Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [188]
A full set of audited financial statements means the assertions of management have been tested by experienced auditors. They contact the banks to make sure a given entity actually has funds on deposit. “Since the New Orleans Financial Report was not audited,” continues Ruhl, “there is no assurance at all that the numbers bear any resemblance to reality. The Financial Report does not include any notes, which would tell about activities such as bond issues and impending litigation.” Perhaps the archdiocese found its way out of the Katrina debt by a 2007 bond issue. Ruhl, who came across the bond issue information through his own research, explains that although the 2009 Financial Report has no mention of it, the archdiocese, working through the Louisiana Public Facilities Authority, issued $69,150,000 of municipal bonds in 2007. As of June 30, 2009, the Archdiocese had an outstanding liability for $68,130,330 of these bonds.
In 2009 Hughes insisted on church property rights, prevailing on Mayor Ray Nagin to order police officers into the two vigil parishes, Good Counsel and St. Henry (which had cash reserves of $150,000). The spectacle of NOPD beating down a door at Good Counsel and arresting people from both parishes was like a whiplash to many people. At his retirement press conference in 2009, Hughes apologized to the community for any harm he had caused. His successor, Archbishop Gregory Aymond, began a dialogue with the two parishioner groups, allowing limited use of both churches, searching for a solution to reconcile the protesters to the archdiocese, with some role for the two dormant parishes.
THE VATICAN TAKES OVER THE LEGION
In June 2009 Borré met again with his contact in the Secretariat of State. He laid out the main points of the eighteen-page Request for Mediation, the terrible damage done to neighborhoods and people of faith when a viable parish was closed because of its immediate material value to a bishop. Negotiating a solution for the Boston archdiocese would likely have a national impact and, if handled fairly for the vigil groups, would position Cardinal O’Malley as a peacemaker, a prelate with the vision and leadership to uplift a demoralized community. This would mean the “peaceful demobilization of the vigils and the quiet withdrawal of the Boston appeals at the Signatura.”
The Vatican official absorbed what Borré had to say and presented the position of the Secretariat of State. The letter’s fundamental issue was outside the competenza (area of responsibility) of his office; however, he arranged for Borré to meet another Vatican official. As these conversations unfolded, Borré was following the news from Cleveland, aghast as Lennon repeated the destruction he had wrought on Boston.
Carlo Gullo determined that the only remaining avenue for the vigil parishes’ canonical prospects was a direct appeal to Pope Benedict.
As one of the handful of canonists licensed to take appeals to the highest level of the Apostolic Signatura, Gullo had the right to send a document to the Holy Father. He had never done so before, but the professor and practitioner of canon law in Rome, who had little experience of America, had absorbed through Borré a metaphysical sense of the people utterly devoted to their sacred spaces at a time when many European churches, for all of their grandeur and iconic presence in the historical memory, drew sparse crowds at times of Mass. The secularization of Europe, a “post-Christian” society, had become a strand of the media narrative. Benedict’s cry against moral relativism was a call for Christian Europe to assert its integrity. Certainly, reasoned Gullo, a movement of Catholics to protect their churches would have meaning for His Holiness.
But by Holy Week of 2010, Benedict XVI had suffered a spectacular loss of respect in public opinion as the abuse crisis came home to Europe, “with scandals convulsing Ireland, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland,