Render Unto Rome (6 page)

He was too young to appreciate the mystery of Jesus, a radical who scorned the powerful and embraced the outcasts of society, or to understand how spirituality matures through suffering, prayer, and ritual memory.

He felt as if he were living in a foreign country, and, of course, he was.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Many years after establishing his career in the energy industry, and residing for long periods in Washington, D.C., and New York City, Peter Borré had come to enjoy the life he and Mary Beth made in Boston.

Charlestown covers one square mile of a hilly peninsula cradled by the Mystic River on the north and the Charles on the southeastern side; the rivers converge at Boston Inner Harbor. The Borrés’ condo looked out on the steel bridge that links Boston’s North End to a neighborhood unusually rich in history.

In 1630, ten years after the first pilgrims reached Cape Cod, a brig
carrying Puritans sailed out of England. John Winthrop, in a famous shipboard sermon, urged his followers to pull together in “patience, and liberty … [so] that we shall be as a city upon a hill.”
¹⁷
Henry VIII’s break with Rome had launched a state church from which Winthrop’s followers soon split. They saw the pope as an anti-Christ and came to view Church of England liturgies as too much like the Mass.
¹⁸
Winthrop’s people became separatists who spurned any official faith. Charlestown, briefly, was the capital of the infant colony, but Winthrop’s idealized city gave way to a Bible Commonwealth as people settled across the Charles along the larger landmass girded by water. Roads followed farms, and villages mushroomed into the townships of a New England society bound by the Puritan covenant. The Congregational churches they fostered would each govern its own affairs, each choose its own pastor and spare interiors shorn of stained-glass windows and icons.
¹⁹

The Massachusetts Bay Colony hatched its own pressures for conformity that sparked hysteria and executions in the Salem witch trials. Mid-seventeenth-century Charlestown “was breaking out of such isolation, becoming a trading center for the region,” writes J. Anthony Lukas. “The less it resembled Winthrop’s model, the more seductive became the memory of that archetypal New England town, harmonious, consensual, cemented by a single faith and devotion to a common cause.”
²⁰
On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere galloped through Charlestown to warn of the British troops advancing on Lexington. In the ensuing battle—the first in the War for Independence—Charlestown and Roxbury, which lay across the river to the south, formed a dual front. Fifteen thousand colonists took arms against five thousand soldiers for the Crown. At Bunker Hill the colonists lost 138 troops to 226 British dead. Most of Charlestown went down in flames. Yet in 1810 Charlestown had nearly five thousand people and was the state’s third-largest town when the national navy opened a harbor shipyard. Builders began crafting vessels out of felled trees. In time, Charlestown became a neighborhood of Boston through annexation.

Compared with its seventeenth-century mission to California, the Catholic Church came late to Massachusetts. In the 1790s two French priests began proselytizing among pockets of Irish settlers and in the Indian villages of Maine, where earlier Canadian clerics had visited. Boston’s first Catholic Church was built in 1803, a parish of mostly Irish surnames; the construction funds drew Protestant support, notably a $100 donation from
former president John Adams. He had sent a consul to Rome, establishing a relationship with the Holy See short of full diplomatic ties. Boston’s first bishop, a Frenchman, came in 1808.

A generation later, the bedraggled people who stepped off swollen ships from Ireland planted fear in the mind of Boston’s fading homogeneous society. Bunched into shanties, clapboard houses, and brick tenements on back streets, the Irish scraped along the margins. In the late summer of 1825, local hooligans rampaged through Irish warrens, shattering windows, smashing furniture, driving the
Boston Advertiser
to decry “disgraceful riots.” Charlestown drew its stability from the shipyard and Protestant artisans, merchants, and farmers. In October 1828 Catholics paraded behind a robed bishop to lay the cornerstone for a church. In 1830 people from Ireland numbered 8,000 in a city of 61,392.
²¹
Irish rowdies cavorted and fought near the docks.

