Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [172]
“Mahony has a big contract with Stewart Enterprises for management of the Catholic cemeteries,” said Wall. “They give a cut to the archdiocese on every funeral they do. Stewart was a big supporter of the new cathedral.36 Burials are a business for the church. If you’re a pastor, as I was, you’re inundated in winter—that’s the burial season. Spring is big for baptisms, summer for weddings. It’s the flow of life, the rise and fall of the rivers and rains. You can bet Mahony is laying his groundwork in Rome to make these abuse cases go away.”
Mahony was indeed doing business in Rome, as several lawyers deduced from informal conversations with certain judges overseeing the negotiations. Of the three geographic groupings for the settlements—Clergy 1, in northern California; Clergy 2, in Los Angeles; and Clergy 3, in Orange, San Diego, and dioceses to the south—Clergy 2, with 554 cases, dwarfed the others. Mahony made presentations to the Third Office of the Congregation for the Clergy for the alienation of church property. Unlike Seán O’Malley, who had come empty-handed from Boston to Rome, Mahony dealt from a position of strength. The Vatican gave him great latitude on his handling of assets, for besides building the great cathedral, he had otherwise proved his mettle.
GIRDING FOR BATTLE
By spring 2003, eleven clerics had been indicted on criminal charges in Los Angeles. More than nine hundred civil claims were filed that year against California dioceses. The judges were pushing the settlement groups for mediation to avoid a system clogged with endless trials. These were not class action suits; still, coordinated proceedings with many clients move slowly. Besides the forty or so plaintiff lawyers, Hennigan had a large firm billing long hours on the many issues; the insurance companies that held liability policies of the dioceses had their lawyers. Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Don Steier represented accused priests. Procedural delays were strategic. Mahony also retained a public relations firm (with Enron among its clients) to help with damage control.37
“The usual process in cases like this is to saddle up, start discovery, and get a trial date,” explained Steve Rubino, a New Jersey lawyer who had two decades’ experience in suing dioceses and religious orders. “Instead, we fought about what the discovery would be. The church claimed the priests’ files were off-limits because of freedom of religion. Then they challenged the state law under which we had filed the cases. It became a tsunami of paper.”
Raised in a blue-collar Catholic home and a law school graduate of Catholic University, Rubino had started out as a prosecutor. He began a civil practice; on taking his first case against the church, he was appalled at the unprosecuted criminal behavior. Through a friendship with Tom Doyle he “joined this strange force, out of the church, into the church,” he told me one afternoon on the Atlantic shore, a short walk from his home. Unlike Jeff Anderson, the conservative Rubino turned down many cases with time-statute problems. The only thing I can get for you is money, he told the clients he did take on. What you’ve got to do is recover and learn to live well.
“Mahony and Hennigan led certain of my esteemed colleagues to believe this would be paid by [insurance] carriers; we’ll settle all claims in six months,” bristled Rubino. “That played well with the judiciary. The judges didn’t want discovery in all of these cases: they wanted order and structure to the proceedings. When Mahony claimed First Amendment privilege, that foxed everything. We spent three