No Greater Love Read online

  “Okay, so you’re not up on the state of things. But do you even have a vague impression?”

  Koesler didn’t have to ponder this question. “A bit conservative, no?”

  “Yes! And not just a bit. Very! Some off the wall on the right wing.”

  Koesler smiled. “You know, Pat, You’ve never been known as a crashing liberal yourself.”

  “That’s a part of the point … my reputation. Here”—McNiff inched his chair even closer, as if proximity would provide greater secrecy—“let me give you some background.”

  Koesler’s reaction was to lean farther back. He was not at all convinced that McNiff was on the down side of his cold.

  “Bob …” McNiff’s voice was taking on a hoarse quality. “… you remember as well as I how things were in the Church when we were ordained in fifty-four.”

  While it was true that Koesler remembered the way it had been as well or better than McNiff, the bishop nonetheless proceeded to conduct a brief, nostalgic tour of the past forty-some years and the cataclysm those decades had brought to Catholicism. Some called the 1950s the last decade of American innocence. It was a marvelous time if you weren’t a black in the ghetto, or fighting in Korea.

  It was the beginning of the end of the Catholic priest as icon.

  The Second Vatican Council took place in the sixties, when Catholic seminaries were still packed. It was an era of militancy.

  Liberal theology sprang up and flourished like unplanned vegetation. Virtually all of the immutables were challenged, and some discarded.

  Much of the seventies was spent questioning the sixties. The priest drain was gushing. Seminaries were precariously holding their own.

  The battlefield was quieting in the eighties and nineties. The number of priests leaving the active ministry had slowed to a trickle—because most of those who hadn’t retired had already left or were nearing life’s final glide path.

  But few young men were entering the seminaries. With the significant number of priests leaving and the virtual absence of seminarian replacements, the priest shortage was real, critical, and discouraging.

  Something had to be done. But what? Prayer seemed the only answer.

  “That,” McNiff concluded, “pretty much brings us up to date.”

  Koesler, sitting motionless, had half-hoped to learn something new—like ultimately why McNiff had been made a bishop. He stood, grasped his lower back, and stretched his torso as far as he could. “Good for the arthritis,” he explained.

  “You too? Old age isn’t for sissies.”

  Koesler looked down at the bishop in irritation. “I know that used to be a joke, but it’s losing its humor as the years go on.”

  “Tell me about it.” McNiff shook his head. “That aneurysm could call my number any moment.”

  “Which,” said Koesler as he resumed his seat, “brings us back to the beginning: Why did they—”

  McNiff convulsively grabbed for a Kleenex, missed it, and sneezed in Koesler’s general direction.

  Koesler dug out a handkerchief and mopped his face. He pushed his chair back a few inches.

  “Sorry,” McNiff apologized.

  “Why don’t you pull out a few sheets so you’re ready for the next one?”

  McNiff did just that. “See,” he said, “you’re helping already.”

  “Little Pat, cut to the chase: Why are you a bishop, and why are you here—and what I can do to help … that is, before your sneezes challenge the defenses of my immune system?”

  “Okay, okay.” McNiff shifted in his chair in an unsuccessful attempt to get comfortable. “So you’re not very familiar with the current situation with St. Joseph’s and our present seminarians.”

  Koesler shook his head.

  “But what we’ve got here,” McNiff explained, “is a kind of counterrevolution—or reformation, depending on your mind-set.

  “Where we are in history is in a backlash of the liberal-conservative struggle. In the sixties and seventies, as a result of the Council, this archdiocese went wildly liberal—”

  Koesler smiled. “You sure this isn’t your conservative perception of how things were?”

  But McNiff was deadly serious. “I’m positive this is the way it was.

  “Anyway, we know what happened when a significant number of priests, seminarians, and laity caught the spirit of the Council—or what they thought was the spirit—and ran with it. All the while the institutional Church was digging in its heels.

  “It wasn’t too long ago that liberal thought controlled this seminary—”

  “And now?”

  “Now …” McNiff looked glum. “Now it’s just turned around. There are three—count them: three—outspoken liberal faculty members. It’s possible there are one or two more, but if so, they’re still in the closet.”

  “How about the seminarians?”

  “On the surface, as far as the seminarians are concerned, they’re all right wing—and pretty far out at that. By the way, we refer to the seminarians here as M.Divs.”

  “M.Divs?”

  “Master of Divinity. That’s the academic degree they need to be ordained.”

  Koesler scratched his head. “What about the others—the ones who aren’t studying for the priesthood?”

  “They can earn any other degree we offer.”

  “But … not the Master of Divinity?”

  “The M.Div is reserved for seminarians exclusively.”

  “I hesitate to ask the logical question, because I’m afraid I know the answer. But anyway: What if one of the nonseminarians wants to take one of the M.Div courses?”

  “Impossible. All M.Div courses are reserved for seminarians.”

  “I assume,” Koesler said, “that one of the M.Div courses would be Homiletics.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And all of your students want a position of some sort in a parish—and all of them want at least instruction in preaching … right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So such a student isn’t taught how to preach.”

