In another 8 weeks Fabian Bruskewitz will celebrate the 20th anniversary of his appointment as Bishop of the Diocese of Lincoln. With that milestone rapidly approaching, His Excellency recently gave an interview to Jim Graves of the National Catholic Register.
Tell me about the Diocese of Lincoln.
It is a stable and wonderful diocese. Much of it is made up of small towns and rural areas, although Lincoln is the state capital and has a mix of businesses and the University of Nebraska.
Thank God, we have no diocesan debts, nor have we had problems with lawsuits with which other dioceses have struggled. We have a splendid clergy, and our religious life is flourishing. We have had many vocations, more than is adequate for a diocese of our size. In the last 20 years, I’ve ordained 67 priests for Lincoln and another 20 or 30 for other dioceses or religious orders.
We have 38 seminarians studying for the priesthood. I’ve had the joy of constructing St. Gregory the Great Seminary, a college seminary, which opened 12 years ago. It instructs not only our students, but those from six other dioceses.
I invited and was pleased to welcome the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, a community of apostolic life dedicated to preserving the memory and practice of the extraordinary form of the Roman rite. Our diocese is home to the Fraternity’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary. They have more young men applying to be seminarians than there is space available for them.
I also invited and was pleased to welcome a community of cloistered Carmelite sisters who pray for us constantly. We also have the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters who pray constantly before Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. The sisters’ prayers have brought us many spiritual blessings.
We have a well-educated and zealous laity, and I’ve had the pleasure to form five new parishes and four new schools to serve them.
Our little diocese on the plains is doing well.
While there is much more here, there are a few topics that did not get covered in the interview. For instance,
- According to the 2011 Official Catholic Directory, the Diocese of Lincoln has 133 parishes, every one of which is under the direct control of a priest. (83 parishes are led by on-site pastors while the remaining 50 are administered by priests.)
- The same source reports that the diocese has precisely 2 lay ministers.
- “Bishop Bruskewitz fully expects that the priests of the Diocese of Lincoln faithfully follow the rubrics and words of the Roman Missal and does not tolerate liturgical ‘creativity'” (source here).
- Diocesan weekend Mass attendance was last reported to be 60%.
Bishop Bruskewitz turned 75 in September of 2010. In doesn’t appear that Pope Benedict is in any hurry to name a successor.
Tags: Orthodoxy at Work
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We have 38 seminarians studying for the priesthood.
Just think how much higher that number would be if the bishop appointed female lay administrators….oh wait.
But here, ideology is more important. It is better there be only a few heretetical priests than a diocese filled with holy priests.
The fewer the priests, then the call for married and women priests might grow.
I don’t see much in this diocese that differs from the “Culture of Death”. Perhaps we can now refer to the DOR as the “Diocese of Death”!
It is good to hear that some dioceses are flourishing! It make me pine for a better situation in Rochester, where we are basking in progressive liberalism! Pope Benedict, please send us a man like Bishop Bruskewitz!
The Diocese of Lincoln Nebraska has had three cases of priests being sex offenders in the current sex offender crisis in the Church. However Bishop Bruskewitz has refused to cooperate with his fellow bishops in adopting church guidelines on handling sex abuse cases involving the clergy.
My concern is that the diocesan seminary is full of men who are under the care of a bishop who does not conform or concur with the guidelines of the NCCB on sex abuse issues.
He also does not present a very good model of episcopal collegiality as presented by the council, Vatican II
On a more positive side, his filling his diocese with cloistered nuns is like filling a busy store with Easter lilies!!
Raymond F. Rice,
The accusations against those 3 priests date back to the 1970s, 1978 and 1987, respectively, well before Bishop Bruskewitz took over in Lincoln in 1992. While it is also true that one of those 3 priests was also accused in an incident that took place in 1993, that incident occurred while he was serving as a Navy chaplain and under the authority of another bishop.
Bishop Bruskewitz has expressed some real concerns about the National Review Board and its leadership. From CatholicCulture.org …
Another source reports as follows …
With regard to McShane’s assertion that “The bishops set up the review board to restore confidence in their care for young people,” he is only telling half the story, as Bishop Bruskewitz seems well aware. The bishops’ other reason was to get the focus off themselves and their collective malfeasance in moving homosexual abuser priests from parish to parish and even diocese to diocese.
