The Council of Elders:
Tapping the Wisdom of the Vatican II Archbishops
ARCHBISHOP PHILIP HANNAN
Transcript of Interview
This is an interview with Archbishop Phillip Hannan in his home in New Orleans conducted by Frank Cunningham and Brother Loughlan Sofield, S.T. June 9, 2005
BPH=Archbishop Philip Hannan
FC=Frank Cunningham
LS=Loughlan Sofield
FC: Background: In the ad limina talk the Pope gave to the bishops of Philadelphia and New Jersey he said as he listens to the bishops of the United States he indicated that they have some problems with credibility. He said they have to change their structures and their governance. They have to recapture the vision of the second Vatican council. You are one of the few bishops still alive who was at the second Vatican council?
BPH: Yes.
LS: Who else besides you?
BPH: One was the Auxiliary Bishop in Louisville, KY, Bishop Hogan. However, I think he may have died recently. There are not many of us left.
When we talk about the difficulties of the church I would like to do-it from a broad viewpoint. The big difficult we have is a lack of responsibility. Pope John Paul II said that the trouble with the world is it doesn’t pay any attention to God. It just ignores him. They don’t fight. They don’t proclaim against him. They simply walk away. Pope John Paul said that that is very hard to deal with. I believe that also. I believe it about priests and lay people. Now, this may seem to be too simple, but I believe that the big difficulty today is lack of confession. I can remember the time when I was at the Second Vatican Council. I was the pastor at St Patrick’s Church in downtown Washington DC and we had an enormous numbers of confessions. On Saturday we had confession from 1:30 to 9:00 and on vigils of big feasts we had confessions from 9:00 in the morning until 9:00 at night. The Holy Cross Fathers would send some of their men to help out. Now we don’t have people going to confession. I constantly see the picture at communion time. Almost everybody goes to communion and you wonder if everybody is obeying all of the documents of church, such as abortion or any of the sins against sex. The polls that have been taken indicate the number of Catholics who believe in abortion and the number of Catholics who do not really believe in the real presence. These are questions that have to be dealt with. As long as Catholics do not have a sense of responsibly for their faith then we are going to be in bad shape. We’re not going to have the vibrant kind of church we had. And in my opinion that is why we don’t have the number of religious vocations that we formerly had.
FC: May I interrupt? When we started you mentioned the lack of responsibility and talking about the faithful in general
BPH: That’s right
FC: And Catholics have a general lack of responsibility?
BPH: Yes, that’s right. I think we share that lack of responsibility with everybody in our culture. That’s the trouble, our culture. Years and years ago I was on a committee of three, Bishop John Wright, myself, and Bishop Hallinan. We were asked to write the annual statement of the Bishops. It was right after the war. I got the idea to write about “responsibility” because we saw it disappearing after the war and to me that still is the reason why we have so many problems.
For instance, kids having children and having no sense of taking care of them. I’m referring to both men and women. A fellow has intercourse with a girl who gets pregnant and neither of them feel any sense of responsibility. You would be surprised if you visited our community houses and covenant houses. I have heard people who go down there as volunteers saying that these young mothers have no sense of responsibility at all. It simply did not enter their conscious that when you give birth to someone you’re responsible for that person. And to me that is one of the real big difficulties we have. And the only way a Catholic can take care of that is to go to confession and to have to confront themselves in the confessional. It also provides the priest with an opportunity to talk with them. When we heard confessions it would give you an opportunity to listen to people who were basically good. You could say “look you are leading a very good life. Did you ever think of having a religious vocation?” Very, very often especially women would say, “Thank you very much.” They were pleased with the compliment and you could see they were going to think about it. Now you have to have that sense of responsibility to nurture a religious vocation. This is one of the big things. I have tried to get the Bishops to deal with in a very forward manner. I’ve recommended an annual statement on the absolute necessity of going to confession. I think that would gradually get back the sense of responsibility.
FC: What else would you do if you were to talk to the leaders is the Church today. What else can the church do today to develop a greater sense of responsibility among people in all sorts of areas?
