Free Render Unto Rome by Jason Berry Page A

space changed: he was offended.”
    Although Castaldi offered no defense of Law’s behavior in the abuse crisis, he spoke admiringly of Law’s response, after a zealot murdered someone at an abortion clinic, getting pro-life and pro-choice advocates to sit down and defuse tensions. “Law showed leadership,” resumed Castaldi, in his careful cadences. “And I wanted to instill better financial procedures. Compared to industry, procedures were not at an appropriate level. Maybe I didn’t have the right touch.” I asked, “What kind of procedures bothered you?” Castaldi raised his eyebrows, then said, “No one can approve their own expense reports. That doesn’t happen in private industry. I felt it had to change. The church had been run by priests, not laypeople with accounting degrees and business education. I didn’t fit into the clerical culture. More than the procedures I wanted to implement, I was abrasive to the culture in some respects.”
    He paused. “It has changed considerably under Cardinal O’Malley. O’Malley has an endearing personality, but he’s not charming, like Law was. The last thing Law would have done was sell the cardinal’s estate.Cardinal O’Malley gets criticized by VOTF, SNAP [Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests], and BishopAccountability, but he does things other bishops have been unable to do. They’re posting financial statements on the archdiocesan website. I think it relates to his ability to part with things .”
    David Castaldi’s parish had deferred maintenance issues, including asbestos, which prompted his support for the decision to close the parish. But the process of meetings to reach that end had been poorly handled. Although he liked Lennon from their past dealings, when he approached him for information on the Reconfiguration oversight work, Lennon resisted. “He interpreted the charter I negotiated with him very narrowly,” explained Castaldi. “Lennon stopped trusting us … All hell was breaking loose with the vigils. He told me, ‘There is no good way to close someone’s church. Do it quickly, get it over with, and things will go back to normal.’ ”
    Castaldi’s committee found a $12 million shift from Reconfiguration money to the Central Fund; they objected to the use of the proceeds from church sales to fund operating costs. 20 Outgoing chancellor David Smith’s comment on the 2005 financial statement had been somber:
The Central Administration of the Archdiocese is not sustainable in its current form. While we do have liquidity, we have little left to sell, and we are faced with substantial obligations. In spite of reductions in force of nineteen percent since the beginning of the abuse crisis, our Central Administration, in an effort to maintain services at pre crisis levels, has operated with deficits each year. As you will see, those deficits were funded with borrowings, property sales and, in the last two years, with parish reconfiguration assets.
    O’Malley was boxed into a corner. An unwritten law of the apostolic succession holds that one bishop does not overtly criticize another, and an archbishop should preserve the reputation of his predecessor, particularly a cardinal. O’Malley could not bring himself to state publicly that Law had mismanaged the money, stuffing money into written-off loans for clerics’ legal fees and writing checks for the expensive psychiatric facilities. One hundred and ninety priests put out to pasture had cost the archdiocese fortheir legal, medical, and stipend costs, while proportionally fewer priests performed the banal but crucial job of raising a parish’s money. As much as Seán O’Malley found Reconfiguration a nightmare, he would not violate an unwritten law of the apostolic succession and open the relevant documents of those accounts to public accounting, lest it invite scrutiny of his predecessor Law. Even if he disliked Lennon, as many believed, O’Malley needed to know what Lennon