The Catholic archdiocese’s Wheeling Hospital is to acquire the Mount de Chantal property which was mentioned as property Bishop Michael Bransfield wanted but found Wheeling Jesuit University president Rev. Julio Giulietti, SJ, in his way?
Rumor has it that the Mount property is now owned or has been optioned by Wheeling Hospital; the hospital also has announced that it was adding a $50 million wing [wrote Timothy F. Cogan in a letter to the Wheeling Intelligencer/News-Register].
“First and foremost” among reasons alleged by WJU alum and former fund-raiser Steve Haid in his letter of protest over Giulietti’s peremptory firing after two years in office, “Father Julio’s lynching was the handiwork of Bishop Michael Bransfield, who wanted to slap down a Jesuit priest who sought to acquire the Mount de Chantal property for Wheeling Jesuit.”
Cogan wrote to object to a $50–million planned addition [not] to the “beautiful old” Mount de Chantal building which stands next to the WJU campus, for historic-preservation and other reasons. [Rather, to the hospital, per comment below]
The bishop
repeatedly denied involvement in Giulietti’s firing, but did confirm to [National Catholic Reporter] that he wanted the sale of the Mount de Chantal property stopped. The sale never went through.
“I was not in favor of the sale of property to Wheeling Jesuit because the price they offered the sisters was half of the price offered by competing bidders,” Bransfield wrote in a message to NCR.
But the bishop was not involved in the Giulietti firing, said then-acting WJU President Davitt McAteer: “We’re seeing the effects of the anonymous Web and the efforts of a small clique who are unhappy. It’s the guy in the theater yelling fire.”
The search for a Giulietti replacement has stalled. Sister Francis Marie Thrailkill has hired on as interim president for an estimated 18 months.
Blithe Spirit 
Just a clarification – the addition is to Wheeling Hospital, not to the Mount.
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This week, Wheeling Hospital, owned by the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston – read Bishop Michael Bronsfield – has purchased the property of the Visitation Sisters at Mt. De Chantal. Howrah! Fr. Giulietti’s name is cleared.
Any logical person following the history of the Wheeling debacle saw the conspiracy at work. A limited number of dysfunctional board members, three troubled Jesuit trustees (two already publicly proven to be inept)and a small town bishop veracious for power, money and a job elsewhere conspired to bring a good man down. The reasons? Envy and greed.
And a good man’s own Order stood by inept.
Bishop Bransfield got the Mount. What will Wheeling Hospital do with it? Sell it, of course. Maybe to UPMC? To the US Government for research and development? To a entrepreneur to cut up into development pieces for “the needs” of the diocese?
And what has come of Wheeling Jesuit? It is without leadership. Its competent and popular legal president, Fr. Giulietti, is gone. Its competent and publicly esteemed AVP, Dr. Letha Zook, is leaving freely in June for the same position at the University of Charleston. Its CFO, Michael Leo, was given the boot. The mood on campus is akin to a funeral home. The Interim (for 18 months) President, Sr. Frances, is trying to understand why so few students want to attend the college. Why does she not know?
So Fr. Giulietti’s reputation is now fully and without doubt re-established. He is cleared. The false accusations and innuendos made against him, all proven to be vapid and without substance, now pale before the truth of the facts. Wheeling Hospital got the Mount.
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