Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [152]
BEATING THE DRUMS IN ROME
Leaders from a large swath of parishes were enraged at the bishop when Peter Borré pulled into Cleveland for a June 27, 2009, meeting at the public library of Westlake, an inner-ring town. Had Cleveland controlled the water distribution to its near suburbs, as Columbus did, the city could have annexed dozens of townships like Westlake, amplifying the tax base to benefit the core. Instead, the diocese helped the mayor’s office with lifelines to the inner city. Forty people from Voice of the Faithful, FutureChurch, and the upstart Endangered Catholics came to the event. Eleven parishes had taken the path of canonical appeals, most of which would end up with Carlo Gullo as he framed the arguments, often in dialogue with Peter Borré, in pleadings to the Signatura. Lennon had shuttered parishes with pivotal neighborhood ministries in Akron and Lorain, too.
Borré, comfortably tanned, wearing jeans and a red button-down shirt, began self-effacingly, “I know a talking head from out of town is not what you need.” He turned to the closures. “Lennon was the architect of what happened in Boston. Now you have him—”
“How did you get rid of him?” asked a lady.
“It took us two years,” he said, shaking his head. “A Boston auxiliary bishop told a group of priests, ‘This is a disaster we will never repeat.’ That is Lennon’s legacy. One cannot be cynical about losing one’s spiritual home.”
Other bishops had been ruthless, too. Anthony and Noreen Foti of Scranton presented a numbing portrait of the suppressions under Bishop Joseph Martino. Two months later, the sixty-three-year-old Martino abruptly resigned after a six-year tenure “distinctive for an almost non-stop round of battles with Catholic academics, Catholic teachers’ union, Catholic politicians and a range of other groups, including his own peers among the Catholic hierarchy,” noted the National Catholic Reporter.37
New Orleans archbishop Alfred Hughes had gotten Mayor Ray Nagin to order reluctant policemen into two vigil churches, one of them on the National Register of Historic Places, hauling several parishioners into patrol cars.
In Boston, explained Borré, with eighty-three closures announced, the archdiocese stopped at sixty. “We mobilized nine vigils. The press thinks of vigils as people with candles. This is civil disobedience. After all of this in Cleveland, Lennon spared two parishes ‘on reflection.’
“As I’ve gone around, I’ve been very clear that the chances of success are low. Then why do it?” He paused. “Even the Communists did not destroy churches in the Eastern bloc. They turned them into houses of the people which have slowly been returned to the church.”
He mentioned Archbishop Raymond Burke, prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, who in 2004, while yet in St. Louis, suppressed a Polish parish. St. Stanislaus Kostka had an 1891 charter under which the then-archbishop allowed a parish board to control their finances. The board in 2004 claimed its properties and assets totaled $8 million. Although the amount was never independently verified, Burke wanted to fold the parish into a common structure of nonprofit parish corporations in order to limit the assets available to sex abuse lawsuits. The parish council spurned Burke’s suppression order; unable to negotiate an agreement with him, they hired a Polish priest as pastor. Burke excommunicated the lay leaders and the pastor, Marek Bozek. The Vatican dismissed Bozek from the priesthood; he continued on as pastor. By 2010 Bozek’s support had splintered, with some parishioners joining the archdiocese in a civil lawsuit against the parish.38 Burke, ensconced in Rome, oversaw the Signatura cases as American parishes tried to reverse their bishops.39
“We are concerned with keeping churches viable,” said Borré. He stressed the importance of filing appeals to keep the issue before the Vatican.
People from the various groups voiced their frustrations, citing well-functioning parishes that stood to lose their funds (Cleveland suppressions netted about $9 million to the diocese the first