Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [34]
In 1916 the newly installed archbishop of Chicago, George Mundelein, sent $62,000 to Benedict for Peter’s Pence.73 Mundelein created his own banking system with procedures for pastors to build or expand on churches, schools, and parish complexes. No parish could exceed $200,000 in debt; the chancery had to approve all construction costs. Mundelein floated church-backed bond issues. With a banker’s eye, he pooled surplus parish funds, facilitating loans from wealthier to poorer parishes. “Mundelein treated most pastors like financial idiots,” states his biographer Edward Kantowicz.”74 As cardinal he made the archdiocese a financial powerhouse. Mundelein presided over Chicago’s expansion; his contributions to Peter’s Pence ran to six figures through the 1920s. But of all the American contributions in that era, the largest came in 1921—the year Boston’s scandal-tainted O’Connell sent $60,000—when Archbishop Dennis Dougherty of Philadelphia, on becoming the third U.S. cardinal, sent a stunning $1 million in Peter’s Pence. In the aftershocks of World War I, Benedict needed every dollar of it.75
Like Boston, Philadelphia was about one-fourth Irish, yet more tightly woven and more prosperous, as financial writer Charles R. Morris reports in American Catholic. The percentage of Irish in the general population before the Civil War was roughly the same in the two cities (about 20 percent), but the Irish accounted for 18 percent of grocers in Philadelphia, as opposed to just a single percent in Boston.76 The Irish flourished in Philadelphia’s construction trades; an entrepreneur by the name of Rafferty organized thirty-five parish loan societies with funding of at least $15 million. With solid blue-collar and middle-class well-kept neighborhoods, topped off by wealthier precincts, Catholic Philadelphia threw out a huge welcome for Archbishop Dennis Dougherty. A native of Scranton, Dougherty studied in Rome, was made a bishop there and dispatched to the Philippines, then served in Buffalo before he detrained at Philadelphia on a winter day in 1918 with 150 priests in escort. En route to the cathedral, he was cheered by 150,000 Catholics as he “sat in an open limousine, ruddy and smiling, behind an entourage of roaring motorcycles, fifty brass bands, and seventy-five automobiles,” writes Morris. “Old ladies broke through the police line all along the way to run up and kiss the ring.” Civic leaders turned out, four thousand strong, “including the governor-elect, the state attorney general, the mayor and all the important ministers and rabbis … that night for a grand reception.”77
Spectacles like that do not happen today. The abuse crisis and issues of financial honesty have sapped the American hierarchy of the moral stature by which an archbishop comes a hero to his grateful city. In another time, Mundelein, O’Connell, Spellman, and the building bishops bestrode the public square as symbols of a triumphal church. Dougherty made his archdiocese one of Pennsylvania’s largest landowners. The cardinal bought acreage in outlying areas before suburbanization, anticipating tracts to one day site a parish, and leased sections “back to the previous owners until he was ready to use [them]—the strategy of a cash-rich, long-term player.” Dougherty foresaw the trend of developers allocating large tracts in a subdivision for a parish, calculating that home owners wanted