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The brothers Donilon: One’s boss is President Obama, the other’s could be
pope By Jason Horowitz<http://www.washingtonpost.com/jason-horowitz/2011/03/02/ABZaXuM_page.html>,
Published: March 10

Vatican City — Shortly after arriving in Rome with his boss, dark horse
papal contender Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Terrence Donilon received an
e-mail. It was from his brother Tom, the national security
adviser<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/20/AR2010122005712.html>to
President Obama.

“How’s it going?” the top White House official asked.

The answer is: astonishingly well.

In the days leading up to Tuesday’s
conclave<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-vatican-conclave-progressive-voices-will-be-faint/2013/03/09/47cf00e4-8851-11e2-98a3-b3db6b9ac586_story.html>,
O’Malley has built up momentum. The archbishop of Boston, a baritone-voiced
Capuchin Franciscan who prefers the order’s humble brown cassock, O’Malley
has earned increasing
attention<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/college-of-cardinals-imposes-media-blackout/2013/03/06/025d07e4-866d-11e2-98a3-b3db6b9ac586_story.html>from
Vatican
reporters<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/at-vatican-leaks-media-blackout-cast-spotlight-on-press-corps/2013/03/07/463f46e2-871d-11e2-999e-5f8e0410cb9d_story.html>and
has a distant shot at becoming the first American leader of the Roman
Catholic Church. That unexpected buzz has also raised a remarkable
possibility for Terry Donilon, O’Malley’s communications director and
cabinet member.

One Donilon brother “working for the most powerful man on the planet and
the other one could work for the most powerful religious leader on the
planet?” mused Terry on Saturday, dressed in blue baseball cap and polo
shirt in a café by the Vatican. “Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting
storyline.”

For O’Malley, 68, it could also be a complicated one. The church has
traditionally excluded Americans from papal consideration for fear of
allotting too much influence and might to the world’s superpower. Changes
in geopolitics and the demands of the church have softened that unofficial
ban, but it’s unclear what it will mean for a potential symbol of world
peace to have a close associate who is also the brother of an architect of
Obama’s foreign policy.

And while reports have emerged that Tom Donilon is expected to step down
this year
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/susan-rice-as-national-security-adviser-un-ambassador-said-to-be-front-runner/2013/03/09/3e54feba-8383-11e2-b99e-6baf4ebe42df_story.html?tid=pm_pop>(“I’m
still fully engaged,” he said), there is also a third Donilon
brother, Michael. A longtime political aide to Vice President Biden, he
would probably play a major role in a Biden 2016 presidential bid. (The
brothers also have a sister, Donna, a nurse who is widely considered a
saint.)

“This is an extraordinary circumstance, not one that we’ve ever thought
about,” Tom said.

In the unlikely event that any of the cardinal electors are concerned by
the Donilon family ties, it is also worth noting that Terry Donilon, 52,
has already shown his willingness to stand up to the Obama administration.
Donilon attacked provisions in the administration’s Affordable Care Act
that required health insurance plans to offer contraceptives and access to
other procedures anathema to the Catholic Church. He argued that recent
concessions were inadequate.

“The way the administration handled that was poor,” Donilon said, adding,
“My brothers have their life and their careers, and I’ve had my life and my
careers and if they intersect at times because of issues, so be it.”

The Donilon children grew up in a solidly Irish section of Providence,
R.I., where St. Michael’s Parish acted as a center of gravity. Faith, Terry
said, was the “fabric of who we were.” He and his brothers served as altar
boys, and the family lived in a Dutch Colonial home where they all learned
instruments: Donna and Tom the piano, Mike the guitar. Terry, a singer,
proved the most musical and later sang with the Gregorian Concert Choir in
St. Peter’s and at the funeral of Tom’s mother-in-law, where he noticed
Biden mouthing the Latin words of the Panis Angelicus hymn along with him.

“He’s a much more public person than Michael and I,” Tom, 57, said.

The other tie that has bound the entire Donilon family is politics. Their
father, a member of the school board, was involved in local races, and
their mother — a “little tiny Irish lady” and “poor lady’s Rose Kennedy” —
had “no problem speaking her mind to the priest,” Terry said.

“Coming out of Vatican II, my mother was deeply involved in the parish,”
added Tom, referring to the reforms that have for decades divided the
church’s progressives and conservatives.

