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By Root 1398 0

Borré became active at St. Catherine of Siena by default. Since moving into the condo in 1987, he had logged hundreds of thousands of air miles on business. Now and then Mary Beth had gone with him, depending on the destination and her schedule. More often he was alone. On layovers from West Africa he had stayed most often in Paris, where he attended Les Augustins church. In London he sought out St. Martin-in-the-Fields, off Trafalgar Square. Back in Boston, he often made his way downtown to the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. But his attendance was sporadic, several Sundays running, then a stretch away.

Moving through his fifties, Borré had reached back for an essence of his earlier spiritual life, before the collapse of his first marriage. He blamed the divorce on his infidelity and the workaholic zeal of his thirties. In his twenties he had married the daughter of a European ambassador; she raised their son and two daughters during his time away. With a widening of his hindsight lens he had come to see those overlong travel stints as an escape mechanism. The divorce had left him riddled with self-disgust. In time, he cultivated a good relationship with his ex-wife; she had lived now for nearly three decades with a man on Martha’s Vineyard. Repairing the bond with his children had come slowly, not without pain. They were grown now, and he had several grandchildren.

At Mass, he wanted to reclaim a spiritual equilibrium, the moral center he had lost. Nevertheless, each Sunday when the moment came to receive the Eucharist, the presence of Christ in the blessed wafer, Borré hung back. He sat in the pew as people moved past him into the Communion line.

Borré had recoiled from the idea of seeking an annulment for his first marriage, a process that would have made him legal, as it were, for Communion. Many Catholics view the annulment process as revisiting the traumas of a divorce. From his father’s cynical take on the Rota, the Vatican court that held the final word on annulments, Borré thought the process was a racket. His father, as an American attorney well connected in Rome, had referred cases to canonists who had standing at the Rota; he had helped translate certain requests into Italian.

“There was a lot of dinner table talk about how phony the whole thing was—false affidavits about mental reservations a spouse had before getting married,” recalls Borré. “It required a lot of collusion on the part of the other spouse, money changing hands in return for supporting affidavits. My dad had peripheral involvement in an infamous case. Lee Bouvier, sister of Jackie Kennedy, needed to annul her marriage so she could marry a Polish prince, Stanislaw Radziwill. It would have looked bad for the Catholic president to have a divorced sister-in-law who had been a maid of honor at his wedding. It was a sordid matter, but the Sacra Rota came through and Lee became ‘Princess Radziwill.’ She was in Rome a lot in the Swinging Sixties. She and the prince divorced in the 1970s. By then it didn’t matter as a political issue.”

Still, many Catholics who go through annulments experience a feeling of cleansing; they can also remarry before a priest. The annulment involves a fee to the diocesan chancery, meeting with a canon lawyer, answering a lengthy questionnaire on causes of the divorce (with more intimate detail than many civil courts require), then the long wait to hear back from Rome. The escalation of annulments granted to American Catholics since the 1980s stirred suspicion at the Vatican. “The United States has the largest tribunal system in the world,” a Vatican canonist told me during an interview in Rome in 2002. “To say that people were unqualified begs the issue. The U.S. tribunals violated grandly—terribly—the annulments of marriage.”29

No one knows how many divorced Catholics remarry without annulments and take Communion. Most priests have no idea who in the Communion line may have canonically stained back pages nor a punitive inclination to use church law in withholding the Eucharist. Peter Borré, a prodigal son returned to