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By Root 1510 0

’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