Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [10]
In 2004 I published Vows of Silence with Gerald Renner, the longtime religion editor of the Hartford Courant. In that newspaper we first reported on the Vatican’s failure to act on pedophilia allegations that trailed Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ. In 2008 I released a documentary film based on that book and updated research. Chapter 7 of this book goes deeper, exploring Maciel’s financial odyssey as a mirror on Vatican justice.
Render unto Rome concludes an investigative trilogy on the crisis of the Catholic Church. Since my first reports in 1985 on a priest who traumatized the Cajun diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, I have followed an intervening path of cultural productions, jazz history, and a novel—works that draw a bead on life’s uplifting mysteries, particularly in my flood-resurrected hometown of New Orleans. These pursuits, I confess, have imbued me with a certain optimism about the human experiment. This cast of mind was a source of some amusement to Gerald Renner, who shares in the dedication of this book. Jerry died of cancer in 2007, at seventy-six. I thought of him often in this current round of work. He was a reporter of rock-solid integrity; he also savored good bourbon. He had a grand Irish heart and was one of the finest men I have known.
CHAPTER 1
BOSTON IN THE FAULT LINES
Peter Borré was midway past sixty, and like most men who find domestic harmony, he had learned that women are usually right. This knowledge, gathered slowly, had taught him that it was useless to argue over certain realities.
The condo he and his wife shared in the old Naval Shipyard overlooked sailboat slips nestled by a pier off Boston Harbor. The view extended to a grand sweep of the city skyline. During World War II, forty thousand men had built destroyers in the vast complex; now, as with many industrial zones of urban America, a large part of the shipyard had become an upscale housing project. On the walls of their home hung color photographs his wife, Mary Beth, had taken of flowers in Finland, carved doors in Marrakech, an arched footbridge in Tahiti—pictures from their travels.
Borré had made his money in oil and gas, developing facilities to generate power and regional grids. He had a holding company for energy ventures. In the 1980s Borré had worked for Mobil on natural gas projects in West Africa and on marketing in Europe. Before that he had worked in government, starting in 1973 as an intelligence officer in the Energy Agency of the Nixon administration, advancing to assistant secretary for international affairs as Energy achieved department status under Jimmy Carter, capped by a year under Ronald Reagan. But all the geopolitical experiences and business savvy had left him without leverage to engage his wife, a Democratic Party activist, about her spiritual life.
And so on Sundays, while Mary Beth watched Meet the Press, Peter Borré went to Mass with his mother-in-law, Rosie. Mary Beth had left the church well before the Boston Globe began its 2002 investigation of how Cardinal Bernard F. Law and a clutch of his auxiliary bishops recycled child-molester priests. The Globe ignited a chain reaction of media coverage in America that radiated to other countries, causing a crisis for which a frail and ailing John Paul II was in no way prepared. By winter of 2004, the media narrative on bishops concealing clergy predators began