Render Unto Rome (35 page)

After a discussion of finances, Gullo agreed to a fee of 4,000 euros per parish, or about $6,000 under the exchange rates. Over time, ten parishioner groups from the Boston archdiocese took this route, which translated into roughly $60,000 for work that was likely to extend three years or longer. The fixed fee also covered an appeal against sale of a church, should the suppression per se be granted. Borré calculated the hourly rate at less than $100, which was affordable to the parish groups, and a form of leverage in driving up the cost to the Boston archdiocese each month a given church could not be sold. When the two men finally met in the winter of 2007, the appeals Gullo had filed in the preceding year were still pending at the Signatura; he would eventually have eleven Boston parishes as clients.

Carlo Gullo lived on the third floor of an apartment building in an eastern suburb of Rome, several miles beyond Porta Pia, the sixteenth-century gate crowned with ornamental crenellations that stood as Michelangelo’s last monumental work. In 1870 Italian troops blasted through Porta Pia in seizing Rome from Pope Pius IX. As the bus passed the sight, Borré saw a bronze-and-marble monument to a Risorgimento rifle regiment that Mussolini had erected in 1932, a reminder of triumphal Rome.

The night before, at dinner with a Jesuit who had taught him decades earlier in middle school in Rome, Borré vented about parishes being sold to pay for clergy crimes. “You Americans,” the old Italian grunted. “Always the sex!” But shutting these churches was driving away the faithful, insisted Borré. “If in ten years the American church is half its present size,” the Jesuit retorted, “we will be a better church.” Borré sized him up as a Ratzingerian, loyal to Benedict XVI’s view of a purified church, small, leaner, more obedient to orthodoxy, a view that conservatives cheered.

Tall and slender, with a full head of gray hair, Gullo greeted him at the door. They sat in the book-lined office. In his soft, courtly voice, Gullo emphasized the importance of language in the petitions to convey a sense of the spiritual integrity in people occupying the churches. Gullo conceded
that they were on a hard road, but the financial ethics intrigued him as an issue the Vatican offices had to confront. “You must put aside any notions of jurisprudence from Anglo-Saxon systems,” Gullo explained. Despite the strict time limits for appellants, the Vatican congregations and courts could take as long as they wished.

Borré conceived the Council of Parishes as an organization capable of expanding as financial convulsions hit other dioceses; this was neither perverse nor wishful thinking, rather a realization that the Boston crisis turned on Lennon, then O’Malley, shielding information on Law’s mismanagement of money and predators—a system corroded by protection rituals. Catholics deserved honesty on church finances. Parishioners in Scranton and Allentown, New Orleans and Cleveland, among two dozen dioceses, contacted Borré in hopes of halting parish closures. Nationally, the large majority of parishes closed without great protest, as many churches had too few members. But where protests arose, they shone a spotlight on how bishops managed money with little or no accountability. Borré prepared folders with plastic labels, comparative information on different dioceses, accounts of media coverage, and a how-to explanation on filing a canonical appeal to the Congregation for the Clergy if the bishop did not respond in thirty days, and how the process worked up to the Signatura.

Borré was careful not to offend Carlo Gullo by going on a tear about the injustices of American prelates. For Gullo, the Vatican legal system was a business, the structure in which he practiced his profession.

At home, Mary Beth was amused when her husband, putting down his Latin dictionary, began speaking in Italian. At least he wasn’t yelling at TV news or stewing in boredom like some men who retire with little self-knowledge. Despite her estrangement from the church, Mary Beth had once gone to a Bible study class with Rosie, telling herself,
I am doing this because I love my mother
. Peter’s journey into church officialdom engaged her intellectually; she liked his focus on the property dynamics. She felt for the people sleeping in pews.

“Why am I doing all this?” Borré said aloud to his wife one day.

“You’ve got parts of your skill set you’ve never used,” she replied.

He rolled the idea over, wondering why it was so.