In 1834 a nun wandered out of Charlestown’s large Ursuline convent, where sixty young ladies studied under a dozen Parisian-trained Irish sisters. In a state of mental collapse, the woman ended up at her brother’s house; she returned to the convent apparently of her own accord. As gossip coiled through the town, a Congregationalist minister named Lyman Beecher whipped up emotions already fed by lurid newspaper stories of the “kidnapped” girl in the nunnery. He accused the pope of wanting to colonize the Mississippi Valley. Town selectmen marched to the convent, demanding entry to investigate; a mob overran them, drove out the women, and set the place on fire. As the convent burned down, drunks fed a bonfire with books and furniture, dancing about in nuns’ habits. Boston Protestants expressed outrage, but few rioters were arrested. A sham trial ended with no one convicted. In 1836 another mob torched most of the Irish neighborhoods. Violence ripped through Irish ghettos of New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit as roiling nativist fears targeted people who had fled deep hardship back home.
²²

A fungus that ravaged Ireland’s large potato crop led to mass starvation and a diaspora of 3 million people between 1845 and 1870.
²³
Thirty-nine percent of people born in Ireland no longer lived there by 1890; most of the emigrants fled to Britain, North America, or Australia. In the decade after 1846, ships bearing 130,000 Irish arrived at Boston. “Our country is literally being overrun with the miserable, vicious and unclean paupers
of the old country,” the
Bunker Hill Aurora
railed in 1848. As the Irish crept up from harbor streets toward triple-decker apartments on Bunker Hill, Protestants were moving back toward Somerville or across the bridge into Greater Boston. In 1880 the archbishop began a system of Catholic schools for Boston.
²⁴
As Charlestown became heavily Irish, Boston’s Italian population doubled, between 1881 and 1886, to 220,000. When Peter Borré’s grandparents put down stakes in the 1880s, the Irish outnumbered the Italians three to one. Charlestown in the early 1900s was still heavily Irish.

Boston in the late 1930s used federal funds to build a housing project close to the Mystic River in Charlestown. The demolitions phase burdened St. Catherine of Siena’s pastor with the task of “reconstructing a parish which was depopulated and nearly obliterated,” according to a parish history. “On his shoulders came all the misery and distress of seeing hundreds of his faithful parishioners forced to leave their homes and dispersed throughout greater Boston.”
²⁵

Charlestown after World War II was still largely Irish and working class. A culture of young Townies clashed with the cops and gangs from other neighborhoods. Charlestown lay in a congressional district that in 1946 drew twenty-nine-year-old John F. Kennedy as a candidate; handsome and rich, he lived in a fine hotel on Beacon Street. Kennedy downplayed his patrician gloss by shaking hands after dawn with shipyard workers and climbing the stairs of triple-deckers to meet stay-at-home mothers, emphasizing his service in World War II. Kennedy presented a check for $650,000 on behalf of his family to Archbishop Richard Cushing for a hospital in Brighton to be named for his brother Joseph Kennedy, who had gone down in a plane in World War II.
²⁶
JFK won over a large share of Townies in winning the election. In April 1961, he welcomed fellow members of the Bunker Hill Council of the Knights of Columbus to a reception on the White House lawn, where they thrilled at “jawing with
their
President.”
²⁷

Cushing became a cardinal and legendary fund-raiser as Boston Catholics gained prosperity. By 1967 he had overseen $300 million in construction projects, which included three hundred elementary or high schools, plus eighty-six new parishes. His insurance plan for archdiocesan property “saved his parishes ten million dollars in twenty years,” according to a
biographer.
²⁸
Cushing donated $200,000 to assist renovations of a church in the hometown of Pope John XXIII and $1 million to help build a Catholic university in Taiwan.

By the mideighties, when Bernard Law became cardinal, black and Latino families had arrived in a new wave of immigration; the Charlestown housing projects took on a racial stigma. Whites who could afford to had been moving out since the midseventies, when a federal judge issued busing orders to desegregate Boston public schools, making Charlestown a flash point of white protests. As the white flight started to ease, younger people with good jobs began renovating the old apartment houses as spacious dwellings for smaller families. A short walk down the hill along the Mystic, an Irish drug mob homed in on poor streets, planting addiction and fueling crime in the ethnic mix. The Naval Shipyard put a gentrified edge to a neighborhood where three parishes lined the incline with less than a mile between them. A financial crisis had silently encroached under Cardinal Law, unbeknownst to Peter Borré as he and Rosie sat in the pews of Charlestown’s poorest parish on a Sunday morning in 2004.

