Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [18]
By the mideighties, when Bernard Law became cardinal, black and Latino families had arrived in a new wave of immigration; the Charlestown housing projects took on a racial stigma. Whites who could afford to had been moving out since the midseventies, when a federal judge issued busing orders to desegregate Boston public schools, making Charlestown a flash point of white protests. As the white flight started to ease, younger people with good jobs began renovating the old apartment houses as spacious dwellings for smaller families. A short walk down the hill along the Mystic, an Irish drug mob homed in on poor streets, planting addiction and fueling crime in the ethnic mix. The Naval Shipyard put a gentrified edge to a neighborhood where three parishes lined the incline with less than a mile between them. A financial crisis had silently encroached under Cardinal Law, unbeknownst to Peter Borré as he and Rosie sat in the pews of Charlestown’s poorest parish on a Sunday morning in 2004.
OPENING HIS LENS
After entering Harvard at age sixteen and graduating in 1959 with a degree in history, Peter Borré joined the U.S. Navy. He spent three years as a naval officer. In 1963 he earned a master’s in international economics from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Quarreling with his father, he refused to attend law school, but earned a second master’s, in international finance, from Harvard Business School. The navy was his pivotal experience, a grounding in the discipline, teamwork, and chain of command on a ship as a system that worked. Three institutions shaped him: the U.S. Navy, the Catholic Church, and Harvard, in that order. Navy life formed a link in his mind with the church, a global institution that had weathered wars, scandal, and its share of crooked popes. The church’s mission was of divine origin. Men could screw up anything.
Rosie Piper thrilled to the sermons of Father Bob Bowers, the forty-something pastor with silver hair who spoke buoyantly about mutual obligations and the parish as a place where all peoples met; he was learning Spanish and creating outreach programs that made her feel good about being Catholic. She found herself oddly moved on the day two adopted boys of a gay couple made their First Communion. Gay marriage was a leap she could not make in her own mind. She had voted Republican much of her life, but civil unions with benefits seemed right. With so many kids out on the street, hooked on crack and fighting with guns, she reasoned that the children of that couple at least had the advantage of family, even if it was a different kind of family: they had two men who loved them, brushed their hair, put them in nice clothes, and prayed with them in church.
The society she found at St. Catherine of Siena, where “church” was greater than its rules, strengthened her sense of a spiritual home as she weighed the realities of her life against past expectations. Back in Delaware all those years ago, she had raised two sons and two daughters in the church, all of whom had left or detached from the faith. For some reason her eldest granddaughter, a University of Virginia undergraduate who had grown up in California, was a deeply devout Catholic. Rosie realized how much she had learned from her children, the tolerance they had taught her about a changing society—a tolerance sadly missing from the church she loved and which gave her spasms of agony. Those bishops! Hiding sex criminals! All that lying! Somebody ought to show those men what’s what!
Attending Mass with Peter lent a measure of comfort to Rosie amid the reservoirs of patience she had to summon in dealing with Bill’s dementia. Her son-in-law with his European air could be brusque, even arrogant, but Peter had a good heart. She was glad he and Mary Beth had found each other.
Peter