CHAPTER 3

SEEDS OF REVOLT

Peter Borré was no bleeding heart on the subject of poverty, but he believed in Christian duty. The low-rise projects off Mystic River were the largest concentration of public housing in New England. Borré realized that the pastor of St. Catherine of Siena, Father Bob Bowers, was about more than “reaching out” to the lowliest members of his flock. Bowers’s liturgies featured Spanish songs. Rosie Piper adored Bob Bowers, the pastor with a youthful face and graying hair who welcomed the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans as he preached about dignity. Borré liked Bowers’s energy for the parish, once a lost cause, now a blossoming place.

The parish named for Saint Catherine of Siena lay at the base of Bunker Hill Street. Midway up Charlestown’s long incline stood St. Mary parish, a Tudor Gothic gem, just past Monument Square and the obelisk that pointed like a needle toward the sky. Several blocks farther up, St. Francis de Sales was the most insular and rock-hard Irish of the three parishes.

Bowers organized a food pantry for hungry people and English-as-a-second-language classes taught by a volunteer Jewish doctor. Many of the unskilled workers taking ESL had no citizenship papers. He runs a good church, Rosie Piper told herself. She felt her $10 donation on Sunday was helping Bowers steer a parish full of life. Imagining Father Bowers thirty years on, she wrote a $100 check for the spring 2003 collection for the clergy retirement fund.

Borré assumed that when the deal was struck on the settlements for the 552 clergy abuse victims, grown now and with gladiatorial attorneys, the church coffers would take a hard dent that the new archbishop would repair over time. He thought Bowers a bit of a sentimental liberal, but he liked his work and saw how hard he gave to the parish.

Warm and outgoing, with an easy wit, Bowers had been inspired by Dorothy Day’s radical witness in the Catholic Worker Movement, where activists lived at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. He liked the liberation theology of Latin America and had been active in a group assisting the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union. Bowers drew his values from an ideal of Jesus as a peacemaker, and peace as a living force of hope.

Born in 1960, Bob Bowers had grown up in Greater Boston, an attorney’s son with three older brothers by whom he now had eight nephews. On graduating from Boston College in 1982 with a B.A. in philosophy, Bowers entered St. John, the archdiocesan seminary in Brighton. As a priest, his assignments had been in comfortable parishes where, with one exception, he had felt welcome. His previous parish had been in Milton, six miles outside of Boston.

Bowers had gotten his new assignment from Cardinal Law two days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Exhausted from the jammed prayer services in Milton, he entered the chancery in a daze from the endless TV loop of airplanes smashing into skyscrapers, spitting back balls of fire and smoke.

Law, then sixty-nine, with white hair and a thick girth, rose from his desk with a smile. Too young to call him “Bernie” as certain older clergy did, Bowers issued a deferential “Your Eminence.” Law was a Boston potentate at ease with politicians, bankers, and CEOs. But he had an emotional distance that many priests noticed, a self-centeredness that some speculated came from his background as an only child, seeing himself as the pivot point in most situations. In 1985, when Law was invested as a cardinal, several hundred Bostonians traveled to Rome. At a reception in the North American College courtyard, Law declared, “This is the strongest moment for the church since the Reformation.”¹

Strong is one way to describe Law’s presence at the Congregation for Bishops in Rome: he became the go-to prelate in choosing new men for the U.S. hierarchy. The prefect of Bishops, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, met with Pope John Paul II every Saturday; he saw the pope’s esteem for Law and acted accordingly.² Law, a maker of bishops, made monthly trips to Rome. In Boston, he made late-night hospital rounds, visiting sick people, taking time to chat with his chaplains. Law was generally benevolent toward his priests, but he had a strain of cold arrogance. At a clergy conference on canon law issues, Law interrupted a lecturer to declare, “Father, while I am in this archdiocese, I am the Law!”³

Bowers’s previous encounter with Law had been in 1996, when the young priest asked to be reassigned; he shared a rectory with an alcoholic pastor whose rage made daily life toxic. Law sent him to Milton, where he thrived. But the old drunk had gotten under Bowers’s skin. “I want to share with you what it is like,” he had written in a National Catholic Reporter essay:

Cardinal Law wrote Bowers, demanding a letter to explain why he wrote the article. Bowers complied; Law then summoned him. Bowers’s genealogy included three cousins who had been nuns and a pair of granduncles who were priests. He unburdened himself, telling Law how his rectory experiences had fallen gallingly short of his seminary expectations—the drunken priest nearly attacked him in one of his stupors. He spoke about the chasm he felt from certain older clerics who were robed in pomposity. Law listened. When Bowers finished, Law said, “I ordained you once and I’d do it again.” That was it: issue resolved. Law had registered his message: No more troublesome articles, Father.

Bowers left the chancery on a wave of ambivalence.

Fluent in Spanish, Law was a strong advocate for dark immigrants who came to Boston. The son of a U.S. Air Force officer, he was born in Mexico and moved often with his parents. Elected president of his black-majority high school class in the Virgin Islands, Bernie Law went to Harvard, and on graduation entered the seminary. As a young priest in Mississippi during the 1960s, he championed the civil rights struggle and became a monsignor at the Jackson diocese, striding on the good side of history. After working in Washington, D.C., for the bishops’ conference, he became a bishop and spent several years at the head of a small diocese in Missouri. In 1984 Pope John Paul II named him archbishop of Boston, an area of 144 towns and cities, with nearly 2 million Catholics. Law announced that the archdiocese would cover the maternity costs and handle adoption for any unwanted pregnancy. After he became a cardinal in 1985, far fewer people called him Bernie. He liked “Your Eminence.”

