UNITED STATES
Philadelphia Inquirer
Render Unto Rome
The Secret Life of Money
in the Catholic Church
By Jason Berry
Broadway Paperback. 420 pp. $16
Reviewed by Kenneth A. Briggs
While some Catholic bishops and lay people have been waging a campaign to convince the public that their religious freedom is being threatened, Jason Berry’s book stands as a formidable reminder of how much the church needs to learn from the “secular” realm that it often scorns.
Like common-law justice for sex abusers.
And certified public accounting of obscure church finances.
Combining superior investigative skills and adroit analysis, Berry links clergy sexual abuse of children – a subject he helped push onto a national stage in an earlier book – with the tactics designed to cover legal and psychiatric damages resulting from it in a crisis that has cost the church more than $3 billion in settlements, according to the advocacy group BishopAccountability. The chief cause he identifies is appalling moral failure by top church officials, including Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Abuse and its cover-up, widespread and hidden, became a nightmare when Berry in Louisiana and a blockbuster series later in the Boston Globe exposed the scope and horror of the scandal. Expenditures on legal fees and suits quickly became astronomical. Strapped for funds, bishops resorted to various schemes.
The reflexive response in settings like Boston, Cleveland, and Los Angeles, was to sell off church property. That often meant killing a parish that was the cherished spiritual home to neighborhood Catholics. Asking them, in effect, to pay for clergy abuse sparked protest.
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