UNITED KINGDOM
The Times Literary Supplement
John Plender
Jason Berry
RENDER UNTO ROME
The secret life of money in the Catholic Church
420pp. Crown Publishers. $25.
978 0 385 53132 7
Published: 4 April 2012
The finances of the Church of Rome are notoriously opaque, but at least one thing about them is clear. The ability to deploy the large contributions of the Catholic laity for charitable purposes has been seriously impaired as a result of huge payments made to the victims of sexual abuse by the clergy. The bill in the United States alone is close to $2 billion. So a scandal which has severely undermined the credibility of the Church in the US and Ireland, while causing considerable embarrassment elsewhere, has cast a spotlight on the lack of transparency and accountability in the Church’s handling of the regular donations of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
The charge sheet outlined in Jason Berry’s exploration of the financial impact of this crisis, which looks primarily at the US, is not pretty. His starting point is Boston, where the former Archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law, and a clutch of auxiliary bishops failed to act against child-molesters while reaching court settlements that muzzled the victims. The predatory priests were given psychiatric therapy and then recycled to other jobs where they had access to more potential victims. When details finally emerged in 2002 courtesy of the Boston Globe, Pope John Paul II felt obliged to apologize, but exonerated the bishops, declaring that “a generalized lack of knowledge, and also at times the advice of the clinical experts, led bishops to make [the wrong] decisions” – a notably slithery shifting of blame. The Pope also turned down a request by US bishops for permission to defrock severe sex offenders. When Cardinal Law finally resigned as Archbishop, he landed a plum church job in Rome.
The Boston vigilantes took their case to Rome, where it became lost in a canon law hall of mirrors There followed an ineptly conceived and even more ineptly executed plan to sell off assets and close parishes under Law’s successor, Sean O’Malley, and his Vicar-General, Richard Lennon. This prompted a vigil movement. Angry parishioners occupied churches, many of them financially viable, that were scheduled for closure. In Boston, O’Malley was reluctant to bring in the police to eject them. Not so elsewhere. And when Richard Lennon subsequently became Bishop of Cleveland, Ohio, a diocese plagued by financial scandal under his predecessor, he had to have a police escort when saying final Masses at closing churches. The Boston vigilantes, meanwhile, took their case to Rome, where it became lost in a canon law hall of mirrors.
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