More Churning At The Papal Foundation

A visitor sent me a link to an article in the UK Catholic Herald on Cardinal Sean O'Malley replacing Cardinal Wuerl as chairman of the Papal Foundation. Again, it's disappointing that a UK Catholic source is ahead of US sources in reporting on this scandal -- among other things, this causes Catholics to place greater trust in sources like Church Militant, when if the Register would maybe work a little harder, this shouldn't be necessary.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston was elected chairman of the Papal Foundation’s board of trustees during a meeting in Washington, D.C. Oct. 30, taking over from Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who served in the position for eight years.

. . . In 2017 Pope Francis asked CardinalWuerl for a $25 million grant through the foundation for the Church-owned hospital Istituto Dermopatico dell’Immacolata, which specializes in researching and treating skin diseases.

The Holy See later declined half the grant after objections from some board members. The critics went to the media, resulting in news coverage that questioned the integrity of the hospital and the wisdom of the foundation’s grant-making process.

The foundation responded to criticism by committing to taking any necessary corrective measures and pledging to provide members with the facts of the grant and a clearer understanding of the foundation’s mission and governance. It also committed itself “to renewing its bond of trust with the Holy See.”

O'Malley has been the chief US figurehead of reform since the First Crisis erupted in 2002, but his performance has been mixed. The historians of the First Crisis haven't yet fully caught up to the Second, and the jury is still out on O'Malley, but his record so far is anything but squeaky-clean.

Engle's The Rite of Sodomy characterizes O'Malley as a "troubleshooter" who emerged under John Paul II as a former Bishop of Fall River, MA who was sent to stabilize the Diocese of Palm Beach, FL in 2002 after Bishop Anthony O’Connell’s resignation there following charges for predatory harassment of eight seminarians. The following year, John Paul sent him to Boston to replace Cardinal Law. However, Engle hasn't followed up on his performance in Boston.

Philip Lawler has discussed O'Malley in Boston in several cases, although again, The Faithful Departed talks primarily of the period leading up to Law's removal. However, he does discuss the Talking About Touching program, required in all Boston Catholic schools. This was a rock-no-boats approach to the First Crisis, in which the US bishops chose to characterize the problem as primarily a pedophile issue, in which all adults, including family members, were potential offenders.

A group of parents in Norwood, MA had concerns about the program, saying that it raised specific sexual matters with very young children, effectively sex education, without giving them a clear moral framework.

But when the Norwood parents brought these concerns to the attention of the Boston archdiocese, they ran into a stone wall. Deacon Anthony Rizzuto, the official responsible for implementing this "personal safety" cur- riculum, admitted that he had not read the Vatican documents that the par- ents cited. . . . Deacon Rizzuto asked the parents why they would not trust the archdiocese to educate their children properly.

Recent history had given parents ample reason to mistrust the archdiocese. But as they investigated the origins of the Talking about Touching curriculum, the Norwood parents found entirely new reasons for suspicion. The program had been developed in Seattle, by the Committee for Children. That group was an offshoot of an organization originally known as COYOTE (an acronym for "Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics"), which was founded by a self-described Wiccan priestess to work for the repeal of laws banning prostitution. To be sure, the organization had changed radically since its inception in the early 1970s. But the bizarre history of the Committee for Children certainly gave Catholic parents no reason to assume that the Talking about Touching program would reflect Christian moral principles.

A few Boston pastors joined the Norwood parents in opposition to Talking about Touching. Arguing that the program violated the innocence of children and the rights of parents, Father David Mullen informed the newly installed Archbishop O'Malley that he could not in conscience allow Talking about Touching in his parish. Rejecting the criticism, archdiocesan officials plowed ahead with their plans, announcing that Talking about Touching was to be a required part of the curriculum for every Catholic school and religious-education program. (p 194)

O'Malley inherited another problem that Law hadn't addressed, a group called Voice of the Faithful and a spokesman, Fr Cuenin. Cuenin and the group publicly questioned Church teachings on birth control, divorce, women's ordination, and homosexuality. Law had taken no action, and following his arrival, O'Malley did nothing as well.

