From FOX News 8 in Cleveland: ON TAPE: Bishop Lennon Recorded Talking About Church Closings
The entire conversation is available for listening. It runs a little over 28 minutes.
CLEVELAND — Behind closed doors, Bishop Richard Lennon, head of the [Roman Catholic] Diocese of Cleveland, is straightforward about the need to close churches.
“Let me be very blunt: why haven’t the people of Cleveland done this over the past years,” asked Bishop Lennon.
The bishop took part in a conversation back in May with Pat Schulte Singleton. She was a member of St. Patrick’s — a church on Cleveland’s west side that has since been closed.
Schulte Singleton was hoping to get the bishop to reverse that decision. She went to the meeting alone, and she recorded the conversation without his knowledge. Why?
“To have an accounting of what happened,” she says now. “When you go to talk to the bishop, especially Bishop Lennon, you’re a bit intimidated…”
A few things:
- In most places people have a right to record conversations to which they are a party. I have no problem with Ms. Schulte Singleton’s doing so. It is her right.
- The bishop hits all the right points on technical issues. Being catholic means more than just “place.” It also means a life of sacrifice. No one in the rest of the hierarchy will fault him on those points. You won’t likely get a co-adjutator or an apostolic administrator unless the Bishop goes completely off (becomes a heretic or a scandal to the Church) although the early change in Scranton looked to be a result of too heavy a hand by the R.C. Bishop there.
- The Bishop is a good businessman who is cutting losses and moving to where his customers prefer to be (the suburbs). He knows the financials and the statistics.
- He is equally wrong about place, because place is important, not just because of individual’s attachment to it, but because the presence of church and Christian witness changes the character of place. Yes church is more than place, but it is present in place and time to bring grace, life, and community.
- He is absolutely wrong in his assessment of neighborhood change. If I were the folks living in, or moving into that neighborhood I would be deeply hurt by his attitude. I sense a subtle bigotry there. He could have just said, ‘I don’t want to minister to THOSE people in THAT neighborhood. I’ve written them off.’
- The PNCC model works (as our Prime Bishop Emeritus often said – we have a gem of a Church because we are Catholic with a democratic form of governance) because parishioner ownership results in commitment to working for the home that no one can take from them. It allows parishioners to innovatively approach evangelization as well as solutions to issues. You would never hear – ‘we didn’t know about the financials,’ from the member of a PNCC Parish Committee (as opposed to Ms. Schulte Singleton noting that they didn’t know anything about assessments in arrears). Thanks be to God that the clergy in the PNCC can concentrate on the spiritual. You will never hear money preached from the pulpit. The people handle it and contribute toward what they own.
- Whomever is hitting her people up for money to run appeals up the Vatican flag pole has quite the racket. Milk the dolts back in the states while we sip wine in Roma. O Solo Mio! The answer three years hence — Negato!