fate.