Render Unto Rome (56 page)

Hurricane Katrina gave Archbishop Hughes a shot at redemption

“I am also a refugee,” a weary Hughes said on a visit to a homeless shelter in Baton Rouge the second day after the storm. He heard confessions of state troopers and aid workers. “It’s not easy to be so drastically dislocated without any early hope of being able to return.”

The church initially announced a $40 million deficit. Over the next
three years, $107 million poured in from dioceses, bishops, Rome, individual Catholics, philanthropists, and foundations for rebuilding and relief costs. Volunteers from parishes in many states traveled to New Orleans, gutting houses that had taken four, six, eight, ten feet of water. Catholic Charities provided $7 million in direct relief for survival assistance.

But in the winter of 2006, New Orleans had only 40 percent of its population back. Federal funds to assist home owners whose insurance did not fully cover their rebuilding needs were slow to get congressional approval. The church had reopened 107 of 142 parishes, and 81 of 107 schools. Although the archdiocese would, like many agencies, recoup substantial losses from FEMA, the immediate task was deciding how to allocate its resources across the area. Several parishes had been destroyed; others would have to merge as part of a smaller urban footprint. Hughes entrusted a key part of the planning for this job of enormous complexity to Father Michael Jacques, the white pastor of St. Peter Claver, an African American parish in a downtown neighborhood that was heavily damaged. Jacques was not a seasoned urban planner. He was popular in the community, though overshadowed by Jerome LeDoux, the seventy-six-year-old African American pastor at St. Augustine, ten blocks away in Tremé, a neighborhood steeped in cultural traditions, just outside the French Quarter. Early in his career, LeDoux had spent four years in Rome, earning a master’s in theology and a Ph.D. in church law.

Now in the autumn of his life, wearing dashiki vestments at Mass, LeDoux, with his mop of gray hair, was a charismatic preacher who welcomed jazz musicians to perform at liturgies. For some reason German tourists regularly showed up at his Sunday Mass, taking photographs in the side garden of the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, an exhibit with a large anchor and chains. In a neighborhood reeling from drug violence, LeDoux said the funerals for any family, regardless of faith. Many were too poor to pay for a wake. His sermons flowed with hope and wit. “Why do we welcome Mardi Gras Indians?” he said one Sunday. “Feathers, tambourines,
war whoops
. Mmm: we hear whoops
of peace
this fine morn. Scripture tells us, ‘Make a joyful noise unto the Lord.’ ” He smiled. “And that, my dear people, is what we now must do!”

He lived in a shambling rectory filled with books and newspapers, a vegan dishing out dollars to homeless people and addicts who came knocking in the night. Many of them he knew by name. LeDoux wrote a column
for the African American
Louisiana Weekly
. He was back at St. Augustine three weeks after Katrina, saying Mass. St. Augustine owed $227,000 in assessments—back taxes—to the archdiocese. Gentrification was edging into Tremé. After the flood, with whole swaths of the city devoid of people, real estate prices were soaring. Church, rectory, parish center, and a huge side yard were a developer’s dream.

In early 2006 Hughes told LeDoux the parish had to close. The public announcement ignited a furor in Tremé. Activists occupied the rectory and church. The media coverage portrayed an aloof archbishop against a black neighborhood as the broken city tried to get back on its feet. In 2009 Hughes would be pilloried in satirical Mardi Gras floats, his visage mocked on the plastic cups that masked revelers dispense as carnival “throws”—a fate traditionally accorded to politicians on their way to jail.

LeDoux was gone when Jacques entered the church in his robes to say Mass on Sunday, March 26, an act by which the parish would be formally closed, its members welcomed by a group from St. Peter Claver. In the fraught atmosphere, some parishioners wept, others seethed. Ten plain-clothes officers accompanied Father William Maestri, the archdiocesan spokesman, who would brook no dissent. When a nervous Jacques took the pulpit to give his homily, people stood and turned their backs; others waved signs in protest. As people began yelling, Jacques could not speak. Maestri made a slicing gesture under his neck, signaling to the cops that Mass was over. “I’m NOPD!” shouted an officer, hustling Maestri and Jacques into a car.
⁶

Hughes denounced “the sacrilege” and canceled Masses indefinitely.

