Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  Nancy McGrath, a founder of Endangered Catholics, was nodding. Their group mounted continuing protests.

  “If you get your foot in the door with a supplemental brief at Congregation for the Clergy,” said Borré, “make sure you do it as registered parishioners, not as a committee.” He traced the steps a case would travel in the Vatican labyrinth. “We are pushing up the caseload. Burke has issued a regulation that cases will not be screened by a panel of the Signatura, but by the secretary of the tribunal. Carlo Gullo, our superbly trained canonist, is up in arms; he considers this a gross violation. He will challenge this at the Council for Legislative Texts, which is like a Supreme Court for procedure in the Vatican.”

  FutureChurch’s package on canonical appeals was on its website. As time passed, Sister Chris Schenk followed the increase in download patterns.

  “Preserve every scrap of paper with postmarks,” Borré told them. He cited Bishop Skylstad’s position in the Spokane diocese bankruptcy proceeding; and the affidavit by canon lawyer Nicholas Cafardi. “Even if the title is held by the bishop, under canon law, Skylstad said in effect, ‘I am a trustee and it would be terrible if I took this property for my own.’ He said he did not own the parishes under canon law. But more than a few bishops are despotic.”

  “We think church closures is a policy issue the Vatican needs to address. No human institution except the Boston Red Sox is entitled to eternal life.”

  Only a few people chuckled. “But the notion of a vibrant, financially stable parish just thrown under the bus is wrong, and it’s where I’m making my stand. The leadership that emerged from the pews has largely been by women.”

  Amid the experiences recounted of people with the poker-faced bishop, a lady said, “You shouldn’t have to work this hard to be a practicing Catholic!”

  Of the many parishes in the struggle, St. Peter on Superior Avenue downtown, catty-corner to the Plain Dealer newsroom, was a sturdy Gothic Revival church. It was also a model parish for a city confronting a cycle of decline. Founded by German immigrants in 1853, St. Peter had for generations been a church school. As people moved away from the old urban core, the parish lost membership, and as the population flow to suburbs accelerated, the school closed. As the downtown area grew more commercial by day, the walking poverty increased by night. In 1991, a young pastor, Father Robert Marrone, oversaw a $300,000 renovation of the church thanks to resilient parishioners—some of whom pushed wheelbarrows of concrete to repave the floor.

  Marrone’s eloquent sermons drew new followers. A liturgist who saw rare ceremonial potential in the large, shabby space, Marrone had the vaulted interior painted white, “revealing the simple elegance of the structure,” writes theologian Joan M. Nuth, “reminiscent of a Cistercian monastery chapel.”40 Pale Corinthian pillars stood in symmetry with the slender stained-glass windows. Marrone dispensed with padded kneelers and extraneous furniture to accentuate the altar as spiritual anchor of the large floor, particularly as the congregants walked in processions. The beauty of the space exuded a deep serenity. By the midnineties, St. Peter had seven hundred parishioners; most members drove in from the suburbs to the deserted downtown for the Sunday liturgies—attorneys, arborists, teachers, physicians, academics, and professionals whose generosity anchored outreach ministries, including one with a public school for tutoring, clothes, books, library assistance, and mentoring help for parents.

  Lennon’s chessboard changes to the churches and the city put St. Peter in a clustering group. Marrone’s parish was an easy walk from the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, where Lennon said Mass. As the jolting news of the closures spread, a benefactor contacted Marrone to offer the parish $2 million to ensure its survival. Bob Marrone was thrilled. With permission from the diocese, he had financed new refurbishing for St. Peter’s 150th anniversary as the city’s oldest Catholic church and oldest pre–Civil War religious house, holding back the assessments rather than taking out a bank loan. Now he could pay $750,000 to the diocese, pay for demolition of the old school as part of a master plan for the physical plant, and put $1 million into the outreach ministries.

  Lennon told him no, turn down the money. His parish would close.

