Render Unto Rome (17 page)

The next day, May 27, came the news that Pope John Paul II had appointed Cardinal Law pastor—or “archpriest,” in Vatican parlance—of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the great basilicas in Rome. Peter Borré understood gilded parachutes as a reality of corporate life; but
redeeming
Law, with an elevation from the convent in Maryland to a perch in Rome, showed a huge disregard for the suffering he had caused. Abuse survivors and Voice of the Faithful activists raised an outcry. John L. Allen Jr., Vatican correspondent for
National Catholic Reporter
, explained the Curia’s view to the
Globe:
“The idea was to find a position in which his baggage would not bog things down, but give him a job which allows him to set up shop here, where he’s still treated with deference and respect, in part because he’s a cardinal and in part because some people think he got a raw deal.”
³⁹

For Lennon—but more so for O’Malley—the timing was awful.

Angry parishioners saw their churches on a chopping block while Law, who had betrayed them, found redemption with a cushy job in Rome. Archbishop O’Malley had a meeting the following day with pastors from across the archdiocese. Media trucks waited outside the church in Weston. Law’s new job “is adding fuel to fire that is already burning in people,” Bowers told a reporter. “It’s an utter disgrace.”
⁴⁰
His words were sure to incense the archbishop, a Franciscan who believed in vows of obedience; nor was the language a tool for negotiating. But hostility was rumbling among certain priests toward Lennon, as Law’s handpicked successor, and whether he knew how Law had managed the money.

Father Stephen Josoma had come to the meeting with his own misgivings. Josoma’s St. Susanna parish was in Dedham, an island of the Charles, and it had made the suppression list for no reason he could see other than its eight prime acres with plenty of shade. The letter ordering the
suppression gave no adequate reason. Josoma wanted answers for his people. O’Malley’s responses at the closed meeting stressed that Bishop Lennon’s clustering was carefully planned; Reconfiguration would be painful, parishes could file a request for a review, but the priests must support the plan.

In the five-hour meeting, Archbishop O’Malley quieted some fears by assuring the priests that none of the fifty-eight who signed the letter asking Law to resign would be punished. The closures were not about reprisals, he insisted.

Church officials disseminated a 168-page manual on how to terminate employees, remove sacred objects, and deal with journalists. Sacred items must be removed to a specified place. “Shortly after the doors are closed, Archbishop Séan will deconsecrate the Church so that we can sell it,” the manual continued. “Sacred items will be removed … After this is done, the Church may be sold for any use except one that would be deemed sordid.”
⁴¹

During a break, Josoma introduced himself to the archbishop as one of the fifty-eight priests who had demanded that Law resign. “You’re asking me to do something I cannot in conscience do,” he said. “Is this because of me or our real estate?” “Neither,” insisted O’Malley. The
Globe
had published a list of the parishes and their assessed values, with a fair market value in the $100 million range. “We’d be lucky if we got even the assessed value,” O’Malley added. “Well, let’s make a deal,” said Father Josoma. “We’re assessed at $320,000. What if I give you a check for $600,000? You’ll get double your amount.” The priest extended his hand to shake on it. O’Malley laughed, but would not shake hands. Josoma replied, “You know and I know that the parish is worth a lot more.” O’Malley’s lips parted in an enigmatic smile.

On the last Sunday in May, Peter Borré and his mother-in-law went to St. Catherine of Siena for a Mass that was packed with people wanting to know what Father Bowers would say. Reporters were following the story of a parish struggling to stay alive. Bowers was so upset he barely got through the liturgy. He was also afraid. Pitting himself against the archbishop would do his career no good. After the service, he opened the floor for discussion. “Let’s pray the rosary,” a woman offered. But people were crying and angry; they needed to talk.

Rose Mary Piper gave her son-in-law a prod of the elbow: “You shoot off
your mouth about everything under the sun. So say something about this.” Peter Borré rose and suggested they send a petition to the archbishop, asking him to meet with them. People applauded. A haggard Father Bowers said, “You’re volunteering to help?”

“I just did,” said Borré, a little unsure just why.

With help from Mary Beth Borré, the lapsed Catholic, Peter and several members of the parish gathered 3,500 signatures. On a warm June day, Peter and two ladies from the parish entered the chancery in Brighton, opposite Boston College. A receptionist sat behind Plexiglas. The tension in the place was palpable. Borré imagined the stress on people here, coming to work over the grueling eighteen months to date. He told the lady they had a petition for the archbishop. She eyed him nervously. Just then a priest entered the foyer. In his mannered way Borré explained the purpose of their visit. “We’re not interested in petitions,” the priest uttered.

Borré asked what they should do with the petitions. The cleric, whom he recognized as a chancery official, retorted, “You should go fuck yourself.”

As the priest withdrew, leaving two startled ladies and Borré to swallow his anger, they went out into the summer day. He got behind the wheel of the car, his rage rising like a volcano. He considered Romans the most anticlerical people on earth, a facet of long memory from Pio Nono and the Vatican’s history as an overlord. Borré’s trust in a modern hierarchy buckled. Mary Beth heard the fury in his voice when he called from the car, saying he’d just been f-bombed by a jerk in a Roman collar. In the days that followed he distilled his anger into a plan of attack that would send him back to Rome to confront a power structure he had once held in awe.