BPH: To me it has got to begin very early. For instance, as soon as religion classes put the emphasis on the communitarian aspect rather than the individual responsibility, I immediately saw a decrease in the sense of responsibility. If everybody in the community is equally responsible it excuses you from any particular effort on your part. It even goes down to elementary grades. That’s where you begin. I even brought this matter up to Cardinal Schoenborne when he was in this country. He was the final editor of the Universal Catechism and I said to him “look I just want to tell you what my experience was. For example in combat, and we had a lot of combat, what makes a soldier say an American soldier, not kill a fellow that is really at his mercy? It always came down to a sense of religion. This man is still a man and therefore I have to treat him like a man. And I would always pay attention to the combat man that would be in this position. Several times a unit would be told you have to take this particular place/spot. It is crucial to us. You must do it whether everybody gets killed. You’ve got to take it! Most of us knew that the Sixth Paratrooper Division of Nazis was against us. So you would have a final clash, a hand-to-hand battle of these men, both determined to give up their lives, if necessary, to win that spot. And there would always be prisoners taken. I would ask myself what triggered the ability or the aptitude of an American paratrooper not to shoot the people who were completely at his mercy. Always it was some act of religion. An American Captain would see a medal on a German guy and he would immediately knock away his gun and say ‘komorade” and that was it. That would begin the whole system of surrender. To me it is extremely practical to talk about a sense of responsibility and to exult in it, to praise them for doing that.
FC: Earlier you referenced the Pope’s comment about the current culture’s difference to God and the difficulty of dealing with that. As a church how can we respond to that feeling that there is no need for God?
BPH: In my opinion you have to point out to them the trouble that’s caused us. We have a trying problem in every large city in the United States and as long as you have a big crime problem you’ve got a wrong sense of responsibility among people. I became very interested in this a one point. I talked with a fellow, a very good accountant and here is what he said, “look, if we could get all of our Catholic students to be responsible it would make such a change in the culture. We are about 30% of the population. If we could truly influence them you would not need as large of a police force, or the number of judges you now need and you would not need, and this is a big thing, all of the social services that you give to people who have children outside of wedlock. All of those things mount up to the fact that it’s costing a lot of money to take care of the problem. The best thing in the world would be if you didn’t have the problems because people have a sense of responsibility.” He said it would pay us to take every kid we could and put him in school and teach him a sense of responsibility.
LS: One of the major things is this issue of taking responsibility. If you were to talk to people who were moving into leadership in the church today, Bishops or others, what other things would you suggest to them? What are the issues that leaders in the church should be concerned about?
BPH: Good. This is what I told Cardinal Shoenbourne. I said one thing that is wrong with your catechism is we don’t have any short definitions; you have a long explanation. It used to be that when we had catechism we would memorize those things and it stuck in our minds. Here’s an example of that. In order to keep the men from stealing in combat, every once in a while we would say, pack up everything. We are going forward about 1/4 mile. Everyone would pack up. They would simply march them through a large open field and they would get them to lay down all their stuff so the officers could see what was stolen and what wasn’t. I remember on one of those occasions I was watching and a fellow next to me, a young guy, and he was completely relaxed. I said to him “You’re not interested?” He said “No I ‘m not.” He said, “I’m a Catholic!” He said, “I can’t steal.” And I said, “What do you mean you can’t steal?” He said, “Because of the way the Sisters taught us.” He said “If I were to reach out with my hand to steal something he said “I have a picture in my mind of that Sister who taught us pulling my ear and saying, “Don’t do it!” And he said, “That’s the trouble we have a lot of fellows here among our paratroopers who haven’t had Sisters teach them. They taught a very simple thing that you wouldn’t forget. That was, “Why did God make me?” And the answer was, “God made you to know him and to love him and serve him in this life and be forever happy with Him in the next.” That was the way we were taught. I think was a better way then to tell them about the whole community being responsible. Because it doesn’t make it specific enough.
FC: As an aside to that, the US bishops are doing a National Catechism. They ought to have your ideas. Is there any kind of consultation going on?
BPH: Consultation or not, I tell them. I spoke to the Cardinal and he agreed with me that we have to re-write a part of this and begin with the definitions. For instance, if the question is, “What is a sacrament?” add a short definition that they can learn. I said the whole trouble with the universal catechism is that you can’t expect anybody to memorize all of that. You have to make it easy for them to remember the salient answers. I don’t mean to dwell on the war but it does present dramatic situations in which you have a very, very, clear opportunity to be responsible for the lives of the men you’ve been trying to kill. And I always felt, and this to me was always proven by the men in combat, that morale, to a large extent depended upon whether they really were good, moral soldiers.