Finally, after two more years, O'Malley did remove Cuenin from his pastoral assignment. But even then the story had a strange twist. In September 2005 an audit by archdiocesan officials uncovered financial irregularities in the Newton parish, and Father Cuenin was asked to resign. Yet as the leading dissident in Boston left his post as pastor, archdiocesan officials took great pains to say that Cuenin was not being disciplined for heterodox views. He was removed because he accepted special stipends from parishioners, in a violation of archdiocesan policy. But was that fiscal policy more important than the Church teachings on sexuality and marriage, which Father Cuenin had questioned for years? (p 206)

Church Militant, in a piece from last August, listed O'Malley as among the current senior figures of the Church whose credibility has been damaged by claims of ignorance in the Second Crisis:

Cardinal O'Malley was accused of failing to act on knowledge of McCarrick after a letter was sent to him in 2015. But O'Malley claims that his staff handled the letter and deemed it not credible.

North American Ordinariate Statistics

My regular correspondent referred me to the Pastor's Message in the November 2018 Epistle from the St Luke;s OCSP parish in Washington, DC.

We have 58 priests in active ministry and 16 retired priests [for a total of 74 priests], 16 in Canada and 58 in the US. We have a vibrant and growing diaconate with 16 deacons, as well as one retired deacon and one transitional deacon, Robert Kirk, who will have been ordained to the Priesthood [correction as of July 2019, this was to the diaconate, not the priesthood, error in original text -- jb] by the time this newsletter is published (October 30 at Christ the King in Towson MD). Most of these clergy are assigned to the 33 communities large enough to have an assigned priest, and several of these communities have active construction projects (with our own to start soon, I pray) to create or add to existing facilities. Some other clergy have assignments in various dioceses around North America and 6 have full time assignments in the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA. As to vocations, on a per-capita basis, we are the strongest diocese in the US in terms of vocations with 5 seminarians.

My correspondent notes that this "means that 13 of the groups listed on the 'Parish Finder' on the webpage have mass celebrated by a diocesan priest, share a priest with another group, or don't really exist". This presumably includes the Potemkin groups set up primarily to justify ordaining the marginal married candidates who continue to come in -- but some of those 33 must include some of those marginal married candidates who've already been ordained in the past year.

The reference to the 33 "real" groups lacks specificity; after the first dozen or so parishes or near-parishes, the numbers quickly fall off. The number of seminarians also doesn't reflect the need to replace nearly all the priests in Canada due to retirements within the next several years. But the continued unwillingness or inability to give a total "membership" statistic is also a matter of concern.

Our diocesan parish is beginning a building project. The level of planning required, as my wife and I have begun to see as we start to participate, is astonishing. In addition, building projects normally have close and professional supervision at the diocesan level. I can't imagine that Houston is equipped to provide this kind of experienced supervision. In addition, a real building project requires serious fundraising with commitments from major donors within and outside the parish. I question whether any but a few OCSP parishes can bring this off.

On the plus side, the Epistle itself contains an intelligent discussion of the Sarum Missal and an installment of a clear explanation of the Church Fathers. The overall product is very well done. If this were in our diocesan adoration chapel, I'd read it as a devotion. This is a genuine plus, but so far with the OCSP, it strikes me as an exception, though it speaks well of Fr Vidal, and for that matter, of Bp Lopes for placing him at St Luke's.

This is the first OCSP community at which I'd consider going to mass.

Bernard Law On Liturgy

Since it deals with "the collapse of Boston's Catholic culture" in recent decades, Philip Lawler's The Faithful Departed has quite a bit to say about Cardinal Law. In fact, Law hired Lawler, a fellow Harvard alum, to edit the archdiocesan newspaper, the Pilot, although he fired him fairly quickly. (Thanks to a visitor for recommending this book.)

Lawler doesn't seem to have had too many personal encounters with Law when he worked for the archdiocese, but he discusses one that gives insight into Law's approach to liturgy, which is important from our perspective, since liturgy has been a key concern in implementing Anglicanorum coetibus, and Anglicanorum coetibus was one of Law's pet initiatives.

According to Lawler,

a visiting priest at my local parish had introduced dozens of his own novel prayers and gestures into the Sunday liturgy, altering the form of the ritual so profoundly that I wondered whether the result was a valid Mass. (p 123)

This went beyond esthetics, it went to the duty of a bishop to ensure that valid sacraments are celebrated for his faithful. So Lawler raised the problem with Law at his next opportunity.

I would not have been surprised if Cardinal Law had told me that my concerns were absurd and scolded me for being an alarmist. Or if he took my charge seriously, he might have dropped everything, ordered an aide to bring around his car, and headed off immediately to investigate matters for himself -- and, if necessary, to replace the pastor immediately with a priest who could be relied upon to provide valid sacraments for the faithful. But I was not prepared for the reaction that my report actually received. The cardinal acknowledged my concerns, sighed, and said, "What can I do?" After a moment's reflection he added: "There are never problems when I'm there."

