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Then a hole broke in the dike. O’Malley released a letter on November 13, 2004, which carried an amazing tone of misery. “Closing parishes is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in forty years of religious life,” he wrote.

I joined the monastery knowing that I would have to do difficult things for the rest of my life, but I never imagined I would have to be involved in anything so painful or so personally repulsive to me as this. At times I ask God to call me home and let someone else finish this job, but I keep waking up in the morning to face another day of reconfiguration.57

A prelate calling reconfiguration “so personally repulsive” as to wish God to end his life made Peter Borré sit up. What an indictment of Lennon’s plan! A priest told Borré that Lennon learned of the letter when he read it in the Globe. If true, that signaled an even deeper breach between archbishop and bishop.

O’Malley’s letter did not mention Lennon as it reiterated details of the crisis: an operating budget chopped $14 million in three years; a deficit of $10 million; a troubled stock market causing “an unfunded pension liability of $80 million”—lay employee and clergy retirement, both endangered.

Many communities who meet their expenses do so by selling land and buildings and spending down savings. (In the last nine years parishes have sold 150 pieces of property mostly to pay bills.) Some people think that reconfiguration will mean a great surplus of money for the Archdiocese. Unfortunately, this is not true. I have asked the Finance Council to work on a strategic plan for the Archdiocese which I shall share with you. I am committed to financial transparency and to using our human and financial resources for the mission of the Church.

Borré told the Washington Post he was “astounded by the depth of emotion.” Borré conceded that demographic changes meant some parishes had to go. “The question is what is happening to the archdiocese’s finances, and the answer is we don’t know.”58

In search of a seasoned canonist in Rome, Borré obtained Annuario Pontificio, a thick book that lists dioceses alphabetically and Vatican offices with names, postal addresses, and phone numbers. It helped to know Italian. Unbeknownst to Borré, as he assembled names of practitioners in the Vatican tribunals, Cardinal Sodano and his nephew had a plan for shuttered American churches.

*In October 2010 Hummes was succeeded by Mauro Piacenza, who soon became a cardinal.

CHAPTER 5

ITALIAN INTERVENTIONS

By the fall of 2003, with John Paul II fatigued and bloated from his treatments for Parkinson’s disease, Cardinal Sodano exerted greater power than ever in overseeing the Roman Curia. “The scandals in the United States received disproportionate attention from the media,” Sodano announced. “There are thieves in every country but it is hard to say that everyone is a thief.”1

Earlier in the year, as America prepared for war with Iraq, papal representatives sent warnings about an invasion. Condoleezza Rice, the Bush administration’s national security adviser, stated that she didn’t understand the Vatican position. As the standoff mounted between President George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, Sodano told Italian journalists, “The Holy See is against the war; it’s a moral position. It’s certainly not a defensive war.” He added a dose of pragmatism: “We’re trying to provoke reflection not so much on whether it’s just or unjust, moral or immoral, but whether it’s worth it. From the outside we can appear idealists, and we are, but we are also realists. Is it really a good idea to irritate a billion Muslims? Not even in Afghanistan are things going well. For this reason we have to insist on asking the question if it’s a good idea to go to war.”2

Hours after the first missiles smashed down on Baghdad, John Paul denounced the war as “a defeat for reason and the gospel.”3

Rice visited the Vatican on February 8, 2005, in her new position as secretary of state and met with her counterpart, Cardinal Sodano. The Boston church closings and the