His absolutism on abortion and on gay relationships did not endear Law to liberals. But he forged ties with Jewish leaders in an ecumenical spirit, and was a visible advocate for poor people, regardless of their citizenship. Catholic conservatives bridled when he gave Communion to pro-choice senators Ted Kennedy and John Kerry. He backed Congressman Joe Kennedy’s annulment request, to remain a Catholic in good standing after his second marriage. Kennedy’s annulment took on a ten-year odyssey through the Vatican courts, before it was stunningly revoked, after a well-documented appeal by his former wife, Sheila Rauch Kennedy. She dissected the process in a 1997 memoir, Shattered Faith. After her position was vindicated, she called the process “very dishonest … The way it is used in American tribunals, it can be anything—a bad hair day, your goldfish died, you weren’t playing with a full deck when you married twenty years ago. And people defending [the marriage], usually women, have been belittled.”⁵

In sermons Law tended to elongate his vowels, a high sign of gravitas. Socially, he had silken charm. But the side of Law that had to have things his way showed in 1992, when he lashed out at media coverage of James Porter, a notorious ex-priest whose crimes caught up with him, at great cost to the Fall River diocese, as Porter went to jail. In a rare rupture of self-control, Law declared, “By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.”⁶ But his private side showed traces of doubt. In 1998 Law agreed to sit for an artist named Channing Thieme who was preparing an exhibition called Boston Faces. Thieme, a non-Catholic, approached him with a natural curiosity; they bantered in the two sessions as he struck a formal pose. When she returned with the finished picture, Law was delighted. What’s the toughest part of your job? she asked.

“Judgment—the decisions I must make,” he replied. As if peering ahead in time to some dark pit, Law added, “That is the half of it. The other half is the judgment I must one day face myself.”⁷

Smoke was still rising in Manhattan from the rubble of the Twin Towers as Bob Bowers sat once more with Cardinal Law, saying that he liked the parish in Milton he had served for nearly six years. Law told him that St. Catherine in Charlestown was struggling to survive. Bowers’s assignments had been in middle-class to upper-crust parishes; he had dreamed of working for the poor in the spirit of Dorothy Day. Law had been quietly closing several parishes a year where population shifts had left churches too empty and impoverished to survive. “Save the school,” Law told him.

“Is the parish a sinking ship?”

“That parish will never close,” Law declared.

Law handed him an envelope and keys. Bowers left with his new assignment. Not a word had passed between them on the parish assessment, the tax each parish pays the diocese based on its average collections. Unpaid assessments accrue interest. Law had forgiven the assessments of several poor parishes in the past. Bowers never gave the chancery taxes a thought. He was bound for the front lines—to stabilize a parish, to save a school.

St. Catherine of Siena was the poorest of the three parishes within a square mile; the other two were nearly all-white. Bowers’s three-story rectory of twenty-eight rooms (with suites for five bedrooms) was an underutilized relic from an era of abundant priests. Nuns who once taught the students, drawing no salary, were gone; the school was scratching by with 120 students, most of them white. After making inquiries, Bowers learned that about seventy-five kids from the parishes up the hill went to parochial schools outside Charlestown. Dominican and Puerto Rican families who made up a third of his parish were too poor to afford school tuition, yet the parish’s image hindered white recruitment for the school.

The church had gone through several pastors. “One guy had been arrested for beating up a housekeeper at a previous parish,” recalled Bowers, “and the guy after him was so introverted he couldn’t light a fire. I inherited a disaster.” He grinned. “It was a dream assignment.” The Sunday liturgies coalesced around a rainbow of people, about a third of them old Irish with local roots, another third Hispanic and mostly poor, the others upper income like Peter Borré from the storied Naval Shipyard.

The world tilted on January 6, 2002, the Feast of the Epiphany, when the Globe Spotlight Team, led by Walter V. Robinson, began reporting how Law and his circle of former auxiliary bishops had played musical chairs with child molester priests over the previous sixteen years. The articles rained down like lightning bolts on Bowers and pastors across the metropolitan area, jarring them and laypeople even more so with indignation about what Law and the assisting bishops had done.

Many priests were depressed; after each new report, they felt humiliated standing on the altar. The numbers at Mass began to drop; outrage in the pews was palpable. Law made public apologies. But as the plaintiff lawyers advanced and the Globe dug deeper, Cardinal Law in the media narrative became linked with the victims. Like an army inching up Macbeth’s hill, the survivors were pushing toward a reckoning with his power, his fate.

A survivor named Arthur Austin planted himself in front of the cathedral, day after day, like a Jew at the Wailing Wall, a media sensation as the Boston story sparked questions in other newsrooms about bishops hiding other priests. Law made the Newsweek cover on March 4 with the subtitle “80 Priests Accused of Child Abuse in Boston—and New Soul-Searching Across America.” On those frigid days outside Holy Cross Cathedral downtown, Art Austin confided, “I felt like Sisyphus—being punished not for being bad but telling the truth.”⁸

A sense of agony seeped into the marrow of Catholic Boston. At Mass, Bowers saw the anguish in people’s body language, the strained faces telegraphing betrayal. He began his sermon one Sunday by stating that he needed to hear from them. Words gushed out of people who were livid at the cardinal and bishops for sending predators to new places, fresh victims. “That bastard, Bernard Law!” thundered one man. People said Shush! Bowers let him vent.

A clamor rose in the media for Law’s resignation; he lumbered on.

In late April, Law flew to Rome to meet with Pope John Paul and seven other U.S. cardinals as the crisis made international headlines. Scores of reporters converged on Vatican City. Bowers followed the Globe and TV news.

John Paul was enfeebled by Parkinson’s. His face swollen, body bent, and voice slurred, the pope once so hale and charismatic now sadly seemed to personify a power structure weak and out of touch. In a shaky voice he read a paper calling the abuse “an appalling sin in the eyes of God.” But a few lines later he washed the hands of guilty bishops in saying that “a generalized lack of knowledge, and also at times the advice of the clinical experts led bishops to make [the wrong] decisions”—blame the therapists. As the church worked to “establish more reliable criteria,” he continued, they should not forget “the power of Christian conversion … that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God”—implying redemption of some kind for sex offender clerics.

