Render Unto Rome (5 page)

Seán O’Malley, a Capuchin monk with a snowy beard, was fifty-nine and the bishop of Palm Beach, Florida, when he received the papal appointment as Boston’s archbishop. Wearing sandals and a brown robe with a rope belt, O’Malley cut an image quite the opposite of Law’s imperial persona. No one blamed O’Malley for the crisis, but donations had plummeted by 43 percent in the preceding year, from $14 million to $8 million in 2003.
⁴
O’Malley faced huge barriers to restoring trust—and cash flow. In a letter issued on January 9, 2004, O’Malley announced that one-seventh of the archdiocesan buildings needed upgrading, a cost pegged at $104
million. The church had to assess its properties and streamline workings of the infrastructure. On February 2, 2004, O’Malley in a speech on the archdiocesan TV station revealed that the church faced a $4 million operating deficit and a $37 million loan from the Knights of Columbus to be repaid: “This has nothing to do with paying for abuse settlements, but has everything to do with providing vital services.”

Nothing to do with abuse settlements
, Borré repeated to himself.

Two months later, the Red Sox had wrapped up spring training when O’Malley approved the sale of the mansion on a hill in Brighton where Law had lived like a lord, with a staff trained to call him “Your Eminence.” The cost for the cardinal’s estate and forty-three acres: $107.4 million. The buyer was the neighbor across Commonwealth Avenue: Boston College, a pearl in the crown of Jesuit higher education.
⁵
By virtue of the size of its student body and faculty, and the scope of its graduate programs, BC should have been called a university, but BU had gotten there first. Nevertheless, in a city synonymous with Irish Catholicism, Boston College had a force of loyal alumni (many of them with Italian and Portuguese roots) who had produced an endowment that exceeded $1 billion. To Catholics outraged by Law’s reshuffling of predators, selling the mansion carried symbolic weight. The palazzo of the cardinal who had resigned his archbishopric in shame joined the infrastructure of a Jesuit college that stood for a church with intellectual moorings and a focus on social justice.

Seasoned in the ways of oil companies, Peter Borré began thinking about an archbishop in the role of a CEO. If forced to do butcher’s work, the prelate must be adroit enough to avoid spattering blood on the floor. Red ink was rising around Archbishop O’Malley. Following the news accounts, Borré knew the archdiocese was holding back information. His mind raced.
Where did the money go? What is O’Malley’s plan? Is he leveling with us? How bad is it?

Those questions might have hung in some cerebral side pocket, throwing cold shadows on his golden years until the day Peter Borré, the very opposite of a radical, got mad at a priest. When that happened, Mary Beth, who had wondered how her husband, with his complex molecular composition, might occupy himself in retirement, saw the swell of dark, silent anger and knew immediately they were in for a ride. Peter Borré was not a man to yell, yet she knew that despite his elegant manner, he was just the kind of Italian who would fight.

FAMILY VALUES

Mary Beth married her college sweetheart in 1976 at a guitar Mass. “It probably didn’t seem like a concession to our families,” she said, sighing, decades later. “If we’d only been a little older, when society accepted people living together, the relationship might have ended with a lot less anguish. I was surprised when my mom actually said that to me much later on.” They divorced after four years—no children. Mary Beth was done with the church, done with religion. Too many of the moral teachings struck her as invasive, politics of the body, insensitive to ordinary people as they sought intimacy in life. She earned a B.S. in marketing at the University of Delaware.

In 1986 she was working for an oil company in Houston when friends introduced her to Peter, who was in town on a business trip. With dark hair going silver at the curls, a charming wit, and a razor-sharp mind, he made an immediate impression. He had three children from his first marriage, which had ended several years before. When Mary Beth told her mother she was taking a trip to Paris with her new (forty-eight-year-old) boyfriend, Rosie caught a train to New York to meet the man. She took note of his flawless manners and the silken gesture of slipping cash into the palm of her cabdriver.

He proposed after three months.

They married in 1987 at the Harvard Club in Boston.

