Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [87]
Castaldi’s committee found a $12 million shift from Reconfiguration money to the Central Fund; they objected to the use of the proceeds from church sales to fund operating costs.20 Outgoing chancellor David Smith’s comment on the 2005 financial statement had been somber:
The Central Administration of the Archdiocese is not sustainable in its current form. While we do have liquidity, we have little left to sell, and we are faced with substantial obligations. In spite of reductions in force of nineteen percent since the beginning of the abuse crisis, our Central Administration, in an effort to maintain services at pre crisis levels, has operated with deficits each year. As you will see, those deficits were funded with borrowings, property sales and, in the last two years, with parish reconfiguration assets.
O’Malley was boxed into a corner. An unwritten law of the apostolic succession holds that one bishop does not overtly criticize another, and an archbishop should preserve the reputation of his predecessor, particularly a cardinal. O’Malley could not bring himself to state publicly that Law had mismanaged the money, stuffing money into written-off loans for clerics’ legal fees and writing checks for the expensive psychiatric facilities. One hundred and ninety priests put out to pasture had cost the archdiocese for their legal, medical, and stipend costs, while proportionally fewer priests performed the banal but crucial job of raising a parish’s money. As much as Seán O’Malley found Reconfiguration a nightmare, he would not violate an unwritten law of the apostolic succession and open the relevant documents of those accounts to public accounting, lest it invite scrutiny of his predecessor Law. Even if he disliked Lennon, as many believed, O’Malley needed to know what Lennon knew. And part of O’Malley’s unwritten job description was protect Bernie Law.
O’Malley had become a cardinal as he opened a realm of transparency in the late winter of 2006, releasing substantial data and annual reports that revealed $330 million in assets, against debt of $346 million. “We’re not trying to keep secrets from people,” he told a press conference. “We’re trying to use the limited resources we have for the mission of the church.” He won praise from Cynthia Deysher: “We’ve never seen this level of financial disclosure from the archdiocese before.”21 O’Malley had restored the trust with certain of Boston’s heavy hitters, like Jack Connors, a public relations executive who was raising money for the parochial schools.
Castaldi had a more benign view of the pension crisis than Borré. By his lights, the Clergy Retirement/Disability Trust was fully funded in the late 1990s. “The money could go for other uses,” he explained. “The stock market started going down in 1999 and continued through 2005. At the same time, clergy health and housing benefit costs were going up … When I was there, laypeople were not involved in decisions about priests. We were not consulted. That needed to change. I participated in lay trust funds and health issues, but not oversight of clergy trust funds.”
The failure to invest the annual donations was a serious mistake. Still, Castaldi concluded, “I see no sign of misappropriation of assets.”
But the documents on how clergy funds were spent from 1986 to 2000 were not available, according to the archdiocese. I asked: “So how do we know what happened?” Castaldi nodded at the question, and said, “Those are the detailed transactional documents. That’s not a big surprise. You don’t keep those documents forever.” On the mystery of what those documents held—how much to the legal, therapy, housing, and early retirement costs of the several score child abusers Law had eased out—Castaldi had no answer. The problem, he averred, was more complex than absorbing costs of bad priests.