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The bishop's quandary | Continued
Some of them had left Germany because of their conservative Catholicism and others left because of their liberal politics, and the tension between the two groups is the presiding dynamic in the history of the diocese. Belleville's first pastor was briefly kidnapped and held in a stable - nice scriptural irony, that - during a squabble over a baptism. In 1876, when a local pastor attempted to enforce his ban on dancing, someone fired a bullet through his window. Nevertheless, when the cathedral burned down 70 years after its completion, everyone in town helped rebuild it within five years. By the time Wilton Gregory was made bishop of Belleville at the end of 1993, the diocese sprawled over 11,000 square miles, ranging from the desolation of East St. Louis to the broad farmlands running east toward Indiana. There were more than 100,000 Catholics within its 125 parishes. And, when Gregory arrived, the diocese was in the same kind of shock that afflicted those people who'd stood in the snow in 1912 and watched the cathedral burn.
"One thing they did," recalls Sun Smith-Foret, a clinical social worker who, on behalf of the diocese, counseled some of the Belleville victims, "was elicit information from me about a client, and then use that information to negotiate with the client on behalf of the diocese." Eventually, Smith-Foret quit over what she saw as a hopeless conflict of interest. Not long afterward, Bishop James Keleher resigned and was replaced by Wilton Gregory. "We saw in those early days that the most critical issue was the safety of the children," Gregory recalls. "We saw that we had no right to put children at risk. My first desire, of course, as a human being, was not to make a mistake. But if I have to make a mistake, I'd rather make one protecting children." Gregory removed the 12 offending priests immediately, and he organized a diocesan pastoral council that met regularly to discuss all church issues, and which gave the laity a sense that it had some control in a church that seemed to have gone out of control. The contrast with what had gone before was striking. "I think he gets it," says Jennifer Joyce, the circuit attorney for nearby St. Louis who recently launched her own investigation of the problem in that city. "He seems to understand that this is a crime and not a character defect." The decisive way in which Gregory confronted the general convulsion accumulated a deep reservoir of respect for him throughout the diocese. He then proceeded to charm people. "He kind of lights up inside," says Mary Stuermer, a member of the diocesan council and a good friend of the bishop. One day, while bringing communion to Stuermer's ailing father, Gregory got into an automobile accident in which his car was totaled. "The next time I saw him, he told me, `Thanks to your dad, I got a new car,' " recalls Stuermer. In fact, Gregory's performance in the crisis almost instantly defused the issue of an African-American bishop coming to preside in southern Illinois, an area that historically was far more Southern than it was Illinois. "It's closer to Mississippi than anywhere else," laughs Clements. "I warned him about that."
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hey poured into southern Illinois - Germans, most of them, fleeing the political turmoil of the mid-19th century. The immigrants dug coal for someone else to afford farms of their own. They helped build the city of Belleville, of which they were very proud but which failed to impress Charles Dickens when he blew through town in 1842. "One unbroken slough of black mud and water," observed the author, who noted that Belleville's Main Street was "knee-deep in mud and slime." That same year, they were there to open St. Peter's Cathedral, modeled after one in Exeter in England, that the immigrants and their children helped to build on a hilltop downtown.