Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  Quinn’s letter to me read in part:

  I respect the moral repentance exhibited by Father …

  I recognize that Father has paid the criminal and civil consequences that the Court and the Church imposed on him. The victim has been compensated to the satisfaction of the Court … [The priest] has undergone extensive psychological counseling and has been recommended as an individual who can begin anew to function as a parish priest. Father continues to cooperate with this diocese through periodic reviews. To date, Father has ministered successfully in the parish to which he is assigned.22

  Unwilling to engage Pilla in an off-the-record exchange, the Plain Dealer published a lengthy Sunday commentary on March 15, 1987, crediting my work, but under a joint byline of the publisher, editor, and managing editor.23 “The Parish Must Be Told the Truth, Bishop Pilla,” read the headline. They called on Pilla to identify the priest. Disappointed to lose an article, I nevertheless supported the decision. The paper treated me fairly; I was back in New Orleans as the drama played out. The face of the diocese in that crisis became Auxiliary Bishop Quinn instead of Bishop Pilla.

  “Probably no churchman in America,” Plain Dealer investigative reporter James F. McCarty later wrote, “has come to personify the [hierarchy’s] split personality more succinctly than Auxiliary Bishop Alexander James Quinn.”24 Jimmy Quinn, as friends called him, was a Cleveland native son who had come back from studies in Rome with a Romanità cast of mind. He called the cops to the cathedral in 1969 to eject Bob Begin and another priest as they gave Communion to antiwar protesters. In 1985 Quinn previewed a ninety-three-page secret report that forewarned U.S. bishops of a pedophilia crisis, coauthored by Father Thomas Doyle, the canon lawyer at the Vatican embassy. Quinn disparaged Doyle to the nuncio, Archbishop Pio Laghi, writing that the “pedophilia annoyance [will] abate.”25 Doyle, an American in the Dominican order, lost his job for pressing the issue. By 2002 his warnings had become prophetic.

  In shielding Berthiaume, Jimmy Quinn and Tony Pilla did just what Tom Doyle and his 1985 coauthors had said not to: stonewall. They warned about huge civil settlements if bishops were found concealing abusers.26 Pilla and Quinn relied on Jones Day, the biggest corporate law firm in Cleveland, and Father John Wright, the diocese’s secretary for financial and legal affairs. Wright had earned a law degree from Georgetown in 1969 before becoming a priest. “Quinn as a bishop had the stature to be the front man,” says Joseph Smith, a CPA who was diocesan treasurer at the time, going to law school at night on the diocese’s dime. “But you didn’t do anything in our diocese without running it through Bishop Pilla.” Wright was uncomfortable in tense situations with the bishop, and in 2000 arranged for Smith to take his own place as CFO, making Smith Pilla’s closest adviser.

  Back in 1987, as people wondered whose parish had the ex-convict, Quinn told the Plain Dealer, “The fact that the priest has been clean for ten years is a very good sign of his rehabilitation.” But the standoff spurred victims of other priests to call the newsroom. In July 1987 Karen Henderson reported that the diocese had bargained with three families to keep silent about three other priests, who had also been reassigned, and were identified by the Plain Dealer.27

  “Quinn had an awful lot of power, and not for the good,” recalls Charlie Feliciano, gazing at the mauve twilight, his feet jittery on the rug. “I went out to tour the Paracletes’ facility in New Mexico [that treated pedophiles]. I came back and told Pilla, ‘Don’t send them there, or [to] St. Luke Institute.’ I told him to send the priests to Johns Hopkins [Hospital Sexual Disorders Clinic] under Dr. Fred Berlin. I trusted him. We began sending priests there. The reports coming back weren’t so good. The internal debate was, Do we force them out of the priesthood? I said, Yes! I am a father of four children. Quinn wouldn’t say anything directly. He thought one way, I thought another. I called him Bishop Quinn.”