CHAPTER 4

THE VATICAN,
THE
VIGILS,
AND THE
REAL ESTATE

When Seán O’Malley reached Boston he was an emergency politician for the church, a specialist in damaged dioceses. As a young priest he had never envisioned such a role for himself: the clerical culture was intact. Born in 1944 in Lakewood, Ohio, and raised in western Pennsylvania, O’Malley entered the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, a branch of the Franciscans who work with the poor. He earned a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese literature at Catholic University of America, and stayed on in Washington, D.C., as founder of Centro Católico Hispano to give immigrants educational and legal help. In 1984 John Paul II made him a bishop and appointed him to the diocese of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

In 1993 the Vatican sent O’Malley to the diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, which had a large Portuguese community and was reeling from the aftershocks of the notorious James Porter. Legal settlements for 131 survivors of the imprisoned ex-priest cost $13.2 million, about half of it paid by insurance policies. O’Malley ordered a sale of nonparish properties;
¹
but to secure the necessary funds, he turned to Knights of Malta, an elite fraternal society which contributed several million dollars to the settlement, according to Tom Doyle, a former priest who served as a Vatican embassy canon lawyer in the 1980s and warned the bishops of the
forthcoming crisis.
²
The Sovereign Military Order of Malta began in the Crusades and evolved into a lay society with the trappings of chivalry. The Knights of Malta had a history of Fascist sympathies before World War II and fervent anti-Communism thereafter. Three CIA directors—John McCone, William Colby, and William J. Casey—and former secretary of state Al Haig were Knights of Malta.
³
“Wealth is a de facto prerequisite for a knightly candidate, and each must pass through a rigorous screening,” wrote journalist Martin Lee in 1983. The group issued its own passports and was known for international relief efforts.
⁴
Peter Borré’s father was inducted at St. Peter’s Basilica in a ceremony officiated by Pope John XXIII.

As the Boston scandal sent out shock waves in 2002, the Vatican dispatched Seán O’Malley to the diocese of Palm Beach, Florida, after Bishop Anthony O’Connell calmly admitted at a news conference that, yes, he did have inappropriate contact, years ago, with a seminarian who had just publicly accused him, and by the way a second accuser might be in the offing. Three men ended up suing O’Connell.
⁵
In Palm Beach, one of the wealthiest dioceses, O’Malley had the unenviable task of replacing a corrupt bishop who had replaced a corrupt bishop. Before the Irish-born O’Connell, Bishop J. Keith Symons resigned in 1998 upon disclosure that
he
had molested altar boys years before.
⁶
Symons moved to a Michigan retreat house, O’Connell to a South Carolina monastery. But in the Vatican idea of apostolic succession, both men remained titular bishops. Cardinal Ratzinger’s tribunal at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith laicized priests, not hierarchs.

In Palm Beach, O’Malley formed a lay panel to monitor accusations against clergy. He told victims, “I want to do what I can to promote healing for you and for all those affected by this abuse.”
⁷
Before the year was out, the Vatican sent him to his third scandal-battered post. Boston’s historic status also put O’Malley in line to become a cardinal. His modesty was refreshing. Unlike the imperial Law, he encouraged people to call him “Archbishop Seán.”

In the summer of 2003, the newly appointed Archbishop O’Malley went to Rome. He had issues to review with men in high places. O’Malley’s meeting at the Vatican is key to our grasp of the larger financial issues in the American church that would engulf him and other bishops who slogged through property disputes that pitted people in the pews against the Vatican.

Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos at the Congregation for the Clergy was a pivotal figure for O’Malley’s presentation on the impact of the proposed settlement for the 552 victims. Discussions of a possible bankruptcy pleading had leaked to the press.
⁸
A Chapter 11 filing, if the court approved it, would freeze debts as the church reorganized its finances and its lawyers tried to bargain down the survivors’ attorneys. The gamble was the backfire potential. The law required disclosure of
all
assets, swatches of which the media were already scrutinizing: spreading everything on the table could make the cash-strapped archdiocese seem rich. It also meant that O’Malley would begin his most important job having to explain to the many victims expecting compensation that his predecessor had, in effect, broken the bank. For as Peter Borré would learn, months later, on ferreting out copies of the archdiocese’s past financial statements from a privileged source, the archdiocese had lost $10 million in fiscal year 2000, $8.3 million in FY 2001 (before the
Globe
series on the abuse scandal), and $12 million in FY 2002 that forced a sale of assets from its investment portfolio. When O’Malley reached Rome that day in 2003, the archdiocese he had come to govern had lost $30.3 million in the preceding three years. Besides a horrific sexual scandal, Bernie Law had bequeathed a financial sinkhole to Seán O’Malley. Where had all the money gone?
⁹

When he sat down with Castrillón, the Franciscan prelate with a vow of poverty needed a huge pump of money. He also faced “the alienation of church property,” the canonical term by which the Third Office in the Congregation for the Clergy processed bishops’ appeals to liquidate assets.

The American bishops at their June 2002 conference in Dallas voted to request approval from Clergy to raise the threshold for permission to sell property from $5 million to $10.3 million. For property or assets below that level, a bishop could sell as he saw fit. (For dioceses with 500,000 people or fewer, the threshold rose to $5 million.) The Vatican approved the measure, and also agreed to adjust the threshold to inflation, such that in 2009 for large dioceses, it was $11.4 million.
¹⁰

According to a former Congregation for the Clergy staffer who spoke on background, the procedure for selling expensive property calls for the bishop to evaulate the assets with his Finance Council, then ask Clergy for the authority to sell, explaining the use for the proceeds. O’Malley knew he had to win trust of the Finance Council that had rejected Law’s request for the victims’ settlement.

Cardinal Castrillón and his staff faced three issues. For them, the first question was whether selling assets would harm the Boston archdiocese’s ability to function. A question arises: how does the Vatican know what might disrupt any archdiocese if it sells property? Barring a flood of information from people, reports or documents from a diocese, Clergy staffers rely on what the bishop tells them. In O’Malley’s case, the Boston crisis had generated press attention even in Italy. Lennon was deep into research on available property.