The Wheeling Jesuit mystery

Do you like a mystery?  Do you love a mystery?  If so, you have to love the slowly unfolding Wheeling Jesuit story. 

The heart of the matter is why Rev. Julio Giulietti SJ was abruptly fired as president of Wheeling Jesuit University.  Inside Higher Education has more than anyone else on the matter:

Did the bishop do it?

The perceived rush to judgment has led to speculation that the local Roman Catholic bishop, the Most Rev. Michael J. Bransfield, a longtime donor with no jurisdiction over the university, pushed for the ouster. A spokesman for the diocese denied the bishop’s involvement, but DiTrapano and another board member have heard otherwise.

“I believe that this termination was directly ordered by the diocese,” said Lynda Wolford, a director who resigned over the issue.

Wolford said she was told by someone “close to the diocese” that the bishop ordered the termination, but she would not elaborate on the source.

Did he have motive?

Despite denials from the diocese, many believe the bishop was interested in obtaining a valuable piece of property that Father Giuletti appeared best positioned to acquire. The property in question was Mount de Chantel [sic: it’s Chantal] Visitation Academy, a recently closed school that is still home to five nuns. The nuns had an affection for Father Giulietti and the university, which is located on contiguous property, and had hoped Wheeling Jesuit would purchase and renovate the buildings – providing a home for the sisters for the remainder of their lives.

While the university may not have been financially positioned to acquire the property, Father Giulietti’s favored access was a source of frustration, according to Wolford’s unnamed source.

Did he have means?

[William] Fisher, the Board of Directors chair who initiated the vote, works for the bishop as the diocese’s financial officer.

Did the Jesuits do it?  Well, three of them who are trustees were the proximate cause, no doubt of that.  The two other trustees, also Jesuits, were missing when they voted to get rid of one of them, Giulietti, in the absence of his sole supporter among them, Rev. Edward Glynn SJ, who was away at a family funeral.

These are the three:

Rev. Brian O’Donnell, the Jesuit community rector for Wheeling; the Rev. Gerard Stockhausen, president of the University of Detroit Mercy; and the Rev. Thomas F. Gleeson, a former president of the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif.

Gleeson unfortunately has a blot on his escutcheon, having been named

as a defendant in a highly publicized sexual harassment suit filed by a former male student in Berkeley. The suit, which alleged Gleeson had asked to masturbate with the young seminary student, settled out of court in 2000 with no admission of wrongdoing . . .

The three acted after the much bigger board of directors came just short of the 2/3 majority needed to fire Giulietti.  The trustees had apparently been quiescent, to go by Rudolph DiTrapano, a Charleston, WV, lawyer and member of the board.

“[Giulietti] survived the Board of Directors, then to add insult to injury some Board of Trustees I’d never heard of, three out of five show up, and overrule us,” DiTrapano said.

“I have not heard of any activity that the Board of Trustees embarked on [before this vote],” he adds. “It’s just bizarre that we were required to vote if our vote was meaningless.”

That is, Guilietti’s fate was sealed, in his view.  It’s still a mystery, but the Inside Higher Ed reporter, Jack Stripling, has done much to make it less mysterious.