  After the Plain Dealer coverage, several journalists at the diocese’s Catholic Universe-Bulletin felt they should write about the church abuse cases. Pilla, as bishop, was the publisher; the editorial staff were members of the AFL-CIO-affiliated Cleveland Newspaper Guild (as were Plain Dealer journalists). Lou Pumphrey, a Vietnam veteran who had worked at the Universe-Bulletin since 1977, was among the four staffers summoned to a 1988 meeting with Pilla, Quinn, and Father Michael Dimengo, who oversaw the paper. According to Pumphrey, “It was an interrogation. Pilla was very calm, like Al Pacino in The Godfather—no threats, just clear the air. I said we as journalists should be autonomous and have the interests of people in the pews uppermost. Pilla said, ‘Well, we are going to have to change that.’ Quinn was crimson. He said that if he were in Pilla’s shoes he wouldn’t be so diplomatic.” Pilla overruled the project. The journalists withdrew their bylines from one issue as a protest. Despite the union security, the diocese managed to fire them on one hour’s notice.28 The Universe-Bulletin handled the printing of the Youngstown and Toledo diocesan papers. The IRS got wind of disputes among the dioceses and did an audit.

  Quinn had a circle of friends, couples he had known for years, and a longtime female secretary who were deeply loyal to him. But sociable Jimmy Quinn could be one tough customer. In a 1990 speech to the Midwest Canon Law Society (an audiotape of which landed in my mailbox), Bishop Quinn declared that personnel files under subpoena

  cannot be tampered with, destroyed, removed. That constitutes obstruction of justice and contempt of court. Prior, however, thought and study ought to be given if you think it’s going to be necessary. If there’s something you really don’t want people to see, you might send it to the Apostolic Delegate (Vatican ambassador) because they have immunity.29

  In the 1985 report Doyle had bluntly warned against such a move, fearing the Vatican would lose diplomatic immunity if the nunciature became a safe house for incriminating files. Quinn’s cynicism was alpine.

  As victims contacted the diocese, Charlie Feliciano went home at night, torn by a horror show of priests he had never imagined. As he told me in 2009, “I wanted to fashion a remedy for victims to get compensation. I’d say, ‘You go out and find a lawyer. Here’s what I’m offering.’ ” Feliciano reported to Father Wright, the financial and legal secretary. Coming from a wealthy local family, Wright had spent part of his childhood in Rhode Island. He was a nephew and namesake of the late Cardinal John Wright, who had been prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, and who, in the 1950s, as a Boston auxiliary bishop, had dined at the Borré household in Rome. “Wright told me, ‘Quinn thinks you’re being too generous with the victims,’ ” says Feliciano. “Quinn began to handle settlements.”

  Gary Berthiaume, in 1988, quietly moved to the Joliet, Illinois, diocese, where he was welcomed by an avuncular friend, Bishop Joseph Imesch.30

  In 1990 a subdued Pilla told his staff that the Vatican had contacted the Cleveland diocese to host World Youth Day with Pope John Paul II in the summer of 1993. From Washington, the bishops’ conference sent people for a briefing. “We were assured of good cooperation from county leaders, law enforcement, and the governor’s office,” explains a high-level person involved in the decision. “It would have cost the diocese a few hundred thousand dollars, and involved about 100,000 youth. Many would stay at college dorms, others in private homes. But internally, there was a serious concern about any sexual abuse to a young person … Pilla did not seem eager to have it.”

  Most bishops would seize the chance to host the Holy Father. By giving the decision to his staff, Pilla sent a message; the staff voted the idea down. World Youth Day 1993 went to Denver, with the attendant commerce and media coverage of an American visit by John Paul. Denver archbishop James F. Stafford subsequently landed a Vatican job and a cardinal’s red hat.

  Feliciano confirms the account, calling himself “among those worried, saying, ‘Can we handle this?’ But I was not on the staff that cast the vote.”

  When a priest abused the son of a deacon on a trip out west, Feliciano felt he had to report the cleric to the co
unty Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). “Father Wright said Quinn and Pilla didn’t want me to report it, since it happened in another state,” says Feliciano, who made the report to DCFS. “They thought I was difficult, squawking about the treatment centers.”

