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accounting course.”
    Catholic cemeteries sell a service called perpetual care, which guarantees the tending of a plot beyond the life of a family. Teague said that in his parish, which had a cemetery, “We couldn’t say for sure where everyone was buried. The caretaker dropped dead at fifty and left no records of who was where. So a former schoolteacher came in and did dogged research with funeral directors.”
    He paused. “You know, at one time being a pastor was like a sinecure. Older priests talk of the pastor taking the Christmas and Easter collections and dividing it five ways with the assistant priests. My home parish was built and paid off during the Depression. Cardinal Cushing wanted to take excess money from the parish to build new ones in the suburbs. My grandfather and a few others went to Cushing and said, Over our dead bodies . It’s so different today, with not enough priests to staff the parishes. Fund-raising is hard.”
    As the bills mounted against the chaotic record keeping he had inherited, Teague installed a software accounting system. “Only then did we realize what trouble we were in.” The parish owed the diocese $100,000 in assessments to the chancery office, which is not quite like dodging the IRS. For Teague, the unpaid assessments masked a larger problem. St. Brigid was not a poor parish. “But it reached the point where we couldn’t meet payroll. I had to let go of some people. I made a lot of enemies.”
    “But you walked into a quagmire,” I countered. Teague nodded. “My predecessor’s sin was a politician’s sin: taking care of his friends. He was a good guy to the poor, the sick, the elderly. He also spent $2,000 a month on food. He had lavish dinner parties in the rectory for priest friends.” Slowly, Teague stabilized the finances and linked the weekly donations to the parish operating expenses, using excess funds to pay down debtand keep anything extra on reserve. Resolving the bill to the diocese over long-deferred assessments was a problem Teague did not solve in his tenure.
    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