CHAPTER 9

SECRECY
AND
LAMENTATIONS

The road that led Peter Borré to Cleveland ran from Boston to Rome and back again. The big Ohio diocese was mired in a financial scandal when he met Sister Christine Schenk. Chris Schenk had been working for years to expand ministry as parishes lost priests; she anticipated the day when bishops would sit down for practical discussions on how to rejuvenate the church by allowing married Catholics and women to become priests. In 1991 the Cleveland diocese had accurately forecast a decline of 480 priests to 340 within the decade, as part of a 40 percent drop since 1970.
¹
History had taught Sister Chris that Rome would accept change when reality was clear to everyone else.

Schenk and Father Lou Trivison founded FutureChurch in 1990 after an eight-month study on the impact of the priest shortage by Trivison’s Church of the Resurrection in Solon, an affluent Cleveland suburb. The motto was: “We love the church … We’re working to make it better!” Years later, as the Boston vigil movement radiated into the heartland, the agenda was well in place:

FutureChurch, inspired by Vatican II, recognizes that Eucharistic Celebration (the Mass) is the core of Roman Catholic worship
and sacramental life. We advocate that this celebration be available universally and at least weekly to all baptized Catholics.

FutureChurch respects the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church and its current position on ordination [of celibate males only] and advocates widespread discussion of the need to open ordination to all baptized Catholics who are called to priestly ministry by God and the people of God.
²

Beloved by his parishioners, Lou Trivison had good ties to Bishop Anthony Pilla. The bishop allowed FutureChurch to seek out supportive pastors for its workshops and speakers. At any time Pilla could have halted the group, though at the cost of a broken friendship with a priest he liked. Independent groups, like religious orders, need a bishop’s approval to meet in parishes.

Born in 1932, Tony Pilla had grown up in an Italian neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side. Pilla graduated from John Carroll, the Jesuit university in Cleveland, then went to St. Charles Borromeo, the diocesan seminary. Short, with dark hair and bedroom eyes, he was a popular bishop, the hometown boy made good. The affable Pilla was politically astute; he served in the midnineties as president of the national bishops’ conference. While never endorsing such ideas, Pilla seemed unthreatened by optional celibacy or women priests. He was resolutely pro-life and a critic of nuclear arms. Pilla’s great concern was dying neighborhoods. Cleveland was a case study of the rust-belt economy in existential panic.

Founded in 1796 on Lake Erie near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, the port town grew into a city as railroads expanded the navigational arteries to carry coal, crops, and timber. From a core of 1830s Irish settlers, the church had a growing German community in 1846 when the pastor Peter McLaughlin got involved with a choir girl and “proved himself a cad,” notes a diocesan history, “declaring the woman had seduced him!”
³
The new priest, Maurice Howard, set tongues wagging over the housekeeper, a young female cousin. Protesting his innocence, Father Howard wrote: “Thank God, I am succeeding with my people here … there is neither card-playing, dancing, party or frolic.”
⁴
Cleveland diocese, founded in 1847, spun off from the Cincinnati archdiocese.

Shipyards and iron plants burgeoned after the Civil War. John D. Rockefeller’s oil refinery controlled 90 percent of U.S. refining capacity
in the 1890s. His mansion was one of many on fabled Euclid Avenue.
⁵
Working families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came from south central Europe, and there were pockets of black people. Settlements in the Haymarket district followed “village chains” in southern Italy, clustering families and folkways in urban enclaves. St. Anthony of Padua church, built in 1887, held yearly celebrations of patron saints of villages with bands, fireworks, and cuisine. The parish had ten thousand Italian residents in 1900, the year that the First Catholic Slovak Union was founded.
⁶
Serbs, Croats, and Poles enriched the urban mosaic; tribal loyalties formed around the parish. “Even a street merchant, whose jaded mare was dragging a wagon through the muddy street, cried his wares in Czech,” recalled a blacksmith of his 1889 arrival. “And it truly did look like a Czech village … Children, chickens, ducks, dogs and cats ran about, and there was not a blade of grass to be seen.”
⁷

Jews came from Russia and central Europe. By 1930 African Americans numbered 71,890, or 8 percent of the 900,429 population.