The pope doesn’t get it, thought Peter Borré, riveted to his TV set.

He wondered if anyone had a plan.

“People need to know that there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young,” declared John Paul.

But how did that square with “the power of Christian conversion”?⁹ Would the pederasts be defrocked? How did Vatican courts enforce justice?

CARDINALS IN CRISIS

A world away from the daily lives of Bowers and countless priests, the cardinals and Curial members close to the pope retreated to a private caucus. Law disappeared from the coverage. Borré shook his head. If Law can’t make his stand at the Vatican, he’s finished. The whole mess reminded him of Watergate.

The afternoon of April 23, 2002, at the closed meeting in the Apostolic Palace, beneath the ornate frescoes of Sala Bologna, Law apologized to the pope’s inner circle and his brother cardinals. Prior to that, the Los Angeles Times had quoted an unnamed cardinal saying Law should resign. Reporter Larry Stammer’s access to Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles fed speculation that the tall, lanky cardinal, who had said Frank Sinatra’s funeral Mass after persuading him to make confession, viewed Law as a liability for Princes of the Church.¹⁰

Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos had his own view. A native of Colombia, Castrillón was a remarkable linguist whose persona radiated confidence; he slept in the bed of Pope Pius XII.¹¹ Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, he had a classic Latin strain of the authoritarian, a religious version of the caudillo, or dictator. He bristled at the media’s anti-Catholic bias. In a press conference several weeks prior to the cardinals’ visit, Castrillón amazed reporters by calling the crisis a problem rooted in American society’s “pan-sexuality and sexual licentiousness.”¹² Besides monitoring the disposition of church property, Clergy oversaw the rights of priests, and in that sphere Castrillón had experience.

In 1992 Father Robert Trupia challenged the bishop of Tucson when he was suspended for transgressions with youths. A canonist, Trupia filed an appeal at Clergy charging that Bishop Manuel Moreno’s investigation was flawed—Moreno had prejudged him. Trupia wrote to Moreno, calling himself a “loose cannon,” threatening to reveal that he had had a sexual relationship with a deceased bishop, that the two of them and a third priest had had sex with a teenage drug addict. In exchange for his silence, Trupia, then forty-two, proposed to retire with a pension in good standing. Moreno asked him to enter a mental hospital. Under Castrillón’s predecessor, Clergy softened the bishop’s order to an administrative leave. Trupia appealed to the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican equivalent of the Supreme Court. Moreno hired a canonist in Rome to represent his position. As Clergy’s newly minted prefect, Castrillón (himself a canonist) asserted his authority in a December 13, 1996, letter to Moreno requesting that he “resolve this matter by means of a ‘reasonable solution.’ ”¹³

Moreno wrote to Castrillón: “we consider [Trupia’s stance] damaging to the faithful as well as to his ‘victims’ of the past … we cannot let Monsignor Trupia ‘loose’ if we do not know whether he is respectful and faithful to the priesthood.” Castrillón replied on October 31, 1997: “Concerning damages arising from the imposition of an illegitimate decree, it is the mind of this [Congregation] that Your Excellency is liable for these from 2 June 1996 onwards. It would appear best that this matter … be resolved in an equitable fashion”—meaning Moreno should provide a package for Trupia to retire in good standing. Castrillón also wanted Moreno to reimburse Trupia’s legal expenses and suggested using him as a canon law consultant! Bishop Moreno in his return letter to Castrillón evinces an understandable frustration:

“When I saw those documents,” recalls attorney Lynne Cadigan of Tucson, who had several clients abused by Trupia, “I thought, This is a gold mine. I know that sounds terrible, but within the confines of the clerical world, Moreno was trying hard to prevent scandal and Castrillón showed the depth of the corruption.”¹⁴ Trupia left Tucson with a tidy $1,475 monthly check and found a condo outside Washington, D.C. He landed consulting work as a canon lawyer for the Monterey, California, diocese—until the lawsuits in Arizona made him toxic. With Castrillón’s letter as a proverbial smoking gun, Cadigan bargained a $14 million settlement for Trupia’s victims. When, finally, the Vatican defrocked Trupia in 2004, the Tucson diocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the face of claims from thirty-three other victims, most of them from a second priest. The diocese eventually settled those for $22 million.¹⁵

On the day of the 2002 emergency meeting in the Vatican, it is unlikely the other cardinals knew about Castrillón’s fiasco with Trupia. (Michael Rezendes’s Boston Globe report on Trupia would come four months later.) But Italians in the room knew that in America huge losses were looming. As the cardinals discussed what to say to a waiting world about the crisis, Castrillón drew a bead on the real issue: dissent. He and Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone of Genoa—a former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith canonist for Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—insisted that “ambiguous pastoral practices” must be addressed. Priests who failed to uphold church teachings contributed to a permissive climate in the priesthood. The motivations of bishops who recycled pedophiles were not an issue to these men.

Another Curia member echoed Castrillón and Bertone: Cardinal James Francis Stafford, the former archbishop of Denver. He wanted the press communiqué on the crisis to endorse the 1968 papal encyclical on birth control¹⁶—obedience to papal teaching was paramount. But international news had shown an ailing pope with a shaky voice, unable to account for an embedded culture of sexual deviants nor up to the task of commanding an investigation. The Vatican cardinals and archbishops washed their hands by shifting blame to the lower clergy. John Paul, so brilliant a moral force against dictatorships and Soviet Communism, had stood back from the escalating priest abuse cases in the 1990s when he was healthy. He failed to ask why a celibate culture tolerated such harm to children or to ask his cardinals what to do beyond apologies.

