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Mystery enshrouds Orange deal
(by Dave Lange - April 29, 2010)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Mystery enshrouds Orange deal
Mark Twain said, "Truth is stranger than fiction."
Even Dan Brown, the fiction writer who tormented the Vatican with such books as "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels and Demons," would be hard-pressed to replicate the strange truth behind St. Margaret of Hungary Church in Orange. For the record, Daniel Brown, the Orange Village Council president, is not a fiction writer.
The secret code that eventually may or may not lead to the village's acquisition of the ethnic church that was callously shuttered by the Cleveland Catholic Diocese already has taken so many twists and turns that even a renowned muckraker of symbology couldn't decipher it. But I'll try.
As the story unfolds, there is a manipulating mayor and a four-member legislative cabal who would augur a shadowy covenant with a calculating diocese to purchase the 7-acre plot, along with the obsolete church building, for the immoderate sum of $750,000. The plot thickens with the latest rendition in a 12-year saga to construct a new village service facility -- this time by retrofitting the church into a workshop, locker rooms, office space and the like.
Then there is the disloyal opposition, a three-vote minority on the Village Council that can slow but not stop the Juggernaut, a secret society of political obstructionists and a clamoring cult of petitioners. With monkey wrenches tossed to the service department and referenda fired at the republican regime, power to the partisans is the battle cry.
Ah, but the tradition of petition deficiency is alive and well in Orange Village, passed down through generations of supra-legal interpretation, volumes of minutiae and canonical mumbo jumbo. Come hell or high water, the citizen uprising and popular plebiscite must be quashed, delayed or otherwise subjugated. Up with authority, down with insurrection and onward with the new service department headquarters.
Higher authority, however, from the Diocese of Cleveland or even the Vatican itself could add more wrinkles to this unfolding mystery.
Instead of a standard transfer of property, the diocese is demanding a series of deed restrictions that would prevent the land or building from being used as an abortion clinic, embryonic stem-cell-research facility, gentlemen's club, simulation of any Catholic sacrament by an unauthorized person or any use that directly violates the consistent ethical and moral teachings of the church. No clues could be found regarding the use of condoms and birth-control pills, nude dancing in the men's showers, ritualistic consumption of crackers and grape juice or taking the Lord's name in vain. But the dissonance between religious law from Rome and constitutional law of the United States is clear. Furthermore, restrictive covenants in property deeds, which once prevented minorities, including Catholics, from living in certain neighborhoods, are no longer enforceable in this free country.
All could be for naught if the former parishioners of St. Margaret of Hungary and other churches are successful in their appeal to the Vatican on what they claim is a diocesan "ethnic cleansing." They believe that churches of certain heritage have been targeted unfairly in a nationwide crusade to deactivate and consolidate parishes.
Whether the Holy Grail lies in the catacombs of Village Hall, the murky depths of the ballot box, confidential transfer files in the bishop's office or historical archives of the papacy, nobody really knows.
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