Render Unto Rome (21 page)

As the pressure bore down on St. Susanna, a lady parishioner died with no provisions for burial. The family decided on a cremation. A few steps outside Steve Josoma’s rectory lay a garden; the family was delighted when he offered to inter the ashes in parish earth. With that burial, Father Josoma consecrated sacred soil. Now, St. Susanna parish had a cemetery. Soon after, parishioners gathered for two more funerals. Evicting people from a parish with a cemetery would cause more headaches for O’Malley, creating new issues under canon law. Josoma kept the information as a hidden ace should the closure order come.

He wanted the living to have the same canonical rights as the dead.

The St. Susanna parishioners’ presentation to O’Malley led to the granting of a three-year reprieve. The archbishop could rescind the order
at any time. But a reprieve, supplanting the suppression order, eased Josoma’s stress.

O’Malley signaled a bigger shift on October 3, 2004, by announcing a committee of eight prominent Catholics to review the closures and report back to him. The cochairs were Sister Janet Eisner, president of Emmanuel College, and Peter Meade, the board chairman of Catholic Charities and executive vice president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts. With a “review” of Reconfiguration, O’Malley was cutting bait on Lennon. “I would be surprised if the archbishop didn’t reconsider some [of the closures],” Meade told the
Globe
.
⁵⁵

Peter Borré and Cynthia Deysher formed the Council of Parishes on October 14, 2004, with seven churches in vigil, asking “the process of closing parishes to be suspended; for closing decrees to be revoked; and to cooperate with Archbishop O’Malley in addressing archdiocesan concerns.” Doris Giardiello, who had spent sixty of her seventy-five years at St. Therese church, slept on the altar in her beige winter coat.
⁵⁶
Harking back to sit-in protests of the Southern civil rights era, Boston’s vigil members, with their pillows, sleeping bags, and cell phones, put their sacred spaces in conflict with the archbishop.

AGONY OF AN ARCHBISHOP

“I have a plan,” Archbishop O’Malley had told Bowers on the phone.

As before, Borré drove his pastor to the chancery and waited outside, unwilling to sit in the foyer. Now, on a luminous autumn day, Mary Beth Borré’s beloved Red Sox were battling into the World Series and her candidate, Senator Kerry, was in a close race with President Bush. If the hard-luck Red Sox could do it, anything was possible. Borré was pleased when O’Malley appointed David Castaldi, a former chancellor of the archdiocese (and Harvard Business School classmate of Peter’s), to chair a Reconfiguration oversight committee. Lennon now faced two groups authorized by O’Malley.

Father Bowers sat opposite Archbishop O’Malley, who explained that he had decided to close all three churches in Charlestown and consolidate them into a single parish. “A fresh start,” said the prelate; however, it would require all three pastors to resign. Bowers did not want to resign, but he was wiped out emotionally and physically; he took heart that
the archbishop had embraced his advisory group’s recommendation of a planned phaseout. “Did you get the other two pastors to resign?” Bowers wanted to know.

They had indeed agreed, O’Malley assured him.

The long process of trying to save the parish had left Bowers feeling like a piece of wood into which a screw has been driven so deeply as to make it split. His group had advocated a long transition guided by three pastors; this was the opposite.
If I don’t resign, my parish closes
, he brooded.
If I do resign, all three pastors leave and one church will stay open. At least it creates a level field
.

O’Malley promised that the parish would not close for at least a year, that whatever melding of congregations into a chosen church would be handled by the new pastor. Exhausted and dispirited, Bowers took it as the best deal he could get. The archbishop wanted him to leave within a week. Bowers needed more time, both to pack and to prepare his flock for a hard transition. O’Malley agreed.

Bowers approached the car, deep in thought. “How’d it go?” asked Borré.

“I think it went pretty well. Seán hugged me at the end of the meeting.”

Resisting the urge to bellow
What the hell happened?
Borré started the car, gently prodding for details. He felt a sinking disappointment at what he heard. Borré wanted St. Catherine of Siena to join the vigil protest. Bowers said the parishioners would have to decide for themselves. Borré’s disgruntlement rose on realizing that the force of fifty-eight priests who had signed a letter denouncing Law for concealing abusers would not carry into the realm of parishioners losing parishes. Law, after all, was gone. Bowers got the deeper message when he returned to sign the papers affirming the agreement. He asked O’Malley where he would go next as pastor. “You will not be a pastor for a very long time,” the prelate said gravely. “Many priests are angry with you.”
It’s he who is angry with me
, thought Bowers. He asked for a sabbatical and received it on the spot.

Lennon refused to answer questions for David Castaldi’s group and stood aloof from the Meade-Eisner inquiry. With people bedding down in pews of eight parishes, O’Malley’s reform status was at risk.

Then a hole broke in the dike. O’Malley released a letter on November 13, 2004, which carried an amazing tone of misery. “Closing parishes is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in forty years of religious life,” he wrote.

I joined the monastery knowing that I would have to do difficult things for the rest of my life, but I never imagined I would have to be involved in anything so painful or so personally repulsive to me as this. At times I ask God to call me home and let someone else finish this job, but I keep waking up in the morning to face another day of reconfiguration.
⁵⁷

A prelate calling reconfiguration “so personally repulsive” as to wish God to end his life made Peter Borré sit up. What an indictment of Lennon’s plan! A priest told Borré that Lennon learned of the letter when he read it in the
Globe
. If true, that signaled an even deeper breach between archbishop and bishop.

O’Malley’s letter did not mention Lennon as it reiterated details of the crisis: an operating budget chopped $14 million in three years; a deficit of $10 million; a troubled stock market causing “an unfunded pension liability of $80 million”—lay employee and clergy retirement, both endangered.

