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Render unto Rome follows a series of property and financial decisions that link certain American bishops and Vatican officials; the book further examines how Father Marcial Maciel, the greatest fund-raiser of the modern church, became its greatest criminal. In following these narrative lines I have taken a deep look at the handling of church assets in Boston, Cleveland, and Los Angeles, interlaced with events from other dioceses and a recurrent focus on the Congregation for the Clergy, the Vatican office that monitors how bishops sell property. A key official in Clergy recently assisted a profiteering scheme on the sale of U.S. churches. A central figure in that scheme, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, was Vatican secretary of state for fourteen years under John Paul and slightly more than a year under Benedict. Sodano was also a tireless supporter of Father Maciel. The cardinal refused to be interviewed; however, FBI findings on the business dealings of his nephew were of great help, along with other sources, as I put a viewfinder on Sodano and his machinations. Nipote, in Italian, is the root word for “nepotism.”

I have drawn a timely insight from Worldly Goods, James Gollin’s 1971 book on Catholic Church finances. Gollin reported that the American church held between 50 and 60 percent of global church assets, but much of it lay in property that could not be sold. “Adding up the total wealth of the church is a game,” he observed. “The essential thing is to understand how the wealth is managed.”5 As I have learned, that management varies greatly from one bishop to the next.

With 1.2 billion members, the Roman Catholic Church is the largest organization in the world, the most populous single entity that operates nearly everywhere. It is also a vastly decentralized church, with power invested in individual bishops. No matter how much a bishop relies on advisory boards or staff, his authority looks to Rome. Each bishop answers to the pope through officials in the Roman Curia. Few Catholics questioned this monarchical arrangement until the bishops’ strategies to conceal sexual abuse unraveled in lawsuits, allowing the press to expose a netherworld of pathological secrecy.

“I’m constantly amazed by how little information some dioceses have on their finances,” Patrick Schiltz, the dean of the University of St. Thomas Law School in St. Paul, Minnesota, told the New York Times in 2002. “They are like mom-and-pop operations.”6 Schiltz has since become a federal judge. Words like that from a legal scholar who had done defense work for dioceses in abuse cases hinted at a deeper dissatisfaction shared by many prominent Catholics.

“The church should open up its books,” Erica P. John, an heir to the Miller brewing fortune and a major philanthropist, also told the Times. “We want transparency.”7 A family foundation established by John’s late husband had been a bedrock supporter of Milwaukee’s archdiocese when she discovered, in May 2002, that Archbishop Rembert Weakland had used $450,000 in church funds in 1998 to pay off a disgruntled male lover from years before.8 Weakland was closing parishes at the time, citing a need for fiscal pragmatism, while his lawyers negotiated the secret settlement; he was also steering $1.5 million to Rome for an endowed chair in social teaching in his name at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and a $500,000 chair in liturgy and music, courtesy of an archdiocesan fund that relied on the John family foundation.9 In a 2009 memoir, Weakland noted: “I knew that people’s allegiance was primarily to the parish: their Catholicism was identified with it. The closing or merging of parishes would almost certainly reduce the number of practicing Catholics.”10 Weakland, who had a remarkable history of recycling child molesters, commissioned a $100,000 bronze relief for Milwaukee’s Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist that gave honor to Saint John, Saint Anne, and himself.

The celibacy law, which any pope could make optional, has become an expensive