Render Unto Rome (24 page)

As solidarity grew among people in those empty churches, the culture of resistance drew on Catholicism as a tissue of values. The sacred spaces became arenas of family and community reimagined. On Friday nights at St. Frances Cabrini in Scituate, the parish near the sea, the seven-year-old Arnold triplets—Christian, Scott, and Sean—scampered down the aisle in their slippers, knelt before the altar, and lay down in their sleeping bags.
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Jon and Maryellen Rodgers, leaders of the vigil in Scituate, were mapping plans for a civil lawsuit to wrest ownership of St. Frances Cabrini from the archdiocese.

“We believe that we control the assets and the liabilities of the parish property,” an archdiocesan spokesman explained to the town newspaper. “The Archbishop understands the anger and pain people are feeling.”
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The civil lawsuit failed. The vigil continued.

At St. James in Wellesley, which sat on eight acres worth $14 million, vigil leader Suzanne Hurley evinced a rough pragmatism: “Once churches close, the towns can send tax bills to the archdiocese.” Hurley had children aged eleven and seven when the 2004 vigil began. She was well paid as an assistant to a corporate CEO. Four years later, sitting in a quiet pew of the once-bustling church, with a handful of women preparing for a Council of Parishes gathering, Hurley cited an independent contractor’s study which concluded that St. James was the parish best suited for growth in its geographic cluster. “We determined that no church in the cluster should close. It’s like being voted off the island in
Survivor
,” she said. “This parish sits on land donated by the Maffei family. They paid $25,000 for the marble altar. Kay Maffei, ninety-two, went to court. She wanted to keep the church open.”

The state’s Supreme Judicial Court denied standing for the case.

For O’Malley, the cost of defending the archdiocese in legal challenges was another expense layered into the protracted dispute. The chancery had to keep utilities working to maintain insurance; drawing down the cash reserves in a given parish, while the parish no longer paid an assessment, meant losing money at both ends.

In lieu of Sunday Mass, the parish had Communion services for which sympathetic priests in open parishes provided them consecrated wafers. “I am a lapsed Catholic,” Hurley reflected one chilly night with Christmas three weeks off. “I feel attached to this
place
”—she gestured toward the stained-glass windows. “I had been a lector at Mass, but it wasn’t until this parish that I heard the words differently, and it gave me a sense of ownership about faith. I’ve become jaded. My kids are well past their First Communion. I listened to my son ask, ‘What’s a pedophile?’ I’m not concerned about something happening to my children, but I could not ask them to look up to me if I ran from this church. My father-in-law goes to Mass at his church, then comes to our vigil. I consider these services as legitimate as the Mass. I was hurt by the injustice of the Reconfiguration process. I remember sleeping in the choir loft, the first time. My husband said, ‘I’ve had enough. I will never walk my daughter down this aisle.’ … It takes
a toll.” The moral premise of the vigil, the human investment in sacred space, had its own logic. “I feel I can raise my children as good Catholics or good Christians.”
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As the vigil movement gained momentum in 2005, Peter Borré’s strategy with Cynthia Deysher on the Council of Parishes was to play for time, expect a loss at Clergy, and plan an appeal at the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican high court; in the meantime, the parishioners occupying churches would keep the issue in the news. Sympathetic lawyers were exploring other strategies, but Borré knew that even in liberal Massachusetts an intrachurch dispute was a legal long shot, given the Constitution’s guarantee for freedom of religion.

Borré was prepared at his own expense to spend time in Rome to see if just a few high church officials could grasp that each week in which a given group of parishioners kept their vigil meant lost Sunday collections, no taxes to the archbishop, continued expenses for the archdiocese, and the potential of losing good Catholics who wanted the sacraments
in their home churches
. O’Malley was losing money on each occupied parish. But Borré and the vigil members were clear-eyed about Vatican tribunals. The church legal system was not democratic. Bishops governed as princes. The pope as supreme arbiter of canon law could intervene in any proceeding; however, that rarely happened. Making the system work for protesting laypeople was one tall order.

