Render Unto Rome (4 page)

One asset stood out from the report: gold. “The Holy See owns almost a [metric] tonne of gold which in today’s volatile market would be worth some £15 million,” wrote Robert Mickens, Rome correspondent for
The Tablet
, England’s independent Catholic magazine, in 2008.
³⁶
“I have never seen gold as a separate line item on any financial statement,” comments Ruhl. “People tend to speculate, rather than invest, in gold, because the gold market is a yo-yo. Still, given the undervalued assets, we can’t tell how much the Holy See is worth.” The Vatican city-state and Apostolic Patrimony appear to be comfortably secured, but the secret profits from the Vatican Bank obscure any real “transparency” by the Holy See.

Meanwhile, eight American dioceses, and the Northwestern province of the Society of Jesus, which includes Alaska, have tried bankruptcy filings to reduce what they would have to pay in lawsuits to abuse victims. As the reports on bankruptcy filings and the impact of civil litigation roll across the media screens, people wonder how a church so powerful could lose nearly $4 billion (embezzlements included) since 1965. The same bishops who recycled sex offenders have avoided a binding policy to secure Sunday collections. Church apologists say the huge settlements are unfair, but the Vatican’s failure to regulate bishops stems from a flawed system of justice.

Corruption in the church is a reality as the wheel of history turns. Democracy has its history of nightmares too. The resilience of the church as a spiritual reality has produced a continuing force of pastoral care, relief work, and vital forms of assistance to the truly needy. “Look at what the church has done for direct services to AIDS victims in Africa, and disaster relief in Haiti and many countries as a first responder,” explains Sister Christine Schenk, a nurse-midwife with a long history of social activism in Cleveland. A pivotal figure in the latter part of this book, Sister Schenk continues: “The church is one of the few transnational entities that connects religious people to something that’s
not
about making a profit—helping the poor, educating and feeding people, healing the sick through health services by missionaries. You don’t see much about this on the nightly news, but these are daily acts of witness in Christ’s name. The church has a communications network to reach many of the world’s dispossessed, people on the outer edge. This is not like Microsoft. It is going where Jesus calls. As crazy as the Vatican monarchical system can be with its top-down political model, the Catholic network of genuine service providers has a global reach to the needy, a real record of doing good in the world.”

The sacramental imagination, and an ethos of responsibility to those on the outer edge, gives many of us who are appalled by the scandals of church officialdom some cause to keep faith. Saint Augustine called justice a virtue that gives every one his due. Internal justice is what the church severely needs.

Render unto Rome
follows a line of reporting I began in
Lead Us Not into Temptation
(1992), a book that took seven years of research and exposed the contours of a national scandal. At the time, the scattered abuse cases
available from Boston and Los Angeles persuaded me that if the internal documents of those archdioceses were ever released, a secret history of epic corruption would surface. Back then I doubted that such would ever happen. Journalists used my calculation of $400 million in losses from legal and medical costs for four hundred priests in covering the early phase of the crisis. The impact of the
Boston Globe
reporting in 2002 signaled more than a new chapter in an old scandal. Under public pressure, the bishops’ conference finally released data: 4,392 priests had abused youngsters between 1950 and 2002.
³⁷

In 2004 I published
Vows of Silence
with Gerald Renner, the longtime religion editor of the
Hartford Courant
. In that newspaper we first reported on the Vatican’s failure to act on pedophilia allegations that trailed Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ. In 2008 I released a documentary film based on that book and updated research.
Chapter 7
of this book goes deeper, exploring Maciel’s financial odyssey as a mirror on Vatican justice.

Render unto Rome
concludes an investigative trilogy on the crisis of the Catholic Church. Since my first reports in 1985 on a priest who traumatized the Cajun diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, I have followed an intervening path of cultural productions, jazz history, and a novel—works that draw a bead on life’s uplifting mysteries, particularly in my flood-resurrected hometown of New Orleans. These pursuits, I confess, have imbued me with a certain optimism about the human experiment. This cast of mind was a source of some amusement to Gerald Renner, who shares in the dedication of this book. Jerry died of cancer in 2007, at seventy-six. I thought of him often in this current round of work. He was a reporter of rock-solid integrity; he also savored good bourbon. He had a grand Irish heart and was one of the finest men I have known.

CHAPTER 1

BOSTON
IN THE
FAULT LINES

Peter Borré was midway past sixty, and like most men who find domestic harmony, he had learned that women are usually right. This knowledge, gathered slowly, had taught him that it was useless to argue over certain realities.

The condo he and his wife shared in the old Naval Shipyard overlooked sailboat slips nestled by a pier off Boston Harbor. The view extended to a grand sweep of the city skyline. During World War II, forty thousand men had built destroyers in the vast complex; now, as with many industrial zones of urban America, a large part of the shipyard had become an upscale housing project. On the walls of their home hung color photographs his wife, Mary Beth, had taken of flowers in Finland, carved doors in Marrakech, an arched footbridge in Tahiti—pictures from their travels.

Borré had made his money in oil and gas, developing facilities to generate power and regional grids. He had a holding company for energy ventures. In the 1980s Borré had worked for Mobil on natural gas projects in West Africa and on marketing in Europe. Before that he had worked in government, starting in 1973 as an intelligence officer in the Energy Agency of the Nixon administration, advancing to assistant secretary for international affairs as Energy achieved department status under Jimmy
Carter, capped by a year under Ronald Reagan. But all the geopolitical experiences and business savvy had left him without leverage to engage his wife, a Democratic Party activist, about her spiritual life.

