Render Unto Rome (46 page)

The inner cities are places where you are most likely to find the very poor, the homeless and the near homeless … The neighborhoods are very fragile. The inner city parish then provides a lot more to the social fabric of the neighborhood than a place to worship. To be sure the great artistic miniature cathedrals that the various immigrant peoples have built at great sacrifice are a real oasis of beauty that the people truly appreciate.

Each parish to some extent has developed and organized leadership in the community to provide safety, sustenance, emergency assistance, and programs for children, etc. When a Church closes, that component of society is removed with the landmark buildings and the already fragile social fabric rapidly disintegrates.

The bishop was ignoring these factors, wrote Father Begin. (Meanwhile, several parishes had appeals in motion to the Congregation for the Clergy.) “For the inner city residents of Cleveland this is a grave scandal,” continued Father Begin to Archbishop Sambi, “a real abandonment not only of Church property of inestimable worth, but also as a real abandonment of truly needy people.”

On the West Side of Cleveland, the recently arrived refugees from Somalia, Liberia, Congo, Sudan and other parts of Africa who have found a welcome in our Churches and a place at the table are devastated and confused by the news of closures. Many of them became Catholics in refugee camps because of Catholic Relief Services. Others are becoming Catholic because of the welcome they are given in our inner city parishes (the only place they can afford housing) …

I have a forty-year history of working with the poor in the inner City of Cleveland and I myself am dismayed. It seems that in one or two years, the work of 40 years can be destroyed by the arbitrary action of Bishop Lennon.
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Four thousand people filled out forms on the importance of the parish, which Begin sent to the bishop. “Lennon had no idea that 30 percent of people in this neighborhood do not have cars,” Begin told me later. “Every day at least fifty people come to our door in need of something. The phone
rings all day. We need a full-time outreach worker. I explained this to him. If you’re from Boston and look at Cleveland, it’s kind of the way Cleveland looks at Alabama: you’re surprised if someone from Alabama has a good idea. At another meeting, he said if I was still interested in studying Arabic, ‘talk to your friend Sambi.’ Council members Jay Westbrook, Dona Brady, and Matt Zone showed him a map of the Lorain Avenue Corridor—four square miles without a church. State Senator Tom Patton talked with Lennon. He helped defeat a motion in our legislature to remove the statute of limitations on pedophilia—which Ohio bishops lobbied hard against, having seen California dioceses lose hundreds of millions in lawsuits after a 2002 state law opened the statutory filing window.”

Lennon reversed his decision on St. Colman and St. Ignatius of Antioch, another inner-city parish. “I now have a more complete understanding of the extent of social and community services at the parish and the outreach of the diverse neighborhoods,” Lennon said in a May 1, 2009, letter, rescinding the two closure orders.
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“The reprieve comes with conditions,” wrote Tom Roberts of the
National Catholic Reporter:

Fr. Robert Begin has been placed on a four-year clock to end a trend of deficit spending and complete needed capital repairs; to continue growing “in households and in Mass attendance”; to strengthen parish finances and to establish “emergency reserves and build preservation reserves”; and to “remain dedicated to its outreach ministries while becoming a more financially viable parish.”
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“Lennon is a hard man to figure out,” Begin told me, months later, as more priests contacted Sambi to complain about Lennon. “Lennon has a fixation about what he wants to do. He evidently read a book about franchise management. He makes his decisions as if parishes are franchises. If there’s enough room in one church to worship, why have more than one? A particular mission, ethnicity, none of those things mean anything if the customer base can be satisfied by one church.”

BEATING THE DRUMS IN ROME

Leaders from a large swath of parishes were enraged at the bishop when Peter Borré pulled into Cleveland for a June 27, 2009, meeting at the
public library of Westlake, an inner-ring town. Had Cleveland controlled the water distribution to its near suburbs, as Columbus did, the city could have annexed dozens of townships like Westlake, amplifying the tax base to benefit the core. Instead, the diocese helped the mayor’s office with lifelines to the inner city. Forty people from Voice of the Faithful, FutureChurch, and the upstart Endangered Catholics came to the event. Eleven parishes had taken the path of canonical appeals, most of which would end up with Carlo Gullo as he framed the arguments, often in dialogue with Peter Borré, in pleadings to the Signatura. Lennon had shuttered parishes with pivotal neighborhood ministries in Akron and Lorain, too.