On one level the cardinal was absolutely right. Priests were always on their best behavior when he visited a parish, so he never witnessed serious liturgical abuses at first hand. When complaints reached his desk, he could only weigh the worries of the laity against the reassurances he received from their pastors, who would invariably deny any infringement of Church norms. There was never enough evidence to warrant decisive action. So the complaints piled up and the liturgical abuses continued.

A few weeks after my conversation with the cardinal, my family attended a Mass that he celebrated at Holy Cross cathedral. As we were leaving he pulled us aside. "Was that liturgy more to your taste?" he asked. Cardinal Law had apparently downgraded my concerns, at least in his own mind, so that he was responding not to a question about the validity of the Mass, nor even about the observance of concrete liturgical norms, but simply to a question of personal preference. My complaint was no longer a matter of pastoral urgency, on which he was morally obligated to act. It was a question of taste, on which reasonable people might differ. (pp 123-4)

I raised this with the visitor who's shared his personal insights into Law here, and he replied,

I was at a liturgy Law was celebrating at the Springfield cathedral where he barked out during post-communion organ meditation "that's enough of that" to the organist playing a saccharine poorly composed piece. He definitely had his preferences. Once I was with him for quick visit to a Trappist monastery where we attended liturgy of the hours. Law's comment on their spare simple style was that it was an abomination.

This raises the question of whether liturgy for Law was ever more than a question of personal preference, and if someone more powerful -- not necessarily in the hierarchy, of course, but perhaps via powerful secular friends or media contacts -- wanted things otherwise, then what could Law do? He could bully an organist to stop playing, or he could mutter something to an associate, but to make a concrete policy move would be something else entirely.

The Anglican business in this context strikes me as something of a hobby, but not something in the end that was very important. But dilettantism has always been an integral feature of Anglo-Catholicism, and I suppose Law was actually faithful to that aspect of it.

It reminds me, actually, of Fr Ian, the rector of the Anglo-Catholic St Thomas Episcopal Hollywood. His observance of liturgical specifics was punctilious. On the other hand, if the spirit moved him, he'd insert passages into the text of the liturgy that seemed right to him, although by that point, the pew missal was only loosely based on the Book of Common Prayer anyhow.

Anglo-Catholicism has a lot of flexibility built into it. This may have been part of its appeal to Law.

Bernard Law: The Catechism Translation

Nearly all of last year's obituaries for Cardinal Law stressed his "conservatism". Crux, for instance, said

In Boston, Law became known as a stalwart of the conservative wing of the American Catholic church, and was a leader throughout the 1980s and 90s for a strong reassertion of traditional Catholic identity after a period of liberalization following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Among other things, Law was one of the early proponents of the publication of an official catechism, meaning an official compendium of church teaching, which was eventually published under John Paul II in the early 1990s.

Just in passing, how would Anglican syncretism promote "a strong reassertion of traditional Catholic identity"? But I'll let that go. Philip Lawler in The Faithful Departed covers Law's time in Boston and recounts episode after episode where Law betrayed "conservative" or "traditionalist" principles. I'm increasingly convinced that throughout his career, Law found it convenient to seem progressive or conservative in turn, but he betrayed either side whenever it suited him.

The visitor who's provided a great deal of personal perspective on Law has been anxious to point out Law's peculiar role in the translation of the John Paul II Catechism. We've already looked at Law's role in starting the project, and I've already asked whether it's a two-edged sword. If you can have an official catechism, doesn't that make it easier to hedge Church teaching, something we've already seen with the wording on capital punishment?

But my visitor thinks Law's role was actually subversive in other ways. The book Flawed Expectations: The Reception of the Catechism of the Catholic Church by Msgr Kenneth J Wrenn and Kenneth D Whitehead is available online, having gone out of print at Ignatius Press. Chapter 4 specifically addresses Law's role in the translation.

Cardinal Law, of course, had been highly instrumental at the 1985 Synod of Bishops in getting the whole project of a universal catechism launched in the first place; he had also served as a member of the Commission on the Catechism for the Universal Church. . . . Few deserved greater personal credit for the whole vast enterprise of the Catechism than Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston.