Italians dominated the Roman Curia. Their window on the world came from the press that gave textured coverage of the Vatican: Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale, the newsweekly L’Espresso, La Repubblica, among others. But Italy’s legal system had few of the surgical discovery procedures available to attorneys in America, Ireland, Canada, and Australia, which shared the taproot of British common law. As judges ordered bishops to release their files on accused priests to victims’ lawyers, the depth charges from a clergy sexual underground rocked the English-language media. Italian journalists with few documents to cite found only scattered cases. The Curia and other cardinals saw “the scandal” as a product of America’s odd legal system and anti-Catholic news media.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger did not share his thoughts about the 2002 cardinals’ meeting with reporters, as others that day did. Alone among the Curial cardinals gathered there, Ratzinger had set himself on a course to confront the crisis. The American bishops had been stymied in their early efforts to contain the damage. In 1989 the U.S. bishops had canonists seek permission from the Vatican to defrock priests proven to be severe abusers. That authority lay with the pope. And John Paul said no. As a cardinal in Poland he knew the Communist police tapped phones and targeted priests for blackmail. The Polish church was the opposition party. His sense of the priesthood as a beleaguered, heroic counterforce seeded a denial, as pope, on a criminal sexual subculture in the priesthood. Vatican canonists, meanwhile, took the U.S. bishops’ request as encroaching on their turf.

“In America the conference on bishops had a machine signing off on [marriage] dispensations,” a prominent canon lawyer in Rome—interviewed on background—told me with exasperation on a sunny autumn day in 2002. “This was highly criticized in Rome by various respondents in these [annulment] cases … That experience of dealing with American bishops set up a resistance to special norms for pedophiles. We see what you’ve done with special norms on annulments. What are you going to do with these pedophilia cases?” To this priest, it was all so clear. “The attitude here in 1989, at the Holy See, was that you have legal provisions. Use them!”¹⁷ He meant that bishops should hold secret canonical trials of predators and send the results to the Vatican for a final decision. Church defense lawyers shrank from the idea of creating a documentary record of a church court, only to wait years to get permission to defrock the perpetrator.

The bishops also wanted the five-year statute of limitations on abuse of children, as stated in canon law, expanded—again, so they could kick out perpetrators. “Only after six years of discussion—in 1994—did Rome grant the U.S. bishops a longer statute: ten years after the victim turns eighteen,” writes Nicholas P. Cafardi, a canon law scholar.¹⁸ Had John Paul granted the 1989 request, and if American bishops had used it, defrocking men rather than cycling them through treatment facilities, the scandal’s scope and titanic losses might have been contained. Instead, for twelve years, bishops sent files on the worst offenders to an array of offices and congregations in Rome, among them Clergy, Doctrine of the Faith, the dicastery that oversaw religious orders, the Secretariat of State, and the Apostolic Signatura, or high court. Most of the files came from English-speaking countries, through the 1980s and ’90s, as “bishops who sought to penalize and dismiss abusive priests were daunted by a bewildering bureaucratic and canonical legal process, with contradicting laws and overlapping jurisdictions in Rome,” Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger later reported in the New York Times.¹⁹ The system yielded grotesque ironies like Castrillón helping the pedophile Trupia find canon law work. In April 2000 bishops from the English-speaking world met with Vatican officials, pleading for help. In 2001 John Paul signed a document that Ratzinger all but drafted, which consolidated the responsibility on the explosive issue in his office.²⁰

None of the cardinals, it is safe to say, envied Ratzinger that task.

Ratzinger was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)—the old Holy Office of the Inquisition. Although it had been renamed in 1965, Sant’Uffizio (Holy Office) was still emblazoned on the majestic rust-colored palazzo just behind the colonnade to the left of St. Peter’s. This is the building where Galileo in 1633 was convicted of heresy for claiming the earth revolved around the sun. Most of the investigations at the CDF had involved theologians accused of straying from orthodoxy. After the 2001 order, the next nine years saw three thousand cases of priests accused of abusing young people lodged in the office.²¹ The financial reality registered at the Congregation for the Clergy, which is housed in a stately, pale yellow building of four stories some five hundred yards across St. Peter’s Square from the Sant’Uffizio.

In December 2001, when the papal document confirming Ratzinger’s new authority made news,²² the ceiling for a bishop to sell church property was $5 million. A bishop could sell property of lesser value on his own. In June 2002, amid the worst scandal of modern Catholic history, the bishops pulled into Dallas for their summer conference trailed by seven hundred reporters. News coverage swung between survivors staging protests and the bishops’ parliamentary vote for a youth protection charter. In a move that drew far less notice, the bishops voted to raise the ceiling for liquidating assets to $10.3 million in large archdioceses without seeking approval from Rome. In America some two dozen priests had gone back to ministry after jail terms. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops hired R. F. Binder Partners Inc., a Manhattan public relations company that specialized in damage control, to advise them amid the media onslaught after the first four months of 2002.

Back at the Vatican, on that day in 2002 as the cardinals debated other steps to remedy the crisis, Ratzinger suggested a day of prayer for the victims. It was a kind gesture, but the American cardinals faced a bleaker reality. Plaintiff lawyers in the civil suits using discovery subpoenas were gaining ever-deeper access to clergy personnel files, particularly therapists’ reports on the priest offenders, in trying to show how much bishops knew. Getting such documents in an Italian or Spanish court would be most unlikely. The more damaging the evidence, the greater the money (and prestige) lost to the church.

As the cardinals’ meetings ran through a second day, the Americans wanted a show of solidarity with their colleagues from other countries. But as the final session at the Apostolic Palace ended in the evening of April 23, they had no consensus on why the crisis happened.

