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In midsummer 1999, a lawyer from Jones Day paid a visit to Feliciano’s small office. “You’re unhappy,” she said. “We have a proposal.” The “we,” he realized, was his employer, which paid the lady from a firm with steep hourly rates to offer him a church job assisting illegal immigrants in another county. Feliciano said no, immigration law was not his specialty; the humiliation added to his stress. Besides the internal battles over the sheltering of pedophiles, the finances smelled bad to Feliciano. “Smith kept saying we couldn’t get pay raises, we had to cut back. It didn’t make sense to me,” says Feliciano. Feliciano sat in a chancery meeting where everyone other than himself reported to Joe Smith. (Feliciano’s boss was still Pilla.) Father Wright all but swooned over Smith. Pilla worked in another building. What am I doing here? thought Feliciano. This place is like Oz.

“Charlie did very good work in the eighties,” recalls Joe Smith. “But in that system you learn that you’re always secondary to the clergy. Charlie liked attention. In that environment you had to know when to open your mouth and when to shut it. You swallow your pride; that’s how you had to operate. I felt bad for Charlie. I liked him. Pilla wanted him fired. Wright was reluctant.”

Feliciano was casting lines for a new job on February 17, 2000, when his body convulsed, the left side suddenly ran stiff: he keeled over with a stroke. Two women rushed him to the hospital. None of the chancery priests or Pilla visited him in the weeks it took him to regain his speech and mobility. He had long-accrued sick days, but when he recovered, the job was gone. He got in a dispute with Wright over the severance pay offer, and left without a settlement.

That fall Feliciano joined the law firm of Gallagher Sharp to establish a practice assisting Catholic schools. “The diocese sent out a letter that implied if any [school] hired outside legal counsel, it could jeopardize their insurance coverage,” reported the Cleveland Free Times.44 The job dried up. As Feliciano searched for new work, his son had a severe medical emergency; the family drained their savings. As debts mounted, they lost their home to foreclosure.

Joe Smith took over as financial and legal secretary in midsummer 2000. A delighted Father Wright devoted himself full-time to the less-stressful work of the Catholic Cemeteries Association, far from the chancery. Smith, a former college football quarterback, was a 5-handicap golfer married to the niece of a priest quite close to Pilla. Charlie Feliciano had seen swaggering Joe Smith as one of Pilla’s elite. “John Wright got tired of Pilla calling him at two a.m.,” explains Smith. “Pilla’s management style was reacting to whatever popped up. He’s a charming guy. When he prepares for a speech, he’s magnificent. But he’s an introvert; he worried endlessly, and it was all about his image. He got angry when the Plain Dealer did a story on Cleveland’s ten most powerful people and he wasn’t number one. The late-night calls didn’t bother me as much. I’m a workaholic, but I had a family, so he wouldn’t call as often.”

Feliciano’s disillusionment shifted to a sense of vindication when the media chain reaction triggered by the Boston Globe reports of 2002 hit Cleveland. The Plain Dealer exposed the diocese’s cynical tactics. James F. McCarty and David Briggs finally identified Gary Berthiaume in a report that March:

Berthiaume had been “watched like a hawk” during his stay at Ascension Church, with no reports of illegal behavior—a strong indication, Auxiliary Bishop Quinn said at the time, that Berthiaume had been cured of his disease.

But it turned out the hawk watching Berthiaume at Ascension was the Rev. Allen Bruening—who himself would become the target of several allegations that he sexually molested Catholic grade-school children during his 20-year stay in the Cleveland Diocese.

In a lawsuit filed last year, a former Ascension student accused Bruening and