  Attorneys in the parish were familiar with the 1888 Mannix v. Purcell decision, in which Cincinnati parishes successfully appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court, against a bishop’s plan to sell the churches to cover the debts of a church bank run by the bishop and his brother. But in the Toledo diocese, St. James parish in the rural farming community of Kansas, Ohio, had used Mannix in a civil case seeking to overturn their 2005 suppression by Bishop Leonard Blair. The state court sided with the Toledo bishop.41

  The parishioners did not appeal the state decision. “The overriding issue was that the bishop padlocked the church and took the money,” explains Columbus attorney Nicholas A. Pittner, whose firm represented the parish. “The parishioners who contributed money were beneficiaries of a trust. We argued that the bishop, as a trustee, couldn’t appropriate the funds. The bishop argued that yes, he was a trustee, but under canon law the beneficiary was a juridic person”—the parish and bishop as one. Pittner continues: “What is a juridic person? The state court of appeals was loath to say that a juridic person is a fiction. Whose law do you apply? Is it Ohio property law? Or is there a federal right to have your claim decided on a body of law other than canon law?”

  “We spent more than $100,000 in legal fees, trying to get the property back,” Virginia Hull, a St. James parish leader, told me. “The $77,957 we had in the parish account all went to Bishop Blair. The diocese provided our attorney with statements that showed that most of our parish funds went to pay the attorney representing them against us. They offered us use of the church for meetings or social activities but not worship. The Methodist church has provided us space and a time to have our Sunday liturgy. A married Franciscan priest drives in to say Mass and provide us the sacraments. We used to have about 160 people each Sunday. Now we have about 45. Some people have gone to parishes in nearby towns, others left the faith. We did not want to join a church seven miles away; we do a lot of outreach to the needy right here. The diocese tore down our church. They allowed us to keep the steeple and bell. The land is for sale. We feel closer to God than we ever have. I don’t think the bishops know what a community is.”

  Virginia Hull’s words describe Bishop Lennon, the self-taught canonist who used the Suppression strategy that backfired in Boston on his new territory. “The Diocese of Cleveland fails to provide parishioners with the audited financial information needed to assess the economic state of the diocese,” comments Western Michigan University professor of accountancy Jack Ruhl, an authority on diocesan financial statements. Weighing the disclosures by the diocesan Finance Office, Foundation, and Catholic Charities, he says: “What is the dollar amount of diocesan assets and liabilities? What is the diocesan liability for post-retirement obligations? Is there any liability for clergy abuse settlements? While Bishop Lennon did publish a ‘Report to the Community’ in 2009 that listed total parish revenues and expenses for two years, the information was unaudited. The Finance Office has been so narrowly defined that financial reports for it exclude ‘troublesome’ accounts like the Property and Casualty Reserve Fund, which pays sex abuse claims. They don’t list it. This is not transparent financial reporting. Too much remains hidden.”

  A St. Peter’s civil case would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a city and state court system that had long shown its subservience to the Catholic Church; even if a court sided with the parish on the ownership issue, Lennon could refuse to provide a pastor. No court could make him do that.

  St. Peter’s leaders filed an appeal at the Vatican over the Suppression order, though they knew the Signatura could take years to make a decision, and, as one member told me, “the Vatican sides with bishops, not people in the pews.” A core group of parishioners formed the Community of St. Peter and incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization
under IRS regulations. They settled on a renovated car dealership in downtown Cleveland, the area where their hearts were, raising $200,000 to cover the rent, administrative expenses, outreach ministry, and supplant the salary and health insurance for Father Marrone, who took a leave of absence from the diocese to be their pastor. Four hundred people joined, nearly two-thirds the number of parishioners, as Sunday services resumed.

  Cleveland’s clergy retirement fund was well capitalized, at about $90 million as of 2006, according to Joe Smith. Whatever his rationale, Lennon failed to provide a persuasive argument for the destructive policy toward the city’s struggling neighborhoods.

  St. Peter closed on Easter 2010. At the final Mass, Marrone recounted its remarkable history. He scored the “tragic and even sinful decisions” made by certain church leaders. As people wept, he spoke of the parish as “an empty tomb,” while admonishing any who would “confuse blind faith with faithfulness … [and] allow more churches to become tombs of the living dead.