And so on Sundays, while Mary Beth watched
Meet the Press
, Peter Borré went to Mass with his mother-in-law, Rosie. Mary Beth had left the church well before the
Boston Globe
began its 2002 investigation of how Cardinal Bernard F. Law and a clutch of his auxiliary bishops recycled child-molester priests. The
Globe
ignited a chain reaction of media coverage in America that radiated to other countries, causing a crisis for which a frail and ailing John Paul II was in no way prepared. By winter of 2004, the media narrative on bishops concealing clergy predators began receding. The big story shifted to the Democratic presidential primaries, and a media frenzy over Mel Gibson’s movie
The Passion of the Christ
. Mary Beth Borré, forty-nine, had worked as a field organizer in Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection. She had no interest in the front-runner, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. She had once worked on Kerry’s annual fund-raiser, held on his birthday, which struck her as an act of outsized ego. Although addicted to news coverage, Mary Beth had tired of campaign work. In Boston, the “epicenter” of the abuse scandal, the church faced financial convulsions.

Mary Beth and her sister, Claudia, had settled their dad, Bill Piper, into a nursing home near Claudia’s house in Winchester. After bouts of depression as the girls grew up, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, then dementia, in retirement. Mary Beth’s brothers, living in Delaware and California, had drifted from the church, and Claudia was a Unitarian. Mary Beth attended Mass once a year with her mother, at Christmas, as a gesture of continuity. She considered herself a spiritual person but despised organized religion.

Rosie lived with Mary Beth and Peter at the condo for six months while searching for a new home in greater Boston. After she found a place near Claudia’s and the nursing home, Bill insisted on moving back in with Rosie.

Peter was seventeen years older than Mary Beth. Watching his response to the
Globe
’s coverage, she decided that his rarefied upbringing as an American in Rome, without exposure to nuns, had made Peter an Italian Catholic. He had an aesthetic idea of Catholicism in contrast to her more puritanical encounter with faith. Born in 1955, she was a high
school senior in Hockessin, Delaware, when the Supreme Court’s
Roe v. Wade
decision legalized abortion. Inspired by Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, Mary Beth Piper, the ripening feminist, gritted her teeth at the elderly pastor’s sermons against abortion. Later, she realized that a younger priest in the parish rectory who had dyed blond hair and vestments that sported lightning bolts (sewn by his mother) was going through his own drama with the closet. At the time she was galvanized by the social changes running every night on TV news, the protests for civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, and against the Vietnam War. She bridled at religion classes about mysteries and the afterlife. She wanted to make sense of this life, now. The right to choose an abortion made sense to her and caused friction with her mother. They clashed when she tried leaving the house without a bra. “Mary Beth went from being a stick figure to an attractive girl who was well endowed,” recalled Rosie, who was fourth-generation Irish from New York and had her standards. Bill, a Presbyterian, was a more detached dad, a bit of the soft touch. The distance Mary Beth felt from the church widened in college as she got to know gay people.

The abuse scandal darkened Peter Borré’s thought field, presaging a slow shift in his views. When the early 2002 reports in the
Globe
uncovered Law’s mishandling of one priest, then others, Borré fumed about “a few bad apples.”

“It’s about time,” retorted Mary Beth.

Borré listened as she recalled the late 1980s, the early years of their marriage, when he had been traveling on business and she worked in an AIDS crisis program as the epidemic hit Boston. While counseling victims of the retrovirus, Mary Beth Borré heard stories of priests who shunned those seeking solace. She knew that for all of its hard-line stance on homosexuality, the church had a large closet of gay priests. Some of them were trying to help AIDS victims, but others held back, avoiding any involvement. She also heard from men with the virus who said that they were abused by priests as teenage boys. Many of her colleagues were ex-Catholics and ex-Jews, divorced from church or synagogue; they joked with one another about religious guilt as they followed a deep Judeo-Christian impulse to help people dying of the mysterious disease.

Fourteen years later, when Cardinal Law’s world exploded in a scandal of covering up abusive priests, Mary Beth Borré figured he had it coming. As the scandal became the topic of everybody’s conversation, Peter
Borré registered his wife’s surgical insights and brooded about the church internal.

On September 18, 2002, the plaintiff attorney Mitchell Garabedian and his associate William H. Gordon secured a $10 million settlement for eighty-six victims of one priest, John Geoghan.
¹
As the press coverage made reference to an earlier line of legal actions, Borré wondered how much the archdiocese had paid to settle claims in the late 1990s that were handled by Garabedian, and by a high-profile attorney at another firm, Roderick MacLeish Jr. (a grandson of the poet Archibald MacLeish). The attorneys had resolved cases for some seventy victims out of court, but with stipulations by the archdiocese that muzzled the survivors—the agreements sealed church documents from public view. Still, with so many cases, information surfaced in legal filings that drew the scrutiny of Kristen Lombardi in the weekly
Boston Phoenix
. Lawyers for the
Globe
asked the court for access to documents. Overruling church lawyers, Judge Constance Sweeney granted the request, which opened the gates for an epic investigation in 2002.
²

Globe
reporters excavated a criminal sexual underground involving dozens of clerics, based on the church personnel files surrendered to the subpoena demands by victims’ lawyers. The media narrative seemed to crest when Cardinal Law resigned as archbishop shortly before Christmas in 2002.

But events charged on in a high-stakes legal war. On September 9, 2003, the church pulled back from a threatened bankruptcy filing to embrace an $85 million settlement with 542 victims. Law was down in Maryland, living with a community of nuns. “The agreement marked the dramatic conclusion to Archbishop Seán P. O’Malley’s all-out push in his first weeks in Boston to bring closure to the abuse cases,” the
Globe
reported.
³