  “You’ve got to remember, Bob: Only a deacon or a priest can preach. There’s no point in teaching someone a skill she will never practice.”

  “She?”

  McNiff was giving every indication that Koesler’s line of questioning was making him ill at ease. “Well, yes, she. You know that no woman can be a priest. So, no woman can be a seminarian. So, no woman will be allowed to preach. So, there’s no reason for women to learn how to preach.”

  Koesler, clearly taken aback, sat bolt upright. “Is that the way it is everywhere? In all seminaries?”

  “No. It’s actually about fifty-fifty. But it doesn’t really matter. Whether a woman can go for a Master of Divinity degree or not, the bottom line is, women can’t be priests. No matter how good or bad a preacher a woman would be, she is not going to preach. In a way, not offering women the opportunity to earn an M.Div degree is maybe more … more honest.”

  “More honest!”

  “Yes! It tells her right up front how it’s going to be in her ministry. It doesn’t give her any reason to expect that things will change. The Pope said it: Women can’t be priests. So why teach them how to do something they’re never going to do?”

  Koesler shook his head. “With policies like this, there can’t be many women here as students.”

  “You’re wrong, Bob. Want me to give you a breakdown?”

  Koesler sat back and nodded.

  McNiff wondered why the space between them seemed to be widening. He hadn’t adverted to Koesler’s gradually distancing himself.

  “See, there are approximately three hundred and twenty students in St. Joe’s Seminary. That’s for four years of college and four years of theology. Of that number about seventy are seminarians. Which leaves about two hundred and fifty non-MDivs—roughly a hundred men and a hundred and fifty women. The only way you can come up with more men than women is if you add the M.Div males to the nonseminarian men. That way, you
get one hundred and seventy men and one hundred and fifty women.”

  “Frankly, Pat, I don’t get it. Why would so many women sign up—freely—at an institution that discriminates against them?”

  “Discrimination is a powerful word, Bob. We could argue about that—and we probably will before the evening’s over. But there’s a likely reason for their being here—all these women, I mean. I had a problem understanding this at first. But now it makes sense.”

  “Help me.”

  “As far as we’re able to tell, not all the women who enroll here want to be priests—not by a long shot. The aim for many of them is to become catechists or directors of religious education … or some of the other degree positions we offer.”

  “But by your own admission, Pat, some of these women students do want to be priests.”

  McNiff nodded.

  Koesler raised his hands in a gesture of incomprehension. “Why?”

  McNiff shrugged. “Hope against hope. Hoping the Church will change its position.”

  Koesler thought for a few moments. “You have how many studying for the priesthood?”

  “Seventy.”

  “Any idea how many seminarians we had here in this place’s heyday?”

  It didn’t require any research on McNiff’s part. Those figures haunted him and anyone else who was concerned with the seminary’s future. “That’d be in the mid-sixties. There were seven hundred in high school. Of course we don’t have a high school anymore. Then there were about two hundred and forty in college and approximately another two hundred and fifty at St. John’s.”

  “So,” Koesler summed up, “there were almost eleven hundred seminarians then to our seventy now. That right—counting the high schoolers of that time, I mean?”

  McNiff nodded slowly.

  Koesler turned his gaze to the window. But his focus was inward, not on the nondescript view of another brick wall. After a few minutes, without returning his gaze to McNiff, Koesler said, “I guess I’d have to put my money on the women who are looking for ordination. The Catholic population is increasing, while the supply of priests to serve them is bottoming out.”

  McNiff ran his hand over his facial stubble. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” he repeated. “A lot of things have been tried. Nothing has worked. Oh, every once in a while there’s a slight gain. But nothing that could match what we had back then … back in the sixties.

  “Of course there’s constant demand for an optionally celibate clergy, and for women priests. But the institutional Church—mainly in the person of the Pope—keeps slamming the door.

  “Will it happen?” he mused after a moment. “It looks like there’s no alternative. If we’re going to field a team, we’ll have to fill it with women and men—married or not.”

  Their conversation had, to this point, been reflective and pessimistic. It continued in much the same mode. There seemed no escape from the autumnal state of today’s Catholic seminary.

  “However,” McNiff said, “at this point, I think we can consider one of your first questions.”

  “Why they made you a bishop? “

  McNiff nodded. “Why, at my age, and with my fragile state of health, they made me a bishop.”

  Koesler could not help believing that this—the explanation of why McNiff had been ordained a bishop—was at the root of why they were meeting this evening.

  McNiff again shifted in his chair, still searching for that elusive comfortable position.

  “It was a beautiful day in June a few years back,” he began. “I was more than aware that retirement was only a few years off. The Cardinal’s secretary phoned. The boss wanted to see me—that afternoon.”

  McNiff had reason to remember that meeting very clearly.

  Five

  After the call summoning him to a command performance that afternoon, McNiff rummaged through his closet until he found a black suit just back from the cleaner’s. Then a new, never-worn clerical vest. Finally, a freshly laundered clerical collar. It was good to have clean new apparel for special occasions. A meeting with Detroit’s Cardinal archbishop more than qualified.

  McNiff, splendidly—for him—attired, early for his meeting, waited fifteen minutes in the Cardinal’s foyer.

