Jerome Listecki: Milwaukee's Archbishop

Archbishop Timothy Dolan left the Archdiocese of Milwaukee on Easter Sunday.

Catholics in southeastern Wisconsin have been waiting a long time for a new archbishop to be named.

The waiting is over.

Welcome Bishop Jerome Listecki!

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Milwaukee-area Catholics got their first glimpse of their new archbishop Saturday, a Chicago native with an easygoing style who seeks to earn their respect and has shown a willingness to defend church teachings in the public and political arenas.

Seven months after Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan left for New York, the Vatican on Saturday announced Bishop Jerome E. Listecki of La Crosse as the new spiritual leader of southeastern Wisconsin's nearly 700,000 Catholics.

Listecki, 60, will be installed in early January.

At a news conference at St. Francis Seminary, he called Dolan a good friend, saying he doesn't expect to "fill the shoes" of so "beloved" an archbishop.

Listecki voiced gratitude and humility for the appointment and a willingness to collaborate with the clergy, others with religious vocations and laypeople. And he asked for forgiveness for any mistakes he may make in the transition.

"Pray, please, that God strengthens me to be a good bishop, I mean archbishop, so that I might earn your love and respect," Listecki said.

...Listecki has been described as "Dolanesque" in his dealings with parishioners - an engaging storyteller who mingles well at baptisms and confirmations.

Unlike Dolan during his tenure in Milwaukee, Listecki has been more inclined to wade into the political fray, admonishing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her misstatement on Catholic teachings on the beginnings of life and criticizing the University of Notre Dame's decision to honor President Barack Obama this year.

That is flat-out wrong, very sloppy reporting by the Journal Sentinel.

Dolan waded into the political fray. He was very vocal in his criticism of Notre Dame's decision to give Obama an honorary degree earlier this year.

Apparently, the Journal Sentinel missed Dolan's statements on the controversy.

At the end of March, Dolan was interviewed by Charlie Sykes and spoke out against Notre Dame.

Transcript

CHARLIE SYKES: Notre Dame -- under a lot of fire for inviting President Barack Obama to deliver the commencement address. And a number of your fellow bishops have been very critical. Bishop of Phoenix Diocese called Obama's selection a 'public act of disobedience, a grave mistake.' The bishop of the Fort Wayne-South Bend diocese, which includes Notre Dame...

ARCHBISHOP TIMOTHY DOLAN: Bishop D'Arcy.

SYKES: ...says he will not attend the ceremony. What do you think? Did they make a mistake?

ARCHBISHOP DOLAN: They did. They did. And I say that as one who loves and respects Notre Dame. They made a big mistake. I think I'd find myself very much in agreement with Bishop D'Arcy, who's the local bishop, who by the way is passionately in love with Notre Dame and still is, but he says this is a big mistake. He said the university of Notre Dame, the decisions it makes has national and international implications. It prizes its Catholic identity. It should not have done something to have placed itself so far outside the teaching of the Church. I'd agree with him.

SYKES: Now explain it to me. They've invited other presidents of the United States...

ARCHBISHOP DOLAN: They have.

SYKES: ...the presidents of the United States to speak. What was inappropriate about Notre Dame inviting the president to show up?

ARCHBISHOP DOLAN: Well, you got two things: Not only are you inviting him to speak, but they're giving him an honor. And we bishops have said when a president dramatically disagrees with the teaching of the Church on a nonnegotiable issue, we got to be careful about giving him a public platform.

And President Obama, who by the way, you might recall, Cardinal George who's the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, there's a lot of things that President Obama does that we can find ourselves allied with and working with him on. And we have profound respect for him and are praying with him and for him. But in an issue that is very close to the heart of Catholic world view, namely the protection of innocent life in the womb, he has unfortunately taken a position very much at odds with the Church. And to give him a platform and to honor him, I think sends a mixed message.

I don't like the way the local media are portraying Bishop Listecki in terms of his alleged political outspokenness compared to Archbishop Dolan. They're rewriting history.

They're wrong.

From WCBS, New York, February 24, 2009:

Dolan To Immerse Himself In All Things NYC

Never Shy To Chastise Politicians, New Archbishop Builds Early Bridges With Calls To Paterson, Bloomberg

Dolan Blasted Pelosi, Biden On Abortion In Sept. 2008

So what kind of leader will the new archbishop be and what problems will he face?

John Cardinal O'Connor used to have press conferences on Sunday at St. Patrick's that were well attended by the press and well listened to by everybody.

...New archbishop Timothy Dolan served notice Monday that he will follow in Cardinal O'Connor's footsteps and embrace a broad public role here.