Along this line Les Femmes – The Truth reports,
There is far more to this story than one seemingly obstinate bishop.
I wish to write strongly in favor of Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, and to acclaim his heroic courage in standing up not only to his fellow bishops, but in the faithfulness to his own responsibilities. On his behalf I offer the very meaningful words of Josef Cardinal Ratzinger in The Ratzinger Report, who clearly cautioned against a group of bishops acting like some kind of senate trying to bind their colleagues. The episcopacy is not a rule of majority, nor (fortunately) to be tested under the principles of American government’s ayes and nays.
I commend to you the entire text for your careful reading, but the following quotes are excerpts from pages 59-63, and should be understood as a serious warning, not simply as a magisterial thesis.
“… the role of bishops … risks being smothered by the insertion of bishops into episcopal conferences that are ever more organized, often with burdensome bureaucratic structures. We must not forget that the episcopal conferences have no theological basis, they do not belong to the structure of the Church, as willed by Christ, that cannot be eliminated; they have only a practical, concrete function.”
…the new Code of Canon Law … prescribes the extent of the authority of the conferences, which cannot validly act “in the name of all the bishops unless each and every bishop has given his consent, unless it concerns cases in which the common law prescribes it or a special mandate of the Apostolic See … determines it.” (Canon 455). “The collective, therefore, does not substitute for the persons of the bishops who … are the authentic teachers and instructors of the faith for the faithful entrusted to their care.” (Canon 753).
“No episcopal conference … has a teaching mission; its documents have no weight of their own save that of the consent given to them by the individual bishops. … it is a matter of safeguarding the very nature of the Catholic Church, which is based on an episcopal structure and not on a kind of federation of national churches. The national level is not an ecclesial dimension. It happens that with some bishops there is a certain lack of a sense of individual responsibility, and the delegation of his inalienable powers as shepherd and teacher to the structures of the local conference leads to letting what should remain very personal lapse into anonymity. The group of bishops united in the conferences depends in their decisions upon other groups, upon commissions that have been established to prepare draft proposals. It happens then that the search for agreement between the different tendencies and the effort at mediation often yield flattened documents in which decisive positions (where they might be necessary) are weakened.”
[Cardinal Ratzinger] recalls an episcopal conference that had been held in [Germany] in the thirties: “Well, the really powerful documents against National Socialism were those that came from individual courageous bishops. The documents of the conference, on the contrary, were often rather wan and too weak with respect to what the tragedy called for…”.
Cardinal Ratzinger points out that even at Vatican II only 10% of the bishops spoke; the other 90% listened and voted. He continues: “it is obvious that truth cannot be created through ballots. … I know bishops who privately confess that they would have decided differently than they did at a conference if they had had to decide by themselves.”
So, I believe that Bishop Bruskewitz’s willingness to stand alone should not be viewed as the position of a disagreeable curmudgeon, but rather of heroic proportions in preventing the US Council of Catholic Bishops from heading down a truly wrong road. God bless him!
One only has to look at the lack of strong statements from the USCCB over decades, in multiple life matters, and its diluting of teachings against the sins of abortion, euthanasia, contraception and homosexual life style, with silence or social engineering messages, to understand that the ‘group’ (until quite recently) has only yielded ground to the secular. Now, perhaps at long last, some leaders there are being shamed into taking positions which they should long ago have taken, but again it is from group pressure (even from the laity) one senses, rather than prompted principally by well-formed individual, courageous consciences.
New parishes? New schools? The mind reels.
From the looks of the very articulate but nuclear response to my comments (LOL), it appears that I will be doing some research concerning my logic. I had assumed that if all the American bishops, for the most part, had been appointed by BJPII, they would for the most part conform to the teachings and mentality of that pope. Evidently more than just the Atlantic Ocean separates our hierarchy from the Vatican.
Years ago, When I was in a Jesuit school, we took provincial exams in lieu of regents exams because the Jesuit exams were of a higher caliber. I am surmising from the comments that Bishop Bruskewitz has a higher caliber plan for dealing with sexual abuse issues than the NCCB. Correct me if I am wrong.
