Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [63]
Lennon’s plan called for St. Susanna members to join St. Mary while the archdiocese took St. Susanna’s money. How would that go down with people who had already bypassed the “cathedral in the wilderness”? Just off Highway 128, Josoma’s parish sat on eight sylvan acres adjoining an animal rescue preserve, buffered by wetlands of the Charles River. The road past the church curled into a wooded cluster of homes. Like the Scituate parish on thirty prime acres near the sea, St. Susanna’s acreage held proverbial rubies in its loam. The parish sent $10,000 a month in assessments to the archdiocese.
“The bishops’ pedophilia cover-ups appalled me,” explained Josoma. “After Law left, Bishop Lennon as Apostolic Administrator met with the priests and said we were $10 million in debt for lay employees’ pensions because pastors had not sent funds to the chancery. I was thinking, Ten million dollars? How could the chancery have let this happen? Within a year, the first time Archbishop O’Malley spoke, [the debt] was $25 million. What is going on here?”
St. Susanna, with neither debt nor a school, was growing. St. Mary, the much larger parish, had a $1.6 million debt for renovation costs, which it had been paying down with help from the $25,000-a-month rental of its school building to a private academy. When the 2004 clustering order came down, the two parishes sent a joint statement outlining their services and finances. The larger church had 1,930 people attending five Sunday Masses; St. Susanna had 640 people at three Masses. But the smaller church, debt free, was on a surge of growth, with 20 percent more members than in the last year.41
Josoma and the other pastor, the Reverend John A. Dooher, prepared the March 8, 2004, joint statement on clustering. They recommended that neither parish close, even though as Josoma explained, “That was not an option given us.” He clashed with Dooher until the day the report was due because “it omitted mention of St. Mary’s million-plus debt. Dooher told me, ‘The diocese knows what we owe.’ I told him the Reconfiguration committee didn’t know that.”
But Dooher was being considered for the hierarchy. Josoma made a political calculation not to spotlight what he knew of Dooher’s track record with financial management lest it seem an attempt to thwart him from becoming a bishop and backfire on Josoma’s efforts to save his parish. Dooher’s church had a $101,129 annual deficit. The school had lost its tenant. The lower level of the church had cut off heating to save money—and developed mold. In 2007 the new pastor reported that the $1.2 million debt to the archdiocese would be more than halved with a $675,000 sale of land to the town of Dedham.42 By then, the pastor who left the debt behind had become Auxiliary Bishop Dooher.
“Politics of the club,” said Josoma drily. “And why are we in a mess?”
Amid the clustering debate, one of St. Susanna’s deacons, a Harvard-educated attorney, told Josoma the suppression order was “a cash-grab.”
Josoma secured an appointment for himself and ten parish leaders with Archbishop O’Malley and Bishop Lennon.
They had done background research on the Santa Fe, New Mexico, archdiocese, which raised about $8 million to pay its share of a $25 million abuse settlement in the early 1990s. Archbishop Michael Sheehan asked parish leaders to help. Through heightened donations and parish property sales, the group provided close to $2 million, while avoiding widespread closures.43 Sheehan’s predecessors had allowed predators in treatment at the Servants of the Paraclete facility in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, to do weekend parish work, where they found fresh victims. The Paracletes’ standards were so shoddy that litigation drove them out of the treatment business in New Mexico. Archbishop Robert Sanchez resigned in 1993 when his sexual relationships with young