LS: Can I move that to another area? I remember years ago you had me come in and work with you and the priests around the issue of morale.
BPH: Oh, really.
LS: What has to happen now to improve the morale of the Church?
BPH: In my opinion, we had things that helped greatly with the morale of the clergy. For instance: We used to have 40 hours devotion. Do you remember that?
LS: Yes, I do.
BPH: And, it was universal. The assistant chancellor in Washington DC was responsible for arranging the schedule for 40 hours devotion in all the parishes. That way the people would know about it. We put it in the Catholic newspapers. It rallied the priests themselves. The last night, Tuesday night, at the end of the 40 hours devotion, the pastors always invited 20 priests or so, friends or priests who were near by. They would come and hear confessions. There would always be an overflow. They would all be there to hear confession. At the end of everything there would always be a big dinner and they would have a great deal of camaraderie. They would get together and get rid of whatever problems they had. They would be very, very candid. I remember a priest who was very famous for his hospitality. He had a large group of priests for the 40 hours devotion. Some had stayed over. They had all gone to bed, a lot of them had just slept on the couch or whatever was available. One fellow lost his glasses. He didn’t want to wake up anybody and he went quietly down to the dining room but couldn’t find them on the table, so he crawled underneath to see if they had fallen down. He forgot he was underneath the table. When he tried to stand up it cause all the silverware to have to come cascading down and made a terrific amount of noise. People across the street, lit their lights up. They didn’t know what in the devil was going on in the rectory. Police came. It was a very embarrassing situation. But what I am saying is we had those things that we don’t have now. And they did help to build up the morale and the priest felt very, very much involved in the personal lives of the youngsters. I know that because I was involved right after being ordained, I noticed immediately there was nothing for young men from age 19 to about 30. So I developed a youth club in which we had a dance. During intermission I would answers questions. In order to keep the fellows attending, we would invite another parish to be our guests. I had them a committee composed of some pretty, young girls and good-looking young men. They were responsible to make sure that the visitors all had a dance partner, no wallflowers. As a result, we felt more involved in the lives of the young people. It was the best possible way of getting their parents to come back to church. As soon as they saw you were doing something like that for their children, something very practical, they’d come back.
LS: You were just talking about the young people. When I lived here in New Orleans, you had a reputation for going to every high school graduation. I understand that you would say to the kids, ”Ask me anything you want.” What sort of issues are the youth of today dealing with?
BPH: I no longer do that, of course. Let me give you an example of what happened. If somebody has seen the movie the exorcist, they wanted to know all about the devil. It’s the very, very opposite right now. A lot of them are tied up with new age stuff and they don’t realize it. And you have to ultimately get down to that basic fact there is a devil and you are going to be tempted.
LS: Are you willing to dialogue with the kids?
BPH: I liked it, to tell you the truth. I always wanted to provide was an opportunity to ask a question that meant a lot to him or her. Not having that opportunity would be very bad because it would put a young kid at a disadvantage. I always encouraged them to ask me the questions, particularly those they would never ask in class. I would encourage them to ask the difficult questions. Again, with the Exorcist, everybody had seen that movie, so it led to a general discussion and to me that had meaning.
FC: That’s structure, and that was a structure that you offered personally. It goes to what the Pope said to the Bishops in Pennsylvania and New Jersey when he called for a commitment to creating better structure of participation, consultation and shared responsibility. How do you view that over your many years as a priest? Did we do better years ago? Are we doing better now?
BPH: We did better a long time ago because we didn’t have television. I’m talking about 1940’s. So for entertainment they loved to come to something where young guys and girls could meet other young people that they didn’t know before. Without really trying, I developed a league of seventeen parishes in Baltimore in one year. That pleased the pastors. I would always tell them when they became affiliated with us that this could make money for the parishes. We would have big events. It was the day of the big bands and we would have enough kids coming to a central spot, so you could pay for any band in the country. That helped an awful lot. Today they don’t have the need to go out of their home for entertainment. But to me it still works for this reason, I always felt you can’t beat the natural law. So, you would get enough pretty girls and enough good looking fellows – that’s it, that makes it!
