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Quinn’s letter to me read in part:

I respect the moral repentance exhibited by Father …

I recognize that Father has paid the criminal and civil consequences that the Court and the Church imposed on him. The victim has been compensated to the satisfaction of the Court … [The priest] has undergone extensive psychological counseling and has been recommended as an individual who can begin anew to function as a parish priest. Father continues to cooperate with this diocese through periodic reviews. To date, Father has ministered successfully in the parish to which he is assigned.22

Unwilling to engage Pilla in an off-the-record exchange, the Plain Dealer published a lengthy Sunday commentary on March 15, 1987, crediting my work, but under a joint byline of the publisher, editor, and managing editor.23 “The Parish Must Be Told the Truth, Bishop Pilla,” read the headline. They called on Pilla to identify the priest. Disappointed to lose an article, I nevertheless supported the decision. The paper treated me fairly; I was back in New Orleans as the drama played out. The face of the diocese in that crisis became Auxiliary Bishop Quinn instead of Bishop Pilla.

“Probably no churchman in America,” Plain Dealer investigative reporter James F. McCarty later wrote, “has come to personify the [hierarchy’s] split personality more succinctly than Auxiliary Bishop Alexander James Quinn.”24 Jimmy Quinn, as friends called him, was a Cleveland native son who had come back from studies in Rome with a Romanità cast of mind. He called the cops to the cathedral in 1969 to eject Bob Begin and another priest as they gave Communion to antiwar protesters. In 1985 Quinn previewed a ninety-three-page secret report that forewarned U.S. bishops of a pedophilia crisis, coauthored by Father Thomas Doyle, the canon lawyer at the Vatican embassy. Quinn disparaged Doyle to the nuncio, Archbishop Pio Laghi, writing that the “pedophilia annoyance [will] abate.”25 Doyle, an American in the Dominican order, lost his job for pressing the issue. By 2002 his warnings had become prophetic.

In shielding Berthiaume, Jimmy Quinn and Tony Pilla did just what Tom Doyle and his 1985 coauthors had said not to: stonewall. They warned about huge civil settlements if bishops were found concealing abusers.26 Pilla and Quinn relied on Jones Day, the biggest corporate law firm in Cleveland, and Father John Wright, the diocese’s secretary for financial and legal affairs. Wright had earned a law degree from Georgetown in 1969 before becoming a priest. “Quinn as a bishop had the stature to be the front man,” says Joseph Smith, a CPA who was diocesan treasurer at the time, going to law school at night on the diocese’s dime. “But you didn’t do anything in our diocese without running it through Bishop Pilla.” Wright was uncomfortable in tense situations with the bishop, and in 2000 arranged for Smith to take his own place as CFO, making Smith Pilla’s closest adviser.

Back in 1987, as people wondered whose parish had the ex-convict, Quinn told the Plain Dealer, “The fact that the priest has been clean for ten years is a very good sign of his rehabilitation.” But the standoff spurred victims of other priests to call the newsroom. In July 1987 Karen Henderson reported that the diocese had bargained with three families to keep silent about three other priests, who had also been reassigned, and were identified by the Plain Dealer.27

“Quinn had an awful lot of power, and not for the good,” recalls Charlie Feliciano, gazing at the mauve twilight, his feet jittery on the rug. “I went out to tour the Paracletes’ facility in New Mexico [that treated pedophiles]. I came back and told Pilla, ‘Don’t send them there, or [to] St. Luke Institute.’ I told him to send the priests to Johns Hopkins [Hospital Sexual Disorders Clinic] under Dr. Fred Berlin. I trusted him. We began sending priests there. The reports coming back weren’t so good. The internal debate was, Do we