Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [69]
Several attempts to sue the Vatican on other issues had failed under the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. “Sodano’s decision to raise the matter with Rice suggests concern in Rome that sooner or later its immunity may give way, exposing the Vatican to potentially crippling verdicts,” wrote John L. Allen Jr. for National Catholic Reporter.4
Sodano’s ham-fisted design on diplomacy was all of a piece with his response to the abuse crisis. Realizing that dioceses were unloading assets, in many cases to pay their share of litigation, Sodano persuaded the silver-haired Cardinal Castrillón to appoint Monsignor Giovanni Carrù as undersecretary of the Congregation for the Clergy. Carrù, who began work on November 1, 2003, had specialized in catechism in the Turin diocese, in Sodano’s native Piedmont, in northern Italy. A man of warm and genial ways, Carrù was physical, putting hands on people’s cheeks, giving the affectionate hug, an effusive Italian friendliness, explains a priest well versed in Clergy’s inner workings.
Cardinal Castrillón was not pleased, this cleric explains. Castrillón felt Carrù was inflicted on him. Carrù, this source surmises, would have been happy as a bishop in his small diocese, but in his affable, simple way Carrù did what he was told. He liked to be important. The cleric describes Carrù in meetings, impatiently waiting for them to end, saying, And now we are done?—when often, no, they weren’t done, and discussions stretched on: after all, it was the Vatican. Monsignor Carrù as undersecretary led the closing prayer before they scattered for lunch.
As third in command, Carrù was a traffic manager for Clergy’s mail, faxes, and documents from the world’s dioceses, bishops, and priests who had business with the congregation. Clergy’s internal offices dealt with priestly discipline, catechetics, and patrimony, meaning property. Carrù took a special interest in the Third Office’s alienation of church property. His patron, Cardinal Sodano, took special interest in his nephew, Andrea Sodano, whose company Carrù helped with leads on church property as it came on the market.
In the long history of American Catholics bailing out the Vatican, it was perhaps inevitable that some shrewd Italian would see profit escalators in shuttered New World churches. To that end, Andrea Sodano, a structural engineer from his uncle Angelo’s hometown, Asti, had a front man who could have come out of central casting.
Enter Raffaello Follieri, with cheeks like a cherub, a tousle of brown hair, and deep, dark eyes. In November 2005, the twenty-seven-year-old Follieri was leasing a two-story $37,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan’s Olympic Tower; his foundation touted vaccinations for poor children in Latin America. Raffaello thrilled to the halo of celebrity circling his airplanes-to-everywhere romance with the movie star Anne Hathaway. Since her breakout role in The Princess Diaries, dark-haired Annie (as Raffaello called her) had made Follieri famous. The paparazzi and tabloids seized on their episodes in society. They were part of a New Year’s Eve soiree at a Dominican Republic resort with Bill and Hillary Clinton among the guests.
Every time his photograph appeared with Anne and her magic smile, Follieri knew it was good for business. The decidedly less glamorous Andrea Sodano was Follieri Group’s vice president. To call Sodano the brains of the operation would be unfair, since Follieri had the raw materials of a master salesman. But Raffaello was an amateur compared with the worldly-wise Andrea, who