Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [11]
Mary Beth and her sister, Claudia, had settled their dad, Bill Piper, into a nursing home near Claudia’s house in Winchester. After bouts of depression as the girls grew up, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, then dementia, in retirement. Mary Beth’s brothers, living in Delaware and California, had drifted from the church, and Claudia was a Unitarian. Mary Beth attended Mass once a year with her mother, at Christmas, as a gesture of continuity. She considered herself a spiritual person but despised organized religion.
Rosie lived with Mary Beth and Peter at the condo for six months while searching for a new home in greater Boston. After she found a place near Claudia’s and the nursing home, Bill insisted on moving back in with Rosie.
Peter was seventeen years older than Mary Beth. Watching his response to the Globe’s coverage, she decided that his rarefied upbringing as an American in Rome, without exposure to nuns, had made Peter an Italian Catholic. He had an aesthetic idea of Catholicism in contrast to her more puritanical encounter with faith. Born in 1955, she was a high school senior in Hockessin, Delaware, when the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion. Inspired by Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer, Mary Beth Piper, the ripening feminist, gritted her teeth at the elderly pastor’s sermons against abortion. Later, she realized that a younger priest in the parish rectory who had dyed blond hair and vestments that sported lightning bolts (sewn by his mother) was going through his own drama with the closet. At the time she was galvanized by the social changes running every night on TV news, the protests for civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, and against the Vietnam War. She bridled at religion classes about mysteries and the afterlife. She wanted to make sense of this life, now. The right to choose an abortion made sense to her and caused friction with her mother. They clashed when she tried leaving the house without a bra. “Mary Beth went from being a stick figure to an attractive girl who was well endowed,” recalled Rosie, who was fourth-generation Irish from New York and had her standards. Bill, a Presbyterian, was a more detached dad, a bit of the soft touch. The distance Mary Beth felt from the church widened in college as she got to know gay people.
The abuse scandal darkened Peter Borré’s thought field, presaging a slow shift in his views. When the early 2002 reports in the Globe uncovered Law’s mishandling of one priest, then others, Borré fumed about “a few bad apples.”
“It’s about time,” retorted Mary Beth.
Borré listened as she recalled the late 1980s, the early years of their marriage, when he had been traveling on business and she worked in an AIDS crisis program as the epidemic hit Boston. While counseling victims of the retrovirus, Mary Beth Borré heard stories of priests who shunned those seeking solace. She knew that for all of its hard-line stance on homosexuality, the church had a large closet of gay priests. Some of them were trying to help AIDS victims, but others held back, avoiding any involvement. She also heard from men with the virus who said that they were abused by priests as teenage boys. Many of her colleagues were ex-Catholics and ex-Jews, divorced from church or synagogue; they joked with one another about religious guilt as they followed a deep Judeo-Christian impulse to help people dying of the mysterious disease.
Fourteen years later, when Cardinal Law’s world