The original draft of the Catechism was written in French. It was determined that a single translator from French to English would be used to maintain stylistic and lexicographical continuity. However, the translator chosen, Fr. Douglas Kent Clark, had connections with the Boston seminary, whose rector would review the draft, and with Law himself, with whom he'd discussed early versions of the Catechism. According to the Ignatius Press book's authors,

one of us, Msgr. Wrenn, came into possession of a copy of the Clark translation. After reading and studying this translation, and consulting with others about it, he became greatly disturbed since he found serious—and he thought obvious—deficiencies. He soon sought the assistance of another New York archdiocesan priest, also fluent in French, Fr. Gerald E. Murray, and the two of them spent many hours laboriously comparing the Clark translation with the original French text. It soon became abundantly clear that this English translation that had been submitted to Rome for approval fell far short of the standard required for the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Wrenn's and Whitehead's reservations were echoed at higher levels in the Vatican, and a number of confidential meetings ensued.

By the end of March 1993, however, further press accounts had surfaced that indicated that the meeting had in fact been highly critical of the translation, mostly, it seemed —but not entirely—because of the inclusive-language issue. One press account related that "Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger told Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston that there was too much inclusive language", while another press account reported that "the Vatican has delayed publication of the English translation of the Roman Catholic Church's Universal Catechism, concerned that language used to assuage feminists could alter the text's theological meaning."

Beyond that,

It should be further emphasized that the defects of the Clark translation were not limited to the question of in­clusive language. The same Peter Hebblethwaite whom we have been quoting—mostly because he was the principal journalist who continued to write about the issue—had reported, following the February 1993 Rome meeting with Cardinal Law and Bishop Konstant, that only "some of the objections" to the translation went back to the inclusive language issue. Other objections were ascribed to what Hebblethwaite coyly styled "an ideology that dare not speak its name". . .

Throughout the dispute, Law was on the side of Clark and his translation. However, Rome eventually turned to Archbishop of Hobart, Tasmania Eric D'Arcy to revise the key offending elements of the Clark translation. Law, however, supported the original Clark translation for as long as he could.

I'm increasingly convinced that it's a major mistake to regard Law as a traditionalist or a conservative force, and beyond that, it's a misinterpretation of the record to see Law's handling of the abuse crisis as an uncharacteristic blot on an otherwise commendable record.

Some Reflections On Anglicanorum Coetibus

Yesterday's post on the fizzling of Anglicanorum coetibus brought a visitor with some knowledge of the Vatican to comment,

It seems as though Pope Francis is all for ecumenism if it has a charismatic or evangelical edge. His distaste for 'traditionalism' [can be] seen from the moment of his election appearance on the balcony whereupon an aide attempted to hand him the traditional regalia for the first meeting with the world and was rebuffed with the words 'the carnival is over'. I would not be surprised if he has sent new directives forth to slow down the mechanism of AC.

My own view is a little bit different. If I buy a car that won't run, it doesn't matter if someone tells me to slow it down or not, it certainly isn't going to go fast, no matter what I do. I think it was always a bad idea. The record we have is that a proposal for an Anglican personal prelature reached Cardinal Ratzinger's desk in 1993 and was drafted in final form by Jeffrey Steenson in 1994. However, John Paul II was lukewarm at best and wanted a vote from the CDF, which apparently everyone knew wouldn't pass, and the matter was dropped until well into Benedict's pontificate.

However, the idea of a personal prelature went at least back to the 1980 meeting between Fr Barker and then-Bp Law's canonist in Chicago, but it was dropped then as well. It was never a good idea, it would seem. The prime mover in 1980, 1993, and 2007-2010 was Bernard Law in every case. Why was he behind it? The "ecumenism" he sponsored in the 1960s that made his reputation was evangelical civil rights-based activism, not high-church Anglican rapprochement.

I passed this question back to my visitor, who replied

I think Law was under orders from someone. I remember him once referring to a move to placate the charismatic movement by giving them office space and staff in Belgium under Cdl Suenens. I could tell it was done with consultation.

And that's about all we know. One thing that's come into my head recently is revisiting the question of what might have become of Anglicanorum coetibus had David Moyer been named US ordinary instead of Jeffrey Steenson. Recall that Anglo-Catholic blogosphere speculation had Moyer or Fr Phillips as the front-runners before Steenson's designation was announced. Steenson, of course, had a history with Law via back-channel communication since the 1980s, long before he became an Episcopalian bishop.

I think Law had Steenson's measure -- a careerist, a very cautious guy, without a whole lot of imagination. He'd do what he was told. In fact, I'd say he was a patsy. He was what the powers that be wanted, and after only a few years, he was expendable. But he was replaced by Steven Lopes, from what we've come to see only a fast-track golden boy of the sort who isn't going to rock any boats himself. But I don't think this reflects any real change between Benedict and Francis. They're still trying to drive the same car that won't run.