  “The power of fear which has caused this injustice is not the last word, must not be the last word and will not be the last word. I know it seems unbearable to us but we can bear it. Go forth into the world and be living stones. God will tent with us where ever we go.”42

  CHAPTER 11

  THE DEBTS OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION

  Marcial Maciel Degollado’s burial in early 2008 in the family crypt at Cotija de la Paz, in the hinterlands of Mexico, was a world away from the tomb he had had built in Rome’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica—the vault for his sainthood candidacy. The saints who founded religious orders, like Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola, stand as spiritual models for their followers across time. Maciel’s canonization quest sank in 2006 when the Vatican ordered him to renounce public ministry for “a reserved life of penitence and prayer.” That communiqué, which in effect banished him from Rome, signaled Pope Benedict’s break from the denial of John Paul, a mind-set that inured the Polish pope to prosecuting Maciel and taking forceful action against the larger abuse crisis.

  Cardinal Sodano, the secretary of state, made sure the 2006 communiqué from the Press Office praised the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi. Ignoring the thirty men who testified about the sexual abuses they suffered before Monsignor Scicluna, the promoter of justice dispatched belatedly by Ratzinger, the Vatican whitewashed the Legion’s eight-year disinformation campaign against Maciel’s victims, even as outraged ex-Legionaries and disaffected RC members sent new information to Scicluna. Ratzinger, who had become Benedict, approved the communiqué.

  Maciel flew off to Mexico for a reunion with Norma Hilda Baños and their daughter, Normita, who was in her early twenties. A March 2005 photograph of Maciel and the Normas in Cotija surfaced well after his death.1 Maciel’s legacy—and John Paul’s failure to stop him—would detonate like land mines as Benedict confronted the Legion of Christ.2

  Sodano had appeared with Maciel several months before the 2006 decision at a religious conference in the beautiful Tuscan town of Lucca. Sodano was pulling out the stops to include Maciel in the de facto immunity given to bishops and cardinals by the logic of apostolic succession. The Vatican considers members of the hierarchy as spiritual descendants of Jesus’s apostles. A cardinal or a bishop can be removed from his position under canon law, but in reality, only the pope as the supreme authority can render such justice. The singular lesson undergirding the quarter century of abuse scandals and financial debacles is that cardinals and bishops stand above their severe mistakes or moral crimes. Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër of Austria made “strong homoerotic gestures to most of his students” for years before he became archbishop of Vienna, reports Leon C. Podles, the author of Sacrilege.3 Groër suffered no demotion in ecclesial rank when accusations forced his retirement in 1995. John Paul uttered no public criticism, yet announced prayers for Groër several years later upon his death. He had no words for Groër’s victims. For all of Maciel’s financial power as the leader of an international religious order, he was neither bishop nor cardinal.

  Bernard Law, Darío Castrillón Hoyos, and other cardinals who concealed pedophiles had caused financial disasters. Prelates of lesser rank, like Bishop Lennon, the self-taught canonist, destroyed parishes and took their money through incompetence. “It is to the holiness of the faithful that the hierarchical structure of the Church is totally ordered,” John Paul stated in forbidding women’s ordination.4 Ecclesiastical tradition sees the men of the hierarchy in a descending line from Jesus’s apostles, fostering holiness as an expression of God’s kingdom. Many bishops work dutifully to do so. Bishops of recent memory who stand out as moral exemplars—the martyred Óscar Romero of El Salvador, Samuel Ruíz of Chiapas—embodied solidarity with the poor. But the hierarchy spares no expense to defend a compromised prelate in secular courts. As this self-protective logic evolved, apostolic succession created a caste system. Cardinals stand as nobility, each prince a potential pontiff; archbishops and bishops hold elite standing above the lower clergy and, at bottom, ordinary Catholics whose donations finance the church.

