Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [83]
Against the temptation to see Law as a high prince obsessed with secrecy, we must weigh the burden imposed on him and countless bishops by John Paul II on what to do with clergy sex offenders. Having spurned the U.S. hierarchy’s 1989 request for canonical power to dismiss those men, John Paul stuck the bishops with them. The laicization cases—which priests could and often did oppose—moved at a glacial pace through one or another of Rome’s congregations, until 2001, when Ratzinger consolidated the authority over them. Not only were the bishops handcuffed in defrocking the abusers, they also had to subsidize their living, medical, and legal expenses.
The missing millions from the Clergy Benefit Trust in 2005 was a bitter pill to the nearly eight hundred priests across the archdiocese who had served the church and pondered how they would retire in the coming years. Law had landed a basilica pastorship in Rome that paid $12,000 a month while the clergy troops endured the aftershocks of the abuse scandal, only to see good parishes close. Had Bernie Law sold out their retirements, too?
A BISHOP’S WARNING
For Bruce Teague, who was a chaplain at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston when the news broke, the memories rolled back of his surreal epiphany about church finances.
In the summer of 1994, Father Teague had a parish in Springfield, Massachusetts, when he paid a valedictory call on his bishop. John Marshall was sixty-six and dying of bone cancer. Teague wanted to express his gratitude for the older man’s stance on a threshold issue. The monolithic Catholicism of Teague’s youth had splintered over the Vatican’s stance on birth control, homosexuality, and priests who abused youngsters. Teague found an ironic touchstone in Flannery O’Connor’s stories of backwoods Southerners bewildered by faith, spiritual outcasts holding a mirror to his own troubled church.
When Teague was nine years old in Dorchester, a working-class parish of Boston, a priest molested him. It was 1956; his father was off in the navy, his grandfather had just died, his mother was pregnant, and the close attention from that priest at first made him feel special. For years he stuffed the sensations of guilt and anger; when the first wave of clergy abuse lawsuits hit in the early 1990s, Teague befriended abuse survivors. One day he went to the grave of the priest who had abused him, and said prayers of forgiveness.14 In those painful words to God he felt a cleansing. Bruce Teague enjoyed being a priest.
As the bishop of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1970s, Marshall put a child molester back in ministry. When he abused again, Marshall yanked him; he persuaded the prosecutor not to take action; he approved the church lawyers’ grueling tactics to wear down the survivors who sued the diocese.15 The cases eventually settled with out-of-court payments. In the late 1980s Marshall went through a turn of mind. He lost trust in therapeutic facilities to treat clergy predators. He petitioned the Vatican to defrock one priest.16 In 1992 Marshall became bishop of Springfield. He confronted another scandal, another priest. This time he eschewed a litigation-by-ordeal strategy, which many bishops deemed a necessary evil to protect church assets. Marshall pushed for timely settlements; he met with survivors. “We have to do this out of justice and charity,” he had told Teague at the time.
At the bishop’s mansion a nun ushered Teague into the parlor.
Pallid and gaunt, Marshall sat in a commodious chair, propped up with cushions, an IV tube planted in one arm. Teague took a seat. Light came to the bishop’s eyes. After small talk, the priest thanked him for his sensitivity toward the survivors. Marshall nodded. There was a bigger problem,