Render Unto Rome (27 page)

Castaldi’s committee found a $12 million shift from Reconfiguration money to the Central Fund; they objected to the use of the proceeds from church sales to fund operating costs.
²⁰
Outgoing chancellor David Smith’s comment on the 2005 financial statement had been somber:

The Central Administration of the Archdiocese is not sustainable in its current form. While we do have liquidity, we have little left to sell, and we are faced with substantial obligations. In spite of reductions in force of nineteen percent since the beginning of the abuse crisis, our Central Administration, in an effort to maintain services at pre crisis levels, has operated with deficits each year. As you will see, those deficits were funded with borrowings, property sales and, in the last two years, with parish reconfiguration assets.

O’Malley was boxed into a corner. An unwritten law of the apostolic succession holds that one bishop does not overtly criticize another, and an archbishop should preserve the reputation of his predecessor, particularly a cardinal. O’Malley could not bring himself to state publicly that Law had mismanaged the money, stuffing money into written-off loans for clerics’ legal fees and writing checks for the expensive psychiatric facilities.
One hundred and ninety priests
put out to pasture had cost the archdiocese for
their legal, medical, and stipend costs, while proportionally fewer priests performed the banal but crucial job of raising a parish’s money. As much as Seán O’Malley found Reconfiguration a nightmare, he would not violate an unwritten law of the apostolic succession and open the relevant documents of those accounts to public accounting, lest it invite scrutiny of his predecessor Law. Even if he disliked Lennon, as many believed, O’Malley needed to know what Lennon knew. And part of O’Malley’s unwritten job description was
protect Bernie Law
.

O’Malley had become a cardinal as he opened a realm of transparency in the late winter of 2006, releasing substantial data and annual reports that revealed $330 million in assets, against debt of $346 million. “We’re not trying to keep secrets from people,” he told a press conference. “We’re trying to use the limited resources we have for the mission of the church.” He won praise from Cynthia Deysher: “We’ve never seen this level of financial disclosure from the archdiocese before.”
²¹
O’Malley had restored the trust with certain of Boston’s heavy hitters, like Jack Connors, a public relations executive who was raising money for the parochial schools.

Castaldi had a more benign view of the pension crisis than Borré. By his lights, the Clergy Retirement/Disability Trust was fully funded in the late 1990s. “The money could go for other uses,” he explained. “The stock market started going down in 1999 and continued through 2005. At the same time, clergy health and housing benefit costs were going up … When I was there, laypeople were not involved in decisions about priests. We were not consulted. That needed to change. I participated in lay trust funds and health issues, but not oversight of clergy trust funds.”

The failure to invest the annual donations was a serious mistake. Still, Castaldi concluded, “I see no sign of misappropriation of assets.”

But the documents on how clergy funds were spent from 1986 to 2000 were not available, according to the archdiocese. I asked: “So how do we know what happened?” Castaldi nodded at the question, and said, “Those are the detailed transactional documents. That’s not a big surprise. You don’t keep those documents forever.” On the mystery of what those documents held—how much to the legal, therapy, housing, and early retirement costs of the several score child abusers Law had eased out—Castaldi had no answer. The problem, he averred, was more complex than absorbing costs of bad priests. “The culture in the club indicated lots of good
things to help people. It’s instinctive in priests. The money will come from somewhere. That mentality builds in structural deficits, and it’s hard to get them under control. The abuse crisis put the club at the tipping point.”

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

The Reconfiguration saga took a new turn on November 16, 2006, when the archdiocese sold an East Boston parish, St. Mary Star of the Sea, for $850,000 to Michael Indresano, a commercial photographer. Twenty days later he resold the property for $2.65 million to a Brazilian-led evangelical sect, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Indresano had presented a plan to the archdiocese’s real estate office to develop a photography studio, six condos, and a parking lot, but the sale contract did not preclude him from changing his mind, which he did quite soon, pulling in a $1.8 million profit for the flip.
²²

The new church owner had sparked a huge controversy in Brazil in 1995, when a pastor “repeatedly kicked a statue of the country’s patron saint on national television, prompting condemnation of the UCKG by the Roman Catholic Church,” reported Laura Crimaldi of the
Boston Herald
. The church’s founding bishop “owns one of Brazil’s largest television stations, as well as radio stations, newspapers and a soccer team.”
²³

Peter Borré sent a letter of protest to the papal nuncio in Washington, D.C. David Castaldi promised further inquiry by the Reconfiguration oversight committee. Cardinal O’Malley, in a deft move, appointed a retired judge to conduct an investigation and write a report on what went wrong.

The archdiocese had turned down an earlier offer of $2 million from a different church. “A discussion with former [archdiocesan] chancellor David W. Smith lends credence to the notion that [the Boston archdiocese] was reluctant to get the word out that it was unwilling to convey the property to another religious institution, no matter what the nature of the denomination,” wrote Kevin J. Herlihy, the retired judge. “Mr. Smith also left no doubt that the Vicar General, Bishop Richard G. Lennon, D.D., saw, read and presented the memo dated January 19, 2006 to the [archdiocesan] Board of Consultors recommending no restriction in the deed to Indresano. Although the memo purports to be from Smith to the Vicar General,
Smith could not rule out with certainty the possibility that Bishop Lennon actually prepared the recommendation.”
²⁴

By the time Judge Herlihy’s report was released, in October 2007, Lennon’s disastrous handling of Reconfiguration in Boston had catalyzed nine parishes into vigil and another round of canonical appeals in Rome. Cardinal O’Malley resisted sending in the police. He was relieved, however, to wash his hands of Lennon. In the culture of ecclesiastical princes, where mistakes are often rewarded, Richard Lennon would soon be moving on, and up, to assume a diocese of his own.

