Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [155]
A St. Peter’s civil case would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a city and state court system that had long shown its subservience to the Catholic Church; even if a court sided with the parish on the ownership issue, Lennon could refuse to provide a pastor. No court could make him do that.
St. Peter’s leaders filed an appeal at the Vatican over the Suppression order, though they knew the Signatura could take years to make a decision, and, as one member told me, “the Vatican sides with bishops, not people in the pews.” A core group of parishioners formed the Community of St. Peter and incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charitable organization under IRS regulations. They settled on a renovated car dealership in downtown Cleveland, the area where their hearts were, raising $200,000 to cover the rent, administrative expenses, outreach ministry, and supplant the salary and health insurance for Father Marrone, who took a leave of absence from the diocese to be their pastor. Four hundred people joined, nearly two-thirds the number of parishioners, as Sunday services resumed.
Cleveland’s clergy retirement fund was well capitalized, at about $90 million as of 2006, according to Joe Smith. Whatever his rationale, Lennon failed to provide a persuasive argument for the destructive policy toward the city’s struggling neighborhoods.
St. Peter closed on Easter 2010. At the final Mass, Marrone recounted its remarkable history. He scored the “tragic and even sinful decisions” made by certain church leaders. As people wept, he spoke of the parish as “an empty tomb,” while admonishing any who would “confuse blind faith with faithfulness … [and] allow more churches to become tombs of the living dead.
“The power of fear which has caused this injustice is not the last word, must not be the last word and will not be the last word. I know it seems unbearable to us but we can bear it. Go forth into the world and be living stones. God will tent with us where ever we go.”42
CHAPTER 11
THE DEBTS OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION
Marcial Maciel Degollado’s burial in early 2008 in the family crypt at Cotija de la Paz, in the hinterlands of Mexico, was a world away from the tomb he had had built in Rome’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Basilica—the vault for his sainthood candidacy. The saints who founded religious orders, like Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola, stand as spiritual models for their followers across time. Maciel’s canonization quest sank in 2006 when the Vatican ordered him to renounce public ministry for “a reserved life of penitence and prayer.” That communiqué, which in effect banished him from Rome, signaled Pope Benedict’s break from the denial of John Paul, a mind-set that inured the Polish pope to prosecuting Maciel and taking forceful action against the larger abuse crisis.
Cardinal Sodano, the secretary of state, made sure the 2006 communiqué from the Press Office praised the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi. Ignoring the thirty men who testified about the sexual abuses they suffered before Monsignor Scicluna, the promoter of justice dispatched belatedly by Ratzinger, the Vatican whitewashed the Legion’s eight-year disinformation campaign against Maciel’s victims, even as outraged ex-Legionaries and disaffected RC members sent new information to Scicluna. Ratzinger, who had become Benedict, approved the communiqué.
Maciel flew off to Mexico for a reunion with Norma Hilda Baños and their daughter, Normita, who was in her early twenties. A March 2005 photograph of Maciel and the Normas in Cotija surfaced well after his death.1 Maciel’s legacy—and John Paul’s failure to stop him—would detonate like land mines as Benedict confronted the Legion of Christ.2
Sodano had appeared with Maciel several months before the 2006 decision at a religious conference in the beautiful Tuscan town of Lucca. Sodano was pulling out the stops to include Maciel