Priest’s Arrest Tries Faith of Some Followers : Reaction: Parishioners are trying to adhere to church tenets and not judge Father Piroli as he faces an embezzlement charge.

Surrounded by the families of accused felons, a Roman Catholic nun waited early Friday 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 accused felon 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 in 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.

Recent weeks have seen Piroli become a fugitive accused of drug use, embezzlement of church funds and smuggling immigrants across the Mexican 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.”

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

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

With equal ease, the 36-year-old Burbank native could arrange 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 got arrested on suspicion of possessing drugs.

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

Church employees discovered $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 criminal charges against him, Piroli disappeared.

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

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 Archdiocese of Los Angeles made a 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 said. “There was like a dead silence. . . . 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. And then, with the generous help of Bishop Ziemann, acceptance.”

Piroli’s “outward attitude was very priestly, I thought,” said Deacon Richard Hamm. “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, 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 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 been very strict, but he kept his personal life and his past to himself, McKeon said.

Piroli did not come and go at odd hours, nor did his behavior indicate drug use, 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. He would take it from the money-counters’ table to the 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 said.

After Piroli telephoned McKeon from the Hollywood Division lockup, 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 $500 bond.

Together with Hamm, they drove to Hollywood to free the priest.

“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 gave him change for a vending machine, and he dropped the money on the floor, McKeon said.

During the ride back to Ventura County, 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.”

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 recovered two weeks later by police in a Burbank medical center parking lot.

Rumors ran wild, McKeon said. Ziemann twice called meetings with parishioners to tell them what had happened and answer their questions: 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 the news 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.

“Healing is a process,” said Father Dennis Mongrain, who was selected to replace Piroli. “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 (there was not enough cocaine in his possession to charge him with drug possession, police decided), 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.”