CHAPTER 7

FATHER MACIEL, LORD
OF
PROSPERITY

Father Christopher Kunze was thirty-six when he began work at the Congregation for the Clergy in December 1997. His admiration for Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos grew quickly. The Colombian prefect with a silver mane and patrician bearing “spoke all the modern languages and knew Arabic, Hungarian, and Russian,” Kunze recalls. Journalists covering the Vatican considered Castrillón
papabile
, a cardinal on the short list to become pope.

Chris Kunze was an American. At six foot two, with receding blond hair and an easy smile, he was pursuing a master’s in theology at the university his religious order, the Legion of Christ, was building in Rome. His Vatican salary was about $28,000, which he signed over to the Legion. Kunze spoke German and therein lay his value. Cardinal Castrillón needed an undersecretary for case work from Germany and Austria. Kunze had spent several years in the Cologne archdiocese as a university chaplain, working to secure a presence for the Legion’s network of schools. The Jesuits and the Dominicans were centuries-old teaching orders, but the Legionaries had begun their mission only a half century earlier, during World War II. The founder with an extravagant name, Marcial Maciel Degollado, was a Mexican who fostered a militant spirituality and rock-ribbed loyalty to the pope.

Father Maciel had befriended Castrillón, then president of the Latin American bishops’ council, in the late 1980s. Praised by Gabriel García Márquez as “this rustic man with the profile of an eagle,” Castrillón was a scourge of liberation theology, the Latin American movement of “a Church being born from the faith of the poor,” in the words of the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff.
¹
Castrillón believed in helping the poor, but he looked to the prevailing winds from Rome. In 1985 Cardinal Ratzinger jolted the Brazilian bishops by imposing a yearlong “silence” on Boff, which turned the prolific Franciscan into a national hero. A student of Ratzinger’s in Germany years before, Boff had likened the Vatican tribunal that judged theologians to “a Kafkaesque process wherein the accuser, the defender, the lawyer and the judge are one and the same.”
²
Boff wanted open theological inquiry. Ratzinger attacked him for an “uncritical use of Marxist mode of analysis.”
³
In a dispassionate account of the conflict, Harvard Divinity professor Harvey Cox observed:

In their famous meeting at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, the Latin American bishops proclaimed that the church should exercise a preferential option for the poor. Liberation theology is an expression of this preference. It is the attempt to interpret the Bible and Christianity from the perspective of the poor. It is in no sense a liberal or modernist theological deviation. Rather, it is a
method
, an effort to look at the life and message of Jesus through the eyes of those who have normally been excluded or ignored … [Liberation theologians] work closely with the burgeoning “Christian base communities” of Latin America. These are local groups of Catholics, most of whom are from the lowest tiers of society, whose study of the Bible has led them to become active in grassroots political movements. Thus liberation theology provides both an alternative to the topdown method of conventional academic and ecclesial theology as well as a source of guidance to the long-neglected people at the bottom.
⁴

“Boff will have to ask God to forgive him,” huffed Castrillón, “and when God answers, then the pope and I will know whether to forgive him or not.”
⁵

When John Paul II summoned Castrillón to the Curia in 1996, the
Colombian had an ally in Father Maciel, who sent young Legionaries to move his boxes into the Vatican apartment. Castrillón was grateful, although they smashed a leg of his grand piano which had to be fixed. Sending seminarians to do heavy lifting folded into Father Maciel’s way of cultivating Vatican officials.

Chris Kunze had barely seen the surface of Maciel’s politesse.

Rome was in a postwar shambles when Maciel, an obscure young priest, arrived in 1946 in hopes of meeting Pope Pius XII. He had been ordained only two years, but at that ceremony in Mexico City a cameraman filmed the twenty-four-year-old at the altar, with steepled fingers and a deep sigh as in the opening scene of a cinematic life. The footage would be used for the Legion’s lucrative marketing in later years.
⁶
Maciel founded his order while in private tutelage for the priesthood under Francisco González Arias, one of his four uncles who were bishops, and the one who ordained him. Maciel, twenty-six, had gone to Rome via Madrid, seeking scholarships the Franco government had announced for Latin American seminarians to study in Spain. The Spanish foreign minister, Alberto Martín-Artajo, told Maciel he needed Vatican approval if his Mexican “apostolic schoolboys” were to qualify for the Spanish benefits.
⁷

With the backing of several of Mexico’s wealthiest families, including that of its president, Miguel Alemán Valdés, Maciel wangled a meeting with Clemente Micara, a newly named cardinal. Maciel, tall, lean, with fair brown hair and searchlight eyes, spoke no Italian; Micara, a portly sixty-seven-year-old diplomat, spoke Spanish. Maciel gave Micara $10,000, “a huge sum in a city reeling from the war,” says a priest with seasoned knowledge of Legion finances.
⁸
The Legion of Christ: A History
(all but dictated by Maciel and published by a Legion imprint) makes no mention of Maciel giving funds to Micara; however, it says that Maciel traveled with “a confidential document and a sum of money” from Mexico’s apostolic delegate (nuncio) for Cardinal Nicola Canali, the governor of the Vatican city-state.
⁹
Canali, a leading Fascist sympathizer during the war, got along well with Maciel, who was a devotee of General Franco.
¹⁰
The two cardinals helped Maciel gain an audience with Pope Pius XII. Maciel returned to Madrid with letters of approval that allowed the apostolic schoolboys from Mexico to study in Spain. But why would the Holy See, with established channels to transmit documents, entrust sensitive material to a priest without a diplomatic passport?
The other part of the story, “a sum of money,” was the shape of things to come.