Render Unto Rome (20 page)

St. Susanna, with neither debt nor a school, was growing. St. Mary, the much larger parish, had a $1.6 million debt for renovation costs, which it had been paying down with help from the $25,000-a-month rental of its school building to a private academy. When the 2004 clustering order
came down, the two parishes sent a joint statement outlining their services and finances. The larger church had 1,930 people attending five Sunday Masses; St. Susanna had 640 people at three Masses. But the smaller church, debt free, was on a surge of growth, with 20 percent more members than in the last year.
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Josoma and the other pastor, the Reverend John A. Dooher, prepared the March 8, 2004, joint statement on clustering. They recommended that neither parish close, even though as Josoma explained, “That was not an option given us.” He clashed with Dooher until the day the report was due because “it omitted mention of St. Mary’s million-plus debt. Dooher told me, ‘The diocese knows what we owe.’ I told him the Reconfiguration committee didn’t know that.”

But Dooher was being considered for the hierarchy. Josoma made a political calculation not to spotlight what he knew of Dooher’s track record with financial management lest it seem an attempt to thwart him from becoming a bishop and backfire on Josoma’s efforts to save his parish. Dooher’s church had a $101,129 annual deficit. The school had lost its tenant. The lower level of the church had cut off heating to save money—and developed mold. In 2007 the new pastor reported that the $1.2 million debt to the archdiocese would be more than halved with a $675,000 sale of land to the town of Dedham.
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By then, the pastor who left the debt behind had become Auxiliary Bishop Dooher.

“Politics of the club,” said Josoma drily. “And why are we in a mess?”

Amid the clustering debate, one of St. Susanna’s deacons, a Harvard-educated attorney, told Josoma the suppression order was “a cash-grab.”

Josoma secured an appointment for himself and ten parish leaders with Archbishop O’Malley and Bishop Lennon.

They had done background research on the Santa Fe, New Mexico, archdiocese, which raised about $8 million to pay its share of a $25 million abuse settlement in the early 1990s. Archbishop Michael Sheehan asked parish leaders to help. Through heightened donations and parish property sales, the group provided close to $2 million, while avoiding widespread closures.
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Sheehan’s predecessors had allowed predators in treatment at the Servants of the Paraclete facility in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, to do weekend parish work, where they found fresh victims. The Paracletes’ standards were so shoddy that litigation drove them out of the
treatment business in New Mexico. Archbishop Robert Sanchez resigned in 1993 when his sexual relationships with young women and teenage girls made news. His replacement, Sheehan, had come with his own baggage from the Dallas diocese, where as seminary rector he ignored warning flags on one Rudy Kos, whose ex-wife had warned church officials of his psychosexual problems. Kos, as a seminarian, had guardianship of a teenage boy who stayed some nights at the seminary, where Kos abused him. Sheehan testified that he had not met the boy. “I just considered that a personal matter, that Rudy was an adult and could take care of it.”
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Kos was ordained. Eight youths in well-to-do parishes and Kos’s ward later sued him and the diocese for abuse. The 1997 jury verdict of $119 million was a stunning rebuke of Bishop Charles Grahmann, whom jurors singled out by name for his oversight failures. As often happens in large verdicts, the plaintiff attorneys agreed to a lower settlement—$31 million—to avoid a lengthy appeal.
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Perhaps the Dallas debacle made Sheehan wiser. In Santa Fe, he worked with pastors and lay leaders in choosing property to sell and fund-raising to pay for settlements.

In the Boston chancery, Josoma and ten parishioners cited Santa Fe as an enlightened response to financial crisis. O’Malley and Lennon listened. St. Susanna’s group argued the benefits of transparency. Josoma said the jump from $10 million to $40 million in archdiocesan debt was hard to fathom. Where had the money gone? O’Malley was quiet. Lennon cited greater deferred maintenance of church properties, a sharp downturn in donations, rising pension costs. The group gave the bishops a packet of information with charts and graphs to bolster their stance that a vibrant parish need not be closed.

Josoma asked O’Malley if he would come celebrate Mass at the parish.

