2012-06-23     A summary of this article is at CathNews of June 22

	ROBERT   MICKENS
	Meet one of the most influential Catholics in the world
	THE TABLET  16 June 2012

This is Carl Anderson. You may not know him. But he is one of the most influential Catholics in the world
Think of the controversies that have beset the Catholic Church in recent years – troubles at the Vatican Bank, investigations into American women Religious, the introduction of the new English Missal, the fight with President Obama over health care. Linked to all of them is Carl Anderson, head of a wealthy lay organisation, the Knights of Columbus. How does he manage to have a finger in so many pies? Our Rome correspondent investigates

No one knows how difficult it is to serve both God and Mammon as much as the men who run the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the so-called Vatican Bank. Turmoil over the recent ousting of its president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, has not only made that clear, but has also put a spotlight on the Vatican’s less than successful efforts to “modernise” this ambiguous financial institution and bring it into line with European regulations.

The reasons why Gotti Tedeschi, an Italian financier and member of Opus Dei, failed in this task remain mysterious. But it became obvious months ago that his bosses had lost confidence in him. Now they are looking to an American lawyer and insurance mogul to resurrect this ambitious enterprise. He is Carl Anderson, the 62-year-old head of the Knights of Columbus, a US-based organisation that describes itself as “the world’s foremost Catholic fraternal benefit society”. He has been on the IOR’s five-man board of directors since September 2009. As its recording sec- retary, he wrote the unflattering 24 March memorandum to officially inform Gotti Tedeschi of his firing, a decision that the five- member commission of cardinals that oversees the IOR then ratified.

Many of Anderson’s fellow Catholic Americans probably did not realise he was so closely associated with the Vatican Bank until its latest mess. That would have been because most of them grew up with an image of the Knights of Columbus as a group of Catholic men who sponsored Friday fish fries at their local meeting hall, provided sword- and-plume honour guards at special episcopal Masses and gathered each week for a game of cards over a few beers or whisky sours.

In fact, the Knights is a wealthy organisation with assets of US$15.6 billion (£10bn), which it dispenses to charities and other worthy causes. It claims to have given away nearly US$1.5bn (£965 million) over the past decade, to beneficiaries including projects and activities sponsored by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the Holy See. The money is presumed to come from interest and investments generated from the multi- billion-dollar life insurance company that exists exclusively for the Knights and their families.

When Fr Michael McGivney established the Knights of Columbus in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1882, the main purpose was to provide financial support for the widows and orphans of its members. Now that there are 1.8 million men belonging to some 14,000 chapters (mostly in the US and Canada, but also in Mexico, the Philippines, Poland and several Caribbean countries), it is easy to understand how the organisation’s wealth has expanded so impressively. The empire now has US$80bn (£51.4bn) of insurance in force with 1,400 full-time agents in the field.

Carl Anderson has been involved with the Knights, which calls itself “the strong right arm of the Church”, since the 1980s. For the past 12 years he has been the Supreme Knight, a lucrative position with an annual combined salary and benefits package of roughly US$1.2m (£772,051). The Supreme Knight also oversees a group that helps bankroll the hierarchy’s projects and mission. Even in the world of religion, it is not unheard of for he who pays the piper sometimes gets to pick the tune. By virtue of his office, the Supreme Knight is considered a trusted Catholic layman. So like his predecessor, Virgil Dechant (1977– 2000), Anderson is a member of such Roman Curia offices as the Pontifical Council for the Laity (2002), the Pontifical Academy for Life (1998) and the Pontifical Council for the Family (2008), as well as a consultor to two other pontifical councils – Justice and Peace (2003) and Social Communications (2007). The Knights give thousands of dollars each year to these offices. They have also pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into an ongoing project begun in 1981 to refurbish St Peter’s Basilica, largely financed the Vatican- sponsored visitation of the communities of US women Religious, and helped to substantially cover the budget of the Vox Clara Committee, the group of English-speaking bishops set up to oversee the new translation of the Roman Missal. But Carl Anderson’s influence in the USCCB and at the Vatican is not merely derivative of his position as head of the Knights of Columbus. It is also due to the personal contacts with movers and shakers in the Catholic hierarchy who he began to cultivate long before he rose to the pinnacle of his fraternal order. Some of these relationships were probably forged during his years in Washington DC, where he practised law and then worked for President Ronald Reagan from 1983 to 1987.

It was during this period that Mgr William Lori, a man with whom Anderson would later form a powerful allegiance, was a personal aide to Washington’s Cardinal James Hickey. Lori became an auxiliary bishop in Washington in 1995, but in 2001 – only a year after Anderson became Supreme Knight – he was appointed Bishop of Bridgeport (Connecticut), just a 21-mile drive from the Knights’ head- quarters in New Haven. Bishop Lori was elected Supreme Chaplain of the Knights in 2005, and then last March he was named as Archbishop of Baltimore, even though he was not thought to be in line for the prestigious post. His appointment came just a few months after he was put in charge of the USCCB’s high-powered ad hoc committee for religious liberty, the body leading the fight against President Obama’s contraception mandate for health-care coverage. Significantly, Anderson is a consultant to the committee and the Knights of Columbus are one of its principal financial and political supporters.

Anderson also began to consolidate important connections in Rome well before becoming Supreme Knight, particularly during the years between 1983 and 1998 when he served as a visiting professor at the Lateran University’s John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. During that period several other churchmen who are now cardinals and leading Vatican officials were also professors or deans at the university. They include Cardinals Carlo Caffarra (Bologna) and Marc Ouellet (Congregation for Bishops), as well as Archbishop Rino Fisichella (Pontifical Council for the New Evangelisation), the latter who also worked with Anderson briefly at the Academy for Life. Anderson also would have become acquainted with Cardinals Edwin O’Brien (Knights of the Holy Sepulchre) and Timothy Dolan (New York), who were rectors during this period at the Pontifical North American College.

But perhaps the most important contact Anderson made was with Cardinal Angelo Scola, currently Archbishop of Milan and Italy’s leading candidate for the papacy. The ambitious and industrious Fr Scola taught at the John Paul II Institute from 1982 until 1999, when he was named Bishop of Grosseto. When he returned as bishop-rector of the Lateran in 1995, he carried out much-needed, multi-million-dollar renovations before taking his building campaign north in 2002 as Patriarch of Venice. One of his first ambitious projects was to re-open and expand a university closed more than 70 years earlier, calling it the Studium Generale Marcianum.
Cardinal Scola appointed Anderson to the institute’s scientific commit- tee. He also named him as the lone layman to the board of promoters of the Marcianum’s Oasis Project, a research foundation that meets annually and produces a journal to promote inter-religious dialogue and cooperation in the Mediterranean world.

Anderson is held in high esteem by some of the most important and powerful men in the Church hierarchy, including Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone SDB. He was the first Vatican Secretary of State to attend a Knights of Columbus convention, something he did in 2007 when he went to the 125th anniversary gathering in Nashville, Tennessee. While there, the cardinal assured the Knights he would “personally work on” helping to have their founder proclaimed a saint.

Such high-level backing would seem to give credence to the speculation in the Italian media that Anderson could soon be asked to succeed the deposed Gotti Tedeschi as president of the Institute of the Works of Religion. The fact that he is not a banker would not disqualify him, but might actually help the Holy See in its insistence that the IOR is not a bank at all. But if the Supreme Knight were to become the institute’s president, he’d likely have to relinquish his current post and at least some of the influence it has given him.