Render Unto Rome (19 page)

Behind those vanilla words lay a strange reality, according to Giovanni Avena, a priest-turned-editor of Adista, a liberal Catholic news service. “Casaroli had great diplomatic skills; he presented the church in a sober, businesslike way,” Avena told me in Rome. “Casaroli thought Sodano was dumb. They sent Sodano to Latin America and he muscled his way, making friends with the worst right-wingers. John Paul clashed with Casaroli
over how to deal with Communism. The pope wanted more hard-line resistance. Silvestrini was an heir to Casaroli. Sodano is a foot soldier, not a thinker. He was put there [as secretary of state] as manager of the Curia. He is perfectly gray.”
³³

By “gray,” Avena meant a calculated neutrality capable of turning colors on a given issue. John Paul, famously bored by Curial politics, had in Sodano a firewall from the inner wrangles
and
a militant anti-leftist for conservative governments and donors. John Paul was famously bored by finances, too. The Vatican Bank scandal erupted in 1982, when Italy’s largest bank, Banco Ambrosiano, collapsed under $1.2 billion in bad debts brought on by a Cosa Nostra money-laundering scheme that utilized the IOR under Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. John Paul allowed Marcinkus to use diplomatic immunity as a latter-day prisoner of the Vatican. It fell to Secretary of State Casaroli to admit an “abuse of trust” to Italian state investigators; he negotiated a $242 million payment in 1984 to resolve the IOR fine.
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In 1990 John Paul summoned Cardinal Edmund Szoka of Detroit to manage the city-state. “When the budget’s finished in November we go over it for about an hour,” Szoka told the biographer Kwitny. “He can’t look at all these details. I keep him aware of what’s going on and how we’re doing.”
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A pragmatist, Szoka called more than one hundred presidents of the national bishops’ conferences to a first-ever meeting on April 8, 1991. As they sat in red velvet chairs, Cardinal Szoka explained that two decades of Vatican deficits had hit a record $87 million. Without assigning quotas, he asked them to help. In one of those cameos of democracy that lend irony as icing to church politics, the bishops took a vote, and of course agreed to send more. An extra $8 million arrived in 1992. In 1993 the Holy See actually ended with a surplus; Peter’s Pence also hit $67 million that year.

Vatican Bank “funds are primarily used by John Paul to bolster the Church in poor countries,” papal biographer George Weigel wrote. “It is not unusual for the IOR to get a call from the papal apartment in the morning, saying that the Pope needs a certain number of envelopes containing $20,000 or $50,000 by noon—gifts to bishops from Africa, Latin America and Asia.”
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The bank that did not exist on the Holy See annual report produced cash on demand for the pope.

After Cardinal Sodano became secretary of state, he assumed the lead role in an IOR oversight commission of five cardinals; he also managed
the Curia’s heavily Italian bureaucracy. “There has been created a certain mystery about the Roman Curia,” Sodano observed in 1992, “but those who are inside it see it as a brotherhood.”
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When the brotherhood embraced Archbishop O’Malley in the summer of 2003, John Paul was in a deepening decline from Parkinson’s disease. Cardinal Castrillón presumably wanted Sodano’s approval for a major transfer of wealth. The Vatican cardinals gave O’Malley the nod to exceed the $10.3 million threshold in the “alienation of church property.” This decision was borne out in a Vatican document that emerged many months later, after Peter Borré spearheaded canon law appeals by nine Boston parishes seeking to halt their closures. The Congregation for the Clergy rejected those requests. The parishes appealed to the Signatura. In that proceeding, one Martha Wegan, a veteran practitioner in Vatican tribunals, filed a brief as the advocate for the Archdiocese of Boston. She wrote:

In this truly very painful case, maximum discretion was given to the Excellent Archbishop of Boston [sic] so that he might save the archdiocese from monetary ruin provoked … by the sexual abuse crisis. It is in this context that all actions of this process of reconfiguration and “closing of parishes” are to be understood, not excluding the suppression of wealthy parishes, not excluding the suppression of parishes of maximum vitality.

Viability must be not at the parish level but at the level of the whole archdiocese, not excluding the giving of goods of extinct parishes to the archdiocese.
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“Maximum discretion” here translates as carte blanche to close and to sell. When O’Malley, the new archbishop, returned to Boston in 2003, Bishop Lennon had the authority to “alienate property.”

