A Church’s Cross to Bear : Simi Valley: He had seemed the perfect priest to his parishioners. But the arrest of Father David Dean Piroli has shaken the parish.

Surrounded by the families of accused felons, a Catholic nun waited early Friday morning in the Ventura County Jail to pay a visit to an old friend.

“He was very, very responsible, very dedicated to his work,” said Sister Mary Francelia, principal of Sacred Heart School in Saticoy, describing the man she was about to see.

“He related very well with the students. They admired him, they appreciated him.”

With Sister Mary was Art Gonzalez, 18, who once studied catechism from Father David Dean Piroli, now a prisoner inside the jail.

“He was more than a close friend, he was like an older brother,” Gonzalez said.

Jeannette Longwill, whose two sons studied religion under Piroli, also waited to visit the man who had been her spiritual counselor.

The recent weeks had seen Piroli become a fugitive priest. He was accused of drug use, embezzling church funds and trying to smuggle undocumented aliens across the U.S.-Mexico border.

But Longwill was determined to keep the faith.

“I think people are really trying with their Christian Catholic background not to judge,” she said. “People’s prayers and support are with him.”

The Perfect Priest

Since moving to St. Peter Claver Church in Simi Valley from Sacred Heart Church two years ago, Father David Dean Piroli had seemed to his parishioners to be the perfect priest.

He was devout yet funny--a popular assistant pastor who seemed at home celebrating a solemn Mass or teaching catechism to teen-agers.

With equal ease, the 36-year-old Burbank native could arrange the liturgy for a youth Mass or explain complex Catholic dogma to the older members of his church.

“He always seemed like he had everything together,” said Dolores Ritch, a Eucharistic minister at the church. “He gave good homilies, he gave a good Mass.”

Then he was arrested for possession of drugs.

Hollywood police who were called to roust loiterers outside a Sears store on May 27 found Piroli sitting in his church car with a young man, a small amount of cocaine and $10,000 cash in small bills.

Church employees found $50,000 more in Piroli’s rooms at the rectory, along with parishioners’ donation checks and St. Peter Claver collection envelopes, some of them torn open, prosecutors said.

On June 3, as prosecutors and church officials pondered possible criminal charges against him, Piroli disappeared.

He resurfaced July 30 at the U.S.-Mexico border, trying to re-enter California at Calexico. When immigration inspectors found two undocumented aliens in the trunk of his newly purchased Mercury and an arrest warrant in police records, they turned him over to authorities in Ventura County.

The reaction to the series of bizarre developments among the congregation at St. Peter Claver was one of stunned disbelief.

In June, Auxiliary Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann of the Los Angeles Catholic Diocese made a special trip to the church to break the news of the first arrest.

“He told us Father David had been arrested and he was not able to give us a whole lot of details,” Ritch recalled. “There was like a dead silence. . . . It just couldn’t have happened.”

The congregation was shocked.

“It’s like a death in the family,” Ritch said. “People are just sad about the whole situation.”

“They went through a lot of disbelief,” said Father James McKeon, the church’s pastor. “They went through anger and then denial, asking for some reason, other than that father be responsible for what’s happening. And then, with the generous help of Bishop Ziemann, acceptance.”

No Clues Offered

On a dusty field near what is now the Simi Valley Freeway, St. Peter Claver Church was opened in 1972 to serve the city’s rapidly growing community of Catholics.

Today, the low, tan cinder-block building surrounded by oleander and driveway signs proclaiming “THOU SHALT NOT PARK” is the spiritual home to 1,850 families.

Outside stands a marble statue of their patron saint, a Spaniard who ministered to black slaves in Cartagena, Colombia, in the 1800s.

Inside, the parishioners each Christmas set up a giving tree. Needy children’s names are hung on the tree, and donors pile gifts for them under its branches.

On the second Sunday of every month parishioners donate canned food to the church’s pantry. A church group called All Concerned Through Sharing (ACTS) distributes the food to the poor, along with clothes and sometimes even money to pay utility bills, Deacon Richard Hamm said.

“I think we are a giving, loving parish,” Hamm said.

Piroli fit the community perfectly. He held the admiration of the church’s children, and an utter reverence for the rituals of the Mass, Hamm said.

“His outward attitude was very priestly, I thought,” Hamm said. “He was very much into doing the right thing.”

Piroli was a good speaker with a photographic memory, who could be as insistent in conversation as he was persuasive in the pulpit, Father McKeon said.

He was “a man of deep convictions” about the church, many of them quite conservative, McKeon said.

Piroli strongly opposed a movement toward allowing altar girls to serve at Mass, and he sometimes referred to feminists as “femiNazis,” borrowing a phrase from The Wanderer, a right-wing Catholic newspaper that he distributed in the church.

He was a strict disciple of the Pope.

