Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [123]
Feliciano confirms the account, calling himself “among those worried, saying, ‘Can we handle this?’ But I was not on the staff that cast the vote.”
When a priest abused the son of a deacon on a trip out west, Feliciano felt he had to report the cleric to the county Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS). “Father Wright said Quinn and Pilla didn’t want me to report it, since it happened in another state,” says Feliciano, who made the report to DCFS. “They thought I was difficult, squawking about the treatment centers.”
As Wright outsourced the legal defense work, Feliciano turned to Cleveland Catholic schools—with sixty-five thousand students, the state’s largest system. He drafted the protocols to ensure child safety and took complaints of misbehavior by lay teachers, priests, nuns, and workers, reporting at least fifty people to DCFS. “Seven or eight were prosecuted,” he says. “The church bureaucracy was a state unto itself.” Stacie White, a child rape victim of Father Martin Louis (who went to prison in 1993), sued the diocese as an adult. A defense motion by outside counsel devastated White’s parents by blaming them for letting the priest get too close to her. Feliciano crafted a settlement of $385,000 to White. Later, she visited Louis in prison and forgave him.31
ROME DEMANDS ASSENT
The issue of priestless parishes entered Sister Chris Schenk’s life through conversations with Lou Trivison, the priest who got his parish to focus on the shortage issue and pass a resolution that said what the bishops would never dare to: “There is no lack of vocations to the ordained priesthood if we consider priests who have married and are willing to lead the community in worship, married men who desire to be priests, and single and married women who feel called to the ordained priesthood.” John Paul and Cardinal Ratzinger were closing the Vatican II window on a collegial relationship between bishops and pope. The papacy wanted “willful assent”—obedience—from the hierarchs on policy defined by the top. As the priest shortage worsened, Mass attendance rates sank in Western Europe. Any priest who favored optional celibacy was immediately disqualified in the vetting of bishops. (Trivison had no such goal.)
As FutureChurch forged ties with sympathetic parishes for discussions on changing the celibacy law and ordaining women, the first wave of clergy sex abuse cases in English-speaking countries magnified a double standard. John Paul stood aloof, offering no leadership, no plan, while bishops faced lawsuits and searing press coverage. A bishop couldn’t defrock a pedophile in prison. Thanks to expensive treatment centers, many priests evaded prosecution. The process to laicize such men in Rome often took years. Many bishops tried to keep victims’ settlements under wraps. And church finances were secret.
Of the scandals in the 1990s, says Sister Chris Schenk, “I think we were inclined to give the diocese the benefit of the doubt, rightly or wrongly. We thought that they had tightened up, that they revamped their procedures.”
FutureChurch worked on fostering pastoral life coordinators, men and women who took on parish duties once reserved for priests. In 1993, 263 deacons, sisters, brothers, and laypersons had such positions. (By 2004 the number would be 566.)32 FutureChurch leaders met with the bishop. “Pilla made clear to us that his job was not only to represent us to Rome but to represent Rome to us,” Sister Chris explains. “As long as we did not question faith and morals, he took a benign neglect approach toward us.”
As she continued her midwife’s work in the poverty of East Cleveland, Chris Schenk enrolled at St. Mary, the diocese’s graduate school of theology. Delivering the babies of teenage girls at night, she caught naps on a couch at school by day during breaks. She felt a pull of kinship across the vales of time