Nothing of its scope had ever been done in an American diocese.

That realization left a marked impression on Cardinal Sodano.

SUPPRESSION

Under canon law, when a parish merges with another, the funds of the closed church follow its members to the new one. But a parish that is “suppressed” by the bishop loses its building, land, bank deposits, all assets to
the bishop-as-banker. Lennon wanted parishes with good land value, and surplus funds, for a strategic outcome: plug the deficit. Lennon was using suppression as foreclosure, a kind of Peter’s Pence enforced. The dead people whose gifts had built the parishes posed no opposition unless the living learned to penetrate thickets of canon law.

Among the suppressed parishes, Infant Jesus in affluent Brookline had $4 million in the bank. An hour’s drive east of Boston in Scituate, the suppressed St. Frances Cabrini sat on thirty lush acres near the Atlantic, a real estate developer’s dream. Our Lady Help of Christians in the town of Concord had $800,000 in the bank, and the year before had opened a $1.3 million parish center.
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Lennon’s letter to the faithful said that O’Malley had ordered the suppressions, but on that issue the two bishops were joined at the hip.

By Peter Borré’s reckoning, of the eighty-three parishes on Lennon’s list, twenty-four were financially solid with active parishioners. Borré, a hardened realist on assets that failed to deliver, was not alone in being offended at Lennon’s sloppiness: soak the rich, screw the poor, trample hard-toiling folk in the middle to raise funds for a debt-riddden chancery. Mayor Thomas M. Menino was upset. “This is the first I’ve heard of where the money is going,” he told the
Globe
. “Families have been going to these churches for years.” Massachusetts secretary of state William F. Galvin bristled at “a deceit to the people in the pews if the money is going to unknown purposes of the central fund,” which, indeed, it was.
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Borré concluded that two dozen parishes needed to close. Many parishes in the middle had issues that seemed soluble with enlightened leadership.

From canon lawyers, Borré learned that an appeal had to be filed in the Vatican soon after a bishop’s rejection of the parish’s request that it be allowed to survive. With help from a kitchen cabinet, he began working on a document.

For Father Bob Bowers, reality hit when the archdiocese sent a team to take inventory of St. Catherine of Siena parish property. They opened cabinets, took photographs, and made lists of furniture, other tangibles, icons, benches, and sacred items of the church. Meanwhile, a summons came from the chancery: Archbishop O’Malley wanted to meet with Father Bowers.

In a series of trips to the chancery office in Brighton, across Commonwealth
Avenue from Bowers’s alma mater, Boston College, he took comfort from his driver, Peter Borré, who offered moral support as the priest’s stomach churned like a fuel pump. Borré had no desire to sit in the foyer where the chancery priest had told him to go fuck himself, and so he waited outside.

Father Bowers sat across a long table from the taciturn archbishop.

“We have a problem,” said O’Malley.

“We do, Archbishop. You need to come see the people in the parish.”

No, came the reply. O’Malley had advisers guiding him through this difficult process, he explained. And he had to follow their advice.

Silence fell between prelate and priest, a lengthening emotional distance: silence begetting silence.
He wants me to obey
, realized Bowers.
He is a Franciscan. Obedience to superiors is their norm, an expectation of the communal life. We diocesan clergy can be more unruly. I am resisting something that is unjust, trying to persuade him to see what I see
.

The two men stared at each other. Bob Bowers, with his strain of flamboyance and supercharged enthusiasm, sat quiet now, as unmovable as his archbishop. The meeting ended as the next one began, some days later, layered in tension and thick with silence. O’Malley wanted Bowers to resign, take a new assignment, let Reconfiguration move forward. But O’Malley could not evict a pastor unless he committed a grave violation of church law. Fighting to keep his parish open, making an issue of it in the media, Bowers was attacking
the plan
—Richard Lennon’s work product. Still, that put him in O’Malley’s face.

Bowers realized that Seán O’Malley was depressed.

Other priests saw it, too. The leaden expressions and slow speech sparked speculation that O’Malley was taking antidepressant medication. O’Malley lived in a spartan room in the Holy Cross Cathedral rectory. His kindness and politeness were offset by reserve, a holding back of emotions. He had come to Boston as a healer and Reconfiguration had blown up in his face.
He cannot understand why one of his priests will not agree with him
, reflected Bowers. When he gave O’Malley the Charlestown consolidation report that his parishioner Val Mulcahy had sent to Lennon, the archbishop rebuffed the gesture.

