Spring 2006 |
Volume 11, Number 2 |
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David Kehoe on one diocese of the American heartland where genuine leadership – with the periodic removal of openly heterodox Catholics from positions of power – is occurring.
Ageing followers of Australian Rules football will be aware of the legend of former Hawthorn player and coach John Kennedy. Kennedy was famously heard to implore his players, in a coach’s high-pitched tenor tongue-lashing, to “Don’t think, just DO IT!”
Now, in case the reader instantly brands Kennedy as another of those unthinking Ocker sportsmen, it needs to be remembered that Kennedy, a teacher and senior public servant, also knew the value of thinking, and that thinking always, but especially in a crisis, demands action.
In the very centre of the United States, in Kansas City, Missouri, a Catholic bishop has done it: he has dared to close down a diocesan formation centre that did not fully understand the crisis of faith facing the Church in English-speaking countries. Bishop Robert W. Finn of the awkwardly-named Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph stepped up to the plate in Kansas City on the feast of Mary, Help of Christians, 24 May last year, after spending one year as coadjutor bishop.
During that year as coadjutor, Bishop Finn, formerly a priest of the Archdiocese of St Louis on the eastern border of Missouri, visited 70 per cent of the parishes in the diocese. Unlike Kennedy’s footballers, he had time to observe and think while planning. Nevertheless, his thinking certainly did not paralyse his action, and he did not wait for his official installation as bishop to begin his reform.
Six weeks before taking responsibility for Kansas City-St Joseph, Bishop Finn met with the diocese’s lay chancellor of twenty-one years, George Noonan, and informed him that he would be appointing a priest as chancellor. Three days later, according to a National Catholic Reporter feature report on the changes in the diocese, he told vice-chancellor Sister Jean Beste, a Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that there was no position for her in the diocesan restructuring.
Bishop Finn explained to the NCR that he wanted for chancellor and vicar-general people who knew the diocese well, were respected and “would help me to keep a good, honest and authentic contact with primarily what was going on with the parishes.” He had the replacements at hand in two priests, Father Brad Offutt and Father Robert Murphy, his picks for chancellor and vicar-general respectively.
Initial changes
After 24 May, Bishop Finn acted quickly. The NCR report listed other initial changes: the diocese’s nationally renowned lay formation program, New Vine, was closed; the budget of the Center for Pastoral Life and Ministry was cut in half, leading to its closure within ten months; a review of adult catechesis in the diocese was begun and a layman was appointed as vice-chancellor of the diocese to oversee adult catechesis, lay formation and the catechesis study of dissenting moral theologian Fr Richard McBrien’s column in the diocesan magazine The Catholic Key was discontinued, and Bishop Finn began checking the weekly’s front-page stories, opinion pieces, columns and editorials before print. The import of Fr McBrien’s removal cannot have been lost on the National Catholic Reporter, the US’s leading lay Catholic mouthpiece for dissenting views, as it is based in Kansas City, and continues to give Fr McBrien space to spread his misleading views on what it is to be a Roman Catholic.
In the following twelve months, the NCR reported, Bishop Finn also slashed the budget of the Office of Peace and Justice in half and established a separate Respect Life Office to promote pro-life issues and fight stem-cell research. The Vocation Office was given a full-time priest director with a part-time priest assistant and other help from the new Office for Consecrated Life.
The diocesan-sponsored master’s program, administered for eight years by the Aquinas Institute of Theology, a Dominican school affiliated with Jesuit-run St Louis University, was transferred to the Institute for Pastoral Theology at Florida-based Ave Maria University. Finn also upgraded the Latin Mass community, which had been meeting in a city parish, to a parish in its own right and appointed himself pastor.
A review of adult catechesis and lay formation, led by new vice-chancellor Dr Claude Sasso, a lay historian with experience in Catholic catechesis and apologetics, gave birth in April this year to the Bishop Helmsing Institute to offer courses for both personal spiritual enrichment and for certification for lay ecclesial ministry. At the time Bishop Finn said the institute was for “today's disciples of our Lord” who wanted “to know the Lord Jesus, and not just ‘about Him’.”
On 16 December last year he said: “All the faithful must be engaged in the work of growing holy in Jesus Christ, and subsequently to be participants in the transformation of the culture around us.” Formation “must be less process and more content.”
Hive of activity
The first eighteen months of Bishop Finn’s episcopacy have undoubtedly been a hive of activity, although the bishop said in a radio interview that “more has remained the same than changed.” At the same time, there is at least one pillar of the diocese that has not, in public at least, come onto the reform radar, and that is the Catholic school system.
In his column in The Catholic Key, on 16 February this year, Bishop Finn gave the standard episcopal praise for the diocese’s Catholic schools, although he did set their goal as the “salvation of souls”, something which is not normally placed in the mission statement of contemporary Catholic schools in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe, from experience elsewhere in the English-speaking Church, that the spiritual atmosphere in the Catholic schools Bishop Finn inherited is any different from that of the defunct pastoral formation centre. Let us hope the trust Bishop Finn has placed in the Bishop Helmsing Institute’s education division will bear fruit over time among the teachers in Catholic schools.
Similarly, little seems to have been said in public about the diocesan clergy, especially those who would have supported the work of the former Center for Pastoral Life and Ministry. If laity are to be held accountable for apostolic failures, then so should clergy and bishops in a form suitable to their state. The Church in the US and elsewhere has suffered greatly for failing to confront clerical sex abuse, and it can ill afford not dealing with other clerical failures which demand the removal of clergy from positions of influence when the salvation of souls is at stake.
Hitting the ground running
Certainly, Bishop Finn hit the ground running in Kansas City-St Joseph and has put into practice in his public actions the repeated teaching of the Church that a bishop’s role is first to preach and teach and ensure that all Catholics are singing from the same orthodox songbook. Doing this, he is likely to find that much of the sanctifying and governing will take care of itself. This will be a great achievement that other bishops throughout the English-speaking world could take advantage of.
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