Borré, comfortably tanned, wearing jeans and a red button-down shirt, began self-effacingly, “I know a talking head from out of town is not what you need.” He turned to the closures. “Lennon was the architect of what happened in Boston. Now you have him—”

“How did you get rid of him?” asked a lady.

“It took us two years,” he said, shaking his head. “A Boston auxiliary bishop told a group of priests, ‘This is a disaster we will never repeat.’ That is Lennon’s legacy. One cannot be cynical about losing one’s spiritual home.”

Other bishops had been ruthless, too. Anthony and Noreen Foti of Scranton presented a numbing portrait of the suppressions under Bishop Joseph Martino. Two months later, the sixty-three-year-old Martino abruptly resigned after a six-year tenure “distinctive for an almost non-stop round of battles with Catholic academics, Catholic teachers’ union, Catholic politicians and a range of other groups, including his own peers among the Catholic hierarchy,” noted the
National Catholic Reporter
.
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New Orleans archbishop Alfred Hughes had gotten Mayor Ray Nagin to order reluctant policemen into two vigil churches, one of them on the National Register of Historic Places, hauling several parishioners into patrol cars.

In Boston, explained Borré, with eighty-three closures announced, the archdiocese stopped at sixty. “We mobilized nine vigils. The press thinks of vigils as people with candles. This is civil disobedience. After all of this in Cleveland, Lennon spared two parishes ‘on reflection.’

“As I’ve gone around, I’ve been very clear that the chances of success are low. Then why do it?” He paused. “Even the Communists did not
destroy churches in the Eastern bloc. They turned them into houses of the people which have slowly been returned to the church.”

He mentioned Archbishop Raymond Burke, prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, who in 2004, while yet in St. Louis, suppressed a Polish parish. St. Stanislaus Kostka had an 1891 charter under which the then-archbishop allowed a parish board to control their finances. The board in 2004 claimed its properties and assets totaled $8 million. Although the amount was never independently verified, Burke wanted to fold the parish into a common structure of nonprofit parish corporations in order to limit the assets available to sex abuse lawsuits. The parish council spurned Burke’s suppression order; unable to negotiate an agreement with him, they hired a Polish priest as pastor. Burke excommunicated the lay leaders and the pastor, Marek Bozek. The Vatican dismissed Bozek from the priesthood; he continued on as pastor. By 2010 Bozek’s support had splintered, with some parishioners joining the archdiocese in a civil lawsuit against the parish.
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Burke, ensconced in Rome, oversaw the Signatura cases as American parishes tried to reverse their bishops.
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“We are concerned with keeping churches viable,” said Borré. He stressed the importance of filing appeals to keep the issue before the Vatican.

People from the various groups voiced their frustrations, citing well-functioning parishes that stood to lose their funds (Cleveland suppressions netted about $9 million to the diocese the first year). A woman complained, “He is destroying the ethnic parishes.” Heads nodded across the room. Borré reviewed the history of O’Malley’s struggle and his 2004 letter “in which he said there are nights when I go to sleep and pray for the Lord to take me home. O’Malley stopped meeting with Lennon. You’re dealing with one of the most extreme personalities of the American bishops—Lennon stays in his own cocoon. He hates people standing outside, protesting. He
hates
that.”

Nancy McGrath, a founder of Endangered Catholics, was nodding. Their group mounted continuing protests.

“If you get your foot in the door with a supplemental brief at Congregation for the Clergy,” said Borré, “make sure you do it as registered parishioners, not as a committee.” He traced the steps a case would travel in the Vatican labyrinth. “We are pushing up the caseload. Burke has issued a regulation that cases will not be screened by a panel of the Signatura, but
by the secretary of the tribunal. Carlo Gullo, our superbly trained canonist, is up in arms; he considers this a gross violation. He will challenge this at the Council for Legislative Texts, which is like a Supreme Court for procedure in the Vatican.”

FutureChurch’s package on canonical appeals was on its website. As time passed, Sister Chris Schenk followed the increase in download patterns.