Despite the French surname, Borré’s forebears were Italian. His paternal grandfather, Agostino, was born in 1871, the year after nationalists captured territories long controlled by the papacy. In the convulsions of Italian statehood, Giuseppe Agostino Borré emigrated from Zerba, a mountain village in Piacenza province, north of Genoa, “at the urging of his brother Ernesto, who had come in 1882. Both came at about age nineteen and became chefs,” explains Marie Roth, a cousin who researched the family lineage.
⁶
His maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Balboni, came from a village in Emilia in the Po Valley. Starting out as a pushcart peddler of fruit and vegetables, he ended up with a grocery store.

Born in Boston in 1938, Peter was a boy when his father, Peter senior, a lawyer and an army veteran, hired on for an American rebuilding project in Italy, in advance of the Marshall Plan. In August 1946 the family moved to Rome. Boxes bearing the remains of U.S. soldiers were stacked at the airport awaiting shipment home. The boy asked about the boxes.
His father answered, gently telling him about the war. His mother, Mary Albina, had completed a teaching degree and then gone to Harvard, earning a master’s in English. She befriended the aging philosopher George Santayana (who famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) during his sunset years in Rome.

The bishops, monsignors, and priests who came to dinner were cultivated men whose intelligence impressed the boy. One visitor, Auxiliary Bishop John Wright from Boston, was a large, heavy man who enjoyed his wine and the discussions of American politics, Italian politics, and Vatican politics. Wright later became a cardinal at the Vatican and prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy.

Postwar Italy was a bleeding chaos of embedded Fascists, the largest Communist Party in Western Europe backed by Soviet Russia, a resurgent mafia in the south, and the Christian Democrats, a party supported by Pope Pius XII. The leader of the Christian Democrats, Alcide De Gasperi, had been an outspoken anti-Fascist before the war; he was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1927 and released to the custody of the previous pope, Pius XI, in 1929. De Gasperi spent the next fifteen years basically living in the Vatican Library. “Catholic, Italian and democratic, in that order” was his motto.
⁷
In 1945, as one of the first postwar prime ministers, he led a church-sponsored party with little organization apart from Catholic Action, a movement that Pius X had launched in 1905 to unite lay activism and the hierarchy’s agenda. The little social cohesion left in postwar Italy lay with the 65,000 parish priests serving 24,000 parishes in 300 dioceses. Another 200,000 religious order priests and nuns staffed schools, hospitals, and charitable organizations.
⁸
As De Gasperi guided the Christian Democrats through three governments in as many years, dozens of parties were vying for power. The Truman administration braced for Italy’s 1948 elections. “The American intervention in Italy was large and well-coordinated, very much the work of an ‘efficient machine,’ ” wrote U.S. intelligence historian Thomas Powers.
⁹
“Cash, lots of it, would be needed to help defeat the communists,” observed journalist Tim Weiner in a history of the CIA
¹⁰
—an estimated $10 million, according to the CIA station chief in Rome. Thus, Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder decided

to tap into the Exchange Stabilization Fund set up in the Depression to shore up the value of the dollar overseas through
short-term currency trading, and converted during World War II as a depository for captured Axis loot. The fund held $200 million earmarked for the reconstruction of Europe. It delivered millions into the bank accounts of wealthy American citizens, many of them Italian Americans, who then sent the money to newly formed political fronts created by the CIA. Donors were instructed to place a special code on their income tax forms alongside their “charitable donation.” The millions were delivered to Italian politicians and priests of Catholic Action, a political arm of the Vatican.
¹¹

Between the CIA and U.S. relief projects, America poured $350 million into Italy during the twelve months before the April 18, 1948, election. The Vatican Bank, which was founded in 1942 under Pius XII to consolidate the Holy See’s finances during the worst of World War II, became a conduit for funds to the Christian Democrats. Pius “provided 100 million lire [$185,000] from his personal bank,” writes John Cornwell, “a sum of money apparently raised from the sale of U.S. war matériel and earmarked for the Vatican to spend on anti-Communist activities.”
¹²
The 1948 parliamentary elections were the first under Italy’s postwar constitution since the fall of Fascism.

