Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [120]
“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 shattered 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