Render Unto Rome (34 page)

As a cardinal, Ratzinger would have laicized an ordinary priest with so many victims. Sodano intervened again, according to a well-placed Vatican official, to soften the punishment and make sure the language praised RC and the Legion, despite the nine-year campaign attacking the victims. The Legion statement had no hint of apology: “Fr. Maciel, with the spirit of obedience to the church that has always characterized him, has accepted this communiqué with faith, complete serenity, and tranquility of conscience … Following the example of Christ, [he] decided not to defend himself.” Comparing a pedophile to Jesus was hubris more inflated than anything in the media circus of celebrities or politicians snared in sex scandals who apologize, pick themselves up, and keep getting airtime. As Maciel, age eighty-six, slouched out of Rome, the Legion took down its website attacks, though for months it maintained the biographical hosannas to the founder, having little else about the Legion to promote.

Money is a mighty force in any religion. The Legionaries had their script with Sodano’s fingerprints: Father Maciel was never tried, the Vatican never stated that he abused anyone. Banking on the illusion of things unsaid, the Legionaries unofficially told people that Maciel had been wrongly
accused and would one day be vindicated. As part of its mop-up campaign, the Legion in 2007 sued ReGAIN Network and Paul Lennon for posting the private vows, the constitution, as allegedly stolen intellectual properties, and in a spectacular display of projection, accused the ex-Legionaries of “malicious disinformation.”
⁸⁵
The nuisance suit threw ReGAIN into a fund-raising scramble. Although the constitution still circulated on the Internet, Lennon gave a copy to Legion lawyers and, in order to settle the case, halted the discussion board, the real target of the lawsuit, as it drew ex-supporters, with fresh facts, like steel filings to a magnet. In Rome, Benedict XVI ordered the Legion to abolish the private vows.

Elizabeth Kunze was in her thirteenth year as a Regnum Christi consecrated woman, teaching in Ireland, when Maciel’s health gave out in late January 2008, in Florida. Legionaries took him to a hospital in Miami. A report in Madrid’s
El Mundo
by Idoia Sota and José M. Vidal reconstructs his final days. Father Corcuera, Maciel’s successor as superior general, gathered in the hospital with several other Legionaries. They wanted Nuestro Padre to make a final confession in keeping with the Catholic faith. He refused so emotionally that one priest reportedly summoned an exorcist, but no ritual took place.

Amid the black emotions of his ebbing life, the women appeared: Norma Hilda Baños and the daughter she had had with Maciel, twenty-three-year-old Normita. “I want to stay with them,” said Maciel. According to the account in
El Mundo:

The Legionary priests, alarmed by Maciel’s attitude, called Rome. [Father] Luis Garza knew right away that this was a grave problem. He consulted with the highest authority, Álvaro Corcuera, and then hopped on the first plane to Miami and went directly to the hospital.

[Garza’s] indignation could be read on his face. He faced the once-powerful founder and threatened him: “I will give you two hours to come with us or I will call all the press and the whole world will find out who you really are.” And Maciel let his arm be twisted.
⁸⁶

The priests got Maciel to a Legion house in Jacksonville, Florida; he reportedly grew belligerent when Corcuera tried to anoint him, yelling,
“I said no!”
According to the reporters, he “did not believe in God’s pardon,” an opinion to which his biographical facts lend large support, but for which, in truth, we have no proof. What mattered to the Legion as he died was sealing the history known to insiders of his financial arrangements for Norma Hilda, with whom he had begun a common-law relationship in Acapulco in about 1980, and their child, Normita. Later on he moved them to Madrid and provided financial security.

Upon his death, the Legion said that he went to heaven.

In Cuernavaca, Mexico, Maciel’s three sons saw the news of his death on TV with their mother, Blanca Lara Gutiérrez, whom he had met and wooed in 1977, when she was nineteen and he, at fifty-seven, told her he was an agent for the CIA. He had been out of touch with that family for several years.

CHAPTER 8

BORRÉ
IN
ROME

Peter Borré’s strategy of drawing the Vatican into responsibility for Boston parish closings registered in March 2006. Cardinal Castrillón responded to the parishioners’ appeals by writing Bishop William Skylstad, the USCCB president (whose Spokane diocese had taken bankruptcy protection because of abuse litigation). With no reference to Boston, Castrillón’s message was clear.

Your Excellency:

This Congregation deems it opportune to write to you regarding the closure of parishes in the dioceses of the United States, since in recent times certain dioceses have wrongly applied canon 123 CIC and stating that a parish has been “suppressed” when in reality it has been merged or amalgamated
.

A parish is more than a public juridical person. Canon 369 defines the diocese as a “portion of the people of God which is entrusted to the bishop to be nurtured by him” … In this light, then, only with great difficulty, can one say that a parish becomes extinct.
¹

The proceeds from closed churches should follow parishioners to the “enlarged parish community.” But the Boston archdiocese wanted church assets to sell and plug the deficit. For Borré it was all very simple: Castrillón was covering his ass. Officials in the Congregation for the Clergy were advising the Boston archdiocese on how pastors of parishes shutting down could “voluntarily” surrender funds. Castrillón’s chief concern was not the injustice of suppression orders, but
how
to help Seán O’Malley meet his financial needs.

