Render Unto Rome (60 page)

The church financial system resembles a constellation of medieval fiefdoms in which each bishop manages his fisc ideally to serve his people but with an eye riveted on Rome. Few dioceses subject their finances to robust auditing. Every five years the bishop sends a secret statement to the Vatican, which has scant interest in “transparency.” The culture of passivity by which most Catholics receive the sacraments and give their dollars is a bedrock. As long as the people ask no questions about their money, the bishop can ban reformers from church grounds. The issue is not faith but fear that people might see where the money goes.

The beatification ceremony of John Paul II slated for May 2011 was an ironic way of avoiding that pope’s call for “the purification of memory.” Why beatify a pope whose faith in Maciel and myopia on the abuse crisis left a trail of human wreckage? The rush to spectacle cannot airbrush facts from history.

The Catholic Church’s great problem is structural mendacity, institutionalized lying. The church that fosters Christian witness through the values of peace and reaching out to the world’s poor is also saddled with bishops who, like Father Maciel’s Legionaries, cannot criticize their cardinals, and with cardinals who fail to uphold the human rights of children. Under heavy media pressure, the U.S. bishops in 2002 adopted a
youth protection charter. “In 1985 I didn’t know anyone else who had been molested by a priest,” says Barbara Blaine, the founder of SNAP. “Today, bishops have removed hundreds of predators from ministry. Survivors who speak up are more likely to be believed and to receive sympathy from parishioners and compassion from church officials. Secrecy is still a top priority for bishops; but the church has safe-touch programs for children. Teachers and lay workers are taught to report inappropriate behavior. The climate is safer for children and better for survivors who report abuse.” Yet, as Blaine points out, the hierarchy’s concealment of perpetrators is still a reality. Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, three years after the youth charter was adopted, put an accused pedophile back in ministry over warnings from his advisory board. The priest reoffended, went to jail, the archdiocese paid heavily to the victims—and Cardinal George was elected president of the USCCB.
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Rewarding failure is so embedded in the good old boy culture of the ecclesial princes as to suggest that bishops think the church will always be rich. Demographics do not bode well for maintaining double standards. A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey found that Catholicism is still America’s largest single religion—about 25 percent of the population identify themselves as Catholic—but the numbers are in decline. The second-largest cohort polled, at 10 percent, consisted of ex-Catholics, people who left the church.
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The monetary losses in the Boston archdiocese with so many believers gone may be seen as a worst case or the shape of things to come. The pivotal group is women of child-bearing age; if they continue to leave, the church loses their children. The rise of an Irish American and Italian American middle class took several generations to achieve, but the early-twentieth-century migrations fostered a booming church. Although the influx of Latinos has thwarted a steeper Catholic population loss, today’s church is scaling back, struggling to provide care for aged clergy and nuns. As bishops shut churches against the people’s will, questions of financial ethics hover like black clouds.

By the lights of apostolic succession, the American bishops’ youth protection charter of 2002 prevented lay review boards from investigating bishops. Cardinals, too, must be protected from the intrusions of justice. But the assumptions of immunity for prelates collided with Pope Benedict’s concern for the secularization of Catholic Europe. His agenda for
evangelizing Europe and renewing the church ran headlong into the 2010 news coverage of clergy abuse cases and European bishops who concealed perpetrators, just as in America.

The European bishops might heed a prescient American legal scholar. Patrick J. Schiltz published an article in
America
, the Jesuit magazine, in 2003. At the time he held a chair at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. Citing his background in doing defense work for dioceses in abuse cases, Schiltz wrote: “I must confess that the church will not restore my trust until it holds negligent bishops accountable for the incalculable damage that they have inflicted on the church.” Schiltz was writing as litigation began to surge, just as the second wave of Boston plaintiffs received an $85 million settlement. A billion dollars more in church payouts from other states was yet to come. Schiltz recommended a reverse-class-action strategy.

The church should set up a national tribunal—a group of extremely well-respected people who are completely independent of the church—to arbitrate sexual claims against the church. A diocese that wanted to “opt in” to the system would invite victims who appear to be telling the truth about being sexually abused—which is about 98 percent of them—to use the tribunal. The diocese would essentially tell the victims that, if they forgo litigation and instead present their claims to the tribunal, the diocese will pay the victim whatever the tribunal decides is fair. Such a system would have major advantages for both victims and the church.

Victims would be certain of getting compensation. The diocese would agree not to raise the statute of limitations or any other defense. In other words, the question before the tribunal would not be “whether” but “how much?” Dioceses would recognize that regardless of what the law says, they have a moral obligation to compensate victims fairly. Moreover, victims could get quick compensation. In the court system, cases often drag on four or five years …

The most important benefit of this system is that it would let the church and the victim work together in a common cause—achieving a just and healing result—rather than pit them against each other through several years of litigation. Needless to say,
there would be a lot of details to work out, but unless the church takes bold and creative steps such as these, it is in for a grim few years in the legal arena.
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Schiltz was right about the grim legal arena ahead. Eight years later, lawsuits continue. Bishops in Europe could embrace his plan, reduce losses, and gain respect in the eyes of their followers and the news media. It might yet work in parts of America. Schiltz, who is now a federal judge, declined to be interviewed.

