Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [114]
Borré pictured Dante’s arrival at the river in the Inferno and the sign saying “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here!”
Gullo explained that if they proceeded in a Vatican process, the decisions would not come fast. The first stage of an appeal, read by the Congressio, involved a counteropinion from the Advocate for Public Administration, whose job was to defend the Congregation for the Clergy’s rationale. As it turned out, the canonist who filled that role in these cases was Martha Wegan. Borré assumed that Congressio canonists would not overrule Cardinal Castrillón’s dicastery. That meant filing a detailed appeal to the full bench. They were looking at an uphill slog to question the moral logic of parishes-as-assets before cardinal-jurists. Borré had no doubt of the resolve by people in their round-the-clock vigils.
After a discussion of finances, Gullo agreed to a fee of 4,000 euros per parish, or about $6,000 under the exchange rates. Over time, ten parishioner groups from the Boston archdiocese took this route, which translated into roughly $60,000 for work that was likely to extend three years or longer. The fixed fee also covered an appeal against sale of a church, should the suppression per se be granted. Borré calculated the hourly rate at less than $100, which was affordable to the parish groups, and a form of leverage in driving up the cost to the Boston archdiocese each month a given church could not be sold. When the two men finally met in the winter of 2007, the appeals Gullo had filed in the preceding year were still pending at the Signatura; he would eventually have eleven Boston parishes as clients.
Carlo Gullo lived on the third floor of an apartment building in an eastern suburb of Rome, several miles beyond Porta Pia, the sixteenth-century gate crowned with ornamental crenellations that stood as Michelangelo’s last monumental work. In 1870 Italian troops blasted through Porta Pia in seizing Rome from Pope Pius IX. As the bus passed the sight, Borré saw a bronze-and-marble monument to a Risorgimento rifle regiment that Mussolini had erected in 1932, a reminder of triumphal Rome.
The night before, at dinner with a Jesuit who had taught him decades earlier in middle school in Rome, Borré vented about parishes being sold to pay for clergy crimes. “You Americans,” the old Italian grunted. “Always the sex!” But shutting these churches was driving away the faithful, insisted Borré. “If in ten years the American church is half its present size,” the Jesuit retorted, “we will be a better church.” Borré sized him up as a Ratzingerian, loyal to Benedict XVI’s view of a purified church, small, leaner, more obedient to orthodoxy, a view that conservatives cheered.
Tall and slender, with a full head of gray hair, Gullo greeted him at the door. They sat in the book-lined office. In his soft, courtly voice, Gullo emphasized the importance of language in the petitions to convey a sense of the spiritual integrity in people occupying the churches. Gullo conceded that they were on a hard road, but the financial ethics intrigued him as an issue the Vatican offices had to confront. “You must put aside any notions of jurisprudence from Anglo-Saxon systems,” Gullo explained. Despite the strict time limits for appellants, the Vatican congregations and courts could take as long as they wished.
Borré conceived the Council of Parishes as an organization capable of expanding as financial convulsions hit other dioceses; this was neither perverse nor wishful thinking, rather a realization that the Boston crisis turned on Lennon, then O’Malley, shielding information on Law’s mismanagement of money and predators—a system corroded by protection rituals. Catholics deserved honesty on church finances. Parishioners in Scranton and Allentown, New Orleans and Cleveland, among two dozen dioceses,