Cleveland’s ethnic churches served as cultural sanctuaries for people rooted in Old World ways. “Saint Stanislaus Church cost its Polish congregation $150,000 to build in 1889—when the average wage at the Newburgh Rolling Mill, which employed many of the members, was $7.25 per week,” writes historian Michael J. McTighe. Three years later the pastor resigned, leaving a debt exceeding $90,000, which the parish and new pastor paid down.
⁸

Conflicts flared in early-nineteenth-century America over parish control by lay trustees and the bishop’s power. In a number of larger dioceses the bishop was a “corporation sole,” a legal term that means the bishop literally owns all church property. Bishops gathered control of parishes as presumably benevolent rulers. An 1888 Ohio Supreme Court decision,
Mannix v. Purcell
, considered the sale of parish property to satisfy a bishop’s debts.

A panic in the 1880’s having made depositors fearful, the Bishop of Cincinnati, John Purcell, created a “bank” for Catholic depositors. Somehow, he and his brother ran the bank into three million dollars of debt, and the creditors took an assignment from Bishop Purcell of “all Diocesan property.”

The creditors of the Bishop sought a ruling from the Ohio
Supreme Court that they could sell the property of the parishes within the diocese of Cincinnati to satisfy the debt, as they were “Diocesan property.” The Court ruled that such property was only held in trust by the Bishop for the benefit of the congregation of worshippers … and consistently named the congregation of persons worshipping and supporting the individual churches as the beneficiaries of the individual trusts in which the churches were held.
⁹

As
Mannix
saved the Cincinnati churches from liquidation to cover a bishop’s bad debts, Cleveland’s ethnic churches fell into the old European pattern of hierarchical property, albeit in an era when a bishop’s challenge was to
expand
, while braiding the mores of varied parishes into a common culture of Catholicism. As Cleveland became a muscle of the industrial Midwest, the diocese educated growing numbers of youngsters and helped people adrift in the city. In 1911 Bishop John Farrelly designated an Orphans’ Week collection with a quota on each parish to support orphanages across the diocese. Other dioceses emulated it.
¹⁰
But as the city grew, so did dozens of inner-ring townships that should have been sending taxes downtown to a central city hall.

“Cleveland did not incorporate inner-ring suburbs, as Columbus did,” explains Father Bob Begin, the pastor of inner-city St. Colman parish. “We have all these little suburbs with a fire department, mayor, and school system. Integrating schools didn’t mean a lot because by then there weren’t many whites. When Interstate 90 was built in the fifties it took out four hundred houses from this parish and St. Ignatius. In those days the parish was the center of life. St. Ignatius is at West 100th Street, we’re at West 65th. St. Ignatius seats a thousand people. We’re about the same. On a given Sunday we have four hundred people. Sixty percent come back from the suburbs and they assist in programs that help the poor, as part of the mission.”

White flight escalated after two riots in the late 1960s tore through black neighborhoods. The city population began a steady decline from 900,000 to 450,000. The economy lost 86,100 industrial jobs between 1970 and 1985. Poverty surged by 45 percent in the 1980s in Cuyahoga County; nearly one-fifth of the county residents were poor. By 2000 Cleveland proper had a poverty rate of 32 percent, or 215,700 people,
while inner-ring townships hummed along via tax bases of their own, delivering better services on a tighter grid. Churches that once anchored the families of Italians, Irish, Poles, Slovenians, and Czechs when factories were at full steam sat in neighborhoods that had become poorer, darker, and less Catholic, even as people drove in from the townships for Sunday Mass. As state funds supported lakefront parks, Cleveland’s revitalization in the 1990s via tax concessions to developers helped draw an educated workforce to downtown jobs. But a crumbling public school system and scourges of a drug economy revealed the bleak fault lines between city and suburbs.