Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [56]
When he sat down with Castrillón, the Franciscan prelate with a vow of poverty needed a huge pump of money. He also faced “the alienation of church property,” the canonical term by which the Third Office in the Congregation for the Clergy processed bishops’ appeals to liquidate assets.
The American bishops at their June 2002 conference in Dallas voted to request approval from Clergy to raise the threshold for permission to sell property from $5 million to $10.3 million. For property or assets below that level, a bishop could sell as he saw fit. (For dioceses with 500,000 people or fewer, the threshold rose to $5 million.) The Vatican approved the measure, and also agreed to adjust the threshold to inflation, such that in 2009 for large dioceses, it was $11.4 million.10
According to a former Congregation for the Clergy staffer who spoke on background, the procedure for selling expensive property calls for the bishop to evaulate the assets with his Finance Council, then ask Clergy for the authority to sell, explaining the use for the proceeds. O’Malley knew he had to win trust of the Finance Council that had rejected Law’s request for the victims’ settlement.
Cardinal Castrillón and his staff faced three issues. For them, the first question was whether selling assets would harm the Boston archdiocese’s ability to function. A question arises: how does the Vatican know what might disrupt any archdiocese if it sells property? Barring a flood of information from people, reports or documents from a diocese, Clergy staffers rely on what the bishop tells them. In O’Malley’s case, the Boston crisis had generated press attention even in Italy. Lennon was deep into research on available property.
The second concern in the Congregation for the Clergy was that the bishop have a valid plan for use of the funds from the property sale. In Boston, the plan seemed clear: to compensate victims. The last issue was in this case the toughest: if the Boston archdiocese needed substantially more than $10.3 million, was it just and prudent for the Vatican to grant approval?
Priests who work at rarefied levels of the Roman Curia know that they are acting for the Holy Father. They take seriously the idea of apostolic succession—that the bishops they meet are spiritual descendants of Jesus’s apostles. In the milieu of a religious monarchy, the priests in those offices use ornamental courtesies in calling a bishop “Excellency,” a cardinal “Your Eminence,” even employing elegant terms in the third person, as I learned in July 2009 on seeking an interview in Rome with the former St. Louis archbishop Raymond Burke, the prefect of the Apostolic Signatura. “This is not possible,” explained a cleric in cool, soft cadences at the other end of the phone. “His Grace is away.” Ah. Did they call him “Your Grace” back in Missouri?
For all of the fawning attention Curial staffers give bishops, the Third Office priests in the Congregation for the Clergy understood “the alienation of church property.” Their duties included safeguarding the rights of the dead.
Generations of Catholics who had donated money, land, art, buildings, or made provisions in their estates to benefit a parish or diocese, slept now in sacred soil. Many were buried in cemeteries behind their family churches. Canon law honored their intentions as souls. Clergy’s Third Office had to ensure that their property and gifts would not be wrongfully liquidated.
O’Malley refused interview requests for this book. So did Bishop Lennon. So did Cardinal Castrillón, who left Clergy in 2006 for another Vatican office (and has since retired). Monsignor James McDaid of Clergy, who was an assistant to Castrillón and his successor, Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, rebuffed my requests in Rome for interviews with himself and Hummes.* Nevertheless, two other men knowledgeable of Clergy provided insight on O’Malley’s meeting