Human nature has many home truths, ugly aspects of character and behavior which are difficult to unlearn. Of these, the most consequential to family, culture and society is our relationship with power, both in the lusting for it and the execution of it. When checked, power in the proper hands can bring about massive, positive change; but when unchecked, when humans are entrusted with autonomous authority, painful experience tells us that, far too often, bloodshed and the loss of innocence are sadly and disastrously inevitable. And even though the Catholic Church cloaks itself in holiness, Mr. Berry illustrates, in Render Unto Rome that righteousness is no obstacle to the human temptation to abuse power.
Mr. Berry, an investigative reporter, has spent 20 years at the tip of the spear which, in its insistent probings into the Catholic Church, has been revealing the extent to which the Vatican has been covering up for its sinful priests. Though Render Unto Rome features its fair share of victims, and the extent to which they were protected by an institution supposedly shrouded in divinity, this effort, Mr. Berry's third book on the recent scandals which have been rocking Catholicism, focuses more on the finances of the Catholic Church, examining both its assets and how those assets are deployed. After explaining some of the accounting tricks which help to make the Church seem worth far less than it actually is, he launches into his primary premise, the consequences for the Church and its adherents of the many, substantial civil settlements which have threatened to bankrupt numerous diocese in the United States.
These eight and nine figure awards, court-ordered settlements meant to comfort and repay the many victims of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of priests, necessitated, in Massachusetts, Ohio and California, a wholesale restructuring of worship. To cut costs and pay the bills, diocese suppressed (closed down) churches, seizing their assets and selling them to fund the settlements. Unsurprisingly, these desperate and heavy-handed edicts angered the many thousands of affected worshippers who, despite doing nothing wrong, had their churches sold out from underneath them by a Vatican caught with its hand in a very naughty cookie jar.
Though the men who ordered the suppressions, and the men and women who fought them, spin through Mr. Berry's riveting chronicle, equally prominent are the abusers, the Orders they founded and the cultures that, for so long, shielded them from exposure. Though there are many names featured in this gallery of pedophiles, none are more prominent, here, than Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of a Christian order which claims tens of thousands of followers. Mr. Berry relentlessly exposes Maciel's unpardonable acts while holding him up as an exemplar of the many abusers which have forever altered the lives of innocents entrusted into their care.
Though Mr. Berry's account suffers from a certain academic dryness, this is, for the most part, an unavoidable consequence of laying out the complicated means by which the Church handles money. This aridness is more than made up for by the flood of information and emotion that comprises the rest of his investigation into the temporal workings of a church which was, for far too long, shamefully, willfully blind to the crimes perpetrated by its most zealous devotees. The reader is not informed about the immense power of archbishops, who are effectively the banks and the auditors of their diocese, he is made aware of the extent to which these bishops have squandered the money of faithful parishioners on the absurd rehabilitation of abusive priests and the cynical schemes of shysters. This is a thoroughly informative and profoundly disturbing piece of journalism which, if it does nothing else, must surely make every reader contemplate a truth far more profound than the cruel crimes of an insensitive church, that man is, by his nature, tempted to test his power, that he will, if unchecked, abuse that power, and that abuse of power is only energized by the expansion of that man's power. No one, and especially no institution, no matter how holy it claims to be, is immune from this truth, the denial of which only hastens ones descend into fantasy. (4/5 Stars)
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