Render Unto Rome (61 page)

A POPE OF IRONIES

As the years of prosecuting theologians sink into his past, Benedict XVI stands as the pope of ironies. The cardinal whose tactics drove Hans Küng to compare him to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (“he fears nothing more than freedom”) must, as pope, balance the agenda of moral absolutes with the politics of restraint.
⁸
In
The Brothers Karamazov
, Dostoyevsky uses the inquisitor’s cameo to condemn the church for abandoning Christ: Jesus appears in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition. The sinister monk who has been burning heretics puts Jesus in a cell and lays on a cynical lecture about power and why the fearful masses must be subdued. Jesus stands silent. Then, in a sublime gesture of forgiveness, Jesus kisses the inquisitor and leaves. For Dostoyevsky, the Church of Rome will betray the conscience of Christ anew.

Ratzinger-as-prosecutor peers over Benedict’s shoulder, repulsed by the structural sins and crimes. The pope, as chief pastor, must weigh flexibility for the greater good. Does he fear a faith unmoored by prosecutions let loose?

Creating a commission to clean up the Vatican Bank, like the punishment of Maciel and takeover of the Legion, suggests a pope gaining confidence with his powers. The powers are supreme. How far should he go? To let the likes of Cardinal Sodano simply age and slip away is a passive sign
that justice is a ritual of half measures. The pope cannot be an authentic voice for peace, affirm the dignity of human life, and preach the values of a greener planet if people see that Vatican justice is a farce. Will justice sink beneath the weight of popes forever bound to the hubris of apostolic succession? Questions hang; a hungry people wait.

The miracle is that the Eucharist endures.

NOTES

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The many interviews for this book involved countless follow-up calls and e-mails; to have listed each interview as a citation was impractical. Most direct quotations are not cited as footnotes. I have kept background sources, who spoke with assurance of anonymity, to a minimum; but investigative reporting, particularly at the Vatican and in high levels of the Catholic Church, relies on some sources with careers to protect, hence their insistence on not being identified. The notes list a small number of interviews that were germane to specific points like a published citation. Many of the news articles and documents cited in this book can be found in the online library archive
www.bishopaccountability.org
.

PROLOGUE: PRINCES OF THE REALM

  1.
Hans Küng,
The Catholic Church: A Short History
(New York, 2001), p. 181.

  2.
Message of Pope Paul VI, Celebration of the Day of Peace, January 1, 1972,
www.vatican.va
.

  3.
Luigi Accattoli,
When a Pope Asks for Forgiveness: The Mea Culpa’s of John Paul II
(Boston, 1998), p. 96.

  4.
Ibid., p. 118.

  5.
James Gollin,
Worldly Goods
(New York, 1971), p. 492.

  6.
Sam Dillon and Leslie Wayne, “Scandals in the Church: The Money,”
New York Times
, June 13, 2002.

  7.
Ibid.

  8.
Brian Ross, “Archbishop Settles Sex Assault Claim,”
Good Morning America
, May 23, 2002.

  9.
Tom Heinan, “Rome Endowments to Honor Weakland,”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
, November 22, 1997.

10.
Rembert G. Weakland,
A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: Memoirs of a Catholic Archbishop
(Grand Rapids, MI, 2009), p. 341. Weakland’s account of the legal settlement with Paul Marcoux—whom I interviewed as part of the ABC News investigation—is a study in self-pity, riddled with inaccuracies.

11.
James A. Brundage,
Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
(Chicago, 1987), p. 214.

12.
Douglas MacMillan, “A Business Plan for the Catholic Church,”
Business-Week
, September 30, 2008.

13.
The Catholic Church in America—Meeting Real Needs in Your Neighborhood
(Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2002), pp. 13–14.

14.
Harris provided his opinion in a telephone interview after extensive dialogue on his interpretation of data.

15.
Harris utilized the data from Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). He explains: “Estimates for the total parish Offertory collection for the years 2002 through 2006 were calculated as follows. CARA annually collected Offertory collection data from members of the International Catholic Stewardship Council (ICSC). In addition to estimates for the Offertory collection, ICSC members also provided estimates of the number of households by diocese. The response rate for these data requests was approximately 65 percent. The data were organized according to a structure of seven geographic regions: Northeast, South Atlantic, South, Great Lakes, Midwest, Mountain, and Pacific. We first developed an average household donation by diocese for every responding diocese. The regional average statistic was then multiplied by the number of households in a diocese that did not report Offertory collection data. The reported data and the calculated data were added together to form an estimated total Offertory collection for every diocese in the region. The process was repeated for all regions to form an estimated Offertory collection for the fifty states and the District of Columbia.”

16.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
The Nature and Scope of the Problems of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States
(Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2004), p. 105, table 6.

17.
Joseph Claude Harris, “The Sexual Abuse Scandal in the United States: What It Cost” (unpublished, 2010). Harris draws his data from annual studies on data related to the abuse crisis by CARA.

