Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  “So am I,” said the bishop, with a ragged sigh.

  When Murphy died later of cancer, at sixty-six, she wept for many reasons, not least the loss of so committed an ally within the hierarchy.

  THE CHURCH’S MONEYMEN

  As Charlie Feliciano’s influence receded on the handling of abusive priests, so did his distance from Pilla, who had taken to working in an office suite that was adjacent to an old dormitory of St. John College, formerly a nuns’ teaching facility, behind Cathedral Square. The college was torn down; the diocese leased the land to investors who built an office tower. The bishop who had once dined at his home was remote. Feliciano, his secretary, and an assistant shared space in the chancery. Pilla had a kitchen cabinet that included Sam Miller, a Jewish real estate developer and Democratic Party potentate, and Patrick McCartan, a managing partner of Jones Day.

  Joe Smith, the diocesan treasurer, had a sideline business, Tee Sports, that organized golf tournaments and corporate events. Smith organized the Bishop Pilla Golf Classic that raised money for inner-city school scholarships. One day Father Wright’s secretary let slip that Joe Smith was getting paid to put on the golf event. Feliciano’s brother was a partner in Baker Hostetler, one of Cleveland’s biggest law firms. “Joe wanted me to sell them an ad for ten grand,” Feliciano says. “I knew he was getting a cut, so I took a pass on that one.”

  In midsummer 1999, a lawyer from Jones Day paid a visit to Feliciano’s small office. “You’re unhappy,” she said. “We have a proposal.” The “we,” he realized, was his employer, which paid the lady from a firm with steep hourly rates to offer him a church job assisting illegal immigrants in another county. Feliciano said no, immigration law was not his specialty; the humiliation added to his stress. Besides the internal battles over the sheltering of pedophiles, the finances smelled bad to Feliciano. “Smith kept saying we couldn’t get pay raises, we had to cut back. It didn’t make sense to me,” says Feliciano. Feliciano sat in a chancery meeting where everyone other than himself reported to Joe Smith. (Feliciano’s boss was still Pilla.) Father Wright all but swooned over Smith. Pilla worked in another building. What am I doing here? thought Feliciano. This place is like Oz.

  “Charlie did very good work in the eighties,” recalls Joe Smith. “But in that system you learn that you’re always secondary to the clergy. Charlie liked attention. In that environment you had to know when to open your mouth and when to shut it. You swallow your pride; that’s how you had to operate. I felt bad for Charlie. I liked him. Pilla wanted him fired. Wright was reluctant.”

  Feliciano was casting lines for a new job on February 17, 2000, when his body convulsed, the left side suddenly ran stiff: he keeled over with a stroke. Two women rushed him to the hospital. None of the chancery priests or Pilla visited him in the weeks it took him to regain his speech and mobility. He had long-accrued sick days, but when he recovered, the job was gone. He got in a dispute with Wright over the severance pay offer, and left without a settlement.

  That fall Feliciano joined the law firm of Gallagher Sharp to establish a practice assisting Catholic schools. “The diocese sent out a letter that implied if any [school] hired outside legal counsel, it could jeopardize their insurance coverage,” reported the Cleveland Free Times.44 The job dried up. As Feliciano searched for new work, his son had a severe medical emergency; the family drained their savings. As debts mounted, they lost their home to foreclosure.

  Joe Smith took over as financial and legal secretary in midsummer 2000. A delighted Father Wright devoted himself full-time to the less-stressful work of the Catholic Cemeteries Association, far from the chancery. Smith, a former college football quarterback, was a 5-handicap golfer married to the niece of a priest quite close to Pilla. Charlie Feliciano had seen swaggering Joe Smith as one of Pilla’s elite. “John Wright got tired of Pilla calling him at two a.m.,” explains Smith. “Pilla’s management style was reacting to whatever popped up. He’s a charming guy. When he prepares for a speech, he’s magnificent. But he’s an introvert; he worried endlessly, and it was all about his image. He got angry when the Plain Dealer did a story on Cleveland’s ten most powerful people and he wasn’t number one. The late-night calls didn’t bother me as much. I’m a workaholic, but I had a family, so he wouldn’t call as often.”

