Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [13]
Seasoned in the ways of oil companies, Peter Borré began thinking about an archbishop in the role of a CEO. If forced to do butcher’s work, the prelate must be adroit enough to avoid spattering blood on the floor. Red ink was rising around Archbishop O’Malley. Following the news accounts, Borré knew the archdiocese was holding back information. His mind raced. Where did the money go? What is O’Malley’s plan? Is he leveling with us? How bad is it?
Those questions might have hung in some cerebral side pocket, throwing cold shadows on his golden years until the day Peter Borré, the very opposite of a radical, got mad at a priest. When that happened, Mary Beth, who had wondered how her husband, with his complex molecular composition, might occupy himself in retirement, saw the swell of dark, silent anger and knew immediately they were in for a ride. Peter Borré was not a man to yell, yet she knew that despite his elegant manner, he was just the kind of Italian who would fight.
FAMILY VALUES
Mary Beth married her college sweetheart in 1976 at a guitar Mass. “It probably didn’t seem like a concession to our families,” she said, sighing, decades later. “If we’d only been a little older, when society accepted people living together, the relationship might have ended with a lot less anguish. I was surprised when my mom actually said that to me much later on.” They divorced after four years—no children. Mary Beth was done with the church, done with religion. Too many of the moral teachings struck her as invasive, politics of the body, insensitive to ordinary people as they sought intimacy in life. She earned a B.S. in marketing at the University of Delaware.
In 1986 she was working for an oil company in Houston when friends introduced her to Peter, who was in town on a business trip. With dark hair going silver at the curls, a charming wit, and a razor-sharp mind, he made an immediate impression. He had three children from his first marriage, which had ended several years before. When Mary Beth told her mother she was taking a trip to Paris with her new (forty-eight-year-old) boyfriend, Rosie caught a train to New York to meet the man. She took note of his flawless manners and the silken gesture of slipping cash into the palm of her cabdriver.
He proposed after three months.
They married in 1987 at the Harvard Club in Boston.
Despite the French surname, Borré’s forebears were Italian. His paternal grandfather, Agostino, was born in 1871, the year after nationalists captured territories long controlled by the papacy. In the convulsions of Italian statehood, Giuseppe Agostino Borré emigrated from Zerba, a mountain village in Piacenza province, north of Genoa, “at the urging of his brother Ernesto, who had come in 1882. Both came at about age nineteen and became chefs,” explains Marie Roth, a cousin who researched the family lineage.6 His maternal grandfather, Giuseppe Balboni, came from a village in Emilia in the Po Valley. Starting out as a pushcart peddler of fruit and vegetables, he ended up with a grocery store.
Born in Boston in 1938, Peter was a boy when his father, Peter senior, a lawyer and an army veteran, hired on for an American rebuilding project in Italy, in advance of the Marshall Plan. In August 1946 the family moved to Rome. Boxes bearing the remains of U.S. soldiers were stacked at the airport awaiting shipment home. The boy asked about the boxes. His father answered, gently telling him about the war. His mother, Mary Albina, had completed a teaching degree and then gone to Harvard, earning a master’s in English. She befriended the aging philosopher George Santayana (who famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) during his sunset years in Rome.
The bishops, monsignors, and priests who came to dinner were cultivated men whose intelligence impressed the boy. One visitor, Auxiliary Bishop John Wright from Boston, was a large, heavy man who enjoyed his wine and the discussions