Render Unto Rome

by Jason Berry

  Jews came from Russia and central Europe. By 1930 African Americans numbered 71,890, or 8 percent of the 900,429 population.

  Cleveland’s ethnic churches served as cultural sanctuaries for people rooted in Old World ways. “Saint Stanislaus Church cost its Polish congregation $150,000 to build in 1889—when the average wage at the Newburgh Rolling Mill, which employed many of the members, was $7.25 per week,” writes historian Michael J. McTighe. Three years later the pastor resigned, leaving a debt exceeding $90,000, which the parish and new pastor paid down.8

  Conflicts flared in early-nineteenth-century America over parish control by lay trustees and the bishop’s power. In a number of larger dioceses the bishop was a “corporation sole,” a legal term that means the bishop literally owns all church property. Bishops gathered control of parishes as presumably benevolent rulers. An 1888 Ohio Supreme Court decision, Mannix v. Purcell, considered the sale of parish property to satisfy a bishop’s debts.

  A panic in the 1880’s having made depositors fearful, the Bishop of Cincinnati, John Purcell, created a “bank” for Catholic depositors. Somehow, he and his brother ran the bank into three million dollars of debt, and the creditors took an assignment from Bishop Purcell of “all Diocesan property.”

  The creditors of the Bishop sought a ruling from the Ohio Supreme Court that they could sell the property of the parishes within the diocese of Cincinnati to satisfy the debt, as they were “Diocesan property.” The Court ruled that such property was only held in trust by the Bishop for the benefit of the congregation of worshippers … and consistently named the congregation of persons worshipping and supporting the individual churches as the beneficiaries of the individual trusts in which the churches were held.9

  As Mannix saved the Cincinnati churches from liquidation to cover a bishop’s bad debts, Cleveland’s ethnic churches fell into the old European pattern of hierarchical property, albeit in an era when a bishop’s challenge was to expand, while braiding the mores of varied parishes into a common culture of Catholicism. As Cleveland became a muscle of the industrial Midwest, the diocese educated growing numbers of youngsters and helped people adrift in the city. In 1911 Bishop John Farrelly designated an Orphans’ Week collection with a quota on each parish to support orphanages across the diocese. Other dioceses emulated it.10 But as the city grew, so did dozens of inner-ring townships that should have been sending taxes downtown to a central city hall.

  “Cleveland did not incorporate inner-ring suburbs, as Columbus did,” explains Father Bob Begin, the pastor of inner-city St. Colman parish. “We have all these little suburbs with a fire department, mayor, and school system. Integrating schools didn’t mean a lot because by then there weren’t many whites. When Interstate 90 was built in the fifties it took out four hundred houses from this parish and St. Ignatius. In those days the parish was the center of life. St. Ignatius is at West 100th Street, we’re at West 65th. St. Ignatius seats a thousand people. We’re about the same. On a given Sunday we have four hundred people. Sixty percent come back from the suburbs and they assist in programs that help the poor, as part of the mission.”

  White flight escalated after two riots in the late 1960s tore through black neighborhoods. The city population began a steady decline from 900,000 to 450,000. The economy lost 86,100 industrial jobs between 1970 and 1985. Poverty surged by 45 percent in the 1980s in Cuyahoga County; nearly one-fifth of the county residents were poor. By 2000 Cleveland proper had a poverty rate of 32 percent, or 215,700 people, while inner-ring townships hummed along via tax bases of their own, delivering better services on a tighter grid. Churches that once anchored the families of Italians, Irish, Poles, Slovenians, and Czechs when factories were at full steam sat in neighborhoods that had become poorer, darker, and less Catholic, even as people drove in from the townships for Sunday Mass. As state funds supported lakefront parks, Cleveland’s revitalization in the 1990s via tax concessions to developers helped draw an educated workforce to downtown jobs. But a crumbling public school system and scourges of a drug economy revealed the bleak fault lines between city and suburbs.

