There’s a locked room in the chancery of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany that tells you everything you need to know about American Catholic power in decline. No gold chalices, no jewel-encrusted reliquaries, no illuminated manuscripts worthy of a Medici cardinal’s envy. Just filing cabinets. Rows and rows of filing cabinets documenting, with the meticulous bureaucratic precision that would make any Vatican functionary proud, which priests had violated which children, when, and how often.
Bishop Howard J. Hubbard kept the key for forty years. And when he finally died—having just married a woman in what can only be described as his final ecclesiastical middle finger to Rome—that locked room became the Rosetta Stone for understanding how an entire regional culture of Catholic institutions learned to operate: document internally, lie externally, and when the bill comes due, file for bankruptcy and blame the lawyers.
Because here’s the thing about Albany’s Catholic establishment that nobody wants to say out loud at the Wolfert’s Roost Country Club or over drinks at 677 Prime: the sexual abuse scandal wasn’t an aberration. It was a template. The same institutional muscle memory that allowed bishops to reassign pedophile priests while filing false reports with authorities also allowed them to loot a hospital pension fund while filing false reports with the IRS. The same boardroom reflexes that shuttered a 103-year-old college with seven months’ notice—leaving students mid-semester and faculty without severance—also allowed the region’s largest healthcare network to sue poor patients for medical debt while collecting millions in state funds earmarked to help those same patients…