As the American bishops in 1921 had resisted passing judgment on Boston’s cardinal O’Connell for his nephew’s secret marriage and misuse of money, so the hierarchs in 2002 avoided talk of Cardinal Law’s disaster. His Eminence had apologized as the meeting began. No need of punishment there; thus they turned to more pressing matters. Encased in their small Tower of Babel, the prelates and princes ran late for a news conference. Castrillón and Bertone drafted a communiqué in Italian; three English texts circulated—so many ideas to distill. When the briefing finally began that night, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., normally at ease with the press, faltered when asked why the document said nothing about laypeople: “I was looking for it … we had it in there last night.” Of Catholics in the pews who had watched the church battered and stained day upon day for nearly five months, the noted author David Gibson wrote: “No reference to their sorrow, their anger, or their possible role in ensuring that such a scandal would never happen again.”²³

The worst Catholic crisis since the Reformation produced a statement that endorsed celibacy as “a gift of God.” The cardinals and archbishops called on pastors to “reprimand individuals who spread dissent.” The Vatican would conduct a visitation of U.S. seminaries. Bishops would hold a special day of prayer for victims and work on a process to expel “notorious” priests from the priesthood. Many of them were already going to prison.

“Where is Law?” a reporter asked. “Is he dodging us?” asked another. “I do not believe so,” said the other official at the briefing, Archbishop Wilton Gregory, president of the USCCB. “But I could not tell you why he is not here.”²⁴

Law flew back to Boston, expecting to resolve the lawsuits with the John Geoghan victims, hoping to salvage some of the standing he had built up in four decades and lost in four months.

In the prosperous suburb of Wellesley, a group had formed called Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), which quickly drew several thousand members. They wanted to support the abuse survivors, affirm priests of integrity, and press the hierarchy for changes. Money was an emotion-charged issue. Joe Finn, a CPA long active on archdiocesan projects, worried about parishioners’ funds going for settlements. The archdiocese had an $18 million operating budget, of which $14 million came from the annual Cardinal’s Appeal. “They’re in steep decline,” Finn told VOTF members. “They’re already cutting like crazy … Look around! There are five hundred cases, five hundred. It’s nuclear winter here in Boston.”²⁵

Finn sought an opinion from a canon lawyer for the wealthy Bostonians who served on Law’s Finance Council. These were the people who worked the phones, raising the big money when the cardinal asked. Finn sent them the canonist’s opinion, which said they could veto a settlement. He added, “You guys have the power to say no.” When the Finance Council did just that at a meeting with Law, the legal negotiations hit a wall. A furious Mitchell Garabedian, the plaintiff attorney, accused his counterpart Wilson Rodgers of double-crossing the survivors. Cardinal Law, meanwhile, was in a stew, unable to approve a settlement and move on.

The Boston agreement was in limbo when the bishops arrived in Dallas that June. The Binder spin-control team helped the USCCB planners orchestrate a drama of crisis-and-response. The bishops sat in a meeting room; journalists in a spacious reception hall watched by closed-circuit video as four abuse victims, in shaky voices, told the bishops about their lives. The bishops’ grim faces joined the harrowing prelude to a vote, the parliamentary procedure by which they adopted a youth protection charter. They pledged to remove any priest with a single past transgression, a “zero tolerance” policy that made international headlines and assured a bottleneck of dismissal cases for Ratzinger’s staff in the Sant’Uffizio. The bishops agreed to empanel advisory boards to field complaints against priests. The Vatican had already insisted that bishops and cardinals be excluded from the jurisdiction of the lay review boards. One justice standard for priests, a much softer one for bishops.

A National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People, composed of twelve prominent laypersons led by outgoing Oklahoma governor Frank Keating (a former prosecutor), would conduct hearings and produce a report. The bishops hired the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to gather the data on the perpetrators, victims, and costs to the church. The bishops were still under a harsh media spotlight, but to their credit, they had responded with apologies, a vote, and a plan.

Back in Boston, assets were under scrutiny. The Boston Herald found a value of “nearly $160 million in land and buildings that are not being used by the church.” Jack Sullivan and Eric Convey reported that the assets were “a fraction of the archdiocese’s total property holdings, estimated at $14 billion.” The archdiocese, “land rich and cash poor,” had the advantage of a hot market in real estate for residential developments.

Mindful of Law’s warning to write no articles, an angry Father Bowers told a Globe reporter of “this feeling of disgust and betrayal … I don’t think any of us understood the role of the church—whether it was denial or incompetence. I think the jury is still out on that.”²⁷ The Globe Spotlight Team had spent weeks reading the clergy files before publishing the first report. As the news rolled out in episodes, public response rose against the church. Bowers accepted the hierarchy’s old-boy network as politics: friends helped their pals. And priests had flaws. But recycling sex criminals like Paul Shanley (whose superiors knew he had endorsed “man-boy” love) staggered Bowers’s imagination.

Sitting in the pew with his mother-in-law, Peter Borré watched Bowers struggle in response to people’s outrage. Borré’s curiosity was growing, too. How did a “land rich” church manage its assets?

Bowers knew many priests demoralized by the scandal’s impact on the church they helped make. But his overtures to his neighboring pastor, Father Dan Mahoney at St. Francis de Sales, to steer school-age youngsters to St. Catherine, had failed. Mahoney, a generation older, was focused on his own parish. Bowers had pulled together a cadre of serious volunteers, mostly women. A Townie who had done time for drugs and been clean for seventeen years ran the daily AA meetings. Despite his parishioners’ anger, Bowers had stabilized the finances, though he had paid no assessment to the archdiocese.

Law was in his own scramble. The archdiocese typically covered operating shortfalls by tapping a line of credit at Fleet Bank, borrowing in summer and fall, repaying in winter or spring. Cash flow rose between Christmas and Easter, when the parishes took in more. “Donations to the annual Cardinal’s Appeal usually arrive in two bursts,” the Globe reported. “In late May and early June after the Appeal is launched, and in late November and December when many donors are looking for tax deductions.” With cash flow deeply down, the archdiocese in late September mortgaged the cardinal’s estate with the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic insurance group, for $38 million.