The question is who benefits, other than the used car salesman. After all, you could always decide to cut your losses and buy another car, or decide just to ride the bus. It's in someone's interest to pretend they're still trying to change the sparkplugs or something.

This brings me back to David Moyer's homily at St Mary of the Angels Hollywood in January 2011, soon after he'd become the parish's bishop. It's stayed with me, and that's reason enough to ask what kind of a shepherd he might have been to the new ordinariate. He'd looked around the parish, apparently for the first time, and in the context of the bright future he foresaw for the US ordinariate, he said it would be necessary to do a lot of expansion on the parish site. That, in retrospect, was an interesting observation.

After a few years at a successful Catholic parish, I'm beginning to see that if a parish isn't growing, there's a problem. I think Moyer understood this. The nave at St Mary of the Angels was (the place is now closed and unlikely to reopen) at best cozy, with a capacity somewhere around 100. It started as, and was always going to be, a church around the corner, a boutique item. This isn't how the Catholic Church operates, and I don't see how a boutique division fits.

If nothing else, I think David Moyer had a grasp of this issue. Whatever he might have done with the US ordinariate in some alternate universe, I can't imagine the outcome we presently see would be the same. Except, of course, that everyone in authority had Moyer's measure just as clearly as they had Steenson's, and that was never going to happen.

Anglicanorum Coetibus Has Fizzled

The three ordinaries of the Anglican ordinariates established under Anglicanorum coetibus meet each year and pose for pictures. The crack team of dilettantes at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society blog is on the case. However, no report of the interview cited was issued on the blog, and aside from the photo, no link to any published interview was given. My regular correspondent had to wait until the November issue of Portal magazine, the UK ordinariate's monthly, to learn anything about the meeting in London last month. The issue can be found here.

My correspondent's take:

As you can see on pages 12 and 13, there was clearly nothing to report. These men have nothing to say to each other. The UK Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham struggles to achieve any meaningful liturgical identity. The US Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter sees home schooling as a means of attracting membership, and hopes that the Gilbertines will be a "useful model" for religious communities in the future. Who knows what the Australian Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross, a few hundred strong, is up to?

Bp Lopes also noted during a talk at Walsingham that the majority of OCSP clergy do not have "other roles" such as chaplaincies and diocesan parish responsibilities. This is misleading, as most of these men are financially supported by TEC or other pensions. When that generation of clergy retires again, Bp Lopes will have to find diocesan jobs for their replacements or fold their mission parishes. If this model is not working well for the OOLW he should be worried. In any event, the Annual Conference seems to have been singularly devoid of meaningful content. A year from now there is supposed to be a symposium in Rome celebrating the tenth anniversary of Anglicanorum coetibus. I do not foresee a much more substantive outcome than this non-event.

I haven't addressed the ordinariates for a while, in large part because I think there's less and less to say about them, while there's more and more to say about everything else. It's worth noting that among the three ordinaries, I don't think their total flock worldwide amounts to five figures, the size of a single average US parish. And it isn't growing -- yet again, it seems as though Houston, after years of supposed effort, is unable to produce a census of its membership.

My wife and I met with our pastor this past week to discuss supporting parish projects, and among the issues we covered, he never quite seemed to get around to asking if we felt the liturgy there was Anglican enough. Instead, he was concerned about parishioners leaving the Church due to the real crises in Washington, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Rome, and nearly everywhere else.

On the other hand, I was watching a Patrick Coffin YouTube presentation on Medjugorje, where he said the cult represented a form of "fantasy catholicism", where people could wrap themselves in comfortable bromides that seemed sorta-kinda catholic, but weren't -- and I would add, are potentially dangerous, in that they're misleading about the true teachings of the Church. Having recently learned about "centering prayer", I'd say this is another form of "fantasy catholicism".

Dare I suggest that Anglicanorum coetibus has turned out to be yet another? What puzzles me is that, even after five former Episcopalian parishes made their suicide leap and left that denomination in 1977, they had to wait several years for a conference to decide just what the "Anglican patrimony" actually was. I'm not sure if that conference ever issued a report. But that doesn't matter; there was another such conference at Oxford a couple of years ago; I'm not sure if it ever decided anything more definite.

