Two weeks ago, men and women who really knew and loved the Church from all over the world suffered the loss of one of the greatest bishops of the last 100 years. It was Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the retired Archbishop of Milan. Even though he has been gone from the diocese for ten years, 200,000 faithful attended his funeral ceremonies.

Why did 200,000 people turn out for one man’s funeral? There are many reasons but the underlying reason was that he was so loved and was such a beautiful, pastoral bishop. Prior to becoming a bishop, Cardinal Martini was rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. The Biblical Institute is the greatest school of Scripture studies that the Church has and under his leadership, it flourished tremendously. The man did his work based on God’s word and an awesome gentleness in exercising the office of bishop.

He made a tremendous impact on young people. While Archbishop of Milan, Martini preached every Sunday night in the Cathedral at a Mass celebrated for the youth of the city. The average attendance was approximately 5,000.

I knew about this man and knew what a wonderful shepherd he was, and twice when the papacy was vacated by death, I prayed fervently that he would be elected pope. That was not to be and I wonder what would have been different if this man had led the Church for the last third of a century. We will never know. What we do know is that love, gentleness and scholarship have a tremendous impact. Martini had these gifts and used them extraordinarily well. Legalism for some reason does not produce the same results inside the life of the Church. I know of no one who has joined the Church because of their admiration for canon law.

May God bless and reward this saintly bishop.

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When I was appointed a bishop at the end of the 1970’s, I made it a point to get to know as many of my brother bishops as possible. There were about 225 of them. Since we had two general meetings a year and a endless smaller meetings of committees and special projects, it was fairly easy to do. I have to admit that I was greatly impressed with the leadership that the Church had at that time. It was truly exceptional.

Joseph Cardinal Bernardin towered over many of his brother bishops and was accepted as a national leader not just inside the life of the Church, but in American society in general. Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco was a leader in all areas of Church life, but especially in continuing efforts to more completely implement the Second Vatican Council responding generously to John Paul II’s request that the bishops help him to more effectively utilize the papacy and remove it as a difficult block to Church unity. Archbishop Patrick Flores of San Antonio was a tremendous source of encouragement to minorities gradually being recognized for their gifts inside the life of the Church. Flores was a migrant worker as a child and would later be one of the nation’s most beloved archbishops. The list could go on and on but I am prejudiced. Those archbishops have all either been retired for many years or have gone on to God and new men have been assigned.

The insightful John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter had a lead article last month under the title “New Gung-ho Archbishops Known For Aggressive Style.” That really caught my eye and I wondered about which issues they were being aggressive. The report uses three new archbishops as example of that aggressive style. The first is Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore who is the most visible point man for the USCCB’s efforts to protect religious freedom which they see as being seriously and imminently threatened. The second aggressive archbishop is Salvatore Cordileone, newly arrived in San Francisco. He is described as “the major Catholic cheerleader on Proposition 8 which will ban gay marriages.” The third new archbishop is Samuel Aquila, newly appointed to Denver to replace Archbishop Charles Chaput who was promoted to Philadelphia. The article, while interesting, does not list Archbishop Aquila’s area of aggressiveness. I am sure that time will reveal it soon enough.

Archbishops come and archbishops go. The Church remains.

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Yesterday I touched on the fact that the Catholic Church is suffering through a number of serious problems. So what’s new? The Church always has problems and always will, as long as most of its members tend to be human beings.
I thought that in the midst of these difficulties it might be a good time to talk about some of the wonderful attributes of Roman Catholicism and blessings that flow from membership within this enormous community of faith. Where to start?

For me personally, one of the joys that I draw from being Catholic is to be able to place myself in a fantastic, interesting and exciting spot in the human story. The Church is now 2000 years old, and it has lived through virtually every possible human experience. Those experiences range from faithfulness and heroism through hard work and struggle on to debauchery and decay, but the Church is here. And that “here-ness” is awesome.
I am a Roman Catholic Bishop. St. Augustine was a Roman Catholic Bishop in the 4th century. We both had the same job description- shepherding a community of faithful followers of Jesus within a certain geographic area. 150 years from now, there will be a Bishop in Austin, Texas, and that person will have the same job that I have just enjoyed. Now that’s unity in time. There is also the Church’s delightful aspect of unity extended across the planet. Naturally, I have known and worked with all the Bishops in the United States, but I have also worked with bishops, clergy and lay people in Mexico, Central America, Ethopia, Ireland, Poland, and other scattered parts of the planet. The miles were many, but the unity of faith was always intact.

As I step back from those realities, I see a gift that for me is wonderfully encouraging. 2000 years ago, a carpenter stood on a hill in Galilee and told eleven battered friends that He was sending them into the whole world to tell the good news of God’s love for the whole human family. All but one of those followers gave their lives in the process of spreading the message. The message is here. Those who believe it are united, and their unity will carry into the future until the end of time.

