Authors: David Yallop
The new Pope very quickly demonstrated, in the words of Monsignor Loris Capovilla, the former secretary of Pope John XXIII, that ‘there was more in his shop than he put in the window’. When Foreign Minister Monsignor Agostino Casaroli came to the Pope with seven questions concerning the Church’s relationship with various Eastern European countries, Albino Luciani promptly gave him answers on five of them and asked for a little time to consider the other two.
A dazed Casaroli returned to his office and told a colleague what had occurred. The priest enquired: ‘Were they the correct solutions?’
‘In my view, totally. It would have taken me a year to get those responses from Paul.’
Another of the problems tossed into the new Pope’s lap concerned Ireland and the Church’s attitude towards the IRA. Many considered that the Catholic Church had been less than forthright in its condemnation of the continuing carnage occurring in Northern Ireland. A few weeks before Luciani’s election the then Archbishop O’Fiaich had hit the headlines with his denunciation of the conditions in the Maze prison, Long Kesh. O’Fiaich had visited the prison and later talked of his ‘shock at the stench and filth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the walls’. There was much more in a similar vein. Nowhere in his very long statement, released to the news media with considerable professionalism, did the Archbishop acknowledge that the prison conditions were self-created by the prisoners.
Ireland was without a cardinal; a great deal of pressure was exerted by a variety of people attempting to influence Luciani. Some elements
were for O’Fiaich, others felt his previous promotion to the archdiocese of Armagh had proved an unmitigated disaster.
Albino Luciani returned the dossier on O’Fiaich to his Secretary for State with a shake of the head and a one-line epitaph: ‘I think Ireland deserves better.’ The search for a cardinal was extended. It ended when Luciani’s successor gave O’Fiaich a cardinal’s hat.
In September 1978 the troubles in Lebanon were not considered to rank particularly high in the list of the world’s major problems. For two years there had been a kind of peace, interspersed with sporadic fighting between Syrian troops and Christians. Long before any other Head of State, the quiet little priest from the Veneto saw the Lebanon as a potential slaughterhouse. He discussed the problem at considerable length with Casaroli and told him that he wished to visit Beirut before Christmas 1978.
On September 15th, one of the men whom Luciani saw during his morning audiences was Cardinal Gabriel-Marie Garrone, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education. This particular audience is an excellent example of just how remarkable were the talents of Luciani. Garrone had come to discuss a document called
Sapienta Christiana,
which dealt with the apostolic constitution and with the directives and rules governing all Catholic faculties throughout the world. As long ago as the early 1960s, Vatican Council II had revised the guidelines for seminarians. After two years of internal discussion the Roman Curia had sent its proposals to the world’s bishops for their recommendations. All the relevant documents had then been submitted to two more Curial meetings attended by non-Curial consultants. The results were then examined by at least six Curial departments and the final document had been handed to Pope Paul VI in April 1978, sixteen years after the proposed reforms had first been discussed. Paul had wanted to issue the document on June 29th, the Feast Day of St Peter and St Paul, but a document with a gestation period of some sixteen years could not be rushed so quickly through the Curia’s department of translation. By the time they had the document prepared, Pope Paul was dead. Any initiative unproclaimed at the time of a Pope’s death falls, unless his successor approves it. Consequently, Cardinal Garrone approached his audience with the new Pope with considerable trepidation. Sixteen years of long, hard work could be tossed into the waste-paper basket if Luciani rejected the document. The former seminary teacher from Belluno told Garrone that he had spent most of the previous day studying the document. Then without referring to a copy of it he began to discuss it
at length and in great detail. Garrone sat astonished at the Pope’s grasp and understanding of such a highly complex document. At the end of the audience, Luciani advised him that the document had his approval and that it should be published on December 15th.
Like Casaroli, Baggio, Lorscheider and a number of other men, Garrone left a discussion with Luciani in complete awe. Returning to his office he chanced to meet Monsignor Scalzotto of Propaganda Fide and remarked: ‘I have just met a great Pope.’
