Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [85]
He was glad to take a chaplain’s job back in Boston for other reasons. In Springfield, the new bishop, Thomas Dupré, returned to ministry several priest-abusers Marshall had yanked. New scandals erupted.17 Then, in 2004, Bishop Dupré abruptly resigned and fled to Suitland, Maryland, where he checked himself into St. Luke Institute, a clergy psychiatric hospital that specializes in treating pedophiles. Two men accused the bishop of abusing them years before; their cases against the diocese eventually settled. After a long investigation the Springfield prosecutor decided against indicting Dupré: the statute of limitations had lapsed. Dupré lived at the clergy hospital in Maryland for five and a half years, until 2010, still a priest, still a bishop without a portfolio.
Bishop Marshall’s deathbed warnings seemed prophetic as Teague reflected on the church’s struggles over breakfast in a café near Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center where he had worked for several years post-Springfield. The IRS had not gone after the church, but the financial problems had reached a crisis stage for the Boston archdiocese, which had deepening deficits and rising pension costs that were not covered.
“It’s not just the abuse settlements,” Teague said, sighing. “The mismanagement shouts out. They can’t guarantee us a decent life after we retire.” Teague, who was sixty-two in 2008, gazed out at the chilly windswept morning with a stoic’s resolve. “Dupré gutted the system that had a social worker in charge of the lay review board. He put two pedophiles in positions of authority. One working with annulment cases, the other in charge of the diocesan archives. An eighty-year-old priest came to live with me. He moved into the rectory, which guaranteed five meals a week and laundry cleaning. This guy left the previous rectory because he couldn’t get heat in the room, and the five meals were TV dinners. The reality is, if you’re betraying people on one level, you’re betraying them on another. In Boston the retirement program has gone belly-up.”
Where did the money go?
Teague shrugged. “Law divided the clergy pension fund for payouts on the abuse costs before the scandal broke in 2002.”
Teague’s conjecture matched what many other people believed, though the release of new financial documents put more riddles over an easy answer.
THE NEWS FROM ROME
“The Globe made repeated efforts in Rome to get an explanation of the appeals process from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy,” Michael Paulson reported in early May 2005.
An undersecretary at the office at first denied that the agency was involved with the parish closings; after the Globe pointed out that the agency’s secretary had signed letters to many of the closed parishes, the undersecretary referred calls to the secretary, who then referred calls to the prefect, Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos. The cardinal did not respond to repeated requests for an interview made both by phone and in writing.18
But in August, the Congregation for the Clergy ruled that the Boston archdiocese had erred in its canonical claim to the assets of eight parishes it had suppressed. Borré was delighted. “Within this archdiocese,” he told the Globe, in a jab at Lennon, the self-taught canonist, “they are improvising in the area of canon law, and they are doing as poor a job under canon law as they have done under Reconfiguration.” But under the Vatican’s royalist system of justice, even as Clergy ruled against Boston’s suppression, Cardinal Castrillón’s staff was helping O’Malley confect a way for pastors to