Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [31]
Every pastor of the nearly two hundred churches needed his permission to pay any expense exceeding $100, meaning each substantial repair to a rectory or school had to pass muster with him. Pastors delivered their ledgers for annual inspection at the chancery. Wisely, he routed donations from key parishes into facilities or charities in those neighborhoods to show lay people proof of their giving. He bought a Catholic weekly, The Pilot, turning it into an archdiocesan paper that publicized his appearances (an early editor was the future New York cardinal Francis Spellman). To Rome, he sent Peter’s Pence at $20,000 annually in his first decade as prelate.62 As Boston’s first cardinal (and America’s second) O’Connell was a throwback to Antonelli the backroom man, reborn in an America of Ireland rising. The fusion of two roles, financial and religious, fanned hostilities toward popery, but “the building bishops” of O’Connell’s generation withstood nativist bigotry, tapping strength in numbers to create a vast system of social and medical services for the poor long before federal programs like welfare or Medicaid.
O’Connell personified a form of governing that held allegiance to Rome and America in equal measure. Like the other building bishops, he saw himself through a prism of the medieval church—the bishop as benevolent lord, with laypeople as vassals. As Catholics thrived in a pluralist society with a court system, elections, and a free press, O’Connell and the twentieth-century bishops molded a medieval idea of power, an insular worldview remarkable both for its long resilience and for its catalytic role in the recent abuse scandals and financial crisis.
A dress rehearsal began in 1907. The values of an Irish ward heeler melded with Romanità when the cardinal appointed Father James O’Connell, a nephew, as his secretary. In 1912 O’Connell, by then a monsignor, moved up to chancellor, the chief financial officer. He “relished being his uncle’s hatchet man,” writes John Cooney.63 The cardinal’s nephew kept the archdiocesan bank accounts, corresponded with pastors, and oversaw church insurance policies and the archdiocese’s investment portfolio—a lot of power for one young man.
Just when O’Connell fell in love with the wife of a New Jersey doctor is unclear, but on April 8, 1913, she got a quickie divorce in South Dakota and landed in Indiana the next day to marry the monsignor before a justice of the peace. They were both twenty-eight. For seven and a half years, O’Connell “lived a bizarre and schizophrenic existence, switching back and forth between two entirely different lives,” using the surname Roe at home in Manhattan on East Thirty-sixth Street (his mother-in-law lived with them) and shuttling to Boston for his church duties. The couple had no children. They lived well. James O’Toole writes:
In the summer of 1913 they sailed to Europe for a delayed honeymoon, declaring $1,600 worth of purchases after returning … Mr. Roe speculated in real estate, almost certainly with money that Monsignor O’Connell was embezzling from the church. The need to support his life in New York gave him the motive for such a crime just as surely as his access to large sums in Boston gave him the opportunity. Father [John] Mullen later claimed that an unnamed Boston banker estimated the pilfering at three-quarters of a million dollars.64
But it was a second priest, one David Toomey, whose secret life set the wheels of fate in motion. Father Toomey, the Pilot editor, was James O’Connell’s close friend—so close that he visited the O’Connells/Roes on their European honeymoon. Mrs. Roe well knew who her husband was. When David Toomey fell in love and married Florence Fossa, a friend