LeDoux, who was in the process of moving out, fired back, saying that police in church “reeked of racial profiling. You have racial profiling when you do not understand an ethnic group or a racial group, and you think that because they are upset, because they’re even a little angry, they are dangerous.”

A French Quarter hotelier from one of the city’s prominent families, Michael Valentino, offered to spearhead a $1 million capital campaign, provided the parish stay open. Another parishioner, Jacques Morial, was a political activist whose father and older brother had both been mayor. He joined Valentino to meet with Father Jacques.

“When you negotiate in a tense situation,” Morial told me later, “you assume the people sitting across from you have good information and a
reasonable sense of how to proceed. Hughes would not get directly involved. Father Jacques was in way over his head; he had his plan to close parishes, no appreciation about the impact or really how to achieve it. I don’t think Hughes had any idea of the reaction or that making LeDoux leave would set off so many folk. Tremé has a history of being stomped, politically, by the city, and to make a move like that with so many people just getting back from Katrina, the timing could not have been worse. Look, I’m a parishioner and I’ve got an interest, okay? But if I were a neutral consultant, first thing, you look at the facts. A church built in 1842. Pride of the black community. A pastor everyone loves. Yeah, the guy drinks carrot juice. LeDoux’s eccentric.
New Orleans
is eccentric. But the city’s in the national media every day because of Katrina. The parish owes two hundred grand plus change to the archdiocese. So what do you do? Launch a national fund-raising campaign! Call Oprah, Bill Cosby, rally people who love New Orleans to help. We knew LeDoux would be essential for fund-raising—he’s a folk hero. Jacques wanted to pastor the two congregations. Hughes, from all I could tell, never thought about an alternative plan.”

Father LeDoux moved to Texas. The parish gained a reprieve, conditioned on its meeting future benchmarks. Jacques remained at St. Peter Claver. Hughes installed a new pastor, Father Quentin Moody who refused to let Mike Valentino, who had already made donations, serve on the Finance Council. Looking back on the fiasco of being stiff-armed for trying to raise money, Valentino told me, “For months after that I went to Mass and sat in the front row, just to let Moody know I was there. I kept asking myself,
Who are these guys?
We could have raised $2 million in twelve months. But the campaign never started. How could I assure donors where the money would go?” Valentino’s plan for a full architectural restoration was aborted; by 2010 the rectory had been renovated, but Valentino no longer went to church. “I didn’t want to fight battles in my own parish or be a source of acrimony in trying to help. The whole thing was such a failure of leadership, failing to do what could have been done. My core faith is intact but I’m disillusioned and have no regular parish.”

The archdiocese in a 2010 report on Katrina’s financial impact cited $287.9 million in total property loss of which $235.9 million had been recovered. More than half of that, $125 million, came from insurance; $64 million came from FEMA reimbursements; and $47 million came from
gifts and donations from other dioceses and Catholic Charities USA.
⁷
The unrecovered loss was $52 million. Although the pie charts and columns put numbers in broad categories, the essay and data fell far short of a fully audited financial statement. Bruce Nolan of the
Times-Picayune
noted that the church was “severely underinsured against flood [damage] … with only $29 million” in coverage.
⁸

In an urban area that had sustained heavy flooding in 1994 and 1995, and had mass evacuations from hurricanes in the years leading up to Katrina,
why cancel flood insurance
? The policies were backed by federal funds and reasonably priced. “They were having cash flow problems—not enough parishes sending money to Walmsley Avenue [the chancery headquarters],” explains a prominent pastor. “They realize now that canceling those policies was a huge mistake.”

The minutes from a February 26, 2007, closed meeting of Hughes and his priests’ council offer an instructive look at the subsequent closure of two financially stable parishes, where vigil protests arose. Our Lady of Good Counsel, in the historic Garden District, was on the National Register of Historic Places. The parish council leader had a pledge of $300,000 for an endowment if Hughes would reverse the closure; he refused. In the wake of the battering media coverage from the St. Augustine events, the priests’ council minutes are devoid of financial or infrastructure planning: “The whole plan is a pastoral plan that deals with the parishes, social service and the schools that will be looked at again at the end of April. Part of the layered look involves [the chief financial officer] looking at the financial pieces to see what it’s going to cost us to put this plan into effect and what’s going to happen with all the buildings and real estate involved.”
⁹

“The whole plan” was never disclosed to the public. The minutes continue, oblivious to people in pews, but fearful that a process without any cost-benefit analysis or impact assessment might be discovered by the press: “The Archbishop asked for the strictest of confidentiality to avoid sabotaging the process with media coverage before the plan is finalized. If forced to deal with damage control the fear would be that final decisions could not be made in the atmosphere that they would want to be made.”