FC: Your reference to television and no need to go out of the home. Our whole culture works against community. I think there is still a hunger for community. As an elder of the church what would you say to the leadership today about trying to find those structures to do that? Maybe we can’t do it as we did 50 years ago.
BPH: I think we still can. I am not at all convinced that that method is not effective. I do that by harking back to some of the young fellows that I knew then. For instance, to my surprise, we developed two very good vocations to the priesthood in one year. One of those fellows became the Rector of the old cathedral in Baltimore. That position had a lot of prestige. Another one began taking care of drunks. He developed a marvelous kind of place to take care of people who had a problem with drinking. He became so well known that he was invited by the Communist Government to go to the Soviet Union to give a talk to some of their people. He established a center for dealing with alcoholics in St. Petersburg. He also has a wonderful treatment center in Maryland.
LS: You are talking about these things that you did. What should the church be doing today? Where should the church be taking leadership?
BPH: In my opinion, you have to start with the young people. When you deal with the young people you will also deal with the older people. They will see that you are doing what they can’t do themselves. Our approach was popular because we happened to choose the right people. We ended up in a parish that had 6 or 8 hundred families having 460 people in our young people class. That was a big influence on the parish. They liked it and they came very willingly. I think you have to deal with human nature the same way. You have got to give them an answer for some of the questions they have and they need sociability in Catholic circles. I still think God put the natural law in us in order to help us, and to enable people to teach us.
FC: Do you see the church, the institutional church, committing resources to evangelizing young people?
BPH: To tell you the truth, I don’t think they are doing it the right way. You have to get down there with them and be associating with them. You can’t just turn them over to somebody. In my opinion education is the major job of the priest in the parish. That’s what he has to do and to do it in a very practical way. I don’t care if the young people are going to Catholic school or not. They have a lot to learn. They have to learn how to apply their religious principles to their actual actions and this is a way to do. I used the intermission at the dances as a time for questions. They would start to argue among one another and that was fine. It gave it a real spirit of naturalness.
LS: You were in dialog with those youths and you gave them a forum in which they could raise whatever issues they wanted to talk about. Are we doing that as a church today with the youth and with the adults?
BPH: No, I don’t think so. One difficulty is that we have far more lay people in proportion to the number of priests than we did back then. Take for instance: this parish. We have about 1600 families, mostly affluent. I just live here and say Mass once in a while. They have a large school. The pastor has a degree in canon law. H has to help out at the tribunal, which has a lot of cases and that take up his time. There isn’t any possible way for him to create parish forums. Now if he could get a good deacon that would be a different thing, a deacon who would be willing to get down to the level of 19 to 30 year old. That would do it I think.
LS: What about the role of the laity?
BPH: In my opinion, that’s where they come in. Here is what you do. You have to arrange various committees to look after things in these clubs. For instance, there will be a certain number of young people who want to be mentors for young people so you would have a committee for that. They would bring up questions during the question period at the next dance, like some problem they had.
FC: I want to get some clarification. When you talk about young people, you made reference earlier to 19 to 30 years old. Generally is that what you mean in our conversations?
BPH: Yes, that’s right. We have a lot of kids in Catholic schools but we have nothing for those who don’t go to Catholic schools and this is a way that affects them and also makes life as a Catholic practical to those who have gone to a Catholic school – I think.
LS: Two areas in which I hear you stressing. One, people need to take personal responsibility. Two, be more in dialogue with youth. What are some of the other issues that we as a church are facing today?
BPH: Well, a lot of people don’t get married now or just temporarily, or shack-up with somebody. To me you have a lot of questions that are not answered because they are not practical about their religion. I especially got this after the Second Vatican Council. People were literally saying that the priest in confession was wrong. They would say that he was telling me what I had to do, but that’s up to me, to my conscience. Now, a lot of them would say that. The Holy Father, by the way, was good at answering those questions. One example was when he spoke here to about 60,000 kids in the Super Dome. They rallied and responded very, very well. He said you have to be pure and you have to maintain yourself as a good Catholic, especially before you get married and to choose the right one. They got up and they cheered! So much so that it surprised him and he lost his place in his speech. I think you have to give them some factual instructions to make them respond like that and for them to understand like that.
