Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [12]
On September 18, 2002, the plaintiff attorney Mitchell Garabedian and his associate William H. Gordon secured a $10 million settlement for eighty-six victims of one priest, John Geoghan.1 As the press coverage made reference to an earlier line of legal actions, Borré wondered how much the archdiocese had paid to settle claims in the late 1990s that were handled by Garabedian, and by a high-profile attorney at another firm, Roderick MacLeish Jr. (a grandson of the poet Archibald MacLeish). The attorneys had resolved cases for some seventy victims out of court, but with stipulations by the archdiocese that muzzled the survivors—the agreements sealed church documents from public view. Still, with so many cases, information surfaced in legal filings that drew the scrutiny of Kristen Lombardi in the weekly Boston Phoenix. Lawyers for the Globe asked the court for access to documents. Overruling church lawyers, Judge Constance Sweeney granted the request, which opened the gates for an epic investigation in 2002.2
Globe reporters excavated a criminal sexual underground involving dozens of clerics, based on the church personnel files surrendered to the subpoena demands by victims’ lawyers. The media narrative seemed to crest when Cardinal Law resigned as archbishop shortly before Christmas in 2002.
But events charged on in a high-stakes legal war. On September 9, 2003, the church pulled back from a threatened bankruptcy filing to embrace an $85 million settlement with 542 victims. Law was down in Maryland, living with a community of nuns. “The agreement marked the dramatic conclusion to Archbishop Seán P. O’Malley’s all-out push in his first weeks in Boston to bring closure to the abuse cases,” the Globe reported.3
Seán O’Malley, a Capuchin monk with a snowy beard, was fifty-nine and the bishop of Palm Beach, Florida, when he received the papal appointment as Boston’s archbishop. Wearing sandals and a brown robe with a rope belt, O’Malley cut an image quite the opposite of Law’s imperial persona. No one blamed O’Malley for the crisis, but donations had plummeted by 43 percent in the preceding year, from $14 million to $8 million in 2003.4 O’Malley faced huge barriers to restoring trust—and cash flow. In a letter issued on January 9, 2004, O’Malley announced that one-seventh of the archdiocesan buildings needed upgrading, a cost pegged at $104 million. The church had to assess its properties and streamline workings of the infrastructure. On February 2, 2004, O’Malley in a speech on the archdiocesan TV station revealed that the church faced a $4 million operating deficit and a $37 million loan from the Knights of Columbus to be repaid: “This has nothing to do with paying for abuse settlements, but has everything to do with providing vital services.”
Nothing to do with abuse settlements, Borré repeated to himself.
Two months later, the Red Sox had wrapped up spring training when O’Malley approved the sale of the mansion on a hill in Brighton where Law had lived like a lord, with a staff trained to call him “Your Eminence.” The cost for the cardinal’s estate and forty-three acres: $107.4 million. The buyer was the neighbor across Commonwealth Avenue: Boston College, a pearl in the crown of Jesuit higher education.5 By virtue of the size of its student body and faculty, and the scope of its graduate programs, BC should have been called a university, but BU had gotten there first. Nevertheless, in a city synonymous with Irish Catholicism, Boston College had a force of loyal alumni (many of them with Italian and Portuguese roots) who had produced an endowment that exceeded $1 billion. To Catholics outraged by Law’s reshuffling of predators, selling the mansion carried symbolic weight. The palazzo of the cardinal who had resigned his archbishopric in shame joined the infrastructure of a