“The fate of Italy depends upon the forthcoming election and the conflict between Communism and Christianity, between slavery and freedom,” declared Cardinal Francis J. Spellman of New York. On Vatican orders, Spellman entreated Italian Americans to write to relatives in the old country. Spellman, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, and the golden boy Frank Sinatra made radio broadcasts for De Gasperi’s party.
¹³
The Vatican pulled out all the stops, “even to the extent of swinging open the doors of convents and marching cloistered nuns off to the polling places to vote for Christian Democrat candidates,” reported journalist Nino Lo Bello.
¹⁴
The Christian Democrats won by a heavy margin in an election that also secured the party’s narcotic dependency on CIA money. “The CIA’s practice of purchasing elections and politicians with bags of cash was repeated in Italy—and in many other nations—for the next twenty-five years,” writes Weiner.
¹⁵

At the soirees that the Borrés hosted or attended, U.S. diplomats,
Italian politicians, and businessmen mingled with Vatican officials, bankers, and film directors. Peter, a pampered only child, grew up in that milieu.

Mussolini had given heavy state support to the 1930s Italian film industry. The dictator considered movies a powerful tool and ordered the production of proto-Fascist films for his propaganda machinery as he moved toward an alliance with Hitler.
¹⁶
After the war, as American dollars rolled into Rome, Borré père did legal work for MGM and other American studios lured by the cheap production costs and solid studio infrastructure Il Duce had built. The CIA encouraged American studios to distribute films in Western Europe as a counter to Communist politics. As American producers became flush with lire, Italian law barred them from taking the funds out of local banks for conversion into dollars. With a mountain of money that the Americans had to spend locally, Italy’s postwar film industry rebounded as a Hollywood-on-the-Tiber. Charlton Heston won the 1959 Best Actor Oscar for
Ben-Hur
, and Peter Borré, who had just graduated from Harvard, earned lire as an Italian-English interpreter and gofer on the film’s set.

The month after he had first arrived in Italy, seven-year-old Peter was enrolled in Rome’s most prestigious Jesuit school, Istituto Massimo. The alumni included Pope Pius XII. Peter admired the teachers for their strong-minded sermons and lectures, vaunting Rome as the capital of the Catholic Church, emphasizing each man’s responsibility to further the faith. The Jesuits stressed classical learning with a rigor that seems punishing by today’s standards. The six-day-a-week schedule began with Mass at 7 a.m. and ran until 2:30 in the afternoon. Lunch was thirty minutes. In third grade he was speaking good Italian, studying Latin and algebra; in fifth grade he added Greek and French.

The school was in central Rome, near Piazza della Repubblica and Santa Maria degli Angeli (St. Mary of the Angels), a vast church begun in 1563 by Michelangelo within the ruins of the ancient baths built by Emperor Diocletian. Brown earth tones colored the shell, which opened into an interior of immense vaulted ceilings and light streams that washed the gigantic columns and multicolored marble floors. When Peter made occasional stops on silent afternoons, watching the people as they knelt in prayer, he drew a notion from the sheer size of the space, fortified by his school lessons, of his soul as a small but unique presence in the firmament.
On trips to St. Peter’s Basilica he felt sorrow at Michelangelo’s
Pietà
, the statue of Mary in grief for the Son come down from the cross. Here was faith, close and true.

He was fourteen when his father, though pleased with his academic skills and fluency in foreign languages, worried that he could barely write in English. And so his parents sent him back to New England for prep school.

The first Mass Borré attended in the town of Andover appalled him. The church reminded him of some garish county fair; the priest so stressed the importance of contributing money as to seem a bumpkin. The beauty and size of Rome’s sacred spaces, inspiring his awe for a global faith, stood out in high relief from what he now took to be a religious backwater. He entered Harvard College at age sixteen. The disgruntlement over Boston Catholicism lingered through his undergraduate years; he was bored by sermons with all the Irish baggage that showed in the working-class people who heeded them and the homilies telling the faithful that they must pray, make confession,
follow the rules
, and give money. Borré’s idea of faith looked back on the urbane clerics at his parents’ dinners, the Jesuits with their emphasis on analytical thinking and a sacramental imagination shaped by the soaring beauty of Italian church interiors.