Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [66]
As autumn settled over Boston, Borré drove out to St. Thomas the Apostle parish in the town of Peabody where he had been tipped off that Lennon would make a rare appearance. People in pews, incredulous at the suppression order for their prosperous parish, were silent as the bishop rose to speak. With thinning black hair, a lean face, and a paunch traversed by the prelate’s gold chain, Lennon gave a cold recitation on the crisis. The deepening shortage of priests meant too few pastors to go around. Twenty-five percent of the parishes were not paying their assessments. But he’s closing some of the wealthiest parishes that paid proportionally more, Borré brooded. The archdiocese was having to cover extra costs of priests’ medical insurance, Lennon continued.
A parishioner asked if they had a canonical right to appeal. Lennon stared, letting his silence seep in for effect. Finally, he said, “Don’t waste your time.”
He does not want a canonical fight, Borré reported to himself.
St. Thomas was spared after a wealthy supporter of the parish made a large donation. Meanwhile, parishioners at seven other churches refused to leave when the doors closed. Cynthia Deysher, the forty-seven-year-old president of an investment consulting firm, was sitting in a pew of St. Anselm in Sudbury, wondering where this vigil would go, when a man sat down by her, introduced himself as Peter Borré, and asked if she would be cochair of a parishes council. Borré wanted to harness the vigils’ passive resistance into an energy the archdiocese could not avoid. Deysher, who had worked as a chief financial officer for three companies she helped steer to public stock offerings, was as unlikely as Borré to join a breakaway group. For years she had recorded the collections on software and made the weekly deposits.54 Joining St. Anselm’s 24/7 vigil rotation, Deysher thought Reconfiguration was a sham. “Catholics can be generous when properly inspired,” she told me later. St. Anselm, sitting on land worth a couple of million, had no debt and $600,000 in the bank. St. Bernard in Newton was worth $12 million, she reckoned.
Deysher had a more short-range goal than Borré: to keep her parish open. Married, with daughters in high school and college, she wanted the archdiocese to recover. Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) had allied itself with abuse survivors, many of whom didn’t care if churches closed, while its leaders tried to engage bishops in dialogue. Borré wanted a more radical strategy of building pressure against the archdiocese with vigil protests, pushing in the civil courts over parish ownership, and taking their case to Vatican tribunals.
As the pressure bore down on St. Susanna, a lady parishioner died with no provisions for burial. The family decided on a cremation. A few steps outside Steve Josoma’s rectory lay a garden; the family was delighted when he offered to inter the ashes in parish earth. With that burial, Father Josoma consecrated sacred soil. Now, St. Susanna parish had a cemetery. Soon after, parishioners gathered for two more funerals. Evicting people from a parish with a cemetery would cause more headaches for O’Malley, creating new issues under canon law. Josoma kept the information as a hidden ace should the closure order come.
He wanted the living to have the same canonical rights as the dead.
The St. Susanna parishioners’ presentation to O’Malley led to the granting of a three-year reprieve. The archbishop could rescind the order at any time. But a reprieve, supplanting the suppression order, eased Josoma’s stress.
O’Malley signaled a bigger shift on October 3, 2004, by announcing a committee of eight prominent Catholics to review the closures and report back to him. The cochairs were Sister Janet Eisner, president of Emmanuel College, and Peter Meade, the board chairman of Catholic Charities and executive