Jason Berry, author of "Render Unto Rome"
Since the 1980s, he has researched Church scandals both financial and lascivious, as a living. Perhaps more accurately, a calling.
On Thursday night, Berry took to the lectern at a North Naples church to advocate before an audience of around 120 people for hefty reforms, from Vatican City to local parishes.
Bishops and cardinals that should be removed. The creation of a justice system within the Church. Fiscal transparency from the top down. The problems are real and they are deep, he said. And because of them, he said the Church is "eroding."
"We're dealing with a hierarchy that is afraid," Berry told the group at Vanderbilt Presbyterian Church. "Afraid of women, of truth, of a bonafide justice system. And we need light, we need truth. That's what we're all pushing for."
There are only three dioceses — geographical administrative divisions established by the Church and headed by a bishop — that maintain a level of financial transparency that would "pass muster," Berry told the audience: Boston, Kalamazoo, and Los Angeles.
Other dioceses, as well as the Vatican, need to be held accountable for the money collected weekly from churches around the world, he said. Berry's most recent book, "Render Unto Rome," explores the Church's financial underpinnings.
"I think that most people want to know about it, but don't think it's germane to their parish, their pastor, their spiritual life," Berry said
Now on his third local visit as part of an annual speaker series organized by the Southwest Florida chapter of Voice of the Faithful, an organization that pushes for Catholic Church reform, Berry is forthcoming about how he grapples with what his research yields, and how he remains a Catholic.
"How do you make the leap of faith?... How do you reconcile the weight of corruption against the purity of one's beliefs?" Berry said. "I think that's a struggle we're all going through."
In the audience Thursday night were Catholics and members of other faiths, several of whom came from cities where sex abuse claims rocked the Catholic community. One attendee, a self-identified non-Catholic from Philadelphia, said the effect the scandal had there was "hurtful" to her Catholic friends.
Berry, now in his 60s, forged his professional identity as an investigator of the Catholic Church in the 1980s, covering the sex crimes of a Louisiana priest against altar boys. In the decades since, Berry explored more scandals in news articles, books, and a documentary film.
"(He) spends more of his career time and talent on the crimes within the Catholic Church than anybody else is," said Peg Clark, local head of Voice of the Faithful, of why the group invited Berry back repeatedly since 2006.
"He who knows well the failings of the Catholic Church," Clark told the audience, "still keeps his faith."
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