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James Mason, the board chairman of Cleveland Catholic Charities, wrote Pilla, asking him to confirm that charitable funds would go to charitable uses. “These are difficult times for all,” replied Pilla in a hazy understatement. “Leadership and trust have been damaged. Only concerted action over time can restore that trust.” He pledged to do “everything in my power”—but gave no full promise on the use of money.51 A culture of passivity was too entrenched for well-heeled Clevelanders to rise in unison, asking Pilla to resign, though several high-end donors did so in protest.

“None of that money was used for settlements,” says Joe Smith, who was secretary for financial and legal affairs at the time. “We had built up a significant reserve in our Property and Casualty Fund. In the 1990s we had great markets, those reserves tripled in value. That was the risk pool. Timing can be everything. We were fortunate we had that money available. I never touched Catholic Charities’ funds for settlement monies.”

“So where did the $4 million go?” I asked.

“Mostly subsidies to parishes and schools that ran short. It happened a lot.”

Roughly 60 percent of the parishes paid their assessments, or taxes, to the bishop. For the other 40 percent, expenses often exceeded the revenues from Sunday collections.52 This situation had been building for years. Church in the City grants, handled by a separate foundation, did not go for deficit shortfalls. But diocesan finances had a chaotic side.

Michael Ryan, who has researched church embezzlements (see this page), criticizes an embedded practice of pastors who take “walking around money” before collection funds make it into the bank. Joe Smith points to a corollary in Cleveland: “In old-school parishes, priests created slush funds. I’d say that 90 percent of the time they really had a good intention. Priests were afraid bishops would take their money. Guys would put new windows in the school or a new roof and start these funds. You have a culture of priests doing this. You have guys from parishes who end up downtown in management spots and they carry the same ideas. A lot of stuff was off the books [concealed from auditors and accepted accounting procedure]. That was the culture we dealt with—a personal culture, a business culture, a diocesan culture … It’s the way things were always done, a way for folks not to tell anyone. Priests didn’t want to deal with inconsistencies. Priests hate confrontation. They do what they want to.

“Pilla used to give out crisp $100 bills at Christmas to staff,” Smith continues. “Maybe twenty or thirty of them; all the secretaries got one. The idea was, take your spouse to dinner on me. As bishop he’d go places, confirmations, weddings. He’d get an envelope with four hundred bucks. As his tax preparer I never saw that. What am I gonna do, beat him on the head and say, Now, Bishop, you know you’re getting money from those Masses … You knew not to press it. This was a norm not only in his office. Pastors gave money to secretaries and people for Christmas. That’s the way it’s done in parishes.”

LAMENTATIONS

To Cleveland’s many priests and nuns, the news reports about clergy sex abuse were like a daily beating. The church in which they believed, the bishops they obeyed—how much worse could it get? Sister Christine Schenk was astounded at Pilla’s behavior when an inkling of hope came in the person of “Stephen” (his real name withheld), a former seminarian who had been abused by a priest. Stephen had done therapy, had a good job, and had sustained a spiritual life, an excruciating challenge to most victims. (Mark Serrano, a Notre Dame graduate who grew up in a close home in the pastoral town of Mendham, New Jersey, told how seeing a priest on the altar made him think of Father Jim Hanley’s genitals.)53

Stephen handed Sister Chris a service of healing prayers he had written. He wanted FutureChurch to sponsor a prayer service for victims. She thought his intermingling of scripture,