Free Render Unto Rome by Jason Berry Page B

knew. And part of O’Malley’s unwritten job description was protect Bernie Law .
    O’Malley had become a cardinal as he opened a realm of transparency in the late winter of 2006, releasing substantial data and annual reports that revealed $330 million in assets, against debt of $346 million. “We’re not trying to keep secrets from people,” he told a press conference. “We’re trying to use the limited resources we have for the mission of the church.” He won praise from Cynthia Deysher: “We’ve never seen this level of financial disclosure from the archdiocese before.” 21 O’Malley had restored the trust with certain of Boston’s heavy hitters, like Jack Connors, a public relations executive who was raising money for the parochial schools.
    Castaldi had a more benign view of the pension crisis than Borré. By his lights, the Clergy Retirement/Disability Trust was fully funded in the late 1990s. “The money could go for other uses,” he explained. “The stock market started going down in 1999 and continued through 2005. At the same time, clergy health and housing benefit costs were going up … When I was there, laypeople were not involved in decisions about priests. We were not consulted. That needed to change. I participated in lay trust funds and health issues, but not oversight of clergy trust funds.”
    The failure to invest the annual donations was a serious mistake. Still, Castaldi concluded, “I see no sign of misappropriation of assets.”
    But the documents on how clergy funds were spent from 1986 to 2000 were not available, according to the archdiocese. I asked: “So how do we know what happened?” Castaldi nodded at the question, and said, “Those are the detailed transactional documents. That’s not a big surprise. You don’t keep those documents forever.” On the mystery of what those documents held—how much to the legal, therapy, housing, and early retirement costs of the several score child abusers Law had eased out—Castaldi had no answer. The problem, he averred, was more complex than absorbing costs of bad priests. “The culture in the club indicated lots of goodthings to help people. It’s instinctive in priests. The money will come from somewhere. That mentality builds in structural deficits, and it’s hard to get them under control. The abuse crisis put the club at the tipping point.”
    LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
    The Reconfiguration saga took a new turn on November 16, 2006, when the archdiocese sold an East Boston parish, St. Mary Star of the Sea, for $850,000 to Michael Indresano, a commercial photographer. Twenty days later he resold the property for $2.65 million to a Brazilian-led evangelical sect, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Indresano had presented a plan to the archdiocese’s real estate office to develop a photography studio, six condos, and a parking lot, but the sale contract did not preclude him from changing his mind, which he did quite soon, pulling in a $1.8 million profit for the flip. 22
    The new church owner had sparked a huge controversy in Brazil in 1995, when a pastor “repeatedly kicked a statue of the country’s patron saint on national television, prompting condemnation of the UCKG by the Roman Catholic Church,” reported Laura Crimaldi of the Boston Herald . The church’s founding bishop “owns one of Brazil’s largest television stations, as well as radio stations, newspapers and a soccer team.” 23
    Peter Borré sent a letter of protest to the papal nuncio in Washington, D.C. David Castaldi promised further inquiry by the Reconfiguration oversight committee. Cardinal O’Malley, in a deft move, appointed a retired judge to conduct an investigation and write a report on what went wrong.
    The archdiocese had turned down an earlier offer of $2 million from a different church. “A discussion with former [archdiocesan] chancellor David W. Smith lends credence to the notion that [the Boston archdiocese] was reluctant to get