  The Cleveland diocese by 2000 had 802,000 Catholics, some 28 percent of the eight-county population. Philanthropy, government grants, and the rise of ethnic generations made Catholic Charities of Cleveland reputedly the world’s largest diocesan system of social services, leveraging donations with government contracts for a 2004 budget of $85 million, facilitating 4 million annual meals to the hungry and a range of social service programs.11

  In a 1996 speech to Cleveland’s influential City Club, Bishop Pilla took aim at regional sprawl as a drain on city revenue and vital services. With “growing concentrations of poverty in our urban cores, fiscal resources are strained, if not scarce,” said Pilla. “We basically have flat regional population growth, yet we spread out over more and more land … sprawl without growth.”

  Does this well established trend represent good stewardship of our valuable agricultural lands? Does it lead to a cleaner environment? Does it strengthen the social fabric of our communities? Does it make cohesive, vibrant family life easier? Does it foster greater civic participation? Does it wisely utilize our fiscal resources? Does it increase our economic competitiveness? … Does it help bridge the widening gaps that separate rich, poor and middle class? Does it advance social justice? I don’t think so.

  Pilla worked tirelessly to fund Cleveland Catholic schools—Ohio’s largest school district, with many inner-city students from non-Catholic homes. “How we live proclaims what we believe,” he told the assembled movers and shakers. Citing the struggle of blacks in slavery and segregation, and Hispanics in immigration, he got personal: “My own father came to this country with a nickel in his pocket. Literally one nickel. Growing up in the city, I know well the struggles he faced and so many others like him and my mother, good hard-working people of all races, religions and backgrounds. They built our cities brick by brick. Today we their sons and daughters are called to build and rebuild not so much buildings and streets as lives and relationships, one by one.”12

  Pilla’s vision of the church as an urban anchor was rooted in Catholic social teaching, a shared responsibility to the Other. Sister Schenk and Bishop Pilla were poised to be natural allies in helping at-risk parishes as the priesthood lost greater numbers of men. Six months after his City Club speech, Pilla voiced worries of “the graying of the priestly fraternity,” in a presidential address to the national bishops’ conference in Washington, D.C. Priests, he said, “worry about the slow fade-out for the priesthood, at least as we have known it.”13 But Rome’s hand in church politics required that Pilla praise the “promise of celibate chastity,” even though celibacy was driving away men in record numbers. Sister Chris Schenk had no inkling that the bigger problem for FutureChurch was the mess surrounding Pilla himself.

  LOOKING FOR JESUS

  Born in 1946, Chris Schenk was the eldest of four daughters raised in a close family in Lima, which is nestled in Ohio farm country. Her father, a decorated war veteran, sold life insurance; her mother, whose nursing studies had been cut short by the war, influenced Schenk, her sister, and two cousins to choose nursing over teaching, she recalls.

  People drawn to the religious life often experience the sweep of a spiritual force, a beauty suggesting God’s love, seeding the imagination with a passion for the search, finding grace in service to others. As a young girl, sitting alone on the front steps, she was overcome by a feeling of primordial mystery in the radiance of trees, the leaves in early sunlight shimmering in the breeze. At Mass, the Latin antiphons Introibo ad altare Dei, the quavering bells, the aromas of incense, and the luminous colors of the stained-glass windows filled her with wonder for a loving God. “I just couldn’t figure out how Harry Miller got to swing the incense when he wasn’t nearly as smart or as well behaved as I.” At Mass, she thought, If only I were a boy, I would be a priest. But I can’t. I’m a girl.

  During senior year in high school, while teach
ing catechism to the children of Latino farmworkers, she was struck by the families’ purity of faith. She headed off to Washington, D.C., on scholarship at Georgetown University’s nursing school. In the social tumult of the 1960s, Chris Schenk’s notion of a loving God “clashed with America’s role in the Vietnam war, rampant racism and urban riots.”14 She found solace in the dirgelike rhythms of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. A Jesuit chaplain for medical and nursing students, Father William Kaifer, counseled her as she wrestled with betrayal. If God is loving, why is the world torn by violence and corruption? They discussed free will; she tried to square her despair with her “industrial-strength Ohio Catholicism.” One day Kaifer said, “What would it mean if you found that God did exist?” She knew immediately: she would dedicate her life to that Being, try to bring love to a sinful world.