That’s awesome!

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I grew up in the 1940s and was gifted by God at that time with a good memory. I very clearly remember how my mother and other older people dressed and acted. Since I am fairly observant, in today’s world I continue to study the clothing and habits of people who are 50 or 60 years old or older- what a difference! When I used to walk on Town Lake, I would be happily surprised seeing 60 year old ladies cruising by in orange or purple jogging suits. I tried to imagine my mother in one of those, and couldn’t pull it off. The older people of 70 years ago were molded in their appearance and behavior on the customs of that time. They were serious- very serious. Today’s older adults are by no means frivolous, but our culture gives them the freedom to be as young as the feel. I think this is a wonderful thing!

Life is a gift from God. We are created to enjoy it here as we journey towards God, where we will enjoy infinite happiness. I doubt very seriously that there will be a dress code in heaven. Onward through the clouds!

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Well, it has finally happened. Bishop Robert Finn, of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, and the diocese itself have been indicted by a county grand jury on a charge of failure to report suspected child abuse in the case of a priest who had been accused of taking lewd photographs of young girls.

This is a terrible event and bitterly saddening for those who suffer with the Church during this long, extended agony. Great progress and cooperation with civil authorities has been present in the vast majority of the dioceses since the bishops developed their own mode of operation in 2002. The fact is that there have been shocking, really shocking failures. Two years ago, Cardinal Francis George in Chicago was discovered to have kept a priest predator in active service in a situation where he could do terrible harm. Last year, the Cardinal Archbishop of Philadelphia stated that there were no priests working in the archdiocese who were charged or suspected of improper conduct with minors. Local authorities released a list of 37 names against whom credible charges had been made. Cardinal Justin Rigali resigned shortly thereafter. There are about 1,000 priests in the archdiocese.

Now comes Bishop Finn ten years after Dallas.

The indictment states that the bishop and the diocese had reason to suspect that the priest might subject a child to abuse. Hundreds of pornographic photographs of children had been discovered on the priest’s laptop. Indicting a bishop is a humiliating event, but the fact is that throughout all of these agonizing years the first reaction of most Church leaders has been trying to cover problems up, to operate under secrecy. In their naivety, they were attempting to avoid scandal but, in acting so imprudently and unjustly, they have generated an agonizing amount of scandal. Let’s pray that the end is in sight.

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Regretfully, our society is used to dealing with scandals. We have had so many of them that we have all had an opportunity to practice how to handle them and survive them. Political scandals, banking scandals, baseball scandals, medical scandals, etc., etc., etc. Because every area of activity in human life is developed and worked out by human beings, and human beings are inevitably frail and inadequate, therefore with the passage of time, you will have scandals in every aspect of life. This is a tragedy but it is certainly an obvious truth.

But not all scandals are equally harmful. Admittedly, as I said, they appear in every area of human life. Among the most destructive are those that occur and are committed within churches and religious institutions who claim as their role the right to be moral teachers on how life ought to be lived.

We are shocked and disappointed but not depressed when an accountant will cave in to the temptation to “cook the books.” We are shocked and disappointed but not depressed when a champion athlete caves in to the temptation to enhance his physical prowess with drugs. On the other hand, I think we are shocked and bitterly disappointed when one of these scandals occurs within the context of a church. Bankers and athletes should teach by good example but usually you don’t find them preaching to us as to how we ought to live. Church leaders do that! It is for this reason that scandals inside the life of the Church are so bitterly disappointing, so destructive, so damaging.

Clichés about the fact that we are all human does not lessen the pain and disappointment. Efforts by Church leaders to clean up the situation, to rectify the immorality, to correct the injustice, are all necessary and have to be utilized quickly. But once the damage is done it takes a long, long time for it to be undone. The fact that only a small percentage of people were involved is of no comfort. Ideally, no one from this group should be so involved.

All churches have experiences of this but over the last 20 years the Roman Catholic Church has had an extraordinarily bitter, disappointing and destructive failure in this regard.

Various efforts have been made to deal with this issue and I was hopeful that we could see light at the end of the tunnel until two months ago when a monumental failure on the part of the bishops reopened the wounds. So far, no bishops have been prosecuted in this saga and only one middle-level Church bureaucrat has been indicted. Maybe that needs to change so we can really learn.

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Some of my readers have accused me of being anti-clerical. Isn’t that hilarious? I am a Catholic priest for 55 years and a bishop for 30. How could I be anti-clerical?

To prove that I am not, let me tell you about one of my new heroes. He is Bishop Gabino Zavala, Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles and he is one of the few bishops who is aggressively stepping forward to defend the rights of working people, most especially their right to form labor unions.