  Feliciano’s disillusionment shifted to a sense of vindication when the media chain reaction triggered by the Boston Globe reports of 2002 hit Cleveland. The Plain Dealer exposed the diocese’s cynical tactics. James F. McCarty and David Briggs finally identified Gary Berthiaume in a report that March:

  Berthiaume had been “watched like a hawk” during his stay at Ascension Church, with no reports of illegal behavior—a strong indication, Auxiliary Bishop Quinn said at the time, that Berthiaume had been cured of his disease.

  But it turned out the hawk watching Berthiaume at Ascension was the Rev. Allen Bruening—who himself would become the target of several allegations that he sexually molested Catholic grade-school children during his 20-year stay in the Cleveland Diocese.

  In a lawsuit filed last year, a former Ascension student accused Bruening and Berthiaume of teaming up to molest him in the school’s shower over three years in the 1980s.

  Berthiaume … now works at the Centacle Retreat House in Warrenville, Ill. Berthiaume did not return calls seeking comment.

  Bruening was quietly forced to resign as Ascension pastor in late 1984, after another parish family accused him of a pattern of child abuse covering the previous two decades … Shortly thereafter, Bruening was reassigned to another Cleveland-area parish.

  In 1990, the Cleveland Diocese sent him to a parish in Amarillo, Texas, but diocese officials say the bishop there was fully informed of the earlier Bruening allegations.45

  Reporter Bill Sheil of WJW TV, Fox 8, began interviewing victims and diocesan sources. Sheil, who had a law degree, prepared a long report on Quinn, utilizing audio of his 1990 speech telling canon lawyers to send files to the nunciature, or Vatican embassy. Quinn avoided Sheil. Pilla, who happened to be in the studio for an unrelated taping, agreed to an interview. Pressed by Sheil, Pilla awkwardly denied ever sending secret files to the nunciature, or that he recycled predators. After the broadcast, the parents of a youth whose perpetrator had gone to a new parish in the 1980s, called Sheil. In a subsequent report, they accused Pilla of lying.46

  Calls from abuse survivors to the chancery sent Joe Smith searching into clergy files, contacting therapists, dealing with reporters, signing six-figure monthly checks to Jones Day for legal help in the $300-an-hour range.47 “Pilla called me at home many times during the abuse crisis, saying he was going to resign,” says Smith. “I calmed him down.” The diocese eventually negotiated victim settlements with Jeff Anderson, a St. Paul lawyer and pioneer in clergy abuse torts. As the scandal drove a shift in public opinion, Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney William D. Mason convened a grand jury to investigate the diocese. As Joe Smith gathered boxes to comply with Mason’s subpoenas he was taking calls from a frantic Pilla well past midnight. The bishop appointed a lay task force to evaluate the response to victims. On Holy Thursday he washed the feet of Stacie White, who had been raped as a girl by the now-imprisoned Martin Louis. Charlie Feliciano had wept on meeting with other victims of Louis. Now, as Pilla suspended other priests, Feliciano, who had slowly rebuilt his legal career, wondered if Pilla had taken his advice as a $90,000-a-year staff attorney, back in the day, he might have avoided all hell breaking loose.

  By the spring, Pilla had suspended twelve priests on past accusations and identified thirteen former or retired priests so accused. Of those twenty-five clerics, the county Department of Children and Family Services had received “just eight reports,” wrote McCarty in the Plain Dealer, “over the last fourteen years. But five of those reports have arrived since mid-March.”48 Feliciano broke his silence on the clergy cases, speaking to the Plain Dealer and to Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes.49 The CBS interview aired during the June 2002 bishops�
�� convention in Dallas, where they adopted the youth protection charter and voted to raise the petition threshold at the Vatican for selling property.

  Money secrets started spilling out in August. A Plain Dealer report on Catholic Charities, the largest social service agency in Ohio’s largest county, found high-end donors incensed about whether funds meant to help the poor had been routed for abuse settlements. Several major contributors revealed that Pilla in 1999 had requested $4 million from Catholic Charities, which emptied “a discretionary fund that had been used to pay for various social service projects.”

  Sources said at least some of that money was used to pay off a multimillion-dollar deficit that built up in the late 1990s during the diocese’s abortive attempt to centralize and modernize its computer system.

  Diocesan spokesman Bob Tayek said the $4 million transaction was meant to combine two of the bishop’s charitable discretionary funds.

  None of the money was spent on the late 1990s computer deficit or sex-abuse settlements, Tayek said.50

  James Mason, the board chairman of Cleveland Catholic Charities, wrote Pilla, asking him to confirm that charitable funds would go to charitable uses. “These are difficult times for all,” replied Pilla in a hazy understatement. “Leadership and trust have been damaged. Only concerted action over time can restore that trust.” He pledged to do “everything in my power”—but gave no full promise on the use of money.51 A culture of passivity was too entrenched for well-heeled Clevelanders to rise in unison, asking Pilla to resign, though several high-end donors did so in protest.

  “None of that money was used for settlements,” says Joe Smith, who was secretary for financial and legal affairs at the time. “We had built up a significant reserve in our Property and Casualty Fund. In the 1990s we had great markets, those reserves tripled in value. That was the risk pool. Timing can be everything. We were fortunate we had that money available. I never touched Catholic Charities’ funds for settlement monies.”

  “So where did the $4 million go?” I asked.

  “Mostly subsidies to parishes and schools that ran short. It happened a lot.”

  Roughly 60 percent of the parishes paid their assessments, or taxes, to the bishop. For the other 40 percent, expenses often exceeded the revenues from Sunday collections.52 This situation had been building for years. Church in the City grants, handled by a separate foundation, did not go for deficit shortfalls. But diocesan finances had a chaotic side.

  Michael Ryan, who has researched church embezzlements (see this page), criticizes an embedded practice of pastors who take “walking around money” before collection funds make it into the bank. Joe Smith points to a corollary in Cleveland: “In old-school parishes, priests created slush funds. I’d say that 90 percent of the time they really had a good intention. Priests were afraid bishops would take their money. Guys would put new windows in the school or a new roof and start these funds. You have a culture of priests doing this. You have guys from parishes who end up downtown in management spots and they carry the same ideas. A lot of stuff was off the books [concealed from auditors and accepted accounting procedure]. That was the culture we dealt with—a personal culture, a business culture, a diocesan culture … It’s the way things were always done, a way for folks not to tell anyone. Priests didn’t want to deal with inconsistencies. Priests hate confrontation. They do what they want to.

  “Pilla used to give out crisp $100 bills at Christmas to staff,” Smith continues. “Maybe twenty or thirty of them; all the secretaries got one. The idea was, take your spouse to dinner on me. As bishop he’d go places, confirmations, weddings. He’d get an envelope with four hundred bucks. As his tax preparer I never saw that. What am I gonna do, beat him on the head and say, Now, Bishop, you know you’re getting money from those Masses … You knew not to press it. This was a norm not only in his office. Pastors gave money to secretaries and people for Christmas. That’s the way it’s done in parishes.”

  LAMENTATIONS

  To Cleveland’s many priests and nuns, the news reports about clergy sex abuse were like a daily beating. The church in which they believed, the bishops they obeyed—how much worse could it get? Sister Christine Schenk was astounded at Pilla’s behavior when an inkling of hope came in the person of “Stephen” (his real name withheld), a former seminarian who had been abused by a priest. Stephen had done therapy, had a good job, and had sustained a spiritual life, an excruciating challenge to most victims. (Mark Serrano, a Notre Dame graduate who grew up in a close home in the pastoral town of Mendham, New Jersey, told how seeing a priest on the altar made him think of Father Jim Hanley’s genitals.)53

  Stephen handed Sister Chris a service of healing prayers he had written. He wanted FutureChurch to sponsor a prayer service for victims. She thought his intermingling of scripture, songs, and hymns was a godsend. Joe Fortuna, the priest who had taught her master’s level class in liturgy, had recently become pastor at Church of the Ascension—the parish where, years earlier, the predators Bruening and Berthiaume shared the rectory. Fortuna and the pastoral associate, Laurel Jurecki, helped Stephen and Sister Chris shape the prayer service called Liturgy of Lament for the Broken Body of Christ. Two hundred people, including many survivors and therapists, attended on October 14, 2002.54

  Father Fortuna began:

  We have come here tonight from many places …

  We come together for one thing only: To raise our hearts and voices and very bodies to God,

  In the hope that in the very act of raising them in lament yet in faith,

  They may be touched in their brokenness

  And know the transforming and surpassing power of God’s love.