  In college she discovered the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit evolutionary philosopher. As a paramedic with French troops in World War I, Teilhard found an essence of Christ crucified in the carnage. He went on to do pioneering paleontological work in China. Church authorities suppressed Teilhard’s writings, which treated scientific findings on planetary growth as expressions of God’s design.15 He died on Easter Sunday 1955, in New York, exiled from his community in France. His posthumously published books quickly became classics. Chris Schenk found inspiration in Teilhard’s words.

  I know that the powers of evil, considered in their deliberate and malign action, can do nothing to trouble the divine milieu around me. As they try to penetrate into my universe … temptations and evil are converted into good and fan the fires of love.16

  Three days before her 1968 graduation, she was shattered by the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. But faith is idealism regenerated. Back in Ohio, working as a hospital nurse, she found herself managing a night ward with one aide and thirty-six patients, a milieu so different from Georgetown’s hospital with its interns and residents and collegial atmosphere. She had read the studies that showed poor staffing affected survival rates. Searching for a way to apply her ideals, she went to Boston College for a master’s in nursing.

  Soon thereafter, she met several members of the Medical Mission Sisters, an order founded in 1925 with a history in north India, where thousands of Muslim women and children died for lack of medical care. The sisters as health providers considered themselves “a healing presence at the heart of a wounded world.” Chris Schenk’s studies of theology reinforced the sisters’ embrace of the Other, finding grace in the poor. She met brilliant, idealistic nuns opposed to U.S. policy that perpetuated poverty in countries where America supported dictators, often to plunder the natural resources.

  Her religious life began in Philadelphia, a teaching job at Temple University; she returned her $28,000 salary to the community; however, she soon soured on academic politics. With the support of the Mission Sisters, she became an interfaith organizer with the United Farm Workers (UFW). At a UFW event she met the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, author of A Theology of Liberation. “To be converted is to commit oneself to the process of the liberation of the poor and oppressed,” he had written. “We can stand straight, according to the Gospel, only when our center of gravity is outside ourselves.”17 She found her center in Kentucky, where she trained to become a midwife. The region’s poverty drove her to join a campaign to change state law so that nurse-practitioners could write prescriptions, an acute need in areas without doctors. In a difficult decision, she left the medical sisterhood, realizing that her need to be rooted somewhere geographically did not mesh with life as a foreign missionary.

  In Kentucky, she found a mentor in Baptist midwife Elsie Maier Wilson, “the most enlightening revolutionary of my life. She taught me to trust Jesus’s power.”

  Some members of the nursing board saw our expanded roles as an abandonment of nursing. Many times as I made the long drive to big-city Louisville from the remote simplicity of the mountains I prayed for God’s help to present our case well. We changed the law because of the common decency of ordinary Kentuckians. But it was Jesus’s power to empower the powerless, and the organizing skills I learned from the Farm Workers, that gave me the courage to try.18

  In 1978 she moved to Cleveland. She had romance, a boyfriend, but a spiritual quest for justice ran deep. As a nurse-midwife among the poor, she lobbied for legislation to expand prenatal care services. In time, she was drawn to an activist sensibility in the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph, the order of Sister Helen Prejean. For a second time, Chris Schenk became a nun.

  SANTIAGO FELICIANO JR. AT WORK

  Cleveland in the 1980s was a crossroads for refugees from Central America. Bishop James Hickey, who had ministered with Mexican farmworkers before his studies in Rome, was aghast at the March 1980 murder of El Salvador’s archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass. The funeral was disrupted by gunshots: twenty mourners were wounded as Hickey and others took shelter in a cathedral. Hickey, who was about to become archbishop of Washington, D.C., encouraged Clevelanders Jean Donovan, a lay missionary, and Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel to continue their work in El Salvador. Just before Christmas, they, too, were murdered.