LS: If a young bishop would come to you today and say Archbishop Hannan share with me your wisdom – what would it be?
BPH: It would be first of all to have longer hours of confession on Saturday. I would also try to make them handle problems that come up. For instance, a group of teens came to my office late one night all worked up about Social Security. They were concerned that there wouldn’t be enough for them when they needed it. They felt that nobody was doing anything about it. I said most of you can vote, can’t you? You have to take care of that. You have to organize a group. Send delegates to your congressman, and raise your voices at the right time for the right things. I think that you have to make them responsible as citizens
LS: I also hear something else in there. Whatever you do people must know you are available to them. That a group of teenagers could come to see the Archbishop late at night – how did you create that sort of climate?
BPH: I don’t know - they seem to learn. I would go to places where there were problems. I remember one year there was a break in the levy and somebody called me about 2:00 in the morning. They said there is a break in the levy across the river and they need people to come. So I got seminarians and took them over there to help remedy the situation. Of course, this gets in the newspaper. It gives the people the idea that you will pay attention to a problem. They’ve got to bring it to your attention and then they have to work with you to solve the problem. When I came down here one of the salient things I noticed was a lot of elderly people and they only had one measly home for the elderly. Black sisters ran it. God bless them. It was very successful. So I called a meeting and a number of priests lay people talked about meeting the needs of the elderly. Almost all the priests said, “Why are you getting into that. We have never done this before. Somebody somehow is going to take care of an aged grandparent who doesn’t have any place to go.” So after the meeting was over I asked a couple of the lay people to stay, especially black lay people. I said you heard what they said. Is that true? They said no. They were talking about a situation that no one ever asked us if it was a problem. We finally ended up having 18 homes for the elderly built here, especially the indigent poor. Then I had a nursing home built right near the chancery for those who could afford it. If the government was providing funds, that was great. I could only build a certain number for the Archdiocese because they had a quota system. I would get religious groups involved and I provided all the skilled help, architects etc. But the groups would make the application not the Archdiocese. I think all together we borrowed about $140 million dollars from the government. Every one of those institutions today has a waiting list. So there was a need.
LS: It sounds like one of the things I hear you say is that as a leader you identify the issues out there. For instance, you discovered that there was only one place for the elderly and the poor elderly. Then, as a leader you gather the people. The people are the priests and laity. When you don’t get the right answer or a complete answer you then talk just to the laity. Is that right?
BPH: Sure, they’re the ones with the problem. The good thing about it is that those priests were not against it. They just didn’t want to get involved. When I opened the home for affluent people every darn one of them that had excused themselves had either themselves or a family member who needed that care. And I’ll say this for them, they now say, “yeah, we were against all this but we were wrong.” So they came around.
FC: It sounds to me in a sense that your inviting participation and then they take ownership. Is there room for more of this in the church today on a broader level?
BPH: I keep telling them that the Second Vatican Council dealt specifically with the laity. Therefore, I say let’s sit down together and we’ll find a way to handle any problem. We’ll help you along, but you have to handle it.
FC: Do we do that well though? I don’t want to seem like I am beating a dead horse here, but when the sexual abuse scandal erupted a few years ago--or re-erupted--the bishops gathered in Dallas and they invited a number of lay people to come in to speak to them. I’m not sure what happened down there. Was that a good way to do it? Where they laity listened to in that environment?
BPH: Yes, they were. But, frankly the bishops should have heard about that problem long before they knew.
FC: Hear about what?
BPH: Sexual Abuse.
BPH: The sexual abuse started here in Baton Rouge in the early to mid-eighties.
FC: If you don’t want us to use this…
BPH: Don’t use this. I became immediately the brunt of a lot of protest, I remember especially one young guy, who had inherited a bank and I knew he had at least 25 million dollars. He called me at my office, and he was absolutely livid and he said “ I want to give you a million dollars, right away in cash, if you will just advertise in various places of the United States that if somebody is abused and the bishop doesn’t handle it right, that they can appeal to you, and you will take care of it. I said thank you very much but I don’t have jurisdiction over everybody, but it is a good idea anyway.