The Boston Priests’ Forum was in its own crisis. Formed in 2001 by three clergymen concerned about issues of isolation and overwork, the forum had become an ad hoc support group; its membership surged to about 200 out of 1,250 priests in active service, as the scandal intensified. The forum discussions got past commiseration: the priests were incensed about the betrayal they felt. Bowers felt an aching irony. Like a benevolent lord, Law had put him under no pressure for the unpaid church taxes. But the cardinal who had given him the best job of his life had sold all the priests down the river.

The weight of the scandal bore down on Bowers just as he was discovering the ideal of peace. Peace was measured by the presence of justice—what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “love in calculation.” To follow Christ in service of the poor was giving love its calculation. Bowers, at age forty-two, was learning the pursuit of that love in the marginal parish where pockets of people who had money made spiritual community with the Other. The chance to live it, he would reflect, with people who were hungry, were aliens, did drugs, lived in violence and fear. It was far from the image of church we so often lived, but it called out the best in the people and in me. His own cardinal and several assistant bishops had squandered innocence, the seeds of peace. Twisted lies from men: power and control. Submerged in the muck of covering it up and protecting what was unspeakable. God, how they turned it all so sour and sick!²⁹

On December 9, 2002, Bowers joined fifty-seven others in the Boston Priests’ Forum by signing a public letter, telling Law he was “so compromised that it is no longer possible for you to exercise the spiritual leadership required for the church in Boston.”³⁰ News coverage of the letter was like a shot across the bow. Four days later, at a private audience with John Paul, Law resigned as archbishop of Boston.

For the Vatican, the resignation of America’s most powerful archbishop, who nevertheless remained a cardinal, meant that whoever followed Law had to be a superb pastor and a good manager. To fill the breach until the new man was named, Rome installed a fifty-five-year-old auxiliary bishop named Richard Lennon with the title of Apostolic Administrator. Untarnished by the scandal, Lennon was loyal to Law, who had basically made him a bishop. Dick Lennon had a prickly personality and among priests was not exactly beloved. But he worked hard and had a commanding sense of his role in achieving whatever needs to be done. As he monitored the negotiations with the plaintiff attorneys, Lennon was drafting a plan for widespread parish closures.

Three days before Christmas, in words aimed at the 552 victims and their attorneys, Lennon announced he was surveying church properties to put on the market “as soon as possible, so we can show our commitment” to resolve the lawsuits; liability coverage by insurers Kemper and Travelers would cover a substantial portion, according to the Globe.³¹

With all that liability coverage, wondered Peter Borré, why sell property?

Bowers wondered how the struggling parish he had come to love would fare in Lennon’s plan. He asked for a meeting with Lennon, to no avail.

RECONFIGURATION DAYS

The son of a suburban deputy fire chief, Dick Lennon was six foot two; he had grown up a sports-loving kid but with a stutter so severe he rarely spoke in class, fearing humiliation. He entered Boston College, majoring in math. In 1967, after his sophomore year, he entered St. John, the diocesan seminary next door to BC in Brighton. Social protests that jolted campuses in 1968 hit St. John, too. Some seminarians clamored for direct involvement with the ghetto in Roxbury; others wanted the traditional path of enclosed study. Liberals clashed with Cardinal Cushing; half the seminarians soon left. Coming out of those years, Dick Lennon fell in love with canon law. He pursued it the hard way, teaching himself avocation-ally, from his studies in theology and the master’s he would earn in church history. He read voluminously in church law, amassing a library of three hundred books. Dick Lennon lacked the stylized polish of clerics educated in Rome, but having conquered his stutter, he could take whatever life threw in his way. In 1998, after a decade of parish work, the autodidactic canonist was plucked by Cardinal Law to be his canonical adviser. In 1999 Law named him seminary rector. In 2001 he became an auxiliary bishop. Within the priestly society he was known for his cold candor.³²

Determined to salvage his parish, Bowers put out feelers to rent some of the unused space in the large rectory. A law firm said yes. A cell phone company approached him about installing a tower behind the steeple. Bowers was thrilled! Let the private sector subsidize the school! Build an endowment, offer scholarships to worthy children. But then he hit a wall. The chancery told pastors to make no new contractual agreements until Bishop Lennon’s parish Reconfiguration was done. No law firm rental, no cell tower revenue.

Faced with the hard demographic realities of Charlestown—three parishes with reduced populations, school-age children at parishes up the hill eschewing the neighborhood school—Bowers and the principal reluctantly made spring 2003 the last semester for Charlestown Catholic Elementary School, the one Cardinal Law had told him to save.

During Law’s seventeen years in Boston, he had reduced the archdiocese from 402 to 357 parishes, without great protest. But Bishop Lennon entered a minefield. The Cardinal’s Appeal had raised only $8 million of the needed $17 million for archdiocesan operating expenses. Through the winter of 2003, as lawyers wrangled over the victims’ settlement, Lennon surveyed the topography of Catholic Boston—a church infrastructure in the city and outlying towns crisscrossed with map lines of money. What could be closed could be sold. The proceeds from sales would allow the church to regain its financial footing.

In a city with neighborhoods steeped in tribal loyalties, closing a given church cut deep into social cloth. In “Southie,” as South Boston is called, St. Augustine Elementary School was a bedrock for families of cops, firemen, and blue-collar and city workers. St. Augustine’s Cemetery, with a Greek Revival chapel, was the city’s oldest Catholic graveyard. A Southie pol once quipped he would be buried there because “I want to remain politically active.”³³

But as older people who had raised large families died off, many of their children moved away, and Southie, like Charlestown, had a shrinking core of old Irish mixed with poor people in projects and the incursion of upscale couples, some without children, who were renovating buildings, laying on a patina of gentrification. “Sixty-one percent of South Boston residents have lived here less than five years,” reflected Brian Wallace, Southie’s representative in the statehouse. “The majority of them have no children … and the number of students going to Catholic schools is rapidly declining.”³⁴ St. Augustine’s, with 158 students in grades K through 8, relied on a $100,000 subsidy from the archdiocese. The pastor, Monsignor Tom McDonnell, was a Southie institution, and he had good ties with the cardinal. Law had forgiven a $328,000 parish debt on its unpaid assessments in 2000.

