{"id":8253,"date":"2004-01-02T15:50:08","date_gmt":"2004-01-02T15:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/read_this_1.html"},"modified":"2004-01-02T15:50:08","modified_gmt":"2004-01-02T15:50:08","slug":"read_this_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/read_this_1.html","title":{"rendered":"Read This"},"content":{"rendered":"

about a former lawyer for the Cleveland Diocese – <\/a>, the<\/strong> lawyer, you might say, whose life has taken a downward spiral since he left the diocese, appeared on 60 Minutes II<\/em>, and since, mysteriously, can’t find work.<\/p>\n

Charlie describes the Cleveland Diocese during his 22 years there \u2014 Pilla became bishop in November 1980 \u2014 as \u201cthe whole dynamic, to be perfectly honest, is when you’re there, you are in a 15th-century court. You are. This is the king (the bishop). The king can do no wrong. And you have what I call courtiers , and if you want to curry favor, you know that Bishop Pilla has had a very bad habit of killing the messenger. That is part of the dynamic of who he is.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the bishop’s lawyer, Charlie says, \u201cI was the messenger on many things. There were educational issues, the current situation with clergy misbehavior. All kinds of things.\u201d <\/p>\n

He describes to me certain diocese courtiers who had direct access to Pilla and \u201cfed into a lot of the bishop’s ego.\u201d He says it’s \u201cfascinating to me when people say, \u2018You were the bishop’s lawyer,’ because for the last four years I worked there, I never talked directly to him. I was shielded from speaking to him.\u201d <\/p>\n

Charlie handled issues dealing with priests until about 1993, he says, when he was told not to do it any more. Before that, he had instructed school principals on sexual abuse, written much-imitated policies, and liasoned with the Department of Human Services. He says Pilla was \u201cfine with letting us do stuff,\u201d but that when Sister Carol Anne Smith joined the diocese to run the schools that \u201call of a sudden we’re stopped from doing the stuff.\u201d He adds, \u201cThere’s a lot that people attribute to Bishop (James) Quinn, but a lot of it has to be attributed to Sister Carol Anne Smith as well.\u201d <\/p>\n

In 1997, while still working with lay people, parishes and the schools, he was asked by a pastor to help with an incidence of alleged sexual abuse at one of the schools. Charlie says that \u201cwe would meet with the families, offer therapy, we had a victim’s advocate who would hook them up with psychologists and psychiatrists, we’d pay the bills.\u201d He says he learned the accused individual had been at another parish for several years, and that \u201che followed our protocol\u201d and called up the other community and turned the man in. <\/p>\n

Afterward, however, Charlie says Sister Carol Anne called him in and removed him from working with schools telling him he was \u201cdoing a bad job,\u201d and that Bishop Quinn told him he lost that part of his job. But even after he was told not to deal with the schools and sexual misconduct issues, Charlie says that in 1998-99 \u201cpeople did come to me and I tried to help them and I was chastised for doing that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Sister Carol Anne Smith did not respond to a request for an interview. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

about a former lawyer for the Cleveland Diocese – , the lawyer, you might say, whose life has taken a downward spiral since he left the diocese, appeared on 60 Minutes II, and since, mysteriously, can’t find work. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}