Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [48]
A National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People, composed of twelve prominent laypersons led by outgoing Oklahoma governor Frank Keating (a former prosecutor), would conduct hearings and produce a report. The bishops hired the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to gather the data on the perpetrators, victims, and costs to the church. The bishops were still under a harsh media spotlight, but to their credit, they had responded with apologies, a vote, and a plan.
Back in Boston, assets were under scrutiny. The Boston Herald found a value of “nearly $160 million in land and buildings that are not being used by the church.” Jack Sullivan and Eric Convey reported that the assets were “a fraction of the archdiocese’s total property holdings, estimated at $14 billion.” The archdiocese, “land rich and cash poor,” had the advantage of a hot market in real estate for residential developments.
In nearby Brookline, the archdiocese has closed two churches, including St. Aidan’s, where slain President John F. Kennedy was baptized and served as an altar boy. The church and rectory, valued at $2,880,200, has been targeted by the archdiocese to be rehabbed for condominiums including nine high-end units mixed with affordable housing.
On West Roxbury Parkway in Brookline, the former Infant Jesus church, which was consolidated with St. Lawrence, sits empty as does its well-kept four-bedroom rectory in the upscale neighborhood. The buildings are valued at $1,512,400 … In Newbury, developers have been clamoring to buy a former church assessed at $3.34 million.26
Mindful of Law’s warning to write no articles, an angry Father Bowers told a Globe reporter of “this feeling of disgust and betrayal … I don’t think any of us understood the role of the church—whether it was denial or incompetence. I think the jury is still out on that.”27 The Globe Spotlight Team had spent weeks reading the clergy files before publishing the first report. As the news rolled out in episodes, public response rose against the church. Bowers accepted the hierarchy’s old-boy network as politics: friends helped their pals. And priests had flaws. But recycling sex criminals like Paul Shanley (whose superiors knew he had endorsed “man-boy” love) staggered Bowers’s imagination.
Sitting in the pew with his mother-in-law, Peter Borré watched Bowers struggle in response to people’s outrage. Borré’s curiosity was growing, too. How did a “land rich” church manage its assets?
Bowers knew many priests demoralized by the scandal’s impact on the church they helped make. But his overtures to his neighboring pastor, Father Dan Mahoney at St. Francis de Sales, to steer school-age youngsters to St. Catherine, had failed. Mahoney, a generation older, was focused on his own parish. Bowers had pulled together a cadre of serious volunteers, mostly women. A Townie who had done time for drugs and been clean for seventeen years ran the daily AA meetings. Despite his parishioners’ anger, Bowers had stabilized the finances, though he had paid no assessment to the archdiocese.
Law was in his own scramble. The archdiocese typically covered operating shortfalls by tapping a line of credit at Fleet Bank, borrowing in summer and fall, repaying in winter or spring. Cash flow rose between Christmas and Easter, when the parishes took in more. “Donations to the annual Cardinal’s Appeal usually arrive in two bursts,” the Globe reported. “In late May and early June after the Appeal is launched, and in late November and December when many donors are looking for tax deductions.” With cash flow deeply down, the archdiocese in late September mortgaged the cardinal’s estate with the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic insurance group, for $38 million.
Much of the initial advance will be used to retire a short-term $9 million debt