  Inspired by the Second Vatican Council, the 1964 Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, Lumen Gentium, gave ordinary Catholics an elevated status as People of God. A body of theological writing on People of God has arisen since then, auguring hope for pluralism in church governance, tapping a wisdom born of married life.5 But the last two papacies have devalued the People of God idea like a poor foreign currency. Pray, pay, obey is Rome’s expectation. John Paul and Benedict blunted the ethos of a collaborative role for People of God through the selection process for bishops. As Cardinal Law wielded great influence on American candidates for the episcopacy, John Paul imposed a litmus test to eliminate any priest who supported optional celibacy or women priests. When the abuse scandals erupted, the subsurface story was a legacy of episcopal yes-men and theological reactionaries who recycled child molesters, kept silent on the burgeoning gay culture in seminaries, and rarely lost rank for mismanaging church money. Suborning moral conscience to papal supremacy was the currency for episcopal advancement. As the CDF in the Palace of the Holy Office became the citadel of moral truth, John Paul’s indifference to traumatized abuse victims, and the impact of the crisis on people in the pews, was symptomatic of the hubris embedded in the apostolic succession.

  Cardinal Ratzinger punished theologians who embraced the complexities of conscience in the real lives of People of God: Charles Curran on birth control, Hans Küng on papal infallibility, Leonardo Boff on poverty as the prism of liberation theology, among other persecuted intellectuals. In defining moral truth as the province of the Vatican, Ratzinger wanted obedience—“definitive assent”—to the magisterium, or teaching office of his congregation. Curia comes from the Latin covir—men among men. “The freedom that celibacy was supposed to give for selfless action is snuffed out at the most basic level when freedom of discussion is outlawed,” Garry Wills has written.6 A larger anxiety turned on whether the church had “gone too far” in its post–Vatican II encounter with a world that saw spaceships sail to the moon. Doctrinaire conservatives thrilled to the spectacle of John Paul and Ratzinger squelching “dissent,” but fell silent on Vatican hypocrisy that protected the guiltiest bishops in the abuse crisis, and Father Maciel.

  “The outer purpose always sounds noble, to defend the Church’s teaching office,” Eugene Kennedy comments in The Unhealed Wound. “Holy Mother Church, as it is called, cannot be ‘defiled’ by false teaching or errant behavior, papal teaching authority cannot be ‘violated.’ ” Nevertheless,

  the underlying psychological and spiritual reality is not difficult to recognize. Men use power against other men to destroy their masculine potency … Feeling righteous is a totalitarian emotion and justifies wounding men in their manhood, emasculating them in the name of an institution that does not notice the shadow it casts as it focuses on and overwhelms them. Women must also be controlled and called into their place, but men—the potent male—must be incapacit
ated, ruined as a man, and shamed and humiliated as well.7

  Ratzinger voiced his outrage when he substituted for the dying pope at the 2005 Good Friday Stations of the Cross in the Colosseum. The cardinal said scornfully, “How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those … in the priesthood”—words that shot across the international media grid. As John Paul’s body lay in state at St. Peter’s Basilica, the media covered a drama of religious grandeur. Father Tom Williams, a Legionary and a stalwart defender of Maciel, provided commentary on NBC’s Today, suffering not a question from perky Katie Couric on his accused superior. Irony hung like a thundercloud as Cardinal Ratzinger in his sermon at the Mass opening the conclave gave a cri de coeur on Christian values: “We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive.”

  The papacy of Benedict XVI opened into a tense drama between moral absolutes and the concessions that come with governing. The moral absolutist, in a speech at his old college in Regensburg, Germany, quoted an ancient Byzantine emperor’s hostile words on Islam. Journalists who saw the advance text warned the Vatican press spokesman “that the talk would cause problems with Muslims,” wrote Marco Politi, a biographer of John Paul and a distinguished correspondent for La Repubblica. “Cardinal Angelo Sodano warned the Pope of the risks he was taking with the lecture.”8 Undeterred, Benedict gave the speech, which inflamed Muslim leaders and provoked attacks on several churches in the West Bank and Gaza; in Somalia, an Italian nun who worked in a children’s hospital was shot and killed. Politi adds: