Render Unto Rome (38 page)

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.
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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 beginning constantly preserved and applied in the tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium.
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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.
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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.”
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Now on the phone, Frank Murphy said gently, “How are you doing?”

“Angry and depressed,” replied Sister Christine Schenk.

“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
.
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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.
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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.