Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [0]
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Copyright © 2011 by Jason Berry
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berry, Jason.
Render unto Rome: the secret life of money in the Catholic Church / Jason Berry.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Catholic Church—Finance. I. Title.
BX1950.B47 2011
262′.020681—dc22 2010051105
eISBN: 978-0-385-53133-7
Jacket design by David Tran
Jacket photograph: Istock.com
v3.1
In memoriam
Ariel Laforet Berry,
child of my heart
Gerald Renner,
colleague and friend
I am an old policeman guarding the gold reserves. If you tell an old policeman that the laws are going to change, he will realize that he is an old policeman, and he will do everything that he can to prevent them from changing … Once the new laws have become the Church’s treasure, an enrichment of her gold reserves, there is still only one principle: loyalty in the Church’s service. But this service means loyalty to her laws—like a blind man. Like the blind man that I am.
—Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Prefect of the Holy Office, to Mario von Galli in The Council and the Future (1966)
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE: PRINCES OF THE REALM
1: BOSTON IN THE FAULT LINES
2: ORIGINS OF THE VATICAN FINANCIAL SYSTEM
3: SEEDS OF REVOLT
4: THE VATICAN, THE VIGILS, AND THE REAL ESTATE
5: ITALIAN INTERVENTIONS
6: THE CASE OF THE MISSING MILLIONS
7: FATHER MACIEL, LORD OF PROSPERITY
8: BORRÉ IN ROME
9: SECRECY AND LAMENTATIONS
10: PROSECUTION AND SUPPRESSION
11: THE DEBTS OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION
12: ANOTHER CALIFORNIA
13: AMERICA AND THE VATICAN
EPILOGUE: BENEDICT XVI: POPE OF IRONIES
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
PRINCES OF THE REALM
The church stood at the bottom of Bunker Hill in Charlestown, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. Like much of Greater Boston, Charlestown was no longer hard-shell Irish. The wooden triple-deckers that housed large working families in decades past had become pearls for gentrification in 2004, despite the outlying streets that bore the scars of a drug economy.
The social mosaic at St. Catherine of Siena parish delighted Rose Mary Piper. She was in the winter of life, with four children grown and grandchildren nearing adulthood. The range of people in the pews, so different from that of the predominantly white parishes she had known, touched her identity as one soul united with a greater body of believers. From the housing projects along Mystic River came Puerto Ricans and people from the Dominican Republic to Sunday Mass, with their Spanish songs and bilingual bulletins, worshipping alongside people with Irish roots and then more cosmopolitan Bostonians like her son-in-law, Peter Borré, who lived in a nearby condo.
Rosie Piper knew the Latino women had it tough, like her ancestors who got off the ships from Ireland and made it in Staten Island, New York. To live is to change. When her husband was diagnosed with dementia, Rosie oversaw the selling of their home in Hilton Head, South Carolina. For most of their long marriage, Bill Piper’s career as a chemical engineer with DuPont had anchored them in Delaware. Rosie had enjoyed their time in the South. But with the realization that she alone could