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contacted Borré in hopes of halting parish closures. Nationally, the large majority of parishes closed without great protest, as many churches had too few members. But where protests arose, they shone a spotlight on how bishops managed money with little or no accountability. Borré prepared folders with plastic labels, comparative information on different dioceses, accounts of media coverage, and a how-to explanation on filing a canonical appeal to the Congregation for the Clergy if the bishop did not respond in thirty days, and how the process worked up to the Signatura.

Borré was careful not to offend Carlo Gullo by going on a tear about the injustices of American prelates. For Gullo, the Vatican legal system was a business, the structure in which he practiced his profession.

At home, Mary Beth was amused when her husband, putting down his Latin dictionary, began speaking in Italian. At least he wasn’t yelling at TV news or stewing in boredom like some men who retire with little self-knowledge. Despite her estrangement from the church, Mary Beth had once gone to a Bible study class with Rosie, telling herself, I am doing this because I love my mother. Peter’s journey into church officialdom engaged her intellectually; she liked his focus on the property dynamics. She felt for the people sleeping in pews.

“Why am I doing all this?” Borré said aloud to his wife one day.

“You’ve got parts of your skill set you’ve never used,” she replied.

He rolled the idea over, wondering why it was so.

CHAPTER 9

SECRECY AND LAMENTATIONS

The road that led Peter Borré to Cleveland ran from Boston to Rome and back again. The big Ohio diocese was mired in a financial scandal when he met Sister Christine Schenk. Chris Schenk had been working for years to expand ministry as parishes lost priests; she anticipated the day when bishops would sit down for practical discussions on how to rejuvenate the church by allowing married Catholics and women to become priests. In 1991 the Cleveland diocese had accurately forecast a decline of 480 priests to 340 within the decade, as part of a 40 percent drop since 1970.1 History had taught Sister Chris that Rome would accept change when reality was clear to everyone else.

Schenk and Father Lou Trivison founded FutureChurch in 1990 after an eight-month study on the impact of the priest shortage by Trivison’s Church of the Resurrection in Solon, an affluent Cleveland suburb. The motto was: “We love the church … We’re working to make it better!” Years later, as the Boston vigil movement radiated into the heartland, the agenda was well in place:

FutureChurch, inspired by Vatican II, recognizes that Eucharistic Celebration (the Mass) is the core of Roman Catholic worship and sacramental life. We advocate that this celebration be available universally and at least weekly to all baptized Catholics.

FutureChurch respects the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church and its current position on ordination [of celibate males only] and advocates widespread discussion of the need to open ordination to all baptized Catholics who are called to priestly ministry by God and the people of God.2

Beloved by his parishioners, Lou Trivison had good ties to Bishop Anthony Pilla. The bishop allowed FutureChurch to seek out supportive pastors for its workshops and speakers. At any time Pilla could have halted the group, though at the cost of a broken friendship with a priest he liked. Independent groups, like religious orders, need a bishop’s approval to meet in parishes.

Born in 1932, Tony Pilla had grown up in an Italian neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side. Pilla graduated from John Carroll, the Jesuit university in Cleveland, then went to St. Charles Borromeo, the diocesan seminary. Short, with dark hair and bedroom eyes, he was a popular bishop, the hometown boy made good. The affable Pilla was politically astute; he served in the midnineties as president of the national bishops’ conference. While never endorsing such ideas, Pilla seemed unthreatened by optional celibacy or women priests. He was resolutely