An article by Robert Ellesberg on the late Bishop Thomas Gumbleton reminds me of the now long lost time when the majority of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops weren't dominated by JPII and Benedict XVI careerist right-wing hacks.
I first met Bishop Gumbleton in the late 1970s. I was the managing editor of the Catholic Worker and Bishop Gumbleton had invited me to Detroit to speak at a conference on peace. My assigned topic was "Youth and the Arms Race." For the first and last time in my life, I found myself the designated voice of my generation.
I don't remember what I said — I'm sure it was not very memorable. But what I remember was Bishop Gumbleton's humility and kindness, his deep commitment to peace, and his evidently genuine interest in listening to what this "youth" had to say.
I was not raised in the Catholic Church. My introduction to Catholicism at that point was largely by way of Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan. And, so, I assumed that Bishop Gumbleton was a pretty typical bishop! I had a lot to learn.
My confidence in Bishop Gumbleton and his fellow U.S. bishops was soon confirmed by their work on "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response," the historic 1983 pastoral letter on nuclear war, which for a short time encouraged speculation that the Catholic Church was on its way to being a "peace church." But, before long, that high-water mark of Catholic social teaching in this country was relegated to the past. The arms race continued unimpeded; the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists continued to tick closer to midnight.
Some of you knew my father, Daniel Ellsberg, who died in June 2023. He was greatly inspired by the peace pastoral, which he studied carefully — acknowledging its limitations, yet encouraged by hope that this would mark a start rather than an endpoint of the discussion.
Just a few years ago he asked me, "What are the odds that the bishops today could once again take up the question of nuclear war?" I said: zero. But that's a long story.
The story of the long anti-pastoral papacies of those two most unfortunate Popes since the Second World War. and what Richard McBrien used to regret as their generally mediocre appointments. We still live with that
This passage gives me a lot to think about.
Yesterday, I was giving a talk about Dorothy Day and someone asked if I agreed with all her positions, all her choices. I said probably not. But I said the striking thing about Dorothy was not that she was necessarily correct in every choice or decision — she was not endowed with infallibility! But with every decision she examined her conscience, and she was guided by what she thought was right, what she believed was the way of Jesus, and there was no daylight between what she said, what she believed, and the way she lived. I believe the same is true of Bishop Gumbleton.
That is not to say he has always been right. If that were true, it would mean he was incapable of growth or conversion, and what is clear is that Bishop Gumbleton's whole life has been a long story of conversion, of always striving to go deeper in the call to be faithful.
The idea that you have to agree with everything someone says, that they have to always be right is one of the stupidest things proving that somewhere along the way adulthood in the modern world turned to jr. high. Where it is still stuck.
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