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The review board Law impaneled to scrutinize men like Picardi advised against a job in ministry and suggested the priest ask the Vatican to be laicized. Picardi balked. And why not? No policeman or prosecutor had gone after him. Law and Lennon sought a compromise by which Picardi went to the Phoenix diocese. But as news of his past overtook him, Picardi was suspended from the priesthood in 2003.

Lennon under Law shouldered two functions that gave him an exceptional lens on money and the church’s response to clergy sex offenders. As Anne Barrett Doyle and Terry McKiernan later wrote on BishopAccountability.org:

• In the mid-1990s, he was the facilitator for the [so-called] Clergy Fund. In this role, he worked closely with Cardinal Law’s abuse delegates and paid out reimbursements for psychiatric treatment of accused priests, travel expenses for priests going to treatment centers for assessments and in-patient care, and travel costs for the abuse delegates, when they traveled to St. Luke Institute and Southdown to participate in assessments.

• During the 1990s Lennon received Status/Address changes for every diocesan priest, so that he could maintain the “clergy cards” that contain priests’ assignment histories. He also maintained cards listing the assignments of order priests who worked in the archdiocese. As a result, Lennon knew every instance of promotion and demotion, what priests were unassigned and on administrative leave, and what priests had been “lend-leased” to other dioceses. This information, combined with the abuse payment information that he also handled, provided Lennon with unique and extensive administrative perspective on the abuse crisis in Boston.12

In spring of 2005, as Peter Borré became a person in the news, Lennon’s background was far from fully surfaced. Borré got a call from Father David Burke. Well into his eighties, sixty-three years a priest, and the pastor of the high-end St. Pius X parish in Milton, Burke was piping hot upon learning that his parish was slated for suppression. Father David Burke lived in a fourteen-room rectory. Borré took his seat in the wood-paneled study at a conference table sufficient in size for twenty-four people. Seated across from him, Father David Burke said, “I’d like to go downtown and punch O’Malley in the nose.”

“Ah, Father, you don’t really mean that.”

“You wouldn’t understand. You’re not Irish.”

But it was Lennon, Borré pointed out, who had designed Reconfiguration. “Seán is the archbishop,” snorted Burke. “He can’t hide behind Dick.”

Burke went to the chancery and threatened to lead his parishioners in a vigil. They lobbied with petitions, bumper stickers, and letters, the sum of which had some impact. St. Pius X was taken off the Suppression list before its vigil coiled into action. Two years later Burke suffered a stroke. He was in a coma when Borré visited the hospital, and he never regained consciousness.

When they first met, Burke had given Borré a copy of Lennon’s letter to the priests on the status of clergy finances. The five-page letter, written in December 2003, is addressed “Dear Clergy Fund Member.”13 Three pages of figures and a copy of what Lennon called the Clergy Fund report were attached. (The individual priest was a beneficiary of the various trusts. Lennon used a generic term: Clergy Fund Member.) Intrigued by the date, Borré created a spreadsheet, realizing that Lennon, who reported to O’Malley, knew where dubious numbers were buried.

In the letter, Lennon explains how the various funds that benefit Boston’s clergy function. He makes clear that the Clergy Benefit Trust “pays for those clergy who are in special circumstances … or who are in between assignments and so do not have a stable source of income” (my emphasis)—an oblique reference to the predators put out of commission, some few of whom, like Geoghan and Shanley, ended up behind bars. Borré read the letter hungrily, realizing that in those last days of 2003 Lennon was immersed in researching property values for the parishes