Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [92]
Kunze lived in a community of sixty priests in the Center for Higher Studies at the Legion’s tree-lined campus on a plateau of western Rome. Kunze was among a dozen younger priests, all forbidden to speak to older clerics. The 320 seminarians, about evenly divided between students of philosophy and theology, were also forbidden to speak across lines of academic formation. Superiors screened their e-mails and approved website viewing. Across the lawn Kunze watched the construction of Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, which Piet Derksen’s $1.5 million was helping to build.15 Weekday mornings Kunze sat in a Peugeot with two other Legion priests who worked in the Curia as they took turns driving down Via Aurelia, turning onto Via della Conciliazione, the grand boulevard cleared by Mussolini that ran from the Tiber River to St. Peter’s Square. The Congregation for the Clergy was in a pale yellow four-story building of neoclassical design. The elevator opened into a marble foyer a floor above a religious souvenir shop looking out on Bernini’s columns in the square.
When Kunze began work on December 8, 1997, he found an office still agog over the $119 million jury verdict in Dallas awarded to eight victims of the ex-priest Rudy Kos. The verdict that July had made international news. Castrillón fumed about money-grubbing lawyers. Clergy staffers wondered why American courts were so hostile to the church. The Dallas case, after six years of litigation, ended in 1998 with a negotiated settlement of $31 million for the plaintiffs.16
Monsignor James Anthony McDaid ran the English-language desk. A short, stocky, Irish-born canonist who had also served as a priest in the Denver archdiocese, Tony McDaid bristled about bishops giving pederasts a second chance. He had a law-and-order approach: defrock ’em. McDaid viewed St. Luke Institute in Suitland, Maryland—the foremost church-owned hospital that treated pedophiles—as a scandal in itself. The treatment included sex education films. McDaid brooded that they induced priests to masturbate.17
Although he did not work in the Third Office, Kunze picked up on his colleagues’ concerns when certain bishops sold assets. “Weakland’s at it again,” Tony McDaid groused one day, referring to canonical protests of the Milwaukee archbishop’s parish closures (see this page). But Clergy backed Weakland, inevitably.
The workaday world at the Congregation for the Clergy exposed Chris Kunze to personalities who mirrored a greater diversity than he found in the Legion. The secretary and second in command, Archbishop Csaba Ternyak, was Hungarian. He believed priests should be allowed to marry. In his aloofness from Kunze, Ternyak telegraphed that he was no fan of the Legion.
Kunze read reports from the German-speaking bishops, often a hundred pages or longer, covering all dimensions of a diocese from finances to baptisms, and distilled the information for Cardinal Castrillón. He summarized the notes he took on the phone or in conversation for the files. No document could ever be taken home. Kunze followed the furor in Austria since Vienna’s cardinal-archbishop, Hans Hermann Groër, retired in 1995 amid accusations that he had coerced sex with young men in a monastery years before. Behind the scenes, Sodano and Ratzinger clashed over how to deal with Groër, Sodano prevailing as he left without a word of condemnation from John Paul in a show of Vatican unity.18 On a 1998 trip to Austria, John Paul avoided mention of Groër. A lay group, We Are Church, with 500,000 signatures, had arisen over the Groër scandal as a larger protest of Vatican control.19 When German bishops arrived for ad limina visits,