Jason Berry
Jason Berry is a multi award-winning journalist in the US for his pioneering work on clergy child abuse. His latest book is the newly-released Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money In the Catholic Church.
[..]Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from 1990 to 2006, was a pivotal figure in the university's growth in Rome.
Maciel and Sodano forged a friendship in Chile in the 1980s during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The Legion needed Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez's permission to function. Haunted by the regime's torturing and abducting of people, Silva had a tense relationship with Sodano, who as papal nuncio appeared on TV in support of Pinochet. Several Chilean bishops implored Silva not to admit Maciel's group, which had a tainted reputation as "millonarios de Cristo" for their obsessions with fundraising. "In a society as polarized as Chile," Andrea Insunza and Javier Ortega wrote in a book on the Legion in Chile, "the Legionaries found a key ally: the apostolic nuncio, Angelo Sodano." Silva approved the Legionaries' presence in Chile.
Back to Rome in 1989, Sodano, in preparing to become secretary of state, took English lessons at a Legion center in Dublin, Ireland. He vacationed at a Legion villa in Southern Italy. An honored guest at Legion dinners and banquets, Sodano became Maciel's biggest supporter. Glenn Favreau, a Washington, D.C., attorney and former Legionary in Rome, said: "Sodano intervened with Italian officials to get zoning variances to build the university" on a wooded plateau of western Rome. Maciel hired Sodano's nephew, Andrea Sodano, as a building consultant. Pontificial Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum is the name of the complex.
But Legionaries overseeing the project complained to Maciel that Andrea Sodano's work was late and poorly done; they were reluctant to pay his invoices. To them, Maciel yelled: "Pay him! You pay him!"
Andrea Sodano was paid.
In 2008, a flashy Italian businessman, Raffaello Follieri, was indicted in New York on fraud and money-laundering charges for his business that bought shuttered church properties and parishes for commercial resale. Andrea Sodano was Follieri Group's vice president. Cardinal Sodano attended the company's 2004 launch party in New York, accorded to press reports. As NCR reported March 3, 2006, the firm's literature trumpeted its "deep commitment to the Catholic church and its long-standing relationship with senior members of the Vatican hierarchy."
After the company secured major backing from billionaire Ron Burkle's Yucaipa development company, Follieri spent wildly on his jet-set romance with movie star Anne Hathaway. As the Follieri-Yucaipa partnership found properties, Follieri sent payments to Andrea Sodano's office in Italy by bank wire transfer.
Documents obtained by the FBI show that Follieri fabricated backdated invoices from Sodano to justify a two-month flurry of payments in 2005 that Follieri had already obtained from the investors. These included: $75,000 on Aug. 22, for "Engineering Services"; a Sept. 12 invoice for $15,000 for work in Atlantic City, N.J., and $80,000 in Orland Park in the Chicago archdiocese; Oct. 21, for $70,000 in Canyon City (no state given in the invoice); another $50,000 for Orland Park; and $75,000 for unspecified "Engineering Services," making a tidy $225,000 net on that single day. None of the single-page invoices has a paragraph on work done.
In the weekly conference calls with Burkle's company, Follieri escalated his request for funds to pay Sodano, stressing that the Vatican needed the engineering reports in order to grant approval for the sales of church property. Yucaipa paid $800,000 to that end, with Follieri providing fabricated, backdated invoices to document payments purportedly made to Andrea Sodano.
RITE AND REASON: IN 2005 parishioners of St James in the farm belt town of Kansas, Ohio, recoiled when Toledo Bishop Leonard Blair, facing a tight budget, closed the parish, steering them to one several miles away. They filed an appeal to the Vatican. It failed.
Then they sued in a local county court, arguing that the bishop was a trustee but parishioners owned the property. The state sided with the bishop. “We spent $100,000 in legal fees,” said parishioner Virginia Hull. “Bishop Blair paid his lawyers with $77,957 from our parish account.” Blair had the church demolished.
Canon law says a parish is “a juridic person”. But that “person”, like an olden slave, does not own itself. The bishop does. Nevertheless, a federal court in Springfield, Massachusetts barred the bishop there from razing a church deemed a historic landmark. Parish ownership is unresolved in American law.
A US Catholic parish has closed on average once a week for the last 20 years. Many bishops have sold churches to plug deficits, or pay for abuse cases caused by their negligence or their predecessors’.
The idea that each bishop stands in a lineage going back to Jesus’s disciples renders them immune from prosecution for recycling abuse predators or selling churches to cover mistakes. Since 2005 at least 95 parishes from 21 US dioceses have appealed to Vatican courts. At least 12 closures won partial reprieves in the Syracuse, Buffalo, and Allentown, Pennsylvania dioceses.
The Apostolic Signatura (Vatican supreme court), in a split-the-baby ruling, decided that the protesting parishes were “sacred” property not to be sold, but would not restore them as active churches. Juridic “persons” slumber in the folds of legal farce.
In July 2003 Boston’s then new archbishop Cardinal Seán O’Malley visited Rome seeking financial help to resolve 552 abuse cases. He met Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano and Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, then in charge of the Congregation for the Clergy, which oversees the liquidation of diocesan assets.
They gave O’Malley carte blanche to sell properties. In Boston, parish sit-ins ignited bad press and a deep slide in donations.
Cardinal Sodano saw profit horizons. He installed an under-secretary at the Vatican who fed information on closing churches to a New York company, the Follieri Group. Its vice-president was Andrea Sodano, a building engineer in Italy and a nephew of the cardinal. The cardinal greeted potential investors at a New York launch party.
The Follieri website promoted its ties to Vatican officials. Its business plan: find churches, buy low, sell high. When an investor sued Follieri for profligate spending, the FBI investigated.
Follieri had wired $387,000 to the Vatican Bank account of a lay staffer in cahoots with Andrea Sodano. Cardinal Sodano’s nephew’s invoices netted more than $800,000 for work the FBI deemed worthless. Raffaello Follieri today is in prison for fraud and money laundering.
Nepotism, from the Italian “nipote”, means nephew. The FBI considers Andrea Sodano, the Vatican under-secretary and a lay staffer there to be “unindicted co-conspirators”. It helps to have an uncle in robes.
Pope Benedict should empanel constitutional scholars to create a court system for criminal issues and church property. But first, he should sack Cardinal Sodano – now Dean of the College of Cardinals and who will oversee the election of the next Pope.
It would give some sign of papal belief that St Augustine was correct: justice is a virtue.
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