Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [57]
CARDINALS AND POLITICS
Born in 1929 in Medellín, before the provincial city became synonymous with drug cartels, Castrillón was a young priest with a great talent for languages. He earned a doctorate in canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, another in religious sociology at the University of Louvain, in Belgium, and at age thirty-six became a bishop back in Colombia. A champion of the homeless in the diocese of Pereira, he walked the streets to feed abandoned children. The boom in cocaine commerce gave Castrillón a Machiavellian slant on power. The media showed him blessing a restaurant owned by a drug mobster. “In fact, his relationship with the traffickers was complex,” writes Elena Curti of The Tablet. Castrillón materialized in a milkman’s outfit at the home of Pablo Escobar, the most wanted man in Colombia, “and persuaded him to confess his sins.” At a 1984 meeting of Latin American bishops, she writes, Castrillón
said he had accepted cash from Escobar’s drug cartel for charitable purposes. He justified his action by saying that by taking the money he stopped it being used in illegal activities such as prostitution, and said he had warned the donors that giving money “would not save their souls.” But, later, as Archbishop of Bucara-manga (1992–1996), he made several public statements against corruption in Colombia, unafraid to embarrass local and national officials and politicians.11
Accepting dirty money for higher good meshed with Castrillón’s idea of the Catholic hierarchy abiding by its own supreme law. In 2001, when a French prelate received a three-month sentence for having sheltered a pedophile, Castrillón posted on Clergy’s website a letter in which he praised Bishop Pierre Pican of Bayeux-Lisieux: “I rejoice to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and all the other bishops of the world, preferred prison rather than denouncing one of his sons, a priest.”12
When he met with O’Malley in 2003, Cardinal Castrillón greeted a younger bishop who faced a taxing crisis of so many victims, foretelling huge losses. His natural instinct in the fraternal culture was to help. The Holy See would not provide financial help to the archdiocese—that was unthinkable. The Vatican in 2003 was running a deficit of $11.8 million on a $250 million operating budget. Peter’s Pence donations of $55.8 million helped defray the loss.13 So did whatever funds the Vatican Bank delivered in its secret subsidy to the pope. For O’Malley, the situation was vastly more severe than that in Fall River a decade earlier, when the Knights of Malta had deep pockets. Law’s arrogance left a fund-raising nightmare. The size of the settlement figures being bargained, well north of $50 million, explains why two Italian cardinals joined O’Malley and Castrillón later: Angelo Sodano, the secretary of state, and Giovanni Battista Re, the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops.
Cardinal Re, a renowned workaholic with a toothy grin and booming voice, had done eleven years as sostituto in the Secretariat of State. In that job overseeing daily operations, Re had enjoyed access to John Paul without need of appointments. Now, in his post overseeing the world’s bishops, Re no longer had the turnstile to John Paul. He worked through the Curia’s channels.14
Sodano, at age seventy-five, was the more imposing presence. With square-set shoulders, sagging jowls, and thick glasses, Sodano as secretary of state functioned as the Holy See’s prime minister and, internally, as a de facto chief of staff. In the nine congregations, or dicasteries, that are roughly akin to cabinet departments, each prefect had autonomy; the foreign minister fell under Sodano. In the dozen years he had overseen the