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By Root 1462 0

John Paul, famously bored by Curial politics, had in Sodano a firewall from the inner wrangles and a militant anti-leftist for conservative governments and donors. John Paul was famously bored by finances, too. The Vatican Bank scandal erupted in 1982, when Italy’s largest bank, Banco Ambrosiano, collapsed under $1.2 billion in bad debts brought on by a Cosa Nostra money-laundering scheme that utilized the IOR under Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. John Paul allowed Marcinkus to use diplomatic immunity as a latter-day prisoner of the Vatican. It fell to Secretary of State Casaroli to admit an “abuse of trust” to Italian state investigators; he negotiated a $242 million payment in 1984 to resolve the IOR fine.34

In 1990 John Paul summoned Cardinal Edmund Szoka of Detroit to manage the city-state. “When the budget’s finished in November we go over it for about an hour,” Szoka told the biographer Kwitny. “He can’t look at all these details. I keep him aware of what’s going on and how we’re doing.”35

A pragmatist, Szoka called more than one hundred presidents of the national bishops’ conferences to a first-ever meeting on April 8, 1991. As they sat in red velvet chairs, Cardinal Szoka explained that two decades of Vatican deficits had hit a record $87 million. Without assigning quotas, he asked them to help. In one of those cameos of democracy that lend irony as icing to church politics, the bishops took a vote, and of course agreed to send more. An extra $8 million arrived in 1992. In 1993 the Holy See actually ended with a surplus; Peter’s Pence also hit $67 million that year.

Vatican Bank “funds are primarily used by John Paul to bolster the Church in poor countries,” papal biographer George Weigel wrote. “It is not unusual for the IOR to get a call from the papal apartment in the morning, saying that the Pope needs a certain number of envelopes containing $20,000 or $50,000 by noon—gifts to bishops from Africa, Latin America and Asia.”36 The bank that did not exist on the Holy See annual report produced cash on demand for the pope.

After Cardinal Sodano became secretary of state, he assumed the lead role in an IOR oversight commission of five cardinals; he also managed the Curia’s heavily Italian bureaucracy. “There has been created a certain mystery about the Roman Curia,” Sodano observed in 1992, “but those who are inside it see it as a brotherhood.”37

When the brotherhood embraced Archbishop O’Malley in the summer of 2003, John Paul was in a deepening decline from Parkinson’s disease. Cardinal Castrillón presumably wanted Sodano’s approval for a major transfer of wealth. The Vatican cardinals gave O’Malley the nod to exceed the $10.3 million threshold in the “alienation of church property.” This decision was borne out in a Vatican document that emerged many months later, after Peter Borré spearheaded canon law appeals by nine Boston parishes seeking to halt their closures. The Congregation for the Clergy rejected those requests. The parishes appealed to the Signatura. In that proceeding, one Martha Wegan, a veteran practitioner in Vatican tribunals, filed a brief as the advocate for the Archdiocese of Boston. She wrote:

In this truly very painful case, maximum discretion was given to the Excellent Archbishop of Boston [sic] so that he might save the archdiocese from monetary ruin provoked … by the sexual abuse crisis. It is in this context that all actions of this process of reconfiguration and “closing of parishes” are to be understood, not excluding the suppression of wealthy parishes, not excluding the suppression of parishes of maximum vitality.

Viability must be not at the parish level but at the level of the whole archdiocese, not excluding the giving of goods of extinct parishes to the archdiocese.38

“Maximum discretion” here translates as carte blanche to close and to sell. When O’Malley, the new archbishop, returned to Boston in 2003, Bishop Lennon had the authority to “alienate property.”

Nothing of its scope had ever been done in an American diocese.

That realization left a marked impression on