"We're just not sacristy people, not sanctuary people. We're just not Sunday people. Boy, we want to bring that into the world," Dolan said.

The new leader of the New York Archdiocese said he intends to fully involve himself in all things Gotham.

...And although he hasn't shied away from going after politicians whose views he disagrees with -- last September he lambasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Sen. Joe Biden on abortion – on Monday was all about building bridges. He spoke to Gov. David Paterson and called Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Mayor Koch.

Read Archbishop Dolan's statement on Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and their blunders on Catholic teaching on abortion.

How can anyone be silent on this key civil rights question?

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of the Milwaukee Catholic Archdiocese

Quite a while back, I concluded that it would be a full-time job trying to correct the misrepresentation of Catholic matters regularly showing up in the media and that, reluctantly, I would have to let most of it pass.

However, "Dead-end discussion" in the Sept. 21 Crossroads by Brian Smith demands a reply.

The hint of bishops "meddling" in politics always has been red meat in American history, from the notorious editorial cartoons of Thomas Nast in the Know-Nothing/Nativist era to those of Pat Oliphant today. So, Mr. Smith had our hackles up already as he opened his piece by referring to the recent corrective given by two American bishops to a couple of prominent politicians, both of whom happen to be Catholic, on the issue of abortion.

It was not the bishops who started this rhubarb but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), who took it upon themselves to explain Catholic teaching on abortion to the nation - and blundered badly.

Now, to be sure, church teaching highly respects the charism of civic responsibility and political leadership as belonging to the laity, not the clergy, a tenet especially strong in the writings of Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and defends as well a properly understood separation of church and state, so clear in Pope Benedict's remarks in France just two weeks ago.

But church tradition is equally clear that bishops are the authentic teachers of the faith. So, when prominent Catholics publicly misrepresent timeless Church doctrine - as Biden and Pelosi regrettably did (to say nothing of erring in biology!) - a bishop has the duty to clarify. Cardinal Justin Rigali and Bishop William E. Lori were thus hardly acting as politicians, "telling people how to vote," but as teachers.

Even more significantly, when all is said and done, abortion is hardly a religious issue at all. Women and men of every religion, or none at all, express grave reservations about our abortion-on-demand culture, insisting that it is not a theological matter but a civil rights one.

Does the baby alive in the womb (a biological, not a doctrinal, fact) deserve the full protection of the law or not? Does one have the right to terminate the life of another at will? Can we consider one form of life - that of the innocent, fragile baby in the womb - inferior and expendable?

Or does the American proposition of certain self-evident truths mentioned in our foundational documents, the first of which is the right to life, have a say in all of this? Was Robert Kennedy correct in observing that the true test of a society's mettle is how it treats the most vulnerable among us, which has to include the tiny baby in the womb?

A half-century ago, a similar civil rights issue was fracturing our beloved nation: Do our black citizens have the right to full protection of the law, the freedom to live where they wish, to vote, to earn a fair wage, to expect fairness, justice and equality? Many argued then as Mr. Smith does now: This issue is way too complex! It deals with morals and conduct, with virtuous living. We can hardly legislate our way out of this, the Mr. Smiths of the era wrote. It's too complicated, too volatile an issue.

Thankfully, a bold pastor, who never hid his religious convictions, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., prophetically demanded that this was indeed an issue of life and death that had to be confronted by a nation committed to justice.

Thankfully, other religious leaders rose up, such as when the archbishop of my hometown of St. Louis, Joseph Ritter, integrated all the parochial schools way before it became law, such as when the archbishop of New Orleans, Joseph Rummel, publicly corrected prominent Catholic politicians who misrepresented Catholic teaching as approving racial segregation, and such as when Lawrence Sheehan, the archbishop of Baltimore, was hooted out of a city council meeting as he called for fair and open housing.

Mr. Smith is correct that abortion is a complex issue; he's on the mark that people of good will need to work creatively to create a just society where the poor have options to care for their babies, born and pre-born - a point powerfully made in many documents of the American bishops, including "Faithful Citizenship," the U.S. bishops' pastoral statement on political responsibility.

He's wrong, though, in implying that bishops are out of bounds in clarifying the truth of their faith on this issue and that the powerful arguments of the growing pro-life movement hinder helpful conversation and lead to a political dead end. We cannot be mute on this premier civil rights issue of our day.

Dolan didn't "wade into the political fray"?

Oh really?

This is an embarrassment for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

It fails a simple fact check.

I welcome Bishop Listecki as our new archbishop.

He's much more like Archbishop Dolan than the JS realizes.