Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [61]
SUPPRESSION
Under canon law, when a parish merges with another, the funds of the closed church follow its members to the new one. But a parish that is “suppressed” by the bishop loses its building, land, bank deposits, all assets to the bishop-as-banker. Lennon wanted parishes with good land value, and surplus funds, for a strategic outcome: plug the deficit. Lennon was using suppression as foreclosure, a kind of Peter’s Pence enforced. The dead people whose gifts had built the parishes posed no opposition unless the living learned to penetrate thickets of canon law.
Among the suppressed parishes, Infant Jesus in affluent Brookline had $4 million in the bank. An hour’s drive east of Boston in Scituate, the suppressed St. Frances Cabrini sat on thirty lush acres near the Atlantic, a real estate developer’s dream. Our Lady Help of Christians in the town of Concord had $800,000 in the bank, and the year before had opened a $1.3 million parish center.39 Lennon’s letter to the faithful said that O’Malley had ordered the suppressions, but on that issue the two bishops were joined at the hip.
By Peter Borré’s reckoning, of the eighty-three parishes on Lennon’s list, twenty-four were financially solid with active parishioners. Borré, a hardened realist on assets that failed to deliver, was not alone in being offended at Lennon’s sloppiness: soak the rich, screw the poor, trample hard-toiling folk in the middle to raise funds for a debt-riddden chancery. Mayor Thomas M. Menino was upset. “This is the first I’ve heard of where the money is going,” he told the Globe. “Families have been going to these churches for years.” Massachusetts secretary of state William F. Galvin bristled at “a deceit to the people in the pews if the money is going to unknown purposes of the central fund,” which, indeed, it was.40 Borré concluded that two dozen parishes needed to close. Many parishes in the middle had issues that seemed soluble with enlightened leadership.
From canon lawyers, Borré learned that an appeal had to be filed in the Vatican soon after a bishop’s rejection of the parish’s request that it be allowed to survive. With help from a kitchen cabinet, he began working on a document.
For Father Bob Bowers, reality hit when the archdiocese sent a team to take inventory of St. Catherine of Siena parish property. They opened cabinets, took photographs, and made lists of furniture, other tangibles, icons, benches, and sacred items of the church. Meanwhile, a summons came from the chancery: Archbishop O’Malley wanted to meet with Father Bowers.
In a series of trips to the chancery office in Brighton, across Commonwealth Avenue from Bowers’s alma mater, Boston College, he took comfort from his driver, Peter Borré, who offered moral support as the priest’s stomach churned like a fuel pump. Borré had no desire to sit in the foyer where the chancery priest had told him to go fuck himself, and so he waited outside.
Father Bowers sat across a long table from the taciturn archbishop.
“We have a problem,” said O’Malley.
“We do, Archbishop. You need to come see the people in the parish.”
No, came the reply. O’Malley had advisers guiding him through this difficult process, he explained. And he had to follow their advice.
Silence fell between prelate and priest, a lengthening emotional distance: silence begetting silence. He wants me to obey, realized Bowers. He is a Franciscan. Obedience to superiors is their norm, an expectation of the communal life. We diocesan clergy can be more unruly. I am resisting something that is unjust, trying to persuade him to see what I see.
The two men stared at each other. Bob Bowers, with his strain of flamboyance and supercharged enthusiasm, sat quiet now, as unmovable as his archbishop. The meeting ended as the next one began, some days later, layered in tension and thick with silence. O’Malley wanted Bowers to resign, take a new assignment, let Reconfiguration move forward. But O’Malley could not evict a pastor unless he committed a grave violation of church law. Fighting to keep his parish