Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [77]
The state’s Supreme Judicial Court denied standing for the case.
For O’Malley, the cost of defending the archdiocese in legal challenges was another expense layered into the protracted dispute. The chancery had to keep utilities working to maintain insurance; drawing down the cash reserves in a given parish, while the parish no longer paid an assessment, meant losing money at both ends.
In lieu of Sunday Mass, the parish had Communion services for which sympathetic priests in open parishes provided them consecrated wafers. “I am a lapsed Catholic,” Hurley reflected one chilly night with Christmas three weeks off. “I feel attached to this place”—she gestured toward the stained-glass windows. “I had been a lector at Mass, but it wasn’t until this parish that I heard the words differently, and it gave me a sense of ownership about faith. I’ve become jaded. My kids are well past their First Communion. I listened to my son ask, ‘What’s a pedophile?’ I’m not concerned about something happening to my children, but I could not ask them to look up to me if I ran from this church. My father-in-law goes to Mass at his church, then comes to our vigil. I consider these services as legitimate as the Mass. I was hurt by the injustice of the Reconfiguration process. I remember sleeping in the choir loft, the first time. My husband said, ‘I’ve had enough. I will never walk my daughter down this aisle.’ … It takes a toll.” The moral premise of the vigil, the human investment in sacred space, had its own logic. “I feel I can raise my children as good Catholics or good Christians.”3
As the vigil movement gained momentum in 2005, Peter Borré’s strategy with Cynthia Deysher on the Council of Parishes was to play for time, expect a loss at Clergy, and plan an appeal at the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican high court; in the meantime, the parishioners occupying churches would keep the issue in the news. Sympathetic lawyers were exploring other strategies, but Borré knew that even in liberal Massachusetts an intrachurch dispute was a legal long shot, given the Constitution’s guarantee for freedom of religion.
Borré was prepared at his own expense to spend time in Rome to see if just a few high church officials could grasp that each week in which a given group of parishioners kept their vigil meant lost Sunday collections, no taxes to the archbishop, continued expenses for the archdiocese, and the potential of losing good Catholics who wanted the sacraments in their home churches. O’Malley was losing money on each occupied parish. But Borré and the vigil members were clear-eyed about Vatican tribunals. The church legal system was not democratic. Bishops governed as princes. The pope as supreme arbiter of canon law could intervene in any proceeding; however, that rarely happened. Making the system work for protesting laypeople was one tall order.
For Mary Beth Borré, the biggest surprise was watching her husband “take on the role of a Don Quixote,” as he headed out on an exotic journey against the odds. “It seemed a natural progression of the fight he chose to wage,” she said later. “Peter is a natural entrepreneur. His greatest strength lies in seeing opportunity where others do not and being able to take advantage of the vacuum.” Those traits ill fit the character of Cervantes’s chivalrous madman on horseback. Still, Peter Borré, toughened by years in the oil industry, had never embarked on anything so remotely idealistic. The search for a point where faith and justice might meet had become a quest that, somehow, appealed to him.
He drew encouragement from the 2004 bankruptcy filings by the dioceses of Portland, Spokane, and Tucson. Canon lawyers were divided on the proprietary