  He was one of the relatively few local priests the Cardinal knew well. From time to time during his nearly forty years as archbishop of Detroit, Cardinal Mark Boyle had called on McNiff to handle some delicate matters—usually troublesome parochial flare-ups that needed a firm, decisive touch.

  Thinking about today’s meeting, which had consumed his attention since the secretary’s call, McNiff could not surmise what the Cardinal needed done. Particularly since the priest was so close to retirement age, whatever task Boyle might have in mind would have to be a short-term duty. But what could it be?

  Exactly at two, Boyle appeared in the foyer to escort McNiff into the inner office.

  That was out of the ordinary. Always previously he had been ushered in by the Cardinal’s secretary.

  The furniture in the rectangular office was configured for two distinctly different types of circumstances. At the far end, everything seemed “official,” with a high-back office chair behind an oversize but extremely organized desk, before which stood several straight-back chairs. The “business end” of the Cardinal’s office.

  The windows on the south wall overlooked a stretch of a once affluent, now nearly deserted, Washington Boulevard.

  At the near end of the office, closest to the door, comfortably upholstered chairs encircled a low, round coffee table. Boyle’s gesture invited McNiff to be seated in this more informal setting.

  There was no small talk. Boyle was not one to waste time, and it was not McNiff’s place to steer the conversation.

  Boyle was tall, ramrod-straight, distinguished-looking, with thinning close-trimmed white hair. When stressed, he fingered the chain of his pectoral cross or twisted his episcopal ring. In an age when many priests and even an occasional bishop dressed down, Mark Boyle might conceivably have worn his clericals to bed.

  “Father,” Boyle began, “I am very concerned over St. Joseph’s Seminary.”

  McNiff had been a student at, indeed had graduated from St. Joe’s, as it was almost universally known among Detroit Catholics. At this stage of his life, he Could not imagine why the Cardinal wanted to discuss this institution with him.

  Without benefit of notes, the Cardinal proceeded to catalogue the statistics that composed the current state of the seminary. These accurate statistics Father McNiff would later cite to Father Koesler.

  The admittedly lackluster figures depicted an institution a mere shadow of its former self when the clear need was for a major improvement of its present condition.

  The St. Joe’s numbers were truly depressing. McNiff knew the enrollment was low; he hadn’t known how low.

  Nonetheless, his attention began to wander. This was mostly because he had nothing to do with the problem as it existed at St. Joe’s. He could, and did, pray for vocations. He tried to live so as to give an example that might attract young men to the priesthood. What more could he do? In other words, why had he been called in for this meeting?

  On top of everything else, he had already begun to plan his retirement, which was just around the corner.

  For that matter, why was the seminary situation bugging Cardinal Boyle? He himself was past retirement age. If the Pope were to accept Boyle’s offer to retire—which he had made annually for the past several years—the state of St. Joe’s would no longer be Boyle’s concern. He could pass that and the other burdens on to his successor.

  All of which brought up the matter of why the Pope hadn’t accepted Boyle’s offer.

  On many occasions, McNiff had heard Boyle proclaim that labels were inaccurate … that no one was liberal or conservative all the time.

  Even so, Boyle could not himself avoid being labeled.

  Those who knew him well realized that the Cardinal was a loyal churchman to hi
s core. What made his enemies hate him and his disciples love him was his simple ability to coexist with those whose opinion he did not share. For that, this loyal churchman, who had not a crashing liberal bone in his body, was tarred with the liberal brush.

  Some held that the liberal label was the reason the Pope would not accept the Cardinal’s resignation.

  McNiff had heard, but did not understand this reasoning, until an explanation was offered by none other than Bob Koesler.

  According to Koesler, the whole thing was vindictive.

  According to Koesler, the generally accepted scenario was that the Pope, with a couple of exceptions, kept selecting very conservative priests as Boyle’s auxiliary bishops. And of course, according to this explanation, these auxiliaries were imposing their conservative stamp on everything in the diocese they could touch.

  In the midst of this, Boyle stood alone as the symbol of his reputedly liberal diocese, while the infrastructure kept growing in conservatism.

  McNiff considered this theory deliberately Machiavellian, and he dismissed it because he could not believe that the Pope and his appointees could be that vindictive. It was unchristian and unworthy of those holy men.

  But now Cardinal Boyle was wrapping up his statistical report; perhaps finally he would get down to McNiff’s concern.

  “So, that is a rundown of the numbers at our seminary. They are, admittedly, discouraging. The problem of the priest and seminarian shortage is, of course, for all intents and purposes, worldwide. It must be addressed on a global scale.

  “But there is another problem that needs to be met on our diocesan level.”

  The Cardinal leaned forward, elbows almost touching his knees. It was a posture McNiff had never before seen Boyle take.

  “The problem is philosophical—an attitude, if you will. Those who favor labels would call it conservatism. As you may know, I do not believe in across-the-board categorizing.

  “It does not greatly trouble me that a number of teachers and students follow a conservative trend. The trouble is that this approach to their training is shared by the vast majority in the seminary. And” Boyle emphasized, “that no other view is tolerated!”