Many communities who meet their expenses do so by selling land and buildings and spending down savings. (In the last nine years parishes have sold 150 pieces of property mostly to pay bills.) Some people think that reconfiguration will mean a great surplus of money for the Archdiocese. Unfortunately, this is not true. I have asked the Finance Council to work on a strategic plan for the Archdiocese which I shall share with you. I am committed to financial transparency and to using our human and financial resources for the mission of the Church.

Borré told the
Washington Post
he was “astounded by the depth of emotion.” Borré conceded that demographic changes meant some parishes had to go. “The question is what is happening to the archdiocese’s finances, and the answer is we don’t know.”
⁵⁸

In search of a seasoned canonist in Rome, Borré obtained
Annuario Pontificio
, a thick book that lists dioceses alphabetically and Vatican offices with names, postal addresses, and phone numbers. It helped to know Italian. Unbeknownst to Borré, as he assembled names of practitioners in the Vatican tribunals, Cardinal Sodano and his nephew had a plan for shuttered American churches.

*
In October 2010 Hummes was succeeded by Mauro Piacenza, who soon became a cardinal.

CHAPTER 5

ITALIAN INTERVENTIONS

By the fall of 2003, with John Paul II fatigued and bloated from his treatments for Parkinson’s disease, Cardinal Sodano exerted greater power than ever in overseeing the Roman Curia. “The scandals in the United States received disproportionate attention from the media,” Sodano announced. “There are thieves in every country but it is hard to say that everyone is a thief.”
¹

Earlier in the year, as America prepared for war with Iraq, papal representatives sent warnings about an invasion. Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration’s national security adviser, stated that she didn’t understand the Vatican position. As the standoff mounted between President George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, Sodano told Italian journalists, “The Holy See is against the war; it’s a moral position. It’s certainly not a defensive war.” He added a dose of pragmatism: “We’re trying to provoke reflection not so much on whether it’s just or unjust, moral or immoral, but whether it’s worth it. From the outside we can appear idealists, and we are, but we are also realists. Is it really a good idea to irritate a billion Muslims? Not even in Afghanistan are things going well. For this reason we have to insist on asking the question if it’s a good idea to go to war.”
²

Hours after the first missiles smashed down on Baghdad, John Paul denounced the war as “a defeat for reason and the gospel.”
³

Rice visited the Vatican on February 8, 2005, in her new position as secretary of state and met with her counterpart, Cardinal Sodano. The Boston church closings and the bankruptcy cases of five other dioceses had become a greater issue for the Curia since Archbishop O’Malley’s 2003 meetings at the Vatican. After discussing Iraq and the Middle East, Sodano surprised Rice with a bald request: that the Bush administration intervene against a class action lawsuit that Louisville attorney William F. McMurry had filed against the Holy See in federal court in Kentucky, seeking damages for all victims of clergy sex abuse. Rice told him the Constitution prevented such a move by any administration.

Several attempts to sue the Vatican on other issues had failed under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. “Sodano’s decision to raise the matter with Rice suggests concern in Rome that sooner or later its immunity may give way, exposing the Vatican to potentially crippling verdicts,” wrote John L. Allen Jr. for
National Catholic Reporter
.
⁴

Sodano’s ham-fisted design on diplomacy was all of a piece with his response to the abuse crisis. Realizing that dioceses were unloading assets, in many cases to pay their share of litigation, Sodano persuaded the silver-haired Cardinal Castrillón to appoint Monsignor Giovanni Carrù as undersecretary of the Congregation for the Clergy. Carrù, who began work on November 1, 2003, had specialized in catechism in the Turin diocese, in Sodano’s native Piedmont, in northern Italy. A man of warm and genial ways, Carrù was physical, putting hands on people’s cheeks, giving the affectionate hug, an effusive Italian friendliness, explains a priest well versed in Clergy’s inner workings.

Cardinal Castrillón was not pleased, this cleric explains. Castrillón felt Carrù was inflicted on him. Carrù, this source surmises, would have been happy as a bishop in his small diocese, but in his affable, simple way Carrù did what he was told. He liked to be important. The cleric describes Carrù in meetings, impatiently waiting for them to end, saying,
And now we are done?
—when often, no, they weren’t done, and discussions stretched on: after all, it
was
the Vatican. Monsignor Carrù as undersecretary led the closing prayer before they scattered for lunch.

As third in command, Carrù was a traffic manager for Clergy’s mail, faxes, and documents from the world’s dioceses, bishops, and priests who
had business with the congregation. Clergy’s internal offices dealt with priestly discipline, catechetics, and patrimony, meaning property. Carrù took a special interest in the Third Office’s alienation of church property. His patron, Cardinal Sodano, took special interest in his nephew, Andrea Sodano, whose company Carrù helped with leads on church property as it came on the market.

In the long history of American Catholics bailing out the Vatican, it was perhaps inevitable that some shrewd Italian would see profit escalators in shuttered New World churches. To that end, Andrea Sodano, a structural engineer from his uncle Angelo’s hometown, Asti, had a front man who could have come out of central casting.

Enter Raffaello Follieri, with cheeks like a cherub, a tousle of brown hair, and deep, dark eyes. In November 2005, the twenty-seven-year-old Follieri was leasing a two-story $37,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan’s Olympic Tower; his foundation touted vaccinations for poor children in Latin America. Raffaello thrilled to the halo of celebrity circling his airplanes-to-everywhere romance with the movie star Anne Hathaway. Since her breakout role in
The Princess Diaries
, dark-haired Annie (as Raffaello called her) had made Follieri famous. The paparazzi and tabloids seized on their episodes in society. They were part of a New Year’s Eve soiree at a Dominican Republic resort with Bill and Hillary Clinton among the guests.