  The FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service harassed New Mexican and Arizona churches in the Sanctuary movement that aided people fleeing civil wars and death squads. Reagan administration CIA director (and Legion of Christ benefactor) William Casey steered money to right-wing militias in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.19 Hickey’s successor, Bishop Pilla, supported a diocesan ministry in El Salvador—and Cleveland. Pilla often quoted Pope Paul VI: “If you want peace, work for justice.”

  “Pilla wasn’t ambitious in the clerical sense,” explains Father Bob Begin, the activist. “Pilla was happy to be Bishop of Cleveland. Priests liked that and had loyalty to him. He also had a real sense of mission for the poor.” Begin went to Bolivia to learn Spanish and returned to start a house for refugees from Central America. “Six hundred people moved through that house,” says Begin. “Most found asylum in Canada.”

  One of Hickey’s last hires, a young attorney named Santiago Feliciano Jr., became general counsel to the diocese and Catholic Charities. “Charlie” Feliciano advised Pilla. In 1984 the Community of St. Malachi, a group affiliated with the parish of the slain missionary women, decided to assist refugees seeking asylum. When Charlie Feliciano gave them a briefing on legal issues, Sister Chris Schenk, who had gotten involved with St. Malachi, was impressed.

  Feliciano was a year old in 1952 when his family left Puerto Rico. His father worked in a steel mill providing for a wife and four kids. As the first Hispanics in the neighborhood, they endured hostilities. Sitting by the window of his rented home on a summer afternoon in 2009, his feet tapping nervously, Feliciano recalls “a church that was elemental to our lives.” From parochial schools he went to John Carroll, then to Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. Charlie Feliciano read prayers from the altar at Pilla’s installation as bishop. Pilla said grace before dinner at the home Charlie and his wife, Rosa, made in the good years. “My kids sat on his lap. This was not a casual relationship.” He pauses. “Pilla was upwards of seventeen years my senior. I never called him by his first name.”

  Meeting Feliciano opened a lens on my own bruising encounter with the Cleveland diocese, and the enigma of Anthony Pilla.

  In 1987 the diocese clashed with the Plain Dealer newspaper over an article I had done on a freelance assignment about Father Gary Berthiaume. The report drew on documents from a lawsuit against the Detroit archdiocese. In 1978 Berthiaume spent six months in jail in Michigan for molesting a boy of thirteen. Eight years later, the victim’s lawyers negotiated a $325,000 settlement. Berthiaume had been a paternal figure to the boy and his older brother after their parents divorced. Unbeknownst to police, the priest abused the older boy and four brothers in a second family. The mother of the second family moved south with a $60,000 settlement for one child, never pressing charges. After a trail of sh
attered lives, Berthiaume took the Fifth Amendment some two dozen times in a deposition when asked about sex with minors.20

  In the ever-forgiving clerical fraternity, Hickey and Pilla gave Berthiaume a new start in Cleveland. Putting a man fresh from prison in a parish unaware of his criminal past fit well with the culture’s benefits package. When I knocked on Berthiaume’s rectory door in November 1986, he refused to speak on the record. Nor would Bishop Pilla, when I called the diocese. But church attorneys gave Plain Dealer editors a message: to expose Berthiaume would destroy his ministry and be grounds for him to sue for invasion of privacy, since he had paid his debt to society years before. As amazing as the argument seems today, no large daily newspaper back then had done an investigation of bishops helping such a priest. The Plain Dealer’s lawyer told the editors that no Ohio judge would dismiss such a suit outright, the legal fees would reach $500,000, and they couldn’t predict a jury’s response.21 At the editors’ behest I sent a letter with questions to Pilla. The answers came back by letter from Auxiliary Bishop A. James Quinn, a canon lawyer who had a law degree from Cleveland State.

  “Quinn drove the decision on Berthiaume,” a grim-faced Charlie Santiago told me twenty-three years later. “Quinn had a lot of influence over Pilla.”