Terry didn’t seem likely to be on the front lines of that debate. He
studied theater education at Emerson College and then worked in radio,
where an executive tried to convince him to change his name to Sandy Beach.
In the mid-1980s, one of the radio show’s guests was Providence Mayor Joe
Paolino, an old high school pal of Tom’s. The eldest Donilon had already
gone on to distinguish himself as a White House staffer and one of the
Democratic Party’s sharpest political minds. “Come see me,” Paolino told
him.

Donilon went to work for Paolino in the mayor’s office and then on his
unsuccessful campaign for governor. Then he worked in the office of Gov.
Bruce Sundlun and on his unsuccessful reelection campaign. He subsequently
worked for Robert Weygand, a member of Congress who lost his bid for a
Senate seat. “My candidates kept losing,” Terry, 52, said.

He became press director for a supermarket chain. In 2005, the Boston
archdiocese, with the help of a group close to Biden, the patron saint of
Donilon family careers, began a search for a new communications director.
Donilon said there was no favoritism, and that his interview with O’Malley
was going terribly because his beeper kept buzzing and his cellphone kept
ringing due to a meat recall by the supermarket chain. Luckily for Donilon,
the conversation turned to a mutual acquaintance, former Providence mayor
Buddy Cianci (who served jail time and once assaulted his wife’s alleged
lover with a lit cigarette, ashtray and fireplace log). That broke the ice.

“I called Tom when I got offered the job,” Terry said, adding that his
brother told him, “Don’t be hobnobbing around Boston because you work for
an archbishop.”

The challenges in the Boston church were vast. O’Malley presided over a
diocese that, under Cardinal Bernard Law, had become ground zero of the
priest sex abuse scandal.

“We were under assault and by our own doing,” said Terry, a divorced father
of two. “This wasn’t like an unprovoked attack.”

Tom said the strain on his brother was apparent. “It’s been difficult for
him,” he said.

But Terry said that O’Malley helped heal the diocese and restore trust.
When Terry Donilon talks about his boss, his political instincts kick in,
and he sounds like any operative boosting his candidate.

“He comes across as very humble, super intelligent, super perceptive. He
understands politics. He understands budgets, he speaks seven languages,”
he said of O’Malley. He called him a brilliant messenger who took the
diocese “out of the fiscal abyss” and “provided the right support for
victims of sexual abuse.”

Donilon acknowledged that the church had a strong political dimension,
recounting a memorable exchange with a priest in Boston. “This place is
driving me nuts, I got out of politics to avoid all this,” Donilon said he
told the cleric. “Terry,” he said the priest responded, “we invented
politics 2,000 years ago.”

Aware of the climate in which he is now
operating<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-search-for-the-next-pope-self-aggrandizement-is-tantamount-to-sacrilege/2013/03/03/9b3f6e50-843a-11e2-98a3-b3db6b9ac586_story.html>,
Donilon insisted he hasn’t thought about moving to Rome to work for the
first American pope. “I think Sean O’Malley is going home,” he said. But in
Rome, he has found himself at the height of campaign season.

On Sunday morning, he accompanied O’Malley to Santa Maria della Vittoria,
the cardinal’s titular church, a baroque gem famous for its sculpture of
the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by the Italian master Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Donilon, his white hair uncovered and a backpack slung over his shoulder,
paused from wrangling dozens of international reporters, photographers and
cameramen, and paused to look out with a stunned expression at the packed
pews.

O’Malley, in ceremonial vestments, followed a procession through the front
door and down a central nave. The Rev. Rocco Visca introduced O’Malley by
saying, “May this be your last visit here as cardinal, and may we be the
first church you visit as the next pope.”

The American prelate opened with a joke about taking the Bernini
masterpiece back with him to Boston. He offered a homily about bringing
strayed sheep back into the flock, prayed in Italian that impressed some of
the Italian reporters in the back of the church and then exited in a
procession of priests. Donilon, backpack on his shoulder, brought up the
rear.

Outside, a group of Italian tourists joked about all the company they would
have if the cardinals chose O’Malley. “All of America will be here,”
Domenico Calocero said to his friend. “Obama would fly here the day after.”


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Alexander Snyder Mackler
(302) 598-867