“Preserve every scrap of paper with postmarks,” Borré told them. He cited Bishop Skylstad’s position in the Spokane diocese bankruptcy proceeding; and the affidavit by canon lawyer Nicholas Cafardi. “Even if the title is held by the bishop, under canon law, Skylstad said in effect, ‘I am a trustee and it would be terrible if I took this property for my own.’ He said he did not own the parishes under canon law. But more than a few bishops are despotic.”

“We think church closures is a policy issue the Vatican needs to address. No human institution except the Boston Red Sox is entitled to eternal life.”

Only a few people chuckled. “But the notion of a vibrant, financially stable parish just thrown under the bus is wrong, and it’s where I’m making my stand. The leadership that emerged from the pews has largely been by women.”

Amid the experiences recounted of people with the poker-faced bishop, a lady said, “You shouldn’t have to work this hard to be a practicing Catholic!”

Of the many parishes in the struggle, St. Peter on Superior Avenue downtown, catty-corner to the
Plain Dealer
newsroom, was a sturdy Gothic Revival church. It was also a model parish for a city confronting a cycle of decline. Founded by German immigrants in 1853, St. Peter had for generations been a church school. As people moved away from the old urban core, the parish lost membership, and as the population flow to suburbs accelerated, the school closed. As the downtown area grew more commercial by day, the walking poverty increased by night. In 1991, a young pastor, Father Robert Marrone, oversaw a $300,000 renovation of the church thanks to resilient parishioners—some of whom pushed wheelbarrows of concrete to repave the floor.

Marrone’s eloquent sermons drew new followers. A liturgist who saw rare ceremonial potential in the large, shabby space, Marrone had the
vaulted interior painted white, “revealing the simple elegance of the structure,” writes theologian Joan M. Nuth, “reminiscent of a Cistercian monastery chapel.”
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Pale Corinthian pillars stood in symmetry with the slender stained-glass windows. Marrone dispensed with padded kneelers and extraneous furniture to accentuate the altar as spiritual anchor of the large floor, particularly as the congregants walked in processions. The beauty of the space exuded a deep serenity. By the midnineties, St. Peter had seven hundred parishioners; most members drove in from the suburbs to the deserted downtown for the Sunday liturgies—attorneys, arborists, teachers, physicians, academics, and professionals whose generosity anchored outreach ministries, including one with a public school for tutoring, clothes, books, library assistance, and mentoring help for parents.

Lennon’s chessboard changes to the churches and the city put St. Peter in a clustering group. Marrone’s parish was an easy walk from the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, where Lennon said Mass. As the jolting news of the closures spread, a benefactor contacted Marrone to offer the parish $2 million to ensure its survival. Bob Marrone was thrilled. With permission from the diocese, he had financed new refurbishing for St. Peter’s 150th anniversary as the city’s oldest Catholic church and oldest pre–Civil War religious house, holding back the assessments rather than taking out a bank loan. Now he could pay $750,000 to the diocese, pay for demolition of the old school as part of a master plan for the physical plant, and put $1 million into the outreach ministries.

Lennon told him no, turn down the money. His parish would close.

Attorneys in the parish were familiar with the 1888
Mannix v. Purcell
decision, in which Cincinnati parishes successfully appealed to the Ohio Supreme Court, against a bishop’s plan to sell the churches to cover the debts of a church bank run by the bishop and his brother. But in the Toledo diocese, St. James parish in the rural farming community of Kansas, Ohio, had used
Mannix
in a civil case seeking to overturn their 2005 suppression by Bishop Leonard Blair. The state court sided with the Toledo bishop.
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The parishioners did not appeal the state decision. “The overriding issue was that the bishop padlocked the church and took the money,” explains Columbus attorney Nicholas A. Pittner, whose firm represented the parish. “The parishioners who contributed money were beneficiaries
of a trust. We argued that the bishop, as a trustee, couldn’t appropriate the funds. The bishop argued that yes, he was a trustee, but under canon law the beneficiary was a juridic person”—the parish and bishop as one. Pittner continues: “What is a juridic person? The state court of appeals was loath to say that a juridic person is a fiction. Whose law do you apply? Is it Ohio property law? Or is there a federal right to have your claim decided on a body of law other than canon law?”