He said: “I want you to do what I’m telling you”—resign, take a new assignment. But that meant a death warrant for the parish where Bowers
had planted heart and soul. Lennon’s plan ignored the research group’s advice on a long phaseout, fusing three parishes into one. The meeting ended in a stalemate.

Bowers turned to Father William Leahy, the Jesuit president of Boston College, who assured him that he had sent the report to Archbishop O’Malley.

PARISHES AS REAL ESTATE

Priests in the fourscore parishes on the closure list confronted a maze of issues. Some pastors in neighborhoods with few parishioners and unmanageable debt accepted reality. The clustering process put stress on other clerics whose followers wanted to keep their parishes intact.

Among the priests at parishes targeted for suppression, Father Stephen Josoma in Dedham had followed Bowers’s travails and decided on a different approach. Born in 1955 into a close-knit family, his father a technician at MIT, Steve passed boyhood summers mowing lawns with his Irish-born grandfather. The old man had done time in Galway Prison as a Sinn Féin rebel before shipping out to America in 1920. Josoma saw him as a landscape artisan. Each night the old man knelt in prayer, “not an in-your-face piety, just a peaceful guy with trust in the Lord,” Josoma recalled. “That stayed with me.” Of the twenty men with whom he began seminary, only Josoma became a priest.

In 1997, at a church in Dorchester, he succeeded a popular priest “who had lived in a condo half the time while the parish ran up millions in deferred maintenance,” he recalled. Josoma and an associate priest “turned the finances around. The accountant warned us we had to cover the school deficit out of parish funds—$70,000. We achieved that. Next, we put in a cafeteria, a science lab, a library. We had an army of kids selling wrapping paper door-to-door. People saw that, they gave more on Sunday. We got the teachers raises. You can do a lot when the people are behind you.”

Josoma put his popularity on the line when he clashed with real estate agents he accused of redlining sales to keep blacks out of Dorchester. The experience was so searing he took a one-year leave from ministry and lived with his folks. In 2001 Cardinal Law asked him to become pastor at St. Susanna in Dedham, a cohesive flock, largely white, that was absorbing
Filipino families. Dedham sits on an island in the Charles River with a population of twenty-four thousand.

“This parish was created by Cardinal Cushing in 1961 for his friend Father Michael Durant,” Josoma said, smiling in the fading light of a winter afternoon. “In those days, churches were like fiefdoms. The other parish, St. Mary of the Assumption, is 125 years old and three times our size. They called it ‘the cathedral in the wilderness.’ Twenty-five hundred families stayed at St. Mary when this one opened. St. Susanna had 300 families and a rectory with three priests, a housekeeper, and a cook. Today, it’s me and Felix [the dog] for 850 families. At least half of our families come from outside of the town, mostly from neighboring Needham. We’re a bit staid, perhaps, but more family-friendly.”

A wave of foreclosures hit Dedham in 2008. The parish food pantry fed rising numbers in an area where the idea of hunger belied the image of leafy New England lanes. Josoma’s popularity in drawing parishioners from a nearby town tracked a national phenomenon of Catholics seeking a spiritual allegiance beyond the neighborhood.

Lennon’s plan called for St. Susanna members to join St. Mary while the archdiocese took St. Susanna’s money. How would that go down with people who had already bypassed the “cathedral in the wilderness”? Just off Highway 128, Josoma’s parish sat on eight sylvan acres adjoining an animal rescue preserve, buffered by wetlands of the Charles River. The road past the church curled into a wooded cluster of homes. Like the Scituate parish on thirty prime acres near the sea, St. Susanna’s acreage held proverbial rubies in its loam. The parish sent $10,000 a month in assessments to the archdiocese.

“The bishops’ pedophilia cover-ups appalled me,” explained Josoma. “After Law left, Bishop Lennon as Apostolic Administrator met with the priests and said we were $10 million in debt for lay employees’ pensions because pastors had not sent funds to the chancery. I was thinking,
Ten million dollars?
How could the chancery have let this happen? Within a year, the first time Archbishop O’Malley spoke, [the debt] was $25 million. What is going on here?”