Professor of Accountancy Jack Ruhl of Western Michigan University analyzed the archdiocese’s public disclosures: “The 2009 Financial Report included a compilation report by a local CPA firm that states: ‘We have not audited or reviewed the accompanying Summaries … and … do not
express an opinion or any other form of assurance on them.’ The CPA firm goes on to say that the archdiocese ‘elected to omit substantially all of the disclosures required by generally accepted accounting principles.’ In other words, the CPA firm performed only compilation services for the archdiocese, checking the numbers for mathematical accuracy.”

A full set of audited financial statements means the assertions of management have been tested by experienced auditors. They contact the banks to make sure a given entity actually has funds on deposit. “Since the New Orleans Financial Report was not audited,” continues Ruhl, “there is no assurance at all that the numbers bear any resemblance to reality. The Financial Report does not include any notes, which would tell about activities such as bond issues and impending litigation.” Perhaps the archdiocese found its way out of the Katrina debt by a 2007 bond issue. Ruhl, who came across the bond issue information through his own research, explains that although the 2009 Financial Report has no mention of it, the archdiocese, working through the Louisiana Public Facilities Authority, issued $69,150,000 of municipal bonds in 2007. As of June 30, 2009, the Archdiocese had an outstanding liability for $68,130,330 of these bonds.

In 2009 Hughes insisted on church property rights, prevailing on Mayor Ray Nagin to order police officers into the two vigil parishes, Good Counsel and St. Henry (which had cash reserves of $150,000). The spectacle of NOPD beating down a door at Good Counsel and arresting people from both parishes was like a whiplash to many people. At his retirement press conference in 2009, Hughes apologized to the community for any harm he had caused. His successor, Archbishop Gregory Aymond, began a dialogue with the two parishioner groups, allowing limited use of both churches, searching for a solution to reconcile the protesters to the archdiocese, with some role for the two dormant parishes.

THE VATICAN TAKES OVER THE LEGION

In June 2009 Borré met again with his contact in the Secretariat of State. He laid out the main points of the eighteen-page Request for Mediation, the terrible damage done to neighborhoods and people of faith when a viable parish was closed because of its immediate material value to a bishop. Negotiating a solution for the Boston archdiocese would likely have a national impact and, if handled fairly for the vigil groups, would position
Cardinal O’Malley as a peacemaker, a prelate with the vision and leadership to uplift a demoralized community. This would mean the “peaceful demobilization of the vigils and the quiet withdrawal of the Boston appeals at the Signatura.”

The Vatican official absorbed what Borré had to say and presented the position of the Secretariat of State. The letter’s fundamental issue was outside the
competenza
(area of responsibility) of his office; however, he arranged for Borré to meet another Vatican official. As these conversations unfolded, Borré was following the news from Cleveland, aghast as Lennon repeated the destruction he had wrought on Boston.

Carlo Gullo determined that the only remaining avenue for the vigil parishes’ canonical prospects was a direct appeal to Pope Benedict.

As one of the handful of canonists licensed to take appeals to the highest level of the Apostolic Signatura, Gullo had the right to send a document to the Holy Father. He had never done so before, but the professor and practitioner of canon law in Rome, who had little experience of America, had absorbed through Borré a metaphysical sense of the people utterly devoted to their sacred spaces at a time when many European churches, for all of their grandeur and iconic presence in the historical memory, drew sparse crowds at times of Mass. The secularization of Europe, a “post-Christian” society, had become a strand of the media narrative. Benedict’s cry against moral relativism was a call for Christian Europe to assert its integrity. Certainly, reasoned Gullo, a movement of Catholics to protect their churches would have meaning for His Holiness.