A tale of two dioceses: from Lincoln to Saginaw - Lincoln, Nebraska, and Saginaw, Michigan - Cover Story

Commonweal, June 6, 1997 by Charles R. Morris

Sexual innuendoes have added a nasty edge to the ideological struggles within the American Catholic church. Most noticeably, concerns over pedophilia and clerical sexuality have thrown the question of priestly celibacy into sharp relief. Is it true that in the modern era the celibacy requirement will draw only men "who haven't worked out their own sexual identities," as the University of Notre Dame's outspoken liberal theologian the Reverend Richard McBrien puts it? "You should visit Lincoln," McBrien told me during a recent interview, "then you'll see what's really going on." The very conservative diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, is famous for recruiting disproportionately large numbers of priests.

I was struck that Joseph Fessio, S.J., founder and director of the conservative Ignatius Press, gave me exactly the same instruction. "You should visit Lincoln," he said. "Then you'll see a church that works."

So I visited Lincoln.

Nebraska in winter is painted with a palette of gray and white. The sky is gray, presaging snow. In the fields that stretch off on every side, gray patches of soil peek through the snow, and the winter's corn stubble is a bleached-out gray and white and dun. It is very cold. Lincoln is the state capital, a prosperous university town in the southeastern corner of the state, with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. Nebraska occasionally elects liberal politicians, like Bob Kerrey, the present senator and former governor, but like most of the agrarian Midwest, it is a natural home of bedrock conservatism. Geographically, the state is an irregular rectangle about 350 miles long, divided roughly in half in the long direction, east to west, by the Platte River. All of Nebraska south of the Platte is assigned to the diocese of Lincoln, so the diocese is shaped like an eel with its head in the east and an attenuating tail of little farm towns, many with only a few hundred souls, stretching all the way to Wyoming in the west. About 15 percent of the people in southern Nebraska are Catholic, rising to about 25 percent in Lincoln.

The Lincoln chancery office is a modest one-story building in the shadow of a surprisingly modernistic cathedral in one of the city's better residential neighborhoods. On an evening in December 1995, twenty-one of Lincoln's theology-level seminarians had assembled to get their religious teaching assignments for the Christmas vacation period. Altogether Lincoln had thirty-nine men in advanced stages of seminary training, a remarkable number for a small diocese. Too small to operate its own seminary, Lincoln farms its students out, mostly to Dunwoodie in New York, Saint Charles in Philadelphia, and Saint Mary's in Emmitsburg, Maryland, the big three of conservative theology. The session at the chancery took about an hour - mostly details about transportation, curricula, and dress code (black suits and ties or Roman collars) interrupted by chaffing about who was likely to oversleep or get lost. I was a fly on the wall, somewhat awkwardly introduced as a visiting writer. After the session almost all of us repaired to the Newman Center at the university for pizza and beer.

Altogether, I spent about four hours with the group. I didn't interview each one, but I was able to watch them interact with each other, I had some lengthy round-table discussions with shifting groups of four or five at a time, and I talked with a few individuals in some depth. They were, frankly, an impressive group of young men. They were not effeminate. They did not seem to be "unhealthy" or immature, or to have rigidly dependent personalities. The ones I talked to did not come from broken homes or problem families. Their theology was very orthodox, as all of Lincoln's theology is, but no one sounded fanatical. As in any group of twentysomethings, some were more gregarious and self-confident than others. Raymond Jansen could pass for an Ivy League swim team captain, but his shoulder span came from hauling bricks on construction sites, not from swimming. The presence and professional directness of Chris Kubat, the oldest at thirty-eight, was striking; but he is a board-certified urologist who jettisoned a thriving practice, an active social life, and a contemplated marriage because "the call became too strong." In my mind's eye, I put the whole group in suits and ties and envisioned them in a training program for Wall Street junior executives. They did fine. If a daughter brought one of them home, a father would be perfectly content. Any bishop would kill to get them.

The ratio of active priests to Catholics in Lincoln is about 1:700, more than half again higher than in the rest of the country. From the diocesan directory, I calculated the median age of active priests to be about forty-three, an astonishing twelve or thirteen years younger than the national median. About a third of the priests are under thirty-five. The diocesan chancellor, Monsignor Timothy Thorburn, is forty-two. After meeting so many older priests in my visits to other dioceses, the succession of recruitment-poster priests in their midthirties was almost disorienting. Lincoln's recruiting secrets offer real insights into the choices faced by the American church.