Minnesota Newman Center shut down

National Catholic Reporter, July 3, 1998 by Kris Berggren

The embattled Newman Center at the University of Minnesota has been closed by church officials, who cited both ideological and pastoral reasons in announcing the decision June 1.

The announcement caps more than a year of conflict between the center's lay staff, who advocated a philosophy of snared governance supported by many in the community, and archdiocesan representatives who take a more hierarchical approach.

Responsibility for the university's Catholic population will be transferred to nearby St. Lawrence Parish, according to the archdiocese. The parish is staffed by Paulist priests, as was the Newman Center.

The Newman Center served students and faculty as well as adults from the Twin Cities area attracted to its progressive liturgies and justice ministries. Controversy has dogged the center since last summer, when two new Paulists were assigned there. Both have since resigned their Newman Center positions in frustration over what they saw as a lack of respect for their roles. Lay staff members have been disciplined by the archdiocese, and the center's two different boards have split over the center's fate (NCR, Jan 30.).

All parties to the dispute agree that the style of church practiced at the Newman Center was unusual. The three lay staff members -- Tom Conry, Dominican Sr. Jeri Cashman and Irish Christian Brother Fintan Moore -- delivered homilies on a rotating basis along with the Paulists. They also had traditionally shared authority as members of the leadership team with the Paulist priests, though that arrangement has been bitterly contested over the last year.

The collaborative style worked well by most accounts from 1991, when the Paulists first contracted to run the Newman Center, until 1997, when the new Paulist priests arrived. Fr. Paul Rospond resigned quickly as the center's director, protesting that his authority had been undercut by the lay staff. Fr. Charles Martin then moved into the director's job and said he found similar difficulty. He announced his resignation in the midst of the decision to close the center.

Those tensions led to a Jan. 16 directive from the archdiocese to lay staff members that they were to end discussions of internal problems in public and were to accept Martin's authority. Observers say the conflict continued, however, and several community meetings were called in an attempt to resolve the differences.

Members of the Newman community are organizing to protest the closure. Meetings held June 2 and June 7 attracted approximately 40 people.

Tim Anderson, spokesperson for the St. Paul and Minneapolis archdiocese, said the decision to transfer pastoral care for the university's Catholics to a nearby parish will give the church "better bang for its buck." It makes little sense, he said, to operate two facilities in the same area serving much the same population.

Thomas McCarver, director of Catholic Education and Formation Ministries, told NCR that the decision did not come out of the blue. In 1994, he said, the archdiocesan financial council had recommended closing the center on financial grounds, and ever since it has suffered from "declining revenues."

Newman defenders rejected that argument. Terry Dosh, one of the organizers of the protest efforts, said, "They [archdiocesan officials] are afraid of secularism. They've never experienced a secular university." Dosh claimed that clerical discomfort with the "radical egalitarianism" practiced at the Newman Center led to the action. "It's a power play by the archdiocese," he said.

Anderson disagreed. "That is not the way [former Archbishop John R. Roach or Archbishop Harry J. Flynn] pastor this diocese," he said.

Since 400 to 500 students already attend Sunday liturgy at St. Lawrence parish -- more than the 300 to 400 who go to Mass at the Newman center -- the decision to consolidate makes sense from both an economic and a pastoral point of view, he said. Some in the Newman Center community, however, dispute his figures.

Br. Moore theorized that some students prefer St. Lawrence because they are uncomfortable with nontraditional liturgical practices such as circular seating or sharing Communion at the end of Mass, and with issues often raised at the center such as poverty, homelessness and gay and lesbian concerns. "Perhaps they don't find it uplifting," he said.

In private, some archdiocesan officials have suggested that the Newman Center had come to revolve less around the needs of students than the agenda of a handful of progressive adult Catholics. Jim Scott, an undergraduate and a former Newman intern, disputes that characterization, saying students are "very angry" about the closure.

Scott said that students from all ideological points of view are disappointed. "I know plenty of conservative Catholics who are questioning the church [now]," he said. "This is not how they imagine the church should operate."

Dosh acknowledged, however, that many students do seem inclined to seek a way of getting along at St. Lawrence's rather than protracting the fight over the Newman Center.