The ‘great Pope’ meanwhile continued to work his way through the mountain of problems left by Paul. One such was Cardinal John Cody, Cardinal of one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful dioceses, Chicago.
For a cardinal, any cardinal, to be considered by the Vatican to be a major problem was unusual, but then Cody was a very unusual man. The allegations made about Cardinal Cody in the ten years before Luciani’s Papacy began were extraordinary. If even 5 per cent of them were true then Cody had no business being a priest, let alone Cardinal of Chicago.
Before his promotion to the Chicago Archdiocese in 1965 he had run the diocese of New Orleans. Many of the priests who attempted to work with him in New Orleans still have the scars to prove it. One recalled: ‘When that son of a bitch was given Chicago, we threw a party and sang the “Te Deum” (Hymn of Thanksgiving). As far as we were concerned our gain was Chicago’s loss.’
When I discussed the Cardinal’s subsequent career in Chicago with Father Andrew Greeley, a noted Catholic sociologist, author and long a critic of Cody, I observed that another Chicago priest had compared Cardinal Cody with Captain Queeg, the paranoid, despotic naval captain in
The Caine Mutiny.
Father Greeley’s response was: ‘I think that’s unfair to Captain Queeg.’
In the years that followed Cardinal Cody’s appointment to Chicago it became fashionable in the Windy City to compare him with Mayor Richard Daley, a man whose practices in running the city were democratic only by accident. There was one basic difference. Every four years Daley was, at least in theory, answerable to the electors. If they could overcome his political machine, they could vote him out of office. Cody had not been elected. Short of very dramatic action from Rome he was there for life. Cody was fond of observing: ‘I am answerable to no one except Rome and God.’ Events were to prove that Cody declined to be answerable to Rome. That left God.
When Cody arrived in Chicago he had the reputation of being an
excellent manager of finances, a progressive liberal who had battled long and hard for school integration in New Orleans, and a very demanding prelate. He soon lost the first two attributes. In early June, 1970, whilst treasurer of the American Church he put 2 million dollars in Penn Central stocks. A few days later the shares collapsed and the company went bankrupt. He had illegally invested the money during the administration of his duly elected successor to whom Cody refused to hand over the account books until well after the loss. He survived the scandal.
Within weeks of his arrival in Chicago, he had demonstrated his own particular brand of progressive liberalism towards some of his priests. In the files of his predecessor, Cardinal Albert Meyer, he discovered a list of ‘problem’ priests, men who were alcoholic, senile, or unable to cope.
Cody began to spend Sunday afternoons arriving at their rectories. He then personally dismissed the priests, giving them two weeks to leave their homes. There were no pension funds, no retirement schemes or insurance policies for priests in Chicago in the mid 1960s. Many of the men were over seventy. Cody simply tossed them out on to the street.
He began to move priests from one part of the city to another, without consultation. He took similar action with regard to closing convents, rectories and schools. On one occasion, by order of Cody, a wrecking crew began to demolish a rectory and a convent while the occupants were bathing and having breakfast.
Cody’s basic problem would appear to have been a profound inability to recognize the Second Vatican Council as a fact of life. There had been endless talk at the Council of power sharing, of a collegial style of decision making. The news never reached the Cardinal’s mansion.
In a diocese with 2.4 million Catholics, the battle lines began to be drawn between factions for and against Cody. The majority of Catholics in the city were in the meantime wondering what was going on.
The priests formed a Trade Union of sorts, the ACP (Association of Chicago Priests). Cody very largely ignored their requests. Letters asking for meetings were not answered. Phone calls found the Cardinal constantly ‘unavailable’. Some stayed to continue the fight for a more democratically run Church. Many left. In a decade, one third of Chicago’s clergy left the priesthood. Throughout these massive demonstrations proving that there was something very rotten
in the State of Illinois, Cardinal Cody continued to insist that his opponents were ‘merely the highly vocal minority’.
