Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [222]
36. Tom Roberts, “Cleveland Diocese Shaken by Seismic Shifts,” National Catholic Reporter, May 9, 2009.
37. Tom Roberts, “Scranton’s Bishop Martino Stepping Down,” National Catholic Reporter, August 28, 2009.
38. Tim Townsend, “The St. Stanislaus Saga: Is Resolution Imminent?” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 1, 2010; Tim Townsend, “After Years of Discord, Status of St. Stanislaus’s Is Coming to an End,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 31, 2010.
39. Malcolm Gay, “Renegade Priest Leads a Split St. Louis Parish,” New York Times, August 13, 2010; Joseph Kenny, “St. Louis Parish Rejects Archdiocese’s Proposal,” Catholic News Service, August 24, 2010, in National Catholic Reporter.
40. Joan M. Nuth, Ph. D., “The Story of a Church,” unpublished. Nuth, a systematic theologian at John Carroll University in Cleveland, sent the essay to Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio in Washington, D.C., on April 18, 2009. The essay appeared in the parish’s online newsletter, which has ceased circulation on the Internet since the parish was suppressed.
41. Court of Appeals, Third District, Seneca County, Kansas St. James Parish of Ohio, et al. Plaintiffs-Appellants v. The Catholic Diocese of Toledo in America, et al., Defendants-Appellees, case no. 13-08-19.
42. Rachel Dissell, “Final Mass at Downtown St. Peter Catholic Church Leaves ‘An Empty Tomb,’ ” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 4, 2010.
CHAPTER 11: THE DEBTS OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION
1. “The Plot Thickens: Two Normas, Maciel, Consecrated and Quirece and des Andres,” March 25, 2010, www.exlcblog.com; Carmen H. Moreno, “Las familias de Maciel,” Quien, March 19, 2010.
2. George Weigel, author of a 1998 biography of John Paul, was among the pope’s advisers at the Vatican during the 2002 abuse crisis. Weigel portrays the pope as a victim of Maciel’s deception in The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (New York, 2010). Weigel argues that John Paul was poorly informed by Vatican officials in 2002. In response to the pounding international media coverage at the time, John Paul issued a statement that condemned clergy predators yet left room for redemption of those priests (see chapter 3). The inconclusive nature of that document mirrored his ambivalence on the issue. John Paul was one of the great popes and a towering figure of the twentieth century, but his failures of church governance were substantial. By bending over backward to absolve John Paul of responsibility in the abuse crisis, Weigel avoids—indeed, distorts—the historical record. In 1984 Father Tom Doyle wrote a forty-two-page summary of the abuse crisis, as it unfolded, for his boss, Archbishop Pio Laghi, the papal nuncio, who sent the information to Rome. In Vows of Silence (New York, 2004), Gerald Renner and I tracked the escalation of scandals in the 1990s, particularly the case of Cardinal Groër of Austria, whose 1995 retirement amid a flood of allegations we now know caused great tension between Ratzinger and Sodano over the Vatican’s tight-lipped response to Groër’s history of sexual abuses. Weigel (unlike Jonathan Kwitny in his biography Man of the Century) ignores the well-documented record of John Paul’s passivity and inaction for years before he was weakened by Parkinson’s disease. By failing to cite the interviews Maciel’s victims gave to us and other journalists, Weigel approaches Maciel as if the public accusations had no merit until they became testimony with the CDF investigator, Monsignor Scicluna, whose sessions began the day John Paul died. By avoiding the public record on Maciel during John Paul’s lifetime, Weigel silences himself on Cardinal Sodano’s machinations and why Ratzinger waited eight years before ordering an investigation. Ignoring the evidence, Weigel places John Paul above