Although the Church has defended this right vigorously for the last 120 years, the bishops in the United States have of late had very little to say about the subject. The absence of bishops involvement in the rights of workers makes for a difficult situation but to refrain from active support at a time when a massive counterattack on workers rights has spread across the country and is betraying our nation’s commitment to serve the common good and defend the dignity of work of people.

Today, I bring up Bishop Zavala because he recently issued a statement justifiably praising the National Labor Relations Board, which had taken a small but important step in leveling the playing field for workers. The bishop is referring to the fact that the NLRB has recently changed the rules on the timing of union elections. This is a relatively minor rule change that restores fairness to a process that has been tilted heavily in favor of employers who often delay union votes by months and even years with excessive litigation. Bishop Zavala points out that “irresponsible companies that stall to prevent workers from voting to form a union frequently retaliate against employees with threats and intimidation. In fact, during the organizing campaign, more than a third of employers simply fire workers who are pro-union.”

Today, the unions are weak, vilified in the press and suffering from an unprecedented assault of workers rights. Some of it was brought about in the past by union mistakes but the union movement is still a great source of strength in our never-ending fight for justice and equality as we argue as to how to divide up the nation’s economic pie.

May God bless you, Bishop Gabino Zavala.

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Mexico is a poor country relatively speaking. There is a tremendous amount of wealth in the country but the overall development of the nation has been slow and unequal. In a nation that is overall poor, it is hard to indicate which state is actually the poorest. In my opinion, one of the worst off economically is the State of Chiapas, the southern most state in Mexico. The great majority of the population are indigenous and live in overwhelming poverty, lacking in education, health care and, in most instances, access to justice.

For all of its problems, the people of Chiapas were blessed with a great religious leader, Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia, bishop of the Diocese of San Cristobal, between 1959 until 1999. He fought tirelessly for the poor, their needs and brought the attention to the world. He suffered constant abuse from government opposition and gradually became the great cause of hope for the poverty stricken people of Chiapas.

I know the State of Chiapas in a very superficial way. Once while delivering a jeep to Maryknoll missioners in Guatemala, I was attacked on the road by a cow. That slowed me down for several days. The only memory I have is that of meeting Bishop Ruiz at an international meeting on foreign aid programs that was held in Dublin, Ireland in 1974. Already having known a great deal about this bishop, I was greatly impressed by his outstanding virtues – a happy blend of faith, strength, humility and courage.

Bishop Ruiz’s work goes on. The elements of his work were:

• A call to humility, commitment and personal change
• Patience and the capacity to listen to others
• Independent of their social position or religious affiliation
• Active non-violence
• Not to have fear
• To maintain hope alive despite negation

Each of those simple sentences are filled with meaning but I have to cut it short.

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Monsignor Ronny Jenkins, a very fine and hard working priest from the Diocese of Austin, was elected General Secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. That is a major post in the Church in the United States and gives Monsignor Jenkins an opportunity to do a great deal of good. Pray for him.

Now comes news that the Vatican has made an announcement of its own. A news release on May 9th stated that, “Today the Holy Father appointed as Prelate Auditor of the Roman Rota, David Marie Jaeger, OFM, professor of Canon Law at the Pontifical “Antonianum” University, consultor for the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, the Congregation for the Clergy, and the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts.” Wow! All of that is one job?

At any rate, these are two fine priests – one from the diocese and one a priest who did many years of great work in this diocese. I congratulate both of them, promise them my prayers and wish them all the success in the world as they proceed through the fog.

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A few weeks ago, I began to introduce some very thoughtful remarks by a parish priest in Ireland who had been ordained fifteen years and was making many positive suggestions regarding the improvement of pastoral care in that country. This is especially important in view of the scandals that have shaken the Church so dramatically and caused many, many Catholics to cease to practice the faith.

Today, I will quote from Father Dempsey’s remarks regarding consultation in the Church, especially as it applies to priests. Dempsey points out that at the time of his writing his diocese has no bishop. When that appointment is made it will have a dramatic affect on Dempsey and all the other priests of the diocese. Dempsey and his cohorts are mature men, well educated, strongly committed and working hard for the Church but their opinion will not be sought about a decision that will profoundly affect their lives for years to come.

He admits that there are a few inquiries to select clergy to get their opinion but those inquiries are supposed to be super-secretive. In point of fact, they are quasi-public. Dempsey closes with this statement. “We are told of renewal in the Irish Church in the light of recent revelations, but there seems to be a distinct lack of renewal in this very significant area of Church life. The present system…has not served us well in the past.”

Next, Dempsey takes up issues regarding serious pastoral problems related to the sacraments.

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