Render Unto Rome by Jason Berry Read Free Book Online Page A

opportunity where others do not and being able to take advantage of the vacuum.” Those traits ill fit the character of Cervantes’s chivalrous madman on horseback. Still, Peter Borré, toughened by years in the oil industry, had never embarked on anything so remotely idealistic. The search for a point where faith and justice might meet had become a quest that, somehow, appealed to him.
    He drew encouragement from the 2004 bankruptcy filings by the dioceses of Portland, Spokane, and Tucson. Canon lawyers were divided on the proprietary rights of bishops, but everyone realized that the bishops wanted to keep those diocesan parishes from being lumped into the assets that plaintiff lawyers were trying to recover in the mass-settlement casesfor victim survivors. If parishes were off-limits in a diocese grappling with bankruptcy, how could the Suppression decrees in Boston—the bishop seizing parish assets—be valid?
    As the Congregation for the Clergy’s Third Office reviewed the appeals from the vigil parishes, the priests in Greater Boston were jolted by the news that the archdiocese was cutting back on benefits from the clergy pension fund. A priest leaked to New York Times reporter Mary Williams Walsh an internal report from the archdiocese’s financial consultant, Towers Perrin. Between 1986 and 2002, “the archdiocese made no contributions” to the clergy pension fund, wrote Walsh. “Twice a year, at Christmas and at Easter, the archdiocese has held fund-raising drives in the parishes for priests’ retirements, raising about $4.5 million a year. But for many years the archdiocese has used that money to fill other needs.” The archdiocese was freezing pensions at $1,889 a month and “has sold church-owned real estate to the priests’ pension fund to raise cash.” 4
    The pension fund had money before the decade plus six years in which the annual donations were channeled elsewhere—enough, at the front end, such that it earned $1.5 million in interest on a $15 million loan to the archdiocese for the $85 million victims’ settlement in 2003. But with $134.4 million in assets on hand at the close of the 2003 fiscal year, the retirement fund needed $204.7 million to meet its projected commitments, a $60.3 million shortfall. “I think we are all very perplexed as to how the archdiocese accumulated such a large unfunded pension liability, because parishioners have been giving for years,” Cynthia Deysher told the Globe . “Now it has come out that they never put the money in for sixteen years. That is fraudulent.” 5
    Peter Borré calculated that if the $4.5 million yearly inflow for the Clergy Retirement Trust, starting in 1986, had been invested conservatively in a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds, at an assumed annual return of 5 percent, more than $140 million would have accumulated by the close of fiscal year 2002. In whatever fashion Cardinal Law had used the $4.5 million yearly donations, Borré considered the diversion a gross violation of trust.
    The archdiocesan Pilot then reported that the Christmas and Easter donations went to the Clergy Benefit Trust, “which provides for the needs of priests including … the Clergy Retirement and Disability [Trust] and the Clergy Medical/Hospitalization [Trust].” The chancellor, or chief financialofficer, was a layman named David Smith. Smith explained that most of the funds went for yearly medical costs. He put the onus on parishes for not sending enough money downtown, a subtle gambit of shifting blame to pastors for not collecting more from the pews: “The billing [to the parishes] has never caught up with the cost, because the cost keeps going up. There is a reluctance to put a burden on the parishes, so premiums have been raised slower than the cost.” The Pilot offered more explanation:
Smith explained that the collections were never intended to be used exclusively for retirement benefits. “I have gone back to check what we said and could not