“I don’t want a media circus. I thought this meeting would suffice,” the archbishop demurred.

“These are two different realities,” replied Josoma.

And then, as agreed upon with his parish council, Father Josoma offered Archbishop O’Malley four acres of the church land—prime real estate—at a value which they calculated at nearly $2 million.

“
It’s not about the money, Steve!
” yelled Bishop Lennon, slamming his hand on the table. The group of parishioners stared.

“Nice to know it’s not personal,” replied Josoma.

For it was
exactly
about the money, as everyone in the room knew. But in the fog of diplomacy, no one wanted to embarrass Lennon. O’Malley, having said little, closed the meeting on a promise to consider their views.

Josoma believed in the church teaching that a diocese existed to serve the parishes. Now it seemed the archdiocese was trying to suck money from its churches. When an archdiocesan inventory team arrived to catalog objects in his church and rectory, Josoma saw his volunteers go numb; he said to the men with clipboards and cameras, “If you want to loot us you’ll have to come later. You must leave now.”

DEPTH CHARGES FROM THE HINTERLANDS

On July 6, 2004, the Portland, Oregon, archdiocese, facing new lawsuits after a $53 million settlement for a hundred abuse claims, filed for Chapter 11 protection under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. “Parish assets belong to the parish,” stated Archbishop John Vlazny. “I have no authority to seize parish property.”
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Several weeks later, the Tucson, Arizona, diocese filed for Chapter 11 protection, but did not echo Vlazny’s position. The Spokane, Washington, diocese followed suit that December, after spending $400,000 on public relations.
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In that case, Nicholas P. Cafardi, a canon lawyer and the dean of the Duquesne University Law School, gave an affidavit that sent a booming echo to suppressed parishes in Boston. “Neither the bishop nor the diocese is the owner of parish property under the Canon Law,” stated Cafardi. “The bishop can only dispose of parish property with the consent of the pastor.”
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By opening the “estate” of dioceses to these courts, defense attorneys hoped to remove parish property from the base of assets. Yet in Portland and Boston, as in Chicago and many smaller sees, such as New Orleans, the bishop was a corporation sole, a juridic person who owned all parish and church properties (excluding schools and universities). Portland defense lawyers argued that Vlazny held “bare legal title,” meaning canon law restricted his selling rights, and religious freedom in the U.S. Constitution barred tampering with a bishop’s authority. In Spokane plaintiff attorneys argued that as a corporation sole, the bishop held all the assets that were fair target for victims’ compensation.

An editorial in the
National Catholic Reporter
, an independent weekly, scoffed at the bishops’ legal gambits:

The arguments made by the diocese of Spokane and Portland bring to mind Marx’s (Groucho’s not Karl’s) famous question: Are you going to believe me or your own eyes? The niceties of canon law aside, power in the U.S. church, ownership, if you will, clearly resides with individual bishops in their dioceses. That power is wielded benignly by some, less so by many, but it is disingenuous to say that it doesn’t exist. Bishops answer to Rome, and, presumably, to God, but not to their pastors and certainly not to the people in the pews.

It is a bankrupt church in more ways than one.
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THE VIGIL MOVEMENT BEGINS

A public Mass on August 15, 2004, at the greenery of Boston Commons, organized by Voice of the Faithful, drew a thousand people under a chilly, rain-darkened sky. Josoma and Bowers were among the five priests who celebrated the liturgy. “The Archdiocese of Boston has confused the mission of the church with the money of the church,” declared Bowers in his homily, pulling applause. “What we don’t have are bishops who have the courage to say why?”
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Bowers’s barb gave voice to the frustrations of people holding signs that said “Keep St. Albert’s Open”—referring to a Weymouth parish with 1,600 families that was debt free and had nearly $200,000 more in income than expenses.
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Like the churches in Charlestown and Dedham, St. Albert the Great had in its pastor, the Reverend Ron Coyne, one of the fifty-eight signatories to the letter that called for Cardinal Law’s resignation. Like Bowers and Josoma, Ron Coyne had revitalized a parish that had been losing membership. The three priests oddly mirrored the role that the Vatican imposed on Archbishop O’Malley as turnaround specialists, albeit of parishes rather than a diocese. Coyne had the smallest building among five parishes in Weymouth; it also had no school. As outrage crackled among parishioners opposed to Reconfiguration, ten people in Weymouth announced on closure day, August 29, that they would not leave. They came with pillows and blankets and slept in the pews. “I feel very sad about it,” Coyne told the Associated Press. “It’s very unjust. [The archdiocese] saw new life coming into this parish and yet didn’t even take that into consideration.”
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Within two days two hundred people had joined a list to maintain the vigil in rotating shifts. The parish filed a canonical appeal to the archdiocese.