  As Wright outsourced the legal defense work, Feliciano turned to Cleveland Catholic schools—with sixty-five thousand students, the state’s largest system. He drafted the protocols to ensure child safety and took complaints of misbehavior by lay teachers, priests, nuns, and workers, reporting at least fifty people to DCFS. “Seven or eight were prosecuted,” he says. “The church bureaucracy was a state unto itself.” Stacie White, a child rape victim of Father Martin Louis (who went to prison in 1993), sued the diocese as an adult. A defense motion by outside counsel devastated White’s parents by blaming them for letting the priest get too close to her. Feliciano crafted a settlement of $385,000 to White. Later, she visited Louis in prison and forgave him.31

  ROME DEMANDS ASSENT

  The issue of priestless parishes entered Sister Chris Schenk’s life through conversations with Lou Trivison, the priest who got his parish to focus on the shortage issue and pass a resolution that said what the bishops would never dare to: “There is no lack of vocations to the ordained priesthood if we consider priests who have married and are willing to lead the community in worship, married men who desire to be priests, and single and married women who feel called to the ordained priesthood.” John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger were closing the Vatican II window on a collegial relationship between bishops and pope. The papacy wanted “willful assent”—obedience—from the hierarchs on policy defined by the top. As the priest shortage worsened, Mass attendance rates sank in Western Europe. Any priest who favored optional celibacy was immediately disqualified in the vetting of bishops. (Trivison had no such goal.)

  As FutureChurch forged ties with sympathetic parishes for discussions on changing the celibacy law and ordaining women, the first wave of clergy sex abuse cases in English-speaking countries magnified a double standard. John Paul stood aloof, offering no leadership, no plan, while bishops faced lawsuits and searing press coverage. A bishop couldn’t defrock a pedophile in prison. Thanks to expensive treatment centers, many priests evaded prosecution. The process to laicize such men in Rome often took years. Many bishops tried to keep victims’ settlements under wraps. And church finances were secret.

  Of the scandals in the 1990s, says Sister Chris Schenk, “I think we were inclined to give the diocese the benefit of the doubt, rightly or wrongly. We thought that they had tightened up, that they revamped their procedures.”

  FutureChurch worked on fostering pastoral life coordinators, men and women who took on parish duties once reserved for priests. In 1993, 263 deacons, sisters, brothers, and laypersons had such positions. (By 2004 the number would be 566.)32 FutureChurch leaders met with the bishop. “Pilla made clear to us that his job was not only to represent us to Rome but to represent Rome to us,” Sister Chris explains. “As long as we did not question faith and morals, he took a benign neglect approach toward us.”

  As she continued her midwife’s work in the poverty of East Cleveland, Chris Schenk enrolled at St. Mary, the diocese’s graduate school of theology. Delivering the babies of teenage girls at night, she caught naps on a couch at school by day during breaks. She felt a pull of kinship across the vales of time with women who were early Christian leaders. Their history, erased from Catholic memory, was her focus at the theologate. The girl-mothers she helped to give birth were unconsciously socialized into seeing their value as an extension of the boy-fathers. Catholic women had historically seen themselves as a rung below men as sacred figures of worship. Yet now, many women took classes alongside the men who were on track to become priests. Many of the young men were gay, some in harmony with their sexual identities, others not. Ratzinger in 1986 had deemed homosexuality “an intrinsic moral evil,” but he could not explain (nor bishops openly discuss) why the priesthood had become a huge closet, or address the complexities of a pronounced gay priest culture.33

  “I commend unto you Phébe, our sister,” Paul writes in Romans (16:1), calling her “a servant of the church … at Cenchreae.” As Chris Schenk found on deeper reading, Phoebe was a diakonos, or minister, who had hosted Paul at Cenchreae, a seaport at Corinth.34 In When Women Were Priests, the scholar Karen Jo Torjesen writes that Phoebe “carried Paul’s letter to the Romans. She was a woman of some wealth and social status.” Paul acknowledged Phoebe as a patron (prostatis) to Rome’s Christians. Of the twenty-eight distinguished people Paul singles out in his letter to the Romans, ten were women.

