Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [42]
“Judgment—the decisions I must make,” he replied. As if peering ahead in time to some dark pit, Law added, “That is the half of it. The other half is the judgment I must one day face myself.”7
Smoke was still rising in Manhattan from the rubble of the Twin Towers as Bob Bowers sat once more with Cardinal Law, saying that he liked the parish in Milton he had served for nearly six years. Law told him that St. Catherine in Charlestown was struggling to survive. Bowers’s assignments had been in middle-class to upper-crust parishes; he had dreamed of working for the poor in the spirit of Dorothy Day. Law had been quietly closing several parishes a year where population shifts had left churches too empty and impoverished to survive. “Save the school,” Law told him.
“Is the parish a sinking ship?”
“That parish will never close,” Law declared.
Law handed him an envelope and keys. Bowers left with his new assignment. Not a word had passed between them on the parish assessment, the tax each parish pays the diocese based on its average collections. Unpaid assessments accrue interest. Law had forgiven the assessments of several poor parishes in the past. Bowers never gave the chancery taxes a thought. He was bound for the front lines—to stabilize a parish, to save a school.
St. Catherine of Siena was the poorest of the three parishes within a square mile; the other two were nearly all-white. Bowers’s three-story rectory of twenty-eight rooms (with suites for five bedrooms) was an underutilized relic from an era of abundant priests. Nuns who once taught the students, drawing no salary, were gone; the school was scratching by with 120 students, most of them white. After making inquiries, Bowers learned that about seventy-five kids from the parishes up the hill went to parochial schools outside Charlestown. Dominican and Puerto Rican families who made up a third of his parish were too poor to afford school tuition, yet the parish’s image hindered white recruitment for the school.
The church had gone through several pastors. “One guy had been arrested for beating up a housekeeper at a previous parish,” recalled Bowers, “and the guy after him was so introverted he couldn’t light a fire. I inherited a disaster.” He grinned. “It was a dream assignment.” The Sunday liturgies coalesced around a rainbow of people, about a third of them old Irish with local roots, another third Hispanic and mostly poor, the others upper income like Peter Borré from the storied Naval Shipyard.
The world tilted on January 6, 2002, the Feast of the Epiphany, when the Globe Spotlight Team, led by Walter V. Robinson, began reporting how Law and his circle of former auxiliary bishops had played musical chairs with child molester priests over the previous sixteen years. The articles rained down like lightning bolts on Bowers and pastors across the metropolitan area, jarring them and laypeople even more so with indignation about what Law and the assisting bishops had done.
Many priests were depressed; after each new report, they felt humiliated standing on the altar. The numbers at Mass began to drop; outrage in the pews was palpable. Law made public apologies. But as the plaintiff lawyers advanced and the Globe dug deeper, Cardinal Law in the media narrative became linked with the victims. Like an army inching up Macbeth’s hill, the survivors were pushing