Yet the dilettantes and amateurs at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society confidently issue pronouncements on the precious spiritual treasures of the Anglican patrimony all the time. They have their tiny groups that one day will maybe look like All Saints Margaret Street, if they can get a few hundred like-minded congregants to supplement the couple of dozen they have and maybe even start a building fund and get some good vestments and an organ and hire a choir and stuff. Meantime, they can dream. No need to go looking for a reverent OF mass, they'll have something much better one day.

And certainly, no need to seek out good diocesan priests, an active and reverent diocesan parish with a real program and school, and actively support it with sacrificial giving.

My regular correspondent added,

Unfortunately most of the visible OCSP spokespeople have fallen into the trap of seizing on the Crisis as a stick to beat perceived "liberals" with, or at least a reminder that by moving into a small gated community they have avoided the problems of the larger metropolis. Both of these approaches must be severely off-putting to those contemplating coming to the Church from another denomination, or from unbelief, who should after all be the focus of evangelism, not disaffected Catholics.

The Turmoil In The Papal Foundation

For a good part of my working career, I had to deal with internal and external auditors. I figured out pretty quickly that it's always best to tell these guys what they want to know, and if you develop a good relationship, they can be useful friends. Or not. But never, ever get them mad at you. I worked at a couple of companies that ran into disagreements with their outside auditors or the audit committees of their boards, and the result was never good -- the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Internal Revenue Service was usually at the door soon afterward.

So in going over the recent news about the Papal Foundation, the biggest red flag I saw was this:

Late last year and in early January, the Papal Foundation approved initial assistance packages of $8 million and $5 million for the Istituto Dermopatico dell’Immacolata, a Rome-based outfit wrapped up in scandals involving alleged money laundering and reeling from a roughly $1 billion siphoning scheme. (A four-year investigation led to 24 separate indictments last year.) The Vatican named new hospital leadership in 2017.

An unofficial summary prepared by James Longon, the chairman of the Papal Foundation’s audit committee, declares: “. . . In many respects, the decision to grant $25 million to a dermatology hospital in Rome without proper due diligence is a disaster for the Papal Foundation.”

The board maintains that due diligence was conducted, but Longon resigned from the committee and as a trustee.

When the chairman of a board's audit committee resigns in protest, this isn't just because the CEO forgot his daughter's name or something, count on it.

Interestingly, the most perceptive reporting on this issue in the US (the article cited above is from the UK Catholic Herald) has been in Nonprofit Quarterly, not in the Catholic press or blogosphere. In one article last March, it wrote:

The 85 individuals and couples listed as stewards each pledge a gift of at least $1 million, payable over a ten-year period. In reaction to the concerns expressed by the stewards who provide much of the foundation’s financial support, the cardinals have “walked back their promise of assistance” to the hospital and Cardinal Wuerl has requested that the Vatican not accept $12 million in funds previously approved by the foundation for the hospital’s support. The cardinals have also proposed giving lay members of the foundation more of a voice in how grants of $1 million or more are awarded.

The Wall Street Journal quotes one anonymous donor who has suspended his annual contribution: “I would feel a lot more confident with my money there, and recommending to other people to be stewards, if I knew it was being managed by business people and not theologians and priests. There’s a risk of killing the goose that laid the golden egg.”

Despite a specific mission to support the pope and the Catholic church, and despite by-laws that explicitly place ultimate decision-making authority in the hands of the American cardinals who constitute a minority of its board, the Papal Foundation is finding there are other constituencies that must be satisfied in order for the nonprofit’s mission to be pursued sustainably and successfully.

Longon was replaced on the audit committee by Timothy Busch, a wealthy Californian who founded the Napa Institute, was the force behind the Diocese of Orange acquiring the Crystal Cathedral, and is, according to this piece, closely allied with Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.

The visitor who sent me the Italian links in yesterday's post suggests that ultimately, the Vatican financial scandals could affect its diplomatic status as a state. According to a recent law review article,

Statehood brings with it obligations to accept responsibility for internationally wrongful acts that were committed by, or can be attributed to, the state. The Vatican has been allowed, in effect, to select attributes of statehood that it wishes to enjoy (such as those conferring powers, influence and immunities) without accompanying those privileges with an acknowledgement of the obligations that normally attend statehood.

Note that very recently, the Vatican cited sovereign immunity in refusing to allow Cardinal Ladaria to appear before a French court. The law review article predates this, but it's clearly the sort of case it anticipates. As the opportunity arises, I'll discuss this in more detail. But I think, again, that the head of a board's audit committee doesn't resign in pique just because the CEO forgot his daughter's name.