For Mary Beth Borré, the biggest surprise was watching her husband “take on the role of a Don Quixote,” as he headed out on an exotic journey against the odds. “It seemed a natural progression of the fight he chose to wage,” she said later. “Peter is a natural entrepreneur. His greatest strength lies in seeing opportunity where others do not and being able to take advantage of the vacuum.” Those traits ill fit the character of Cervantes’s chivalrous madman on horseback. Still, Peter Borré, toughened by years in the oil industry, had never embarked on anything so remotely idealistic. The search for a point where faith and justice might meet had become a quest that, somehow, appealed to him.

He drew encouragement from the 2004 bankruptcy filings by the dioceses of Portland, Spokane, and Tucson. Canon lawyers were divided on the proprietary rights of bishops, but everyone realized that the bishops wanted to keep those diocesan parishes from being lumped into the assets that plaintiff lawyers were trying to recover in the mass-settlement cases
for victim survivors. If parishes were off-limits in a diocese grappling with bankruptcy, how could the Suppression decrees in Boston—the bishop seizing parish assets—be valid?

As the Congregation for the Clergy’s Third Office reviewed the appeals from the vigil parishes, the priests in Greater Boston were jolted by the news that the archdiocese was cutting back on benefits from the clergy pension fund. A priest leaked to
New York Times
reporter Mary Williams Walsh an internal report from the archdiocese’s financial consultant, Towers Perrin. Between 1986 and 2002, “the archdiocese made no contributions” to the clergy pension fund, wrote Walsh. “Twice a year, at Christmas and at Easter, the archdiocese has held fund-raising drives in the parishes for priests’ retirements, raising about $4.5 million a year. But for many years the archdiocese has used that money to fill other needs.” The archdiocese was freezing pensions at $1,889 a month and “has sold church-owned real estate to the priests’ pension fund to raise cash.”
⁴

The pension fund had money before the decade plus six years in which the annual donations were channeled elsewhere—enough, at the front end, such that it earned $1.5 million in interest on a $15 million loan to the archdiocese for the $85 million victims’ settlement in 2003. But with $134.4 million in assets on hand at the close of the 2003 fiscal year, the retirement fund needed $204.7 million to meet its projected commitments, a $60.3 million shortfall. “I think we are all very perplexed as to how the archdiocese accumulated such a large unfunded pension liability, because parishioners have been giving for years,” Cynthia Deysher told the
Globe
. “Now it has come out that they never put the money in for sixteen years. That is fraudulent.”
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Peter Borré calculated that if the $4.5 million yearly inflow for the Clergy Retirement Trust, starting in 1986, had been invested conservatively in a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds, at an assumed annual return of 5 percent, more than $140 million would have accumulated by the close of fiscal year 2002. In whatever fashion Cardinal Law had used the $4.5 million yearly donations, Borré considered the diversion a gross violation of trust.

The archdiocesan
Pilot
then reported that the Christmas and Easter donations went to the Clergy Benefit Trust, “which provides for the needs of priests including … the Clergy Retirement and Disability [Trust] and the Clergy Medical/Hospitalization [Trust].” The chancellor, or chief financial
officer, was a layman named David Smith. Smith explained that most of the funds went for yearly medical costs. He put the onus on parishes for not sending enough money downtown, a subtle gambit of shifting blame to pastors for not collecting more from the pews: “The billing [to the parishes] has never caught up with the cost, because the cost keeps going up. There is a reluctance to put a burden on the parishes, so premiums have been raised slower than the cost.”
The Pilot
offered more explanation:

Smith explained that the collections were never intended to be used exclusively for retirement benefits. “I have gone back to check what we said and could not find a single [communication] that said ‘only for retired priests,’ ” he said. Smith maintained that the collections were used appropriately. “Every dollar that was collected was used exclusively for the needs of priests, and a great deal of it went to the needs of retired priests,” he said …

The collections were not needed for the retirement fund because returns from investments in the booming stock market provided the plan with sufficient funds.
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Smith was more forthcoming while under oath in a June 2002 civil deposition, after the archdiocese pulled back from agreeing to a settlement with the first wave of eighty-six victims of John Geoghan. (The cases settled that fall before the much larger victims’ group.) Plaintiff lawyers Mitchell Garabedian and William H. Gordon were focused on Cardinal Law and his Finance Council. Bill Gordon asked the questions; he zeroed in on funding streams. “I’m not a trustee,” Smith stated, “but essentially the Clergy Benefit Trust is for medical and ultimately retirement benefits for clergy.”