Benedict XVI’s ascetic personality and history, as a cardinal, of punishing church intellectuals hardly suggest a reformer who would embrace Schiltz’s proposal; but as the annus horribilis of 2010 drew to a close, Benedict took a calculated risk with the Legion of Christ. He installed Cardinal Velasio De Paolis as papal delegate to the order—read: overseer. De Paolis is a canon lawyer, former secretary of the Signatura, and president of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, the office that audits the balance sheets and budgets of other curial departments. As he began the process of drafting a new constitution for the Legion, De Paolis had to locate its assets. Benedict was gambling that it was better to salvage the organization than to dismantle it, despite its many disillusioned ex-members and the opinions of six U.S. bishops who banned the Legion and Regnum Christi from their dioceses. The pope ordered an investigation of Regnum Christi. Benedict began prodding the Legion to compensate Maciel’s victims, especially older ones who no longer had legal recourse. Jeff Anderson sued the Legion in Connecticut on behalf of Maciel’s son for allegations of incest committed on U.S. soil. The Vatican has no mechanism for compensating victims per se, but the pope wanted the Legion’s coffers to do that; he was, in a way, acting like a judge pushing two parties to settle a dispute—a wise use of power. Bishop Ricardo Watty Urquidi of Tepic, Mexico, one of five apostolic visitators who had investigated the Legion for the Holy See, told reporters in Mexico on May 18, 2010: “We need, then, to take care of [Maciel’s] victims, as much inside as outside the Legion, and to compensate them for damages. This is something we all agreed on, and the pope accepted—just as he has been doing, and bravely so.”
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The Vatican monarchical system has no separation of powers, nor a bona fide court system for criminal prosecution or property rights. Benedict
in theory had the power to punish or call down cardinals, though to do so would violate the unwritten laws of apostolic succession. Benedict seemed ill-suited for the hard choices of reform during the debacles of 2010, as exemplified by his refusal to accept the resignations offered by two Irish bishops for their complicity in harboring predators. But his design that Legion assets be used to compensate victims, if achieved, would set a precedent. The Legionaries as a religious order are subject to papal obedience. To punish Sodano would be a greater act of justice.

The Vatican cannot be reformed without an independent court system to supplant the tribunals that cater to bishops. An international commission of Catholic constitutional scholars could craft a system to codify children’s rights, the preservation of parishes, and oversight of bishops. The alternative is a recurrent spectacle of parish-closing protests, while victims’ lawyers target diocesan assets, notably in Europe, with more shame heaped on the Vatican.

The financial accountability of bishops is an issue that seems destined for more activity in the civil courts. Corporation sole—the bishop owns all—is an anachronism prone to abuse. When American parishioners have sought rights as beneficiaries to their churches, judges have largely bowed to canon law, as in the Ohio decision that gave ownership of St. James Parish in the town of Kansas to Bishop Leonard P. Blair of Toledo. The Ohio court allowed Bishop Blair to pay his lawyers from the parish bank accounts, close the church, demolish it, and put the land up for sale. And the parishioners’ recourse? A sovereign monarchy that bars them from sitting in the court, since there are no open arguments anyway. The Apostolic Signatura and the Congregation for the Clergy make a mockery of justice. As American judges learn how the Vatican system works, a few of them, perhaps even in Ohio, may emulate Mr. Ponsor of the federal bench in Springfield, Massachusetts, in recognizing religious property as a more complex issue of democratic jurisprudence.

VATICAN BANK IN TROUBLE AGAIN

The Institute of Religious Works, or Vatican Bank, has 40,000 account holders from among the members of religious congregations, and cardinals sit on its board of directors. Church officials over the years have said it should not be considered a bank, but rather a massive trust to manage
the capital of religious orders, relief organizations, and church charities, getting the best returns on funds invested, thereby promoting charitable and other works. But from its small suite in a medieval tower near the courtyard leading to the Apostolic Palace, IOR has also functioned as an offshore bank by virtue of its status in Vatican City, a sovereign state. Italy exerted little control after the Vatican paid a $242 million fine a quarter century ago to resolve IOR’s role in the money-laundering scheme involving Archbishop Marcinkus, Roberto Calvi, and Michele Sindona that caused Banco Ambrosiano’s collapse.
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Monetary wire transfers is a serious issue for central banks of various countries in trying to thwart terrorist groups and organized crime. In September 2010, Italian authorities impounded $30 million in IOR assets on suspicion of money laundering and ordered an investigation of the IOR chairman Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and his chief deputy. It was a bitter pill for Tedeschi, an economics scholar, daily communicant, and Opus Dei member with an image of rectitude. Italy’s central bank flagged transfers from an IOR account in Credito Artigiano to JP Morgan Frankfurt for $26 million, and to Banca del Funcino for $4 million, for insufficient documentation under European Union laws. The Holy See stated it was “perplexed and astonished” that that information was available to Italy’s central bank. Tedeschi voluntarily spoke with prosecutors and pledged to work with the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to put the IOR in full compliance.
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For all of its religious clients, and the funds it provides the Holy Father for his charitable uses, IOR had “an unknown number of private Italian account holders who use the Vatican as a tax haven,” according to the
Financial Times
. A month after the $30 million impoundment, Guy Dinmore reported that police in Sicily made six arrests linked to

Father Orazio Bonaccorsi allegedly using an account in the name of the Vatican bank to help his father launder €250,000 ($350,000) he had obtained from European Union funding for an allegedly non-existent fish farm project.

After passing through the account as a “charity” donation in 2006, the money allegedly returned to Sicily to be withdrawn by an uncle previously convicted for mafia association …

“IOR cannot work like this any more,” an Italian official said.
“People have used IOR as a screen,” he added. “What is behind the screen? That is the mechanism we are trying to dismantle,” he told the
Financial Times.
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The $30 million was in a state of banking limbo when the Holy See issued a statement by Pope Benedict on December 30, 2010, promulgating a law for the Vatican city-state “concerning the prevention and countering of the laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and the financing of terrorism.” The pope created a Financial Information Authority to ensure that IOR and all Vatican departments adhered to European regulations on money laundering. He named Cardinal Attilo Nicora, who administers the Vatican real estate and financial holdings, as its chairman. The Vatican appointed a four-member board of prominent academics in relevant fields to sit in Rome.