Read Online Render Unto Rome by Jason Berry - Free Book Online
Authors: Jason Berry
Tags: Religión, General, History, Business & Economics, Christianity, World, Catholic, Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
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expenses realized $3,135,000.00, for a profit of $1,235,000.00 Finally, wereceived all of the $4,150,000.00 back from the St. John of God investment, plus interest totaling $521,054.30. All of this money, totaling $10,239,127.30, has been returned to the original Trusts they came from . (emphasis added)
With his powers before the advent of O’Malley, Lennon pulled in a profit just under $2.44 million in real estate transactions for the interlocked “Clergy Funds,” which suggests another name for the controlling account, Clergy Benefit Trust. Not a bad profit. But the “good news concerning some of our past investments in Real Estate” obscured the bad news: the missing millions given by parishioners on those designated Sundays from 1986 until 2002. Substantial though they are, the real estate profits in Lennon’s seven-month tenure come to roughly six months’ donations by parishioners for the priests’ retirement, which averaged $4.5 million per year. Where had all the parishioners’ money gone?
“By 2001, the Boston archdiocese knew of allegations against at least 190 priests,” states Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org . “Only about 25 of those cases had appeared in news reports before the Globe series in 2002.” By March 2002 the personnel documents that the newspaper and plaintiff lawyers made public listed some 80 clergy sex offenders, most of whom had evaded prosecution by going to treatment facilities before reassignment or departure from active ministry, with pension. That still left 110 priests, each one of whom was an expensive mess.
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 comingyears. 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
With his powers before the advent of O’Malley, Lennon pulled in a profit just under $2.44 million in real estate transactions for the interlocked “Clergy Funds,” which suggests another name for the controlling account, Clergy Benefit Trust. Not a bad profit. But the “good news concerning some of our past investments in Real Estate” obscured the bad news: the missing millions given by parishioners on those designated Sundays from 1986 until 2002. Substantial though they are, the real estate profits in Lennon’s seven-month tenure come to roughly six months’ donations by parishioners for the priests’ retirement, which averaged $4.5 million per year. Where had all the parishioners’ money gone?
“By 2001, the Boston archdiocese knew of allegations against at least 190 priests,” states Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org . “Only about 25 of those cases had appeared in news reports before the Globe series in 2002.” By March 2002 the personnel documents that the newspaper and plaintiff lawyers made public listed some 80 clergy sex offenders, most of whom had evaded prosecution by going to treatment facilities before reassignment or departure from active ministry, with pension. That still left 110 priests, each one of whom was an expensive mess.
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 comingyears. 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
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