I devised what I thought was a good way to handle it. And that would be on the provincial level, the archdiocese suffragens, to have a tribunal itself, a review board. The archbishop would name people to it. There would have to be some priests, but there would have to be others, as well. I favor lawyers who were in criminal law not civil law, to be on the review board and have somebody from the circuit court who is very well versed in criminal law to determine which complaints had not been met. Now, this meant you were neglecting one thing; you were disregarding the rights of the bishops who didn’t do anything about it, didn’t act. And you would take care of it that way. That idea was not accepted. That was 1986. If they had acted on that we wouldn’t have had all this trouble. That was 14 years or so that before the root of these tremendous abhorrences.
LS: One of the priests here at the diocese quoted you after the Dallas meeting. He was impressed. He said you said something to the effect of “We made a mistake in Dallas”. I’m not sure if you remember saying something like that?
BPH: See I had constantly talked to the priests and said that they had to be helpful to each other. I find it difficult to believe that 2 or 3 priests who are acquainted with a priest, who had a problem, didn’t act on it. The only people who can protect the reputation of the priests are the priests themselves. They have to be serious about taking responsibility for a priest that they know who is a pedophile. They have to act! I said you are going to keep things away from me, and you are not going to allow me to act because you are not going to tell me everything. But, I will be glad to talk to anyone who does have a problem. Now I see there is a reaction and they actually agree with me. But it seems to go against an idea that we have always had, to protect the priests. And this, protecting pedophiles, is a wrong application of that idea in my opinion. Looking back on it, I don’t remember any priest coming to me and saying “Look, my friend at the next parish is in trouble and I think we ought to go after him and bring him in if the priest himself is not able to talk to him. Bring him in and talk to him. There are some lay people who did that, but not any priest. This is a hard thing to talk about. But it was true.
To me too, there was a basic error. The periti at the Second Vatican Council went around because they didn’t have anything to do at the various talks and seminars and so-forth. They scattered the idea that celibacy would last 2 years after the Second Vatican Council and there wouldn’t be any celibacy. It would be obsolete. And then, they went a little bit further, and this is completely off, “the church is completely against intercourse of priests with women but not with men.” The reason why I feel that got around is that we read about cases of some brothers in Canada who were engaged in it. I tried my best to find out whether or not there was a silent network. I went twice to gather the whole faculty of the Notre Dame Seminary and I told them we have the French Quarter here. This is the last place a guy can get ordained who’s has a tendency towards homosexuality or towards pedophilia. Even if he just has a strong tendency, we don’t want him as a seminarian! This is not the place at all for them. The one person who protested the most was a Sister who was teaching moral theology, and she objected strenuously. She said, “ Archbishop you are being discriminating”! And I said, “That’s right I am discriminating. I don’t want anybody that has a tendency at all”. I said “Look, here is actually what happens.” I had learned this in Washington. I knew guys in politics there. I had a wonderful setup. I had a couple of judges that I could call on any night and they would go down and sequester the pad at the precinct and there was no publicity at all. Anyway, I didn’t have that here but I had it there. And this gave me an insight as to how much went wrong. I said to her “We have to absolutely make a stand against the people who practice homosexuality. “. And I could see it didn’t sink in. So I let a month pass and called them back again. At this point I could see that I was getting on peoples’ nerves. The rector himself said, “You have done enough. We understand.” They did not understand and to this day I still think that some members of the faculty of the seminary were compliant and just let this go on.
FC: We were talking about the laity. I am sensing from our conversation that you called on the laity many times for help and advice. What’s your reaction to some of the lay organizations that have formed, that seem to be Catholic, but are not “official? CUFF, Voice of The Faithful, San Egidio. What do you think of these as structures for lay involvement?
BPH: I had started an organization in Washington called The John Carroll Society. It was because a number of Catholics who came there as members of congress or the cabinet, did not know other Catholics, even in their own party. They wanted a way to get together occasionally and know who were Catholic. We would have 4 meeting a year and we would have Mass at the Cathedral and then we would walk down to the Mayflower for a talk. Half of them would give a pretty good talk. They were lay people, not just priests. It worked well. We had a rule that no politician could address The Society. Now along came John Kennedy. Some said we should make an exception. He’s the only guy we’ve got for a presidential candidate and we think we ought to hear him. It was time to make an exception. So he came and gave a good talk and it was very vibrant and you could see they enjoyed it. And they did know the other Catholics in Congress and in the District. It was one way for them to have a sense of responsibility.
