Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [112]
Upon his death, the Legion said that he went to heaven.
In Cuernavaca, Mexico, Maciel’s three sons saw the news of his death on TV with their mother, Blanca Lara Gutiérrez, whom he had met and wooed in 1977, when she was nineteen and he, at fifty-seven, told her he was an agent for the CIA. He had been out of touch with that family for several years.
CHAPTER 8
BORRÉ IN ROME
Peter Borré’s strategy of drawing the Vatican into responsibility for Boston parish closings registered in March 2006. Cardinal Castrillón responded to the parishioners’ appeals by writing Bishop William Skylstad, the USCCB president (whose Spokane diocese had taken bankruptcy protection because of abuse litigation). With no reference to Boston, Castrillón’s message was clear.
Your Excellency:
This Congregation deems it opportune to write to you regarding the closure of parishes in the dioceses of the United States, since in recent times certain dioceses have wrongly applied canon 123 CIC and stating that a parish has been “suppressed” when in reality it has been merged or amalgamated.
A parish is more than a public juridical person. Canon 369 defines the diocese as a “portion of the people of God which is entrusted to the bishop to be nurtured by him” … In this light, then, only with great difficulty, can one say that a parish becomes extinct.1
The proceeds from closed churches should follow parishioners to the “enlarged parish community.” But the Boston archdiocese wanted church assets to sell and plug the deficit. For Borré it was all very simple: Castrillón was covering his ass. Officials in the Congregation for the Clergy were advising the Boston archdiocese on how pastors of parishes shutting down could “voluntarily” surrender funds. Castrillón’s chief concern was not the injustice of suppression orders, but how to help Seán O’Malley meet his financial needs.
Other prelates secured closures predicated on fleeting media coverage. On a February night in 2007 Borré bedded down in a pew of Our Lady Queen of Angels in Harlem in a show of solidarity with forty people at a vigil. The next day, with the vigil established, he caught an evening shuttle to Boston. A few hours later police officers responding to Cardinal Edward Egan’s office hauled off the leaders, most of them women, releasing them after the archdiocese locked the doors.2 Egan, a Chicago canonist trained in Rome, had come to New York from the diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut. In a 1997 deposition over an abuse case and his recycling of perpetrators, Egan, in trying to contain financial damage, actually testified, “Every priest is self-employed.”3 Three years later he went to New York, with 2.5 million Catholics, after the death of Cardinal John O’Connor. “New York Catholicism was practically an Irish-run Establishment overseeing a mosaic of stable ethnic enclaves,” wrote the religion writer David Gibson.
But now those old-time Catholic communities were spreading out to suburbs while new, poorer immigrants back-filled city parishes that had fewer priests to staff them and little money to support them. Churches and schools would have to close, creating a sense that after 200 years of surging numbers and clout, New York Catholicism had become a mature industry, religiously speaking, and was facing a discouraging phase of downsizing …
O’Connor’s popularity was owed to the fact that he never denied anyone who came begging for a new program or for him to halt the closing of an old parish and he left the archdiocese with a $20 million-a-year operating deficit and an infrastructure that