  Among these women leaders of the Roman congregation was a woman apostle, Junia, whom Paul hailed as “foremost among the apostles” (Rom. 16:7). She and her husband, Adronicus, traveled teaching and preaching from city to city. The turmoil and riots occasionally provoked by Christian preaching landed her and her husband in prison, where they encountered Paul. She was a heroine of the fourth-century Christian Church, and John Chrysostom’s elegant sermons invoked the image of Junia, for the Christian women of Constantinople to emulate.35

  As a female priesthood emerged in the Anglican Church, John Paul in 1994 issued Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, a letter forbidding women’s ordination. Although he acknowledged a “debate among theologians and in certain Catholic circles,” the pope ignored the issues in explaining, simply, that because the Blessed Virgin Mary was not a minister, it “cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against them.”

  In calling only men as his Apostles, Christ acted in a completely free and sovereign manner. In doing so, he exercised the same freedom with which, in all his behavior, he emphasized the dignity and the vocation of women, without conforming to the prevailing customs and to the traditions sanctioned by the legislation of the time …

  Moreover, it is to the holiness of the faithful that the hierarchical structure of the Church is totally ordered.36

  Pared to the essentials, John Paul said that it was Jesus’s intent that only men—through all of time to come—should serve as priests. But as scripture scholars pointed out, the New Testament never says that Jesus “ordained” His own apostles. Nor does scripture say that Jesus banned women, who were vital figures in His public life, from the ordained ministry. By evading the scriptural findings, John Paul’s stance is antihistorical. In that sense he echoes Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical on celibacy, which calls clerical chastity the “brilliant jewel” of the church, with “a maximum psychological efficiency.” Pope Paul cited no psychological studies on maximum efficiency because none existed.37 Like celibacy, the male-priests position is not doctrine, but “legislation of the time.” John Paul wanted legislative permanence: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”

  Sixteen months after John Paul’s letter, Cardinal Groër “retired” as archbishop of Vienna, engulfed by accusations that he had made sexual advances on young men in a monastery years before. Admitting nothing, Groër provoked a huge scandal. John Paul was silent. The financial impact took a while to register. Within weeks, 500,000 Austrians and 1.8 million Germans sent petitions to the Vatican asking for married priests and women priests. Catholics in Austria had the option of resigning from the church and renouncing a portion of their taxes designated to the church. Forty thousand resigned that year. By 2009 the Austrian church had declined from 78 percent to 66 percent of the population. Tax revenues to the church had fallen from 394.2 million euros in 1994 to 295 million euros.38

  A key factor behind those figures was the release of Ratzinger’s decree in support of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, on November 18, 1995, which all but said to the incensed Catholics of Austria and his homeland, Your views don’t matter:

  This teaching requires definitive assent, since, founded on the written Word of God, and from the beginnin
g constantly preserved and applied in the tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium.39

  Ratzinger’s insertion of “infallibly” as part of the magisterium, or teaching office, caused bonfires of criticism. The Cambridge divinity professor Nicholas Lash decried the infallibility reference as “a quite scandalous abuse of power.”40 Sister Joan Chittister, the prolific Benedictine lecturer from Erie, Pennsylvania, wrote with surgical precision:

  Can an office of the Vatican declare a papal statement infallible?

  And can they do it ex-post facto? Any time they want to? Maybe hundreds of years after it was written?

  Why is it that when bishops all over the world ask for this issue to be discussed, they are simply ignored?

  I am now more convinced than ever that this subject is not closed, in fact it has not even been opened. It has only been suppressed.41

  Chris Schenk was feeling numb when a call came from Auxiliary Bishop P. Francis Murphy of Baltimore, who had found sympathetic bishops with whom the women’s ordination advocates could have dialogue. In 1991, after ten years of internal discussion, the bishops’ conference was finishing a pastoral letter on women when Ratzinger demanded strict language against female priests. “For the first time in the entire history of the conference,” writes David Gibson, “the bishops spiked the entire project.”42 On October 27, 1995, three weeks before Ratzinger’s decree, Bishop Murphy had spoken at a dinner for FutureChurch. “It is critical that we who hold some authority in the church listen to the base, to the people much more than we give directives,” he declared. “I have grave concerns that the official teaching church has forgotten about learning.”43

  Now on the phone, Frank Murphy said gently, “How are you doing?”

  “Angry and depressed,” replied Sister Christine Schenk.