18.
In a personal communication with the author, Mary Gautier, Ph.D., of CARA explains a discrepancy: “Dioceses are not consistent in what they report to
The Official Catholic Directory
, which is the only source of those data. If a diocese merges three parishes into one, it should report that it has closed three parishes and created one new parish. Too often, they do not report this accurately.” A “new” parish formed by a consolidation of existing ones, however, is not the same as a church developed and built to be a Catholic parish.

19.
James Freeman, “Pennies Backed by Heaven,”
Wall Street Journal
, May 16, 2008.

20.
Ralph Cipriano, “Lavish Spending in Archdiocese Skips Inner City,”
National Catholic Reporter
, June 19, 1998.

21.
“A Continuous, Concerted Campaign of Cover-up,” excerpts from the Grand Jury’s Report,
Philadelphia Inquirer
, September 22, 2005.

22.
Robert West and Charles Zech, “Internal Financial Controls in the U.S. Church” (Villanova, PA: Villanova University, Center for the Study of Church Management, January 2007).

23.
Susan Spencer-Wendel, “Bookkeepers Believed Priest Was Skimming from Church,”
Palm Beach Post
, February 18, 2009; and “Jury Finds Priest Stole Collections,”
Palm Beach Post
, February 23, 2009.

24.
Anemona Hartocollis, “Monsignor Gets 4-Year Sentence for Large Thefts from His East Side Parish,”
New York Times
, September 23, 2006; Associated Press, “N.Y. Church Sues Insurer Over $1.2 Million Thefts Blamed on Priest,”
Insurance Journal
, January 26, 2005; Veronika Belenkaya, “Priest Who Swindled East Side Parish Released from Prison,”
New York Daily News
, September 22, 2007.

25.
Michael Ryan draws on parish population data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), a Georgetown University–affiliated research center, and financial figures drawn from media reports he has culled in more than twenty years of research on Catholic church embezzlements. Ryan estimates that nearly $90 million was embezzled from Sunday collections in the calendar year 2010.

“News articles concerning specific embezzlements occasionally include a reference to the stolen funds being replaced by the diocese acting as its own insurer,” writes Ryan. “I am amazed that any commercial insurers are or would be willing to indemnify the church or a particular diocese without requiring them to implement readily available procedures that would prevent virtually all Sunday collection embezzlements. Insurers often pay out large sums of money when an embezzlement is discovered, and many diocesan officials are quick to announce that the loss suffered by the victim parish is being recovered through insurance. Whether such losses are paid for by a commercial insurer or a fund created and maintained by the diocese, it is still a loss that need not have been sustained.”

Ryan continues: “The $90 million estimated to have been lost from collection plates in 2010 was arrived at by estimating that the average
Sunday collection embezzlement totaled $25,000, or about $500 per week, and that such embezzlements are ongoing in 20 percent of parishes at any given time. For 2010, 20 percent of CARA’s reported 17,958 American parishes comes to 3,592 parishes. Multiplying that number by the estimated average loss per affected parish results in a total estimated loss of $89.8 million in 2010 alone.

“The key years (’65, ’74, ’75, ’84, etc.) were computed using the 2010 estimate of $89.8 million as the base year and applying the Consumer Price Index (CPI) calculator to determine the equivalent ‘real dollar’ value for each of the key years. The average yearly loss for each of the five multiyear periods was then determined by adding the beginning and ending years’ estimated losses and dividing the total by two.”

ESTIMATE OF LOSSES DUE TO SUNDAY COLLECTION EMBEZZLEMENTS IN THE U.S. CATHOLIC CHURCH

ESTIMATED CUMULATIVE LOSSES 1965–2010:
$2,317,036,000

* Annual loss figures are based upon an estimation that collections in 20% of existing parishes lost an average of $25,000 in CY 2010. Losses for other years shown in left column were computed by applying the Consumer Price Index to the CY 2010 estimation.

† Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate,
http://cara.georgetown.edu/CARAServices/requestedchurchstats.
html
.

‡ Estimated from trend reflected by CARA figures.

26.
Alan Gomez, “Bishops Look at Fleecings of Flocks,”
USA Today
, February 18, 2007.

27.
Julie Shaw, “Priest Admits Stealing from School: Sex Abuse, Drug Use Alleged,”
Philadelphia Daily News
, March 10, 2009; Joseph A. Slobodzian, “Judge Calls Priest Liar; Sends Him to Prison for $900,000 Theft,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, May 22, 2009.

28.
Andrew Greeley and William McManus,
Catholic Contributions: Sociology and Policy
(Chicago, 1985), pp. 2–3.

29.
The study by Joseph Claude Harris,
The Cost of Catholic Parishes and Schools
(Kansas City, MO, 1996), is cited in Charles E. Zech,
Why Catholics Don’t Give … and What Can Be Done About It
(Huntington, IN, 2000), p. 13.