Is there a separate trust called the Clergy Medical Trust, then?

Clergy Medical and Hospitalization Trust is essentially, it is another trust, it is a separate legal vehicle. It is essentially the checkbook that pays those medical bills.

And the Clergy Benefit Trust in contrast to that is for—

Well, the Christmas and Easter collection monies flow into the Clergy Benefit Trust. They flow out of that trust either to the Clergy
Medical Hospitalization or to the Clergy Retirement Disability Trust, and occasionally for special needs of priests for medical that wouldn’t normally be covered under the plan, the Clergy Benefit Trust would cover that.

The Medical Hospitalization Trust is essentially a checkbook. It’s the device that literally pays the bills.

Another part of the organizational structure, the Clergy Fund Advisory Committee, had its own priest-secretary. Gordon bore down on Smith.

Is there a dollar limit when the committee must be consulted before any expense is made?

I’m not aware of any dollar limit …

Has the Clergy Benefit Trust been used to pay loans to priests to retain counsel when they’ve been involved in legal matters?

Not to my knowledge.

Which trust would produce loans to priests to retain counsel when they’re involved in legal matters?

As far as I know, there’s only one trust that has ever made any loans to any priests, and there isn’t a specific trust for legal matters. The Clergy Assistance Trust makes loans to priests who need them, and they are Boston priests only … It could be somebody’s mother died and needed to be buried. It could be, you know, any kind of family-related, personal issue. There isn’t any restriction that I know of that describes what kind of assistance they can get.
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Smith was describing a shell game: the money starts out beneath one shell, the Clergy Benefit Trust, after the two big dollops of contributions from the pews at Christmas and at Easter. From the Benefit Trust, a line of money slides over to the shell called Medical/Hospitalization Trust, which “is essentially a checkbook” used to pay for, among other bills, the psychiatric facilities where the child molesters were sent, at least the portion of charges not covered by ordinary health insurance. A separate Medical/Hospitalization Trust suggests a need beyond standard coverage. When legal expenses arose, the Clergy Benefit Trust shifted the funds to another
shell, the Clergy Assistance Trust, for “any kind of … personal issue,” Smith testified. “There isn’t any restriction.”

Unaware of Smith’s deposition, Peter Borré pounced on the chancellor’s line from the
Pilot
article: “Every dollar … used exclusively for the needs of priests.”

How exclusive
, he wondered,
did those needs get? And at what cost?

The case of Paul Shanley was vexing. Father Shanley moved to California in 1988, in good standing courtesy of his seminary friend Father John McCormack, who was destined to become a bishop for his chancery work. Shanley had a
seventeen-hundred-page
personnel file with sexual allegations to boggle the mind. After a stint at a mental hospital, he left the archdiocese early on a $1,000-a-month pension to become a weekend priest for the San Bernardino diocese. Shanley also bought a half interest in a Palm Springs hotel known for gay sex parties. He lived there part-time; his co-owner was another exiled Boston cleric, a recovering cocaine addict. Arrested in 2002 and extradicted to Massachusetts, Shanley was tried and imprisoned for crimes from years gone by.

“It is horrifying to see up close the psychic damage allegedly inflicted by Paul Shanley,” Maureen Orth wrote in a
Vanity Fair
article before the trial.

I have spoken to nine accusers, whose ages at the time they claim they were abused ranged from 6 to 21. A number have become alcoholics, some have developed suicidal tendencies and post-traumatic stress, and one has undergone electroshock treatments … What is truly alarming is how closely their stories resemble one another, according to their ages when they were abused. Shanley allegedly lured the youngest children with games such as strip poker, the younger teens with the pretext of examinations of their penises during puberty, the older youths with an invitation to use his body to get over their fears of homosexuality. He apparently was a master of manipulation and cunning.
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