Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [182]
The diocese had nonchurch properties—multiple-unit buildings, condos, property zoned for commercial or industrial use, stores, and parking lots—valued at $115 million by the county assessor. A real estate economist told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the diocese had properties “with a market value well in excess of $1 billion.”57
The judge dismissed the diocese’s bankruptcy filing with prejudice, meaning it could not soon refile. She gave a strong rebuke: “Chapter Eleven is not supposed to be a vehicle, a method, to hammer down the claims of those abused.”58 In the end, plaintiff attorneys closed their briefcases with a settlement of $198 million for 144 clients. The Vatican made no punitive move against Bishop Robert Brom.
“Part of our settlement,” explains San Diego plaintiff attorney Irwin Zalkin, “was funded by Allied Irish Bank. They also funded the building of a high school here. I don’t know if AIB is directly involved with the Vatican Bank, but the grapevine talk among the lawyers is that AIB was a financial arm of the Vatican, that this is how the Holy See is able to fund some of the things they are involved with, including helping to pay for the settlements.”
Unlike Lennon and O’Malley in Boston, Mahony acted like a politician in the end. He went to his people, making an impassioned pitch to all the parishes, in personal meetings and letters, asking for money. He had already apologized. His decisions in recycling perpetrators, and living among them, were more egregious than Bernard Law’s scandal. But the media-savvy Mahony spent heavily on publicity and used his financial muscle to wage the legal fight to shelter incriminating files, a strategy that caused delays, which drove up the costs all around. The protracted struggle consumed more time and more money, ratcheting up an overall final payout of $750 million. But Mahony was not indicted. Battered again and again in the media, he was still standing. Cardinal Mahony could have given Nixon lessons on survival.
A parish in Woodland Hills donated its cash reserves of $1.5 million to the archdiocese. Another parish offered a $100,000 interest-free loan to be repaid over ten years. A smaller, poorer parish pledged $25,000 over five years.59 As Mahony worked to whittle down the huge debt, the clergy files were still bottled up in the labyrinthine Los Angeles court system as the 2010 abuse crisis put Benedict in the media crosshairs. Jeff Anderson had a constitutional attorney working on a motion to the Supreme Court not to hear the appeal by the Holy See, which was seeking to dismiss the Oregon lawsuit and his motion to take Pope Benedict’s deposition. And he had a new client, the thirty-year-old son of Marcial Maciel Degollado, who was livid at how he had been treated by the Legion of Christ.
CHAPTER 13
AMERICA AND THE VATICAN
To advance the canon law cases for the vigil parishes, Peter Borré flew to Rome, on average, every other month in 2009 and 2010, staying at least five days each time. He had passed his seventieth birthday; although his retirement years were darkened by the frustration of dealing with church officialdom, he loved Rome and found enjoyment in his friendship with the canon lawyer Carlo Gullo. In developing the appeals together, Borré had polished his Latin and gained an appreciation of the baroque intricacies of the Vatican legal system. But Borré wanted a way to take the story—parishioners seeking to preserve their churches from becoming liquid assets—beyond Gullo’s elegant Latin briefs and fuse it into the mental circuitry of other Vatican officials. The Signatura was a vertical process of appeals; Borré needed a horizontal strategy, a way of depositing the information in other stations of the Roman Curia.
As he spoke with midlevel officials at the Congregation for the Clergy, the Signatura, and other dicasteries, Borré sensed that many of the priests were severely overworked and lacked the support staff requisite