Three years later, in May, as Bishop Lennon remapped the infrastructure, students went home with notes to their parents: St. Augustine Elementary was closing. “This was a decision that came out of the parish,” a priest-spokesman for the archdiocese stated. Because of declining enrollment and rising repair costs, “the parish didn’t believe it could go on any further.”

Not so, said one of the parents, Anne Spence. The archdiocese “kept vehemently denying that the school was closing. Then, all of a sudden, here’s a letter—the school’s closed, goodbye, don’t bother coming back next year.”³⁵

In the bitter protests that followed, parishioners screamed at the aging pastor, Monsignor McDonnell, for selling them out. Parish leaders plunged into emergency fund-raising; two city council members and a state senator met with a poker-faced Lennon to pitch a turnaround plan. Brian Wallace went separately to the chancery with a colleague to meet Lennon. Wallace knew the church had a money crisis, but Lennon’s closure on an unsuspecting pastor had hung McDonnell out to dry. In the chancery Wallace took his seat opposite the Apostolic Administrator. Lennon glanced at his watch. “You have five minutes.”

“Five minutes?” snapped Wallace. “Here’s five seconds!” And with that the state representative walked out.

Whatever honeymoon Lennon had had with Catholic Boston soured in the media coverage over the St. Augustine closure. Bitterness over Law’s betrayal spilled out in cascades at Lennon.

When Seán O’Malley settled in as archbishop in the summer of 2003, Bishop Lennon retreated from the spotlight. O’Malley, with his white beard, serene demeanor, and soothing tones, had the persona of a peacemaker. He met with abuse survivors to advance the healing. The archdiocese agreed to the $85 million legal settlement for the 542 abuse survivors; the threat of bankruptcy receded as the archdiocese and Boston College moved toward the sale of the cardinal’s estate. But O’Malley minced few words of his own on the depth of the financial crisis. On February 13, 2004, Lennon wrote to Boston priests explaining that Archbishop O’Malley “has deliberately chosen the canonical procedure of suppression, rather than merger.” A suppressed church would close, its assets going to the archdiocese. The assets of a church that merged with another parish would follow parishioners to the new church. Lennon’s letter asserting that the archbishop had “deliberately chosen … suppression” suggested that O’Malley was a joint designer of the Reconfiguration blueprint. The archbishop set a March 8 deadline for leaders from eighty regional clusters to recommend which churches in their groupings should close.

Peter Borré, who had seen his share of layoffs in the corporate world, was struck by the icy logic of Reconfiguration. The order bore the archbishop’s signature, but everyone knew it was Lennon telling parish groups to vote on whose church took the bullet. In corporate downsizing, you never asked people to vote on who kept their job. “Suppression”—a canon law term evocative of the Inquisition—meant you were evicted from your spiritual home, and all the money you and your people had put into that sacred space back through time went down to prop up a debt-ridden chancery. This is going to blow up on them, Borré told himself.

Bowers secured an appointment with Archbishop O’Malley.

The new prelate in his friar’s robe sat at the end of a long table. Seán O’Malley was visibly subdued. He spoke slowly, in a voice so low Bowers sat forward to hear, explaining that the church faced hard decisions about consolidating parishes. Bowers delivered an upbeat account of his parish, the diversity of people, rich allied with poor, a financial curve bending their way. O’Malley as a young deacon had done missionary work with Indians on Easter Island, far off the coast of Chile. The prelate who had read Spanish literature in graduate school would surely warm to the picture of brown folk from Puerto Rico making a spiritual home at St. Catherine of Siena. Or so thought Father Bowers. But as he spoke of his parish’s resilience, O’Malley seemed drained. “We are facing tough decisions,” he reiterated. Bowers wanted O’Malley to see the parish. Would he come to St. Catherine of Siena and say Mass? Yes, replied O’Malley stiffly.

O’Malley seemed sad and listless as Bowers left.

As Peter Borré suspected, the cluster meetings threw many people into bitter standoffs with neighboring parishes over whose should close. On March 12, 2004, the study group Bowers had worked with sent a “Minority Report” by lead author Val Mulcahy to Bishop Lennon. In a dispassionate economic analysis, the document provided Lennon the blueprint to reverse the financial decay and revitalize the area. Politically speaking, it gave Lennon cover.

Where Mass attendance in generations past had been 45,000 a week, Charlestown had only 1,500 people per Sunday at the three churches. Charlestown could do with one church. Two parishes would cost $250,000 yearly in extra debt-servicing costs. “The luxury of retaining two parishes means that the community forgoes an annual surplus of $155,000,” the report stated.

As parishioners from rooted families died or moved away, the demographics posed tough choices. “Newcomers see more value in a financially secure and culturally vibrant parish rather than in the preservation of historic buildings,” the document stated. And then, the report hit dead-on what the Boston archdiocese—and the American church writ large—now faced:

The report left open just how the phaseout would be handled, though a transition via facilitators was written between the lines.

Lennon never replied to the plan.

Two months later, on May 25, the chancery sent letters to eighty-three pastors by Federal Express, a rather lavish expenditure in light of the financial crisis and availability of e-mail. But with reporters and TV cameras huddled in the rectory, waiting to gauge how Bowers and his small staff and volunteers, mostly women, would react to the news, the coming of the FedEx trucks was a moment of high drama. Bowers’s voice choked as he read the letter from O’Malley—the parish must close. Each parish had the option of appealing the decision to Archbishop O’Malley, and if he said no, to the Vatican. But the chances of the Congregation for the Clergy reversing an archbishop were remote, as Bowers knew. The priest was crying on TV news. The next morning’s Globe carried parallel photographs on page one: O’Malley reading a statement, Bowers in anguish.

