Render Unto Rome (39 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.

Ironically, Ohio had one of the better public records laws. Bill Sheil wanted the list of priests; so did Jim McCarty at the
Plain Dealer
and other journalists. Sheil lodged a request with Mason’s office for documents on the priests. The diocese then threatened to sue Mason if he released grand jury information. “We are looking to protect the identity of persons who are investigated but not charged,” a church spokesman offered.
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With overhanging questions of about 145 priests, Mason, who had failed to indict the bishops, did a pirouette to become a target of the church’s legal hammer. Having gained in the public media sweepstakes, Mason had his staff petition the court: would Judge Brian Corrigan, who had overseen the grand jury, release the names and files? The motion referred to “more than one thousand (1000) possible victims and four hundred ninety-six (496) possible offenders,” most of them lay workers.
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In March 2003, the diocese’s financial picture worsened. The
Plain Dealer
reported that Catholic Charities had taken a $1.4 million loss
in recent donations. Catholic Charities’ donor base had dropped from 104,000 individuals in 1996 to 79,000 in 2002. Pilla met with one hundred diocesan staffers to outline pay cuts, freezes in office expenditures, and selling “unused church property.” Blaming the nation’s economic decline since 9/11, he assured the staffers that insurance had covered the Jones Day legal bills for its help in the abuse crisis.
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How much had the scandal cost in lost donations?

Bill Sheil persuaded his TV station to fund a law firm to research and file a motion with Judge Corrigan, seeking release of the church records reviewed by the grand jury. Prosecutor Mason’s brief “lacks the courage of its own convictions,” opined the WJW–Fox 8 attorneys, Michael McMenamin and Kenneth Zirm. “The requested issuance of a mere advisory opinion by this Court” would give Mason’s office the leeway to decide which documents to give to law enforcement. Federal law allowed disclosure of grand jury files for compelling reasons. The TV station attorneys asked Corrigan to do the same.

The breadth, depth and duration of sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church, both here and across the nation, make this a matter of public and historical significance, present special circumstances and weigh heavily in favor of disclosure … Exceptions to grand jury secrecy are well-recognized and the First Amendment protects the right to gather as well as disseminate news.
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The prosecutor and diocese “may know which of these priests and other employees remain in unsupervised contact with children [but] the public does not, especially the parents of children” in Catholic schools or programs, they argued. Sheil flew east and interviewed District Attorney Paul F. Walsh Jr. of Bristol, Massachusetts, who had released the names of twenty priests with allegations too old to prosecute, citing the common good. The TV station attorneys referenced prosecutor Walsh’s position, among other new precedents:

In September, 2002, Cardinal William H. Keeler publicized the names of 83 priests accused of sexually molesting in the Baltimore Archdiocese over a period of 70 years, saying in a letter to
180,000 Catholic households, “At times we have let our fears of scandal override the need for the kind of openness that helps prevent abuse.” The conduct of the Cleveland Diocese in resolutely resisting this Court even contemplating the Prosecutor’s modest request for an advisory opinion stands in marked contrast to the courage and responsibility displayed by Cardinal Keeler.