Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [134]
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As his public image took a drubbing, Pilla caved in to traditionalists in the chancery and punished FutureChurch. Here was a way for Pilla to prove his defense of the church; he felt no allegiance to the group. FutureChurch had grown to five thousand dues-paying members with a $260,000 budget and a small paid staff that organized Catholic groups to sponsor educational programs, prayer services about Mary Magdalene, and discussions regarding the future of priestly ministry and women’s roles in the church. After fourteen years of live and let live, Pilla announced on April 1, 2004, that FutureChurch’s activities were “not appropriate” for church facilities.70 “We are both sad and puzzled,” the group said in a response Schenk and Trivison posted. “During Pope John Paul II’s papacy, the number of priests in the world declined by 4% while the number of Catholics increased by 40%.” Restricting the priesthood to celibate males “makes celibacy more important than the Eucharist.” They called for “respectful discussion” on “systematic inequality of women in the Catholic Church.”
Through Cleveland’s aching scandal, Schenk had held back from criticizing Pilla. The promoter of Church in the City had betrayed people who had shared his vision. As the media drubbing intensified, the nun had even written Pilla a personal letter of support. Now Pilla was making FutureChurch a scapegoat. The Plain Dealer in covering the story published a leaked e-mail Schenk had sent her board. She was blunt. If pastors refused to ban FutureChurch, she said, and if John Carroll University and her religious order gave them a welcome mat, “what can the diocese do? Kick out a priest for allowing discussions when they haven’t kicked them out for sexually abusing kids?”71
“I console myself that Jesus was rejected by his own tradition,” she told Tom Roberts of the National Catholic Reporter. “So was Paul. He was thrown out of all the best synagogues in the Mediterranean world, so when I get upset that one diocese or the other won’t let me speak on church property, I just remind myself that it’s all part of it.”72
That August, Joe Smith had his five-bedroom house on the market for $579,000, when Charlie Feliciano opened his newspaper to read that Smith had a new job: CFO of the Columbus diocese! Feliciano detected an old pattern: as the bishops had shuffled the pederasts, so now with the money-grubbers. Feliciano thought again, Joe Smith must have a lot on Pilla. Columbus bishop James Griffin “said that he had spoken to Pilla about Smith and that a Cleveland auxiliary bishop had strongly recommended Smith,” the Columbus Dispatch reported.73 Feliciano knew that Jimmy Quinn and Jim Griffin had been classmates in seminary and law school.
The Ernst & Young audit had satisfied the Cleveland diocese’s insurance company to pay “an unspecified damage claim,” the Plain Dealer reported. The insurer “then filed a claim against Smith to recoup the money.”74 If Smith had lied on January 6, 2004—as the Jones Day letter to AIG stated in laying out the theft-insurance claim—why did Pilla recommend the man his diocese accused of lying and theft to oversee church finances in Columbus?
Smith says he was never sued by AIG.
How did he get the Columbus job after being sacked in Cleveland?
Smith told me that Matt Brown, the Columbus diocese’s outgoing finance director and a longtime friend, arranged for him to meet with Bishop Griffin. Griffin in 2002 was the first prelate to ban the Legion of Christ and Regnum Christi from his diocese. “So I go down and talk to Griffin,” states Smith. “He says, ‘Joe, you’re probably overqualified. Tell me what happened.’ For an hour and a half I told him everything, how I wanted to leave for a better-paying job. I’d had an offer [in 1996] to sit on the board of Blue Cross for $30,000 a year. Pilla wouldn’t allow it. John Wright wanted to keep me.