Other prelates secured closures predicated on fleeting media coverage. On a February night in 2007 Borré bedded down in a pew of Our Lady Queen of Angels in Harlem in a show of solidarity with forty people at a vigil. The next day, with the vigil established, he caught an evening shuttle to Boston. A few hours later police officers responding to Cardinal Edward Egan’s office hauled off the leaders, most of them women, releasing them after the archdiocese locked the doors.
²
Egan, a Chicago canonist trained in Rome, had come to New York from the diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut. In a 1997 deposition over an abuse case and his recycling of perpetrators, Egan, in trying to contain financial damage, actually testified, “Every priest is self-employed.”
³
Three years later he went to New York, with 2.5 million Catholics, after the death of Cardinal John O’Connor. “New York Catholicism was practically an Irish-run Establishment overseeing a mosaic of stable ethnic enclaves,” wrote the religion writer David Gibson.

But now those old-time Catholic communities were spreading out to suburbs while new, poorer immigrants back-filled city parishes that had fewer priests to staff them and little money to support them. Churches and schools would have to close, creating a sense that after 200 years of surging numbers and clout, New York Catholicism had become a mature industry, religiously speaking, and was facing a discouraging phase of downsizing …

O’Connor’s popularity was owed to the fact that he never denied anyone who came begging for a new program or for him to halt the closing of an old parish and he left the archdiocese with a $20 million-a-year operating deficit and an infrastructure that needed a serious overhaul. During his tenure, O’Connor
blew through tens of millions in reserves. “O’Connor spent like a drunken sailor,” as one priest said.
⁴

Not so Ed Egan. The cardinal who adored opera courted donors at small fund-raisers by playing piano. Egan wouldn’t dream of emulating O’Malley by posting archdiocesan financial statements. “Do we want to leave ourselves open?” Egan mused to the
Times
, rolling his eyes. “Oh, what fun people could have.” Church officials said Egan had erased the deficit, paying down $40 million of internal debt at $3 million annually, but there was no way to check.
⁵
When Egan suppressed Our Lady of Vilnius, a Lithuanian parish in Manhattan, he called in the pastor, told him his church was being padlocked as they spoke, and that ended the 107-year-old parish.
⁶
Bad news would pass.

Three Boston area parishes that filed canonical appeals to Rome had been occupied twenty-four hours at a time since 2004, despite Clergy’s rejection of their requests. Two other parishes had had their appeals rejected by the Boston archdiocese for failure to file in thirty days; their appeals never went to Rome, but people slept in the pews anyway, making five vigil parishes in 2006.

For an appeal to the Apostolic Signatura the groups needed well-positioned counsel. Borré saw that only twelve people were qualified as advocates at the Signatura listed in the Holy See’s
Annuario Pontificio
. Only two lay canonists had the standing to bring a recourse, or ultimate appeal, to the Holy Father. One was Martha Wegan, the Austrian who had filed the 1998 case against Maciel in Ratzinger’s tribunal; the other, Carlo Gullo, an Italian, taught canon law at Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, which was affiliated with Opus Dei. (Gullo insisted to Borré he was not an Opus member.)

Born in 1942 in Tuscany, Carlo Gullo was married with four grown children. After law school at the University of Messina, in Sicily, he had taken a canon law degree from the Gregorian in 1968. Canon lawyers gained a role in Italy’s legal system with the 1929 Lateran Pacts by which Mussolini gave the church authority over marriage in civil affairs. Divorce was illegal until the 1970s; dissolving a marriage required an annulment. In 2002 the Pontifical Lateran University had seven hundred students pursuing degrees in canon law, most of them laywomen and laymen.
Canonists could earn $20,000 or more by resolving property issues in complex annulments.
⁷
Gullo practiced with his daughter, Alessia, one of the youngest advocates admitted at the bar of the Signatura. She also oversaw the computer system in her father’s home office.

“Dottor Borré”—Doctor—was the salutation in Gullo’s e-mails, while Borré’s opened “Egregio Avvocato,” Distinguished Attorney. In their get-acquainted conversations, Borré spoke Italian, since his counterpart did not speak English. Alessia, who was conversant in English, occasionally assisted on arcane points of law. In the exchanges with Gullo, Borré was summoned back to his Latin studies as a schoolboy in Rome, for Gullo wrote his briefs in Latin. On the telephone Gullo spoke so softly that Borré at times strained to hear. Gullo was an elegant voice in explaining how hard it was to reverse an archbishop’s decree. But, it had happened some years ago when a Chicago parish persuaded the Signatura to overturn a suppression by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. Borré asked if he could read the decision.

“This is classified,” Gullo replied gravely.

Borré was curious about the give-and-take among the cardinals and judges during Signatura proceedings.

“I have no idea,” said Gullo.

He explained that it was forbidden for the advocates to be in the room when the judges met. The Signatura had twenty-five canonists, most of them cardinals (including Egan of New York) on its board of consultors. The Rome-based judges, led by the prefect and assisted by the court secretary and a “promoter of justice,” constituted a tribunal called the Congressio, which screened appeals to determine which should go to the full bench. The Signatura covered administrative decisions of other tribunals and congregations. Parishioners who might travel to Rome would never be admitted to a session; nor were they allowed to read the briefs in Latin submitted by parties other than their advocates.

Borré pictured Dante’s arrival at the river in the
Inferno
and the sign saying “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here!”

Gullo explained that if they proceeded in a Vatican process, the decisions would not come fast. The first stage of an appeal, read by the Congressio, involved a counteropinion from the Advocate for Public Administration, whose job was to defend the Congregation for the Clergy’s rationale. As it turned out, the canonist who filled that role in these cases
was Martha Wegan. Borré assumed that Congressio canonists would not overrule Cardinal Castrillón’s dicastery. That meant filing a detailed appeal to the full bench. They were looking at an uphill slog to question the moral logic of parishes-as-assets before cardinal-jurists. Borré had no doubt of the resolve by people in their round-the-clock vigils.