OPENING HIS LENS

After entering Harvard at age sixteen and graduating in 1959 with a degree in history, Peter Borré joined the U.S. Navy. He spent three years as a naval officer. In 1963 he earned a master’s in international economics from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Quarreling with his father, he refused to attend law school, but earned a second master’s, in international finance, from Harvard Business School. The navy was his pivotal experience, a grounding in the discipline, teamwork, and chain of command on a ship as a system that worked. Three institutions shaped him: the U.S. Navy, the Catholic Church, and Harvard, in that order. Navy life formed a link in his mind with the church, a global institution that had weathered wars, scandal, and its share of crooked popes. The church’s mission was of divine origin. Men could screw up anything.

Rosie Piper thrilled to the sermons of Father Bob Bowers, the forty-something pastor with silver hair who spoke buoyantly about mutual obligations and the parish as a place where all peoples met; he was learning Spanish and creating outreach programs that made her feel good about
being Catholic. She found herself oddly moved on the day two adopted boys of a gay couple made their First Communion. Gay marriage was a leap she could not make in her own mind. She had voted Republican much of her life, but civil unions with benefits seemed right. With so many kids out on the street, hooked on crack and fighting with guns, she reasoned that the children of that couple at least had the advantage of family, even if it was a different kind of family: they had two men who loved them, brushed their hair, put them in nice clothes, and prayed with them in church.

The society she found at St. Catherine of Siena, where “church” was greater than its rules, strengthened her sense of a spiritual home as she weighed the realities of her life against past expectations. Back in Delaware all those years ago, she had raised two sons and two daughters in the church, all of whom had left or detached from the faith. For some reason her eldest granddaughter, a University of Virginia undergraduate who had grown up in California, was a deeply devout Catholic. Rosie realized how much she had learned from her children, the tolerance they had taught her about a changing society—a tolerance sadly missing from the church she loved and which gave her spasms of agony.
Those bishops! Hiding sex criminals! All that lying! Somebody ought to show those men what’s what!

Attending Mass with Peter lent a measure of comfort to Rosie amid the reservoirs of patience she had to summon in dealing with Bill’s dementia. Her son-in-law with his European air could be brusque, even arrogant, but Peter had a good heart. She was glad he and Mary Beth had found each other.

Peter Borré became active at St. Catherine of Siena by default. Since moving into the condo in 1987, he had logged hundreds of thousands of air miles on business. Now and then Mary Beth had gone with him, depending on the destination and her schedule. More often he was alone. On layovers from West Africa he had stayed most often in Paris, where he attended Les Augustins church. In London he sought out St. Martin-in-the-Fields, off Trafalgar Square. Back in Boston, he often made his way downtown to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. But his attendance was sporadic, several Sundays running, then a stretch away.

Moving through his fifties, Borré had reached back for an essence of his earlier spiritual life, before the collapse of his first marriage. He blamed the divorce on his infidelity and the workaholic zeal of his thirties. In his twenties he had married the daughter of a European ambassador; she
raised their son and two daughters during his time away. With a widening of his hindsight lens he had come to see those overlong travel stints as an escape mechanism. The divorce had left him riddled with self-disgust. In time, he cultivated a good relationship with his ex-wife; she had lived now for nearly three decades with a man on Martha’s Vineyard. Repairing the bond with his children had come slowly, not without pain. They were grown now, and he had several grandchildren.

At Mass, he wanted to reclaim a spiritual equilibrium, the moral center he had lost. Nevertheless, each Sunday when the moment came to receive the Eucharist, the presence of Christ in the blessed wafer, Borré hung back. He sat in the pew as people moved past him into the Communion line.