The Cardinal also pilloried the local Press, declaring them hostile. In truth the Chicago news and television media were extraordinarily fair and tolerant during most of Cody’s reign.
The man who fought for integration in New Orleans became known in Chicago as the man who closed the black schools, claiming that the Church could no longer afford to run them; this in a diocese with an annual revenue approaching 300 million dollars.
Like much else that Cody did, many of the school closures were effected without reference to anyone, including the school board. When a cry of ‘racist’ went up, Cody defended himself by stating that many of the blacks were non-Catholics and that he did not consider the Church had a duty to educate middle-class black Protestants. But the label of racism was a hard one for him to throw off.
As the years passed, the charges and allegations against Cody increased tenfold. His conflict with large sections of his own clergy grew bitter. His paranoia blossomed.
He began to tell tales of how he had been employed on secret espionage work for the US Government. He recounted his contributions to the FBI. He told priests that he had also undertaken special assignments on behalf of the CIA which included flying into Saigon. The details were always vague but if Cody was telling the truth he had been involved in secret service activities on behalf of the Government since the early 1940s. It would seem that John Patrick Cody, the son of a St Louis fireman, had lived many lives.
The reputation for financial astuteness which he had brought to Chicago, a reputation which was rather dented by the 2 million dollar Penn Central debacle, took a further knock when some of Cody’s opponents began to dig into his earlier, highly colourful career. In between his real or imaginary flights over enemy territories he had unwittingly succeeded in bringing some of the Church to a state of poverty, though not quite in the manner envisaged by Albino Luciani. He had left the diocese of Kansas City, St Joseph, 30 million dollars in debt. He had performed the same feat in New Orleans, which gave added significance to the Te Deum of thanks when he departed. At least he left a permanent memento of his stay in Kansas City, having spent substantial amounts of money to gild the dome of the restored down-town cathedral.
He began to monitor the day-by-day movements of priests and nuns he suspected of disloyalty. Dossiers were assembled. Secret
interrogations of friends of ‘suspects’ became the norm. What all of this had to do with the Gospel of Christ is unclear.
When some of the activities described above became cause for complaint to Rome by the Chicago clergy, Pope Paul VI worried and agonized.
It would seem abundantly clear that the most senior member of the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago had demonstrated by the early 1970s that he was unfit to preside over the diocese, yet the Pope, with a strange sense of priorities, hesitated. Cody’s peace of mind seemed to weigh more heavily than the fate of 2.4 million Catholics.
One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Cody affair is that the man controlled, apparently without reference to anyone, the entire revenue of the Catholic Church in Chicago. A sane, highly intelligent man would be stretched to control with total efficiency an annual sum of between 250 and 300 million dollars. That it should be placed in the hands of a man like Cody defies explanation.
The total assets of the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago were by 1970 in excess of one billion dollars. Because of Cardinal Cody’s refusal to publish an annual certified account, priests in various parts of the city took to holding back sums of money, which in happier days would have been destined for control by the Cardinal. Eventually in 1971, six years after his despotic rule had begun, Cody deigned to publish what passed for a set of annual accounts. They were a curious affair. They did not reveal real estate investments. They did not include the share portfolio investments. With regard to the revenue from cemeteries they did give, at last, some evidence of a life after death. The movement of the profit was very lively. Six months before the figures had been published, Cody had confided to an aide that the figure was 50 million dollars. When the accounts were made public this had dropped to 36 million dollars. Perhaps for a man who could simultaneously be in Rome, Saigon, the White House, the Vatican and the Cardinal’s mansion in Chicago, misplacing some 14 million dollars’ worth of cemetery revenue was child’s play.
Sixty million dollars’ worth of parish funds were on deposit with the Chicago chancery. Cody declined to tell anyone where the money was invested, or who was benefiting from the interest.