Hello Raymond,
Yes, I think more research could be very helpful to you on this issue. The world is so changed from the days when a bishop’s letter read at Mass was people’s almost only connection to the Holy Father’s teaching. Today, with the widespread availabilty of information, many parishioners can be more up-to-date and informed on a variety of events than their bishops or pastors. I appreciate that makes it challenging for bishops, but it is one of the best reasons for a bishop to be completely orthodox. In the long run, this will be very good for the church, but in the short run there can be much turmoil. And the false idea that a bishop can hide away in a “group” of bishops and blame his failures on consensus, only illustrates how egregious is the failure of a bishop to fully embrace his role and responsibilities.
In this horrible situation of pedophilic (principally homosexual) abuse by priests, there is much need for sharing among bishops about what works and what doesn’t, but not to the point of violating the rights and obligations of individual bishops. It appears the USCCB was way off base in this matter. Moreover, I cannot answer your question about how Bishop Bruskewitz addresses the issue, as it is his business and he is not obligated to publicize or limit himself in his rights and practice as bishop. But I will say this: If the Diocese of Rochester’s ‘safe environment’ programs are representative of what all the members of the USCCB agreed to (except for Bishop Bruskewitz) then almost anything else might be an improvement. So I would guess that, given how Bishop Bruskewitz excels in his faithful teaching, his program and policy in this area would excel as well.
I took the Safe Environment course just to see if I thought it could really make a difference, and I came away feeling that it is mostly about protecting dioceses from lawsuits. I saw very little that was meaningful protection of the children. I realize the diocesan program has changed in the last year or two, but this is what I published in August 2009 about my disappointment in their course — a naive course which had been in place for a number of years. I reported on that experience and wrote at that time:
The “Safe Environment” Course
“Ever since the priest sexual abuse cases broke into the news in the early part of this century, efforts have abounded to “fix” part of the problem; i.e. to require diocesan employees and volunteers to take a “Safe Environment” set of courses administered by the diocese. While parents weren’t the main source of complaint or problem, they have been caught up in the bureaucracy of certification requirements.
It piqued my interest how a course, about 7½ hours spread over three evenings, could stop sexual abuse of children. So I decided to take the course but, since I’m not trusting with things like my SSN, I figured I’d just take the course but not “register” for approval. It was an eye-opener, but not in the way you might think.
There are three sections: sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, and sexual abuse. The course is totally silent on other forms of abuse, such as verbal abuse, bullying or emotional intimidation. As a matter of fact, one instructor tried to insist the word abuse had to apply only to sexual abuse. It is partly lecture, some handouts, and a video of lectures from a few years ago. But, there is only ONE requirement: be there! There are no tests, no grades, not even pass or fail based on anything except attendance. One person, who text-messaged under the table during much of the lecture, put in the required time and will be “approved.”
Around this same time I took an 8 hour U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary Boating Safety course, so I can meet the new requirements for driving a personal watercraft. At the end of the course, there was a tough, proctored exam. No fooling. And not everybody passed. There was certainly a lot more care in making sure the Jet Ski and I are safe, than any checking on whether I learned something in the Safe Environment Course.
Then it hit me….Safe Environment isn’t much about safety; it’s about keeping insurance rates down. But it doesn’t make the children safer. The reason I’m writing is because I think that parents especially can get lulled into a false sense of comfort that those who took the program are “safer” than those who didn’t. As I pondered the thought, I also realized that at some point in everyone’s life they could pass a background check; i.e. before their first crime. It doesn’t say anything at all about what individuals will do when they are in situations to cause danger to another. The priest sexual abuse scandal proved that conclusively.”
I took the VIRTUS course as part of my requirement for teaching catechism. It was a mixed bag. On the one hand it did a decent job of explaining how sexual predators operate and what to look for; it also had continuing follow-up with required online information and quizzing. It also kicked to the curb the baloney about celibacy contributing to the desire for perverted sex. On the other hand, it went to great pains to make homosexuals disappear from the equation. It seemed to be under the assumption that us unenlightened rubes believed that only homosexuals were abusers. None of us believed that and it isn’t true, but the clear impression from the training was that homosexuality doesn’t factor in at all which is just as false especially given the fact that a full 60% of the 3000 abuse cases were between priest and post-pubescent male.
The lesson is that an anti-abuse program is only as good as the underlying assumptions governing the content, and just because a conference green lights either because they didn’t bother to check those assumptions, or knew them and just didn’t care (I’ll be nice and assume the former), doesn’t a naughty bishop make when he says go jump in a lake.