Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [178]
And then, as if by magic, several days after the white smoke heralded a new pope, Benedict XVI lowered a rope ladder that would lift Archbishop Levada out of the provincial muck, up and away to the Eternal City. Bill Levada would take Ratzinger’s place as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The new job assured him of a cardinal’s red hat. Why Levada? many people wondered. His credentials as a theologian were marginal. But Ratzinger realized that his office, backlogged with seven hundred cases of sex offenders, needed an American who understood the issue. Levada’s messy record in the swamps of scandal mattered little; he had proved his fidelity to the men of the apostolic succession.
By late summer 2005, four jury trials in northern California civil cases involving one priest had produced $5.8 million in judgments. Settlement negotiations yielded another $37.2 million to a plaintiffs’ group. Two of the survivors were women abused as girls by Father Greg Ingels, a canon lawyer who had advised Levada on abuse issues. On learning of the accusations against him, Levada let Ingels live quietly at a seminary with a retired archbishop, John Quinn. That move so outraged psychotherapist Jim Jenkins, chair of Levada’s clergy review board, that he resigned. A beaming Levada stood in the cathedral sanctuary for his farewell Mass when a process server handed him a subpoena to testify in a San Francisco case.
Mahony’s lawyers used the term “formation privilege” as shorthand for the religious freedom argument by which that archdiocese shielded sex offenders’ files. Los Angeles Times reporters Jean Guccione and William Lobdell, who covered the legal saga with tenacious intelligence, wrote in 2004:
The archdiocese asserts that the privilege stems from a bishop’s ecclesiastical duty to provide a lifetime of formative spiritual guidance to his priests. As claimed by the archdiocese, the privilege would require that sensitive communication between a bishop and his priests involving counseling—including documents relating to sexual abuse of minors—be kept confidential.
Any action by the state to breach that privilege would violate both state law and the state and federal constitutions’ guarantee of religious freedom, the archdiocese’s attorneys argue.44
Anderson scoffed, “This kind of assertion of a First Amendment privilege has never succeeded elsewhere. Mahony is putting his fingers and toes in a big dyke, but he can’t keep plugging the holes.”45
Mahony had borrowed a page from the Vatican playbook. Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, a top canon lawyer at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, asserted in 2002, “If a priest cannot confide in his bishop because he is afraid of being denounced it would mean there is no more freedom of conscience. Civil society must also respect the ‘professional secrecy’ of priests.”46
Bertone was a Salesian. His comments were utterly consistent with the order’s concealment of sex offenders in Jeff Anderson’s experience. Bertone had left the CDF in 2003 to become archbishop of Genoa, gaining administrative experience to help him rise in the apostolic succession. On June 23, 2006, Pope Benedict named Cardinal Bertone to succeed Sodano as secretary of state.
Only later did the news emerge that while in Genoa, Bertone had written a celebratory preface to the 2003 Italian edition of Father Maciel’s book-length interview, Christ Is My Life—a last-ditch effort at defending himself in the congregation where Bertone had previously worked. Christ Is My Life appeared some months before Ratzinger ordered the investigation. “The answers that Father Maciel gives … are profound and simple and have the frankness of one who lives his mission in the world and in the Church with his sights and his heart fixed on Christ Jesus,” wrote Bertone. “The key to this success is, without doubt, the attractive force of the love of Christ.”47
When