“He said, ‘I’d only change things like the way I say Mass if I saw the document from Rome,’ ” McKeon recalled. “He was very, very rigid.”

Piroli hinted sometimes that his parents had also been very strict, but he kept his personal life and his past to himself, McKeon said.

He also gave no clues to what would happen on the night of May 27, or in the weeks that would follow, McKeon said.

Piroli did not come and go at odd hours, nor did his behavior indicate he was using drugs, McKeon said.

If the priest occasionally spent his night off away from the rectory, McKeon said he thought nothing of it. The bishop had counseled all priests in the Ventura-Santa Barbara region to avoid burnout by spending the occasional night away from home.

The only thing that struck McKeon as odd was that Piroli sometimes offered to handle the collection money after it had been counted.

After saying Mass, Piroli sometimes offered to take the money from the money counters’ table to a safe place where it was kept before being taken to the bank.

“He’d say, ‘Oh, you guys are working too hard. I’ll get the collections,’ ” McKeon remembered.

Drive to Hollywood

Then came a phone call.

Piroli telephoned from the Hollywood Division lockup, asking McKeon to bail him out. He had been arrested in a church car, and police said they had found a small amount of cocaine and $10,000 in cash.

Unable to raise $500 cash, McKeon and Lyle Hibbs, a layman ordained as a Eucharistic minister at the church, agreed to put up Hibbs’ 1990 Lincoln Continental as collateral for a bondsman to pay the priest’s bail.

Together with Hamm, they drove to Hollywood to rescue the priest from the lockup.

“We’d been there about an hour, and he comes out, he’s very hyper,” even more energetic than usual, McKeon said. “He says, ‘Jim, I’m so cold, I’m so hungry. I’m so cold.’ ”

Someone then gave him change for a vending machine, which he dropped all over the floor, McKeon said.

Retrieving the coins, Piroli mistakenly bought a bag of candied popcorn and dug into it, then complained, “Oh Jim, this stuff is awful, it’s awful,” McKeon said.

“He was quite hyper that night, but he got that way from time to time,” Hamm said. “He was very concerned about getting his car back.”

After searching the police lot, the four men retrieved the church’s white 1990 Chevrolet Lumina, which McKeon and Hibbs drove home. Hamm drove the priest back in his own car.

Piroli said little about his arrest, Hamm said.

“I did not ask questions, because I did not want to start jabbing him. He did not discuss it at all, other than when the police came up on him, he was scared. He said there was about four police cars around him.”

Two days later, McKeon offered to cover Piroli’s Masses, but the younger priest turned him down, and celebrated Mass as if nothing had happened.

“Nobody knew about (the arrest) except those in the office and the three of us, and we tried to not say anything to anybody,” Hamm said. “Things were, on an outward appearance, the same as normal.”

A few days later, Piroli disappeared, taking the church car with him. It was not recovered until two weeks later by police in a Burbank medical center parking lot.

Piroli did not come back.

Rumors ran wild, McKeon said. Bishop Ziemann twice called meetings with parishioners to dispel those rumors, tell them what happened and answer their questions. They were told Father David was arrested with cocaine and a large amount of cash. He is gone. We do not know where he is.

One by one, parishioners began to deal with what happened in their own ways, and they still talk about it with each other from time to time, Hibbs said.

“I think you see the complete range--I do think a lot of people are hurt by it,” Hibbs said. “That was such a bad experience for me. I’m just putting that part of my life aside.”

As the parishioners learned more about Piroli’s arrest and disappearance, Ziemann stepped in to move the congregation past its worries, parishioners said.

Ziemann removed Piroli from his post for failing to show up at the church. He personally packed the priest’s belongings into boxes, sealed them and put them in a rented storage shed.

Then he set about the business of choosing a replacement--an administrator, someone who would oversee the church’s financial affairs while filling Piroli’s spiritual duties.

Ziemann chose Father Dennis Mongrain, who had replaced Piroli at Sacred Heart in 1990, to replace him again.

By all accounts, Mongrain and McKeon are helping the parishioners put St. Peter Claver Church back on an even keel.

“He and I are working together,” Mongrain said last week. “We’re here to serve the people. Healing is a process. I’m sure each person has their own particular feelings, but the movement is toward wholeness and healing.”

The arrest of Piroli, who is scheduled to be arraigned on an embezzlement charge Thursday, has shaken some parishioners’ faith, Hamm said.

But often, people forget that “priests are human,” he said.

“They’re just like us, and as humans, we have free will and we have feelings,” Hamm said. “And when they fall down, it’s just devastating to the people who’ve put them on a pedestal.”

“I feel like Father David was a good person, and I just feel he’s caught in a kind of whirlwind or something,” Ritch said. “I just would like for him to get help.”

McKeon said, “We must remember, priests are not God.”