Render Unto Rome by Jason Berry

the word out that it was unwilling to convey the property to another religious institution, no matter what the nature of the denomination,” wrote Kevin J. Herlihy, the retired judge. “Mr. Smith also left no doubt that the Vicar General, Bishop Richard G. Lennon, D.D., saw, read and presented the memo dated January 19, 2006 to the [archdiocesan] Board of Consultors recommending no restriction in the deed to Indresano. Although the memo purports to be from Smith to the Vicar General,Smith could not rule out with certainty the possibility that Bishop Lennon actually prepared the recommendation.” 24
    By the time Judge Herlihy’s report was released, in October 2007, Lennon’s disastrous handling of Reconfiguration in Boston had catalyzed nine parishes into vigil and another round of canonical appeals in Rome. Cardinal O’Malley resisted sending in the police. He was relieved, however, to wash his hands of Lennon. In the culture of ecclesiastical princes, where mistakes are often rewarded, Richard Lennon would soon be moving on, and up, to assume a diocese of his own.

CHAPTER 8
    BORRÉ IN ROME

    Peter Borré’s strategy of drawing the Vatican into responsibility for Boston parish closings registered in March 2006. Cardinal Castrillón responded to the parishioners’ appeals by writing Bishop William Skylstad, the USCCB president (whose Spokane diocese had taken bankruptcy protection because of abuse litigation). With no reference to Boston, Castrillón’s message was clear.
Your Excellency:
This Congregation deems it opportune to write to you regarding the closure of parishes in the dioceses of the United States, since in recent times certain dioceses have wrongly applied canon 123 CIC and stating that a parish has been “suppressed” when in reality it has been merged or amalgamated .
A parish is more than a public juridical person. Canon 369 defines the diocese as a “portion of the people of God which is entrusted to the bishop to be nurtured by him” … In this light, then, only with great difficulty, can one say that a parish becomes extinct. 1
    The proceeds from closed churches should follow parishioners to the “enlarged parish community.” But the Boston archdiocese wanted church assets to sell and plug the deficit. For Borré it was all very simple: Castrillón was covering his ass. Officials in the Congregation for the Clergy were advising the Boston archdiocese on how pastors of parishes shutting down could “voluntarily” surrender funds. Castrillón’s chief concern was not the injustice of suppression orders, but how to help Seán O’Malley meet his financial needs.
    Other prelates secured closures predicated on fleeting media coverage. On a February night in 2007 Borré bedded down in a pew of Our Lady Queen of Angels in Harlem in a show of solidarity with forty people at a vigil. The next day, with the vigil established, he caught an evening shuttle to Boston. A few hours later police officers responding to Cardinal Edward Egan’s office hauled off the leaders, most of them women, releasing them after the archdiocese locked the doors. 2 Egan, a Chicago canonist trained in Rome, had come to New York from the diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut. In a 1997 deposition over an abuse case and his recycling of perpetrators, Egan, in trying to contain financial damage, actually testified, “Every priest is self-employed.” 3 Three years later he went to New York, with 2.5 million Catholics, after the death of Cardinal John O’Connor. “New York Catholicism was practically an Irish-run Establishment overseeing a mosaic of stable ethnic enclaves,” wrote the religion writer David Gibson.
But now those old-time Catholic communities were spreading out to suburbs while new, poorer immigrants back-filled city parishes that had fewer priests to staff them and little money to support them. Churches and schools would have to close, creating a sense that after 200 years of surging numbers and clout, New