A Priest-Scholar Takes the Helm
A Priest-Scholar Takes The Helm
CHICAGO—Among the most daunting tasks facing the new archbishop of Chicago will be breaking down the dissent so deeply institutionalized in Chicago's Catholic schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions, but Francis E. George should have the intellectual tools to do the work.
"He has a mindset few possess," Dr. Jude P. Dougherty of the Catholic University of America told Catholic News Service. "He is a man of intellectual courage, with experience in the secular and religious worlds, and a kind of global outlook. He isn't afraid to take a minority position and isn't afraid to challenge. He'll defend the faith."
George revealed his toughness at the beginning of his assignment as archbishop of Portland, Ore., when he used his installation Mass to deliver a strong homily on the evils of abortion, infanticide, and suicide. He also showed his strength in his fight to force law enforcement officials in Portland to destroy the tape made of a prisoner's Confession—a fight he has vowed to carry to the U. S. Supreme Court.
And his willingness to enter into debate on hot-button issues can be measured by his thoughtful essays written for his diocesan newspaper and others, such as a Boston Pilot debate with Sr. Regina Coll C.S.J., on the impropriety of referring to God as her.
"Calling God 'her'," he wrote in the August, 1994 essay, "so that women have some kind of 'representation' in the divinity, makes God a projection of ourselves and language about God the instrument of our social projects. If either men or women worship a God made in their image they are idolaters, worshiping themselves.... Behind worry about using masculine pronouns for God lies a logic, pervasive but wrongheaded. It begins, admirably, with justice. But biblical justice gets defined in terms of American legal equality, and equality gets reduced to interchangeability."
And, in 1992, he took the unusual step of "correcting" a brother bishop, Kenneth E. Untener of Saginaw, Mich., who, in an interview with The Catholic Northwest Progress of the Seattle Archdiocese, spoke in favor of ordaining women.
In Chicago, there will be no shortage of possible debaters among the numerous dissenting moral theologians, Scripture scholars, liturgists, and others who occupy some of the most prestigious chairs in Catholic education.
Scholarly Resume
From his earliest years as an elementary school student, George showed an unusual brilliance. His first-grade teacher at St. Pascal's School, Sr. Rita McCabe, now 80. recalled him as "the smartest little boy that ever went through my classroom. "
When the children would play Mass in school, she'd set up an altar on her desk, and George would be the priest, having memorized all the prayers, in Latin, of the Mass.
From those earliest years, he also set his mind on the priesthood, and his sister, Margaret Cain, of Grand Rapids, Mich., recalled that he was trying to discern where he should study when he contracted polio.
"The polio struck," she told The Chicago Tribune, "when he was praying to God [about where to study]. It came like an answer." Since he couldn't make the bus trip to Quigley Prep, he enrolled at the Oblates' seminary in Belleville IL.
He entered the Oblates in 1957, and after studying at Our Lady of the Snows in Pass Christian, Miss., he was ordained a priest in his parish church, St. Pascal's, in 1963.
He received a bachelor's degree in theology at the University of Ottawa, where his former canon law professor, Fr. William Woestman, remembers the 20-year-old George as a "Renaissance type of person."
"He is not an easy person to debate with," continued Woestman, "because he is very intelligent and is quick to point out where people are wrong . . . but he does it with great kindness."
After Ordination, George earned two master's degrees, in philosophy from Catholic University and in theology from Ottawa He taught philosophy at Creighton University in Nebraska, where his mentor was Bishop John R. Sheets, S.J., the Fort Wayne auxiliary.
In 1970, he received his Ph.D. from Tulane University in New Orleans, where he explored the three main philosophical movements in early 20th-century America. In 1973, he was elected to serve as head of the Oblates' central province in St. Paul, Minn. Eighteen months later, he was named the order's vicar general and was posted in Rome where he would spend the next 12 years.
Oblate secretary Fr. Edward Carolan described George as "a very good, very holy man, a very well-read intellectual, very up on theology, an ardent reader, and a very personable man."
Upon his return to the United States in 1986, he was invited to establish the Circle of Fellows at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Faith and Culture. Bernard Cardinal Law initiated that center to study the relationship between the Church and culture.
In 1990, he was named bishop of Yakima, Wash., a small diocese split nearly 50-50 between Anglos and Hispanics. Immediately after his installation, he went to Mexico to take a three-week crash course in Spanish. In the six years he was in Yakima, George worked to unite his ethnically diverse flock, eliminated the debt, ordained five new priests, and impressed everyone as a man very much intellectually aligned with the Holy Father.
"He's a thinker, a theologian," observed Msgr. Perron Auve, George's first chancellor. "His mindset is very close to John Paul II. He thinks the way the Pope thinks about most if not all of the issues in the Church." In fact, George's doctoral dissertation in theology, done at the Pontifical University Urbaniana, is on Pope John Paul II's views on inculturation.
In Chicago—a city that boasts of its Catholic roots with pride, but whose Catholic identity has been seriously weakened by three decades of dissent — Archbishop George will have plenty of opportunities to apply his intellectual gifts.
But Richard Freeman, a lay activist, says that the archbishop will also have to be a genius in applying the full powers of his considerable intellect in coping with the extremely difficult situation into which he has been placed.
"He'll also need a lot of cunning and discretion, and I'd feel a lot more comfortable if I knew that he had experience as a bar bouncer, or as a policeman in a difficult neighborhood," said Freeman.
"He's going to come up against a lot of unsavory characters. In order to survive, he's going to have to have a strong sense of self-preservation and be very quick on the trigger."
This article was taken from the April 17, 1997 issue of "The Wanderer," 201 Ohio Street, St. Paul, MN 55107, 612-224-5733. Subscription Price: $35.00 per year; six months $20.00.
This item 168 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