  Then the choir rolled out “Were You There,” a Negro spiritual.

  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

  Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.

  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

  Fortuna, Schenk, and other men and women in robes lay down on the altar, an act of obeisance to God, and a ritual expression of repentance to the abuse survivors. Sister Christine took the podium. “Why would a supposedly good God allow such a terrible thing to happen to one so innocent—you as a child?” she began. “Why did God allow you to lose your childhood so early? How could this grievous betrayal happen at the hand of one from whom you had every right to expect nurture, respect, and wisdom about the ways of God? Instead, you learned fear, self-hatred, and numbing confusion about yourself and about God.”

  Everyone present was stunned at the galloping pace of the scandal. “Many of us here tonight,” she said, “never experienced childhood sexual abuse or clergy sexual abuse, but we feel wounded and betrayed by church leaders who made decisions more protective of institutions than of persons. We want to say in some way that we are sorry. Perhaps we are like the women of Jerusalem in the gospel who witness Jesus’s crucifixion and death. Watching from a distance, we come to offer what comfort we can in our presence, our sorrow, our lament, our mourning over what our institution has done to individuals.”

  She paid tribute to Stephen and other survivors present for affirming

  that yes, there is a God who is good and able to heal even the horrible wound of childhood sex abuse. You, more than any here, know what it is to be an earthen vessel carrying within your body the death of Jesus. And you know as well the wondrous gift of carrying within your body the life of Jesus … You witness that yes, there is a balm in Gilead as the old hymn says.

  Believers know that Jesus’ suffering did not end in death but in resurrection—in new life. A dear friend once told me to never look at the cross without seeing the resurrection. When we venerate the cross we are acknowledging the reality of evil and death but even more so venerating God’s power to save. This is the life journey of every believer, not only those who have been touched by the evil of clerical sexual abuse, or by the grievous structural evil which allowed such abuse to continue. All of us are journeying to a deeper, richer
life as we slowly, slowly loose the power that evil holds through our belief in Christ.

  Matthew tells us that after crying out on the cross, Jesus “yielded up his Spirit … and the veil of the temple was torn in two.” I wonder if we are not in that place now as a church. The veil of our sacred structure has been torn and we see it for what it is—a flawed human institution. But since we want our church structures to reflect the goodness of the God we serve, we must cry out for repentance, renewal and rebirth. We trust this Spirit to make all things new. And we claim our Church and our wounded persons once again for Christ.

  The priests and female pastoral ministers in robes lay hands on the congregants in a prayer for healing.

  A DIOCESE RUN AMOK

  Three weeks before Christmas 2003, the county grand jury indicted one priest for child sexual abuse and, in a separate set of events, six men who had worked at Parmadale, a youth home under the auspices of Catholic Charities. Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney William D. Mason seemed frustrated to some journalists as he explained that his staff had found 145 priests with accusations in their files. “But for the statute of limitations, many more would have been indicted,” he said. An assistant prosecutor had presented charges of obstruction of justice and racketeering against Pilla and Quinn, but the nine-member grand jury lacked the seven votes to indict them.55

  Although Mason’s office had gotten the 145 names from the diocese, the grand jury proceedings were secret. Bill Mason, a husky fellow with reddish-blond hair and a potent political machine behind him, could stand tall for the cameras, while the faceless grand jurors bore responsibility for giving the bishops a pass. State laws long predating child abuse as a social issue shielded most of the alleged sex offenders from punishment. Cleveland was a near washout compared with Boston, where a judge had released files, abusers were identified, several prosecutions were under way, half a thousand victims were in court, and Cardinal Law had resigned in proverbial disgrace.