“We’re not going to drag people out of church,” the chancery spokesman said in the quickening media coverage. “The archbishop says let’s just be patient and work this out as Christians.” But Christians from the pews of St. Albert the Great raised $100,000 for legal fees and sued the archdiocese, claiming
they owned the parish
. “We now understand that we are the church and we are followers of Christ and not the archdiocese of Boston,” read a parish council statement, all but declaring a religious secession, or schism.
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Archbishop O’Malley let the rebels stay in Weymouth’s priestless church.

At St. Catherine of Siena, Peter Borré watched people groping for a strategy. They wanted to meet with the archbishop. Borré wondered how to expose the financial duplicity and use that information to force the archdiocese into reversing course. Bowers held more meetings with O’Malley, to no avail. As much as he liked Bob Bowers, Borré, with his corporate background, was a gritty realist on the dynamics of large organizations; he was skeptical that the idealistic pastor whom his mother-in-law adored had a real strategy. Bowers was a go-to figure for reporters, speaking truth to power in the media narrative. Borré saw the coverage affording leverage for dealing with O’Malley (or Lennon, as the power behind the throne) but only if a strategy pushed beyond the headlines.

As autumn settled over Boston, Borré drove out to St. Thomas the Apostle parish in the town of Peabody where he had been tipped off that Lennon would make a rare appearance. People in pews, incredulous at the suppression order for their prosperous parish, were silent as the bishop rose to speak. With thinning black hair, a lean face, and a paunch traversed by the prelate’s gold chain, Lennon gave a cold recitation on the crisis. The deepening shortage of priests meant too few pastors to go around. Twenty-five percent of the parishes were not paying their assessments.
But he’s closing some of the wealthiest parishes that paid proportionally more
, Borré brooded. The archdiocese was having to cover extra costs of priests’ medical insurance, Lennon continued.

A parishioner asked if they had a canonical right to appeal. Lennon stared, letting his silence seep in for effect. Finally, he said, “Don’t waste your time.”

He does not want a canonical fight
, Borré reported to himself.

St. Thomas was spared after a wealthy supporter of the parish made a large donation. Meanwhile, parishioners at seven other churches refused to leave when the doors closed. Cynthia Deysher, the forty-seven-year-old president of an investment consulting firm, was sitting in a pew of St. Anselm in Sudbury, wondering where this vigil would go, when a man sat down by her, introduced himself as Peter Borré, and asked if she would be cochair of a parishes council. Borré wanted to harness the vigils’ passive resistance into an energy the archdiocese could not avoid. Deysher, who had worked as a chief financial officer for three companies she helped steer to public stock offerings, was as unlikely as Borré to join a breakaway group. For years she had recorded the collections on software and made the weekly deposits.
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Joining St. Anselm’s 24/7 vigil rotation, Deysher thought Reconfiguration was a sham. “Catholics can be generous when properly inspired,” she told me later. St. Anselm, sitting on land worth a couple of million, had no debt and $600,000 in the bank. St. Bernard in Newton was worth $12 million, she reckoned.

Deysher had a more short-range goal than Borré: to keep her parish open. Married, with daughters in high school and college, she wanted the archdiocese to recover. Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) had allied itself with abuse survivors, many of whom didn’t care if churches closed, while its leaders tried to engage bishops in dialogue. Borré wanted a more radical strategy of building pressure against the archdiocese with vigil protests, pushing in the civil courts over parish ownership, and taking their case to Vatican tribunals.