Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [150]
Lennon was flanked by police officers when he went to officiate at the final Mass of the Hungarian church, St. Emeric. A group called Endangered Catholics protested outside, singing “God Bless America.”
“The St. Emeric community wanted to buy the church for a cultural center,” continued Polensek. “He wouldn’t sell it to them. It’s that kind of in-your-face stuff that’s so insulting and unsettling. These are people who fled from Europe, came here for religious freedom; I heard the stories as a kid of men and women who carried the bricks and raised the money. He comes here without respect to knock down churches. Some of these architectural gems were abandoned. My great-grandmother’s church, St. Andrew’s at Fifty-fifth and Superior, I drove down there when it was demolished. They didn’t even take the bells out of the tower. It was one of only two examples of Spanish Mission architecture in the city. They never took the wrought-iron cross out of the tower. My mother sent me over to get some bricks. I wanted to drive down Superior Avenue with one of those bricks and say, ‘You know what, you SOB? You couldn’t take the bell and cross out of the tower! That’s a sacrilegious act!’ ”
Polensek did not finish the metaphor of brick usage when we spoke in the fall of 2010. “Collinwood used to be a stand-alone village,” he continued. “It’s predominantly African American but we have a lot of Italians, Irish, and Lithuanians. Senator George Voinovich still lives in the neighborhood. We have a high concentration of city employees, working class, a great sense of pride. We presented documentation to the bishop on each parish. We started a campaign—letters, e-mails, elicting support from Baptist and Jewish leaders to say these are not just houses of worship, these are neighborhood institutions. If you close these it has an impact on stability. Because of pressure we were the only neighborhood not to have a closure.”33
Father Bob Begin, who had helped Central American refugees in the 1980s, was pastor of St. Colman. Begin had been studying Arabic in his off hours for several years, anticipating work with Iraqi refugees in America. He hoped for a sabbatical to further his study, but when the closure list came out, his parish was on it. Begin went to see the retired bishop Pilla.
Did Pilla have friends in Rome?
Rome will never reverse a bishop, Pilla told him. Solve the problem locally.
Begin asked if Pilla knew Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the papal nuncio in Washington. “I do know Sambi and you should write him.” But, added Pilla, “you need to think of the church as your mother. You may not agree, but she’s your mother—you love her.”
Archbishop Pietro Sambi made a good impression on embassy row in Washington. The nuncio had silver hair and deep forehead creases that lent dignity to his image after four decades as a diplomat. An Italian trained in canon law, he spoke English, French, and Spanish and had previously served as a nuncio in Indonesia, Cyprus, and Israel. He had worked with Cardinal O’Malley in arranging for Benedict to meet several Boston abuse survivors on his 2008 trip to America. Before that, Sambi had negotiated with Palestinian militants to free people in the siege of a Bethlehem basilica. Lennon’s Darwinist plan for Cleveland may have seemed small by comparison, but Sambi took Begin’s letter seriously. A priest who writes the papal delegate about his bishop knows the letter will go right back to the bishop, who can make his life hell.
“I am deeply troubled,” began Begin. After the cluster groups’ many meetings, “the Bishop made decisions that completely disregarded our recommendations,” he wrote.
The inner cities are places where you are most likely to find the very poor, the homeless and the near homeless