FC: When we were talking about young adults before, I wondered if you had heard of a program called Theology on Tap. I know it had started out in Chicago and it’s big in Washington in recent years.
BPH: Oh lord, yes. We had it down here. I went once. There was one guy who came in and who was just absolutely determined to throw a spoke in the wheel. He got up and spoke against the church. These people really clearly took care of him. So I like it.
FC: You had made some reference to lay people arguing amongst themselves. You don’t have to answer this, but, do bishops argue among themselves and if so, is this a good thing?
BPH: Oh yes, absolutely!
FC: Should it be more apparent to the rest of the Church?
BPH: Absolutely. And if you follow their discussions you will find at least 10% speak up while the rest don’t. There are about 250 attendees. I think there ought to be far more numbers of speakers.
FC: Why don’t the speakers – speak up?
BPH: I don’t know. I speak up. A lot of times they don’t like it.
LS: Going back to the address of the Pope at the ad limina visit. He said you need to change your structures and you need to change your governance. Do you have any idea what he would mean by that?
BPH: I sure do. In regard to structure, it still depends too much upon the bishop. I don’t think we bishops talked enough about the 16 different subjects we decided upon at the Second Vatican Council. The one thing wrong with the Second Vatican Council was no time was allotted to teach this stuff to the people, especially in the United States. We were at the council for 3 or 4 months and came back to a lot of work. We’re not like the Church say in Germany or France where they give a certain amount of money to each priest. In my opinion our situation really necessitates the lay people really getting into it. We did not teach the lay people that Vatican 2 says you have to get involved. You can organize a society or group to do whatever good work you want and run it yourself. You don’t need the church. That’s never been explained. The one person that I heard of that really explains the 16 documents to the people was the Archbishop from Krakow. First of all he wrote a summary of each document and he formed group to teach these to the people. Now that’s the way it should have been done. But we did not have the opportunity. In Poland, the finance of the church is taken care of by the law. A bishop goes home after the Second Vatican Council to all kinds of administrative duties, all kinds of people that want more money, for children who are handicapped, etc. The administration in the United States is directed towards the bishop. Not so in Europe. Take the situation in Washington. Cardinal O’Boyle was very much interested in some of the documents about social matters. But when it came to teaching the priests how to say the new mass he said you take care of it. He told me to do a demonstration and I did. But that sent the wrong message and we did not have meetings to instruct the people. And I don’t know if they wanted it but we should have tried to do something.
From the very beginning there should have been a time between one session and the next session of the council to allow the bishops in busy places like the US to instruct the people. The trouble was canonically none of this stuff was supposed to be taught authoritatively until it was actually voted on and the Pope signed it. All of those things were done at the last session.
LS: You just said a moment ago that Cardinal O’Boyle asked you to do this and you said it sent the wrong message. What was the message it sent?
BPH: It sent the message that he was not going to get personally involved in applying and telling the people the application of those 16 documents for their lives. And to me that was the big trouble. Because meanwhile these experts were telling everybody what the spirit of the council was and what was going to come out of it and that’s where all the dispute came in.
LS: Anything more you want to say to us? Anything you want to share?
BPH: What I would like to share is this. If there is some way for a number of the intelligent, well instructed Catholic lay people to read the section on the laity of the church documents--if they would just read that and take it seriously and do what it says, organize and take care of the problems that they have, it would make an enormous difference in the church.
FC: If they did do that, does it become threatening to the established authority?
BPH: Yes, sure but they have to learn to deal with it.
LS: You had one recommendation would be that the priests should spend more time in the confessional. I remember that you were on the committee when they did the study on the priests in the United States and I remember at one point you saying to me that it was never really implemented. Could you say why?
BPH: Because, the excuse was there were too many other things to do. To
me in the seminary that is where we should have had the answer. The people
on the faculty should have been very explicit in saying “Look, you
have to make a decision about where you are going to use your time. You
can’t do everything. You have to give priority to some things. But
you have to understand that you have these lay people who can help you out
in doing a lot of things if you only teach them and instruct them, that
they are empowered to do that. They cannot only arrange their own group
but they have the right to elect their own officers and they do. There isn’t
one in a hundred Catholic lay people whom I know, that understands what
the council did in regard to lay people.