• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Berthiaume … now works at the Centacle Retreat House in Warrenville, Ill. Berthiaume did not return calls seeking comment.

Bruening was quietly forced to resign as Ascension pastor in late 1984, after another parish family accused him of a pattern of child abuse covering the previous two decades … Shortly thereafter, Bruening was reassigned to another Cleveland-area parish.

In 1990, the Cleveland Diocese sent him to a parish in Amarillo, Texas, but diocese officials say the bishop there was fully informed of the earlier Bruening allegations.45

Reporter Bill Sheil of WJW TV, Fox 8, began interviewing victims and diocesan sources. Sheil, who had a law degree, prepared a long report on Quinn, utilizing audio of his 1990 speech telling canon lawyers to send files to the nunciature, or Vatican embassy. Quinn avoided Sheil. Pilla, who happened to be in the studio for an unrelated taping, agreed to an interview. Pressed by Sheil, Pilla awkwardly denied ever sending secret files to the nunciature, or that he recycled predators. After the broadcast, the parents of a youth whose perpetrator had gone to a new parish in the 1980s, called Sheil. In a subsequent report, they accused Pilla of lying.46

Calls from abuse survivors to the chancery sent Joe Smith searching into clergy files, contacting therapists, dealing with reporters, signing six-figure monthly checks to Jones Day for legal help in the $300-an-hour range.47 “Pilla called me at home many times during the abuse crisis, saying he was going to resign,” says Smith. “I calmed him down.” The diocese eventually negotiated victim settlements with Jeff Anderson, a St. Paul lawyer and pioneer in clergy abuse torts. As the scandal drove a shift in public opinion, Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney William D. Mason convened a grand jury to investigate the diocese. As Joe Smith gathered boxes to comply with Mason’s subpoenas he was taking calls from a frantic Pilla well past midnight. The bishop appointed a lay task force to evaluate the response to victims. On Holy Thursday he washed the feet of Stacie White, who had been raped as a girl by the now-imprisoned Martin Louis. Charlie Feliciano had wept on meeting with other victims of Louis. Now, as Pilla suspended other priests, Feliciano, who had slowly rebuilt his legal career, wondered if Pilla had taken his advice as a $90,000-a-year staff attorney, back in the day, he might have avoided all hell breaking loose.

By the spring, Pilla had suspended twelve priests on past accusations and identified thirteen former or retired priests so accused. Of those twenty-five clerics, the county Department of Children and Family Services had received “just eight reports,” wrote McCarty in the Plain Dealer, “over the last fourteen years. But five of those reports have arrived since mid-March.”48 Feliciano broke his silence on the clergy cases, speaking to the Plain Dealer and to Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes.49 The CBS interview aired during the June 2002 bishops’ convention in Dallas, where they adopted the youth protection charter and voted to raise the petition threshold at the Vatican for selling property.

Money secrets started spilling out in August. A Plain Dealer report on Catholic Charities, the largest social service agency in Ohio’s largest county, found high-end donors incensed about whether funds meant to help the poor had been routed for abuse settlements. Several major contributors revealed that Pilla in 1999 had requested $4 million from Catholic Charities, which emptied “a discretionary fund that had been used to pay for various social service projects.”

Sources said at least some of that money was used to pay off a multimillion-dollar deficit that built up in the late 1990s during the diocese’s abortive attempt to centralize and modernize its computer system.

Diocesan spokesman Bob Tayek said the $4 million transaction was meant to combine two of the bishop’s charitable discretionary funds.

None of the money