The archdiocese had spared the other two parishes in Charlestown. Lennon and O’Malley had ignored the research by the study group that had pinpointed $1.73 million in deferred maintenance. Closing one parish would not reduce the debt building at the other two. The smartest remedy was a single consolidated parish. In selecting two parishes at the expense of one, reconfiguration had flouted the hard research of the Charlestown group’s report.

“Numerous parishes targeted for closing held prayer vigils last night,” reported Michael Paulson, the Globe’s astute religion correspondent. Paulson sized up the territory:

The next day, May 27, came the news that Pope John Paul II had appointed Cardinal Law pastor—or “archpriest,” in Vatican parlance—of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the great basilicas in Rome. Peter Borré understood gilded parachutes as a reality of corporate life; but redeeming Law, with an elevation from the convent in Maryland to a perch in Rome, showed a huge disregard for the suffering he had caused. Abuse survivors and Voice of the Faithful activists raised an outcry. John L. Allen Jr., Vatican correspondent for National Catholic Reporter, explained the Curia’s view to the Globe: “The idea was to find a position in which his baggage would not bog things down, but give him a job which allows him to set up shop here, where he’s still treated with deference and respect, in part because he’s a cardinal and in part because some people think he got a raw deal.”³⁹

For Lennon—but more so for O’Malley—the timing was awful.

Angry parishioners saw their churches on a chopping block while Law, who had betrayed them, found redemption with a cushy job in Rome. Archbishop O’Malley had a meeting the following day with pastors from across the archdiocese. Media trucks waited outside the church in Weston. Law’s new job “is adding fuel to fire that is already burning in people,” Bowers told a reporter. “It’s an utter disgrace.”⁴⁰ His words were sure to incense the archbishop, a Franciscan who believed in vows of obedience; nor was the language a tool for negotiating. But hostility was rumbling among certain priests toward Lennon, as Law’s handpicked successor, and whether he knew how Law had managed the money.

Father Stephen Josoma had come to the meeting with his own misgivings. Josoma’s St. Susanna parish was in Dedham, an island of the Charles, and it had made the suppression list for no reason he could see other than its eight prime acres with plenty of shade. The letter ordering the suppression gave no adequate reason. Josoma wanted answers for his people. O’Malley’s responses at the closed meeting stressed that Bishop Lennon’s clustering was carefully planned; Reconfiguration would be painful, parishes could file a request for a review, but the priests must support the plan.

In the five-hour meeting, Archbishop O’Malley quieted some fears by assuring the priests that none of the fifty-eight who signed the letter asking Law to resign would be punished. The closures were not about reprisals, he insisted.

Church officials disseminated a 168-page manual on how to terminate employees, remove sacred objects, and deal with journalists. Sacred items must be removed to a specified place. “Shortly after the doors are closed, Archbishop Séan will deconsecrate the Church so that we can sell it,” the manual continued. “Sacred items will be removed … After this is done, the Church may be sold for any use except one that would be deemed sordid.”⁴¹

During a break, Josoma introduced himself to the archbishop as one of the fifty-eight priests who had demanded that Law resign. “You’re asking me to do something I cannot in conscience do,” he said. “Is this because of me or our real estate?” “Neither,” insisted O’Malley. The Globe had published a list of the parishes and their assessed values, with a fair market value in the $100 million range. “We’d be lucky if we got even the assessed value,” O’Malley added. “Well, let’s make a deal,” said Father Josoma. “We’re assessed at $320,000. What if I give you a check for $600,000? You’ll get double your amount.” The priest extended his hand to shake on it. O’Malley laughed, but would not shake hands. Josoma replied, “You know and I know that the parish is worth a lot more.” O’Malley’s lips parted in an enigmatic smile.

On the last Sunday in May, Peter Borré and his mother-in-law went to St. Catherine of Siena for a Mass that was packed with people wanting to know what Father Bowers would say. Reporters were following the story of a parish struggling to stay alive. Bowers was so upset he barely got through the liturgy. He was also afraid. Pitting himself against the archbishop would do his career no good. After the service, he opened the floor for discussion. “Let’s pray the rosary,” a woman offered. But people were crying and angry; they needed to talk.

Rose Mary Piper gave her son-in-law a prod of the elbow: “You shoot off your mouth about everything under the sun. So say something about this.” Peter Borré rose and suggested they send a petition to the archbishop, asking him to meet with them. People applauded. A haggard Father Bowers said, “You’re volunteering to help?”

“I just did,” said Borré, a little unsure just why.

With help from Mary Beth Borré, the lapsed Catholic, Peter and several members of the parish gathered 3,500 signatures. On a warm June day, Peter and two ladies from the parish entered the chancery in Brighton, opposite Boston College. A receptionist sat behind Plexiglas. The tension in the place was palpable. Borré imagined the stress on people here, coming to work over the grueling eighteen months to date. He told the lady they had a petition for the archbishop. She eyed him nervously. Just then a priest entered the foyer. In his mannered way Borré explained the purpose of their visit. “We’re not interested in petitions,” the priest uttered.

Borré asked what they should do with the petitions. The cleric, whom he recognized as a chancery official, retorted, “You should go fuck yourself.”

As the priest withdrew, leaving two startled ladies and Borré to swallow his anger, they went out into the summer day. He got behind the wheel of the car, his rage rising like a volcano. He considered Romans the most anticlerical people on earth, a facet of long memory from Pio Nono and the Vatican’s history as an overlord. Borré’s trust in a modern hierarchy buckled. Mary Beth heard the fury in his voice when he called from the car, saying he’d just been f-bombed by a jerk in a Roman collar. In the days that followed he distilled his anger into a plan of attack that would send him back to Rome to confront a power structure he had once held in awe.