Genesis for a Bishop: Kevin Vann Takes over As Diocese Leader

By Jim Hinch
The Orange County Register
December 9, 2012

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/vann-379889-diocese-county.html


Incoming Orange County Catholic Bishop Kevin Vann will do just about anything to pastor his people.

Last August, Vann paid a visit to a burgeoning parish in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, where he has been bishop for the past seven years. Vann was there to consecrate a newly built chapel, including a 100-foot bell tower.

Brushing aside the trepidations of parishioners, Vann insisted on riding a hydraulic lift to the top of the tower so he could sprinkle holy water directly on the bells.

"Are you willing to do this?" parish pastor Richard Eldredge recalled asking Vann.

"Yes!" Vann declared.

And he was. A photograph taken by a parishioner shows Vann in flowing white robes and purple cap rising into the air beside the tower, holy water in hand.

The man on that lift, Vann, 61, will be installed as the fourth bishop of the Diocese of Orange in a ceremony Monday afternoon at the Bren Events Center at UC Irvine. He succeeds Bishop Tod Brown, who last year reached the church's mandatory retirement age of 75.

Vann will become spiritual leader for 1.3 million Orange County Catholics, who now make up 41 percent of the county's population. The diocese is the 10th-largest in the U.S., the second-largest in California and, by some estimates, the nation's fastest-growing.

EARTHLY POWERS

Vann is described by priests and laypeople who have worked with him as something close to a force of nature, a tireless, gregarious pastor who remembers names and family histories of people he's barely met and drives hundreds of miles in a weekend to celebrate Mass at far-flung rural parishes.

During his time in Fort Worth the diocese nearly doubled in size to 710,000 Catholics. Vann presided over $135 million in building projects, including renovation of the diocese's 120-year-old downtown cathedral and consecration of the nation's largest Vietnamese parish church in Arlington.

He made public the names of priests credibly accused of sexual abuse and called the diocese's prior handling of abuse cases "a huge moral failure."

He arrived in a diocese that was "asleep," in the words of Fort Worth businessman Art Dickerson, who oversaw the cathedral renovation. "Now it is a dynamic, busy, unbelievable place."

"I just enjoy being with people and getting to know them and connecting with them and knowing their stories and lives," Vann said in an interview last week. "Whatever I can do as a pastor, I will do."

More than 4,000 people are expected to attend Vann's installation Monday, including the United States' representative from the Vatican, Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez and more than 50 other bishops from around the country.

Word of Vann's energetic style has already reached Orange County Catholics.

"I am very, very excited," said Berni Neal, a parishioner at St. Edward the Confessor Church in Dana Point and board member of the Orange Catholic Foundation. "We've heard he's very dynamic, very pastoral, very engaged, really out there as an example."

Celebration of Vann's arrival begins tonight with an evening prayer service at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, which the Catholic diocese bought last year for $57 million.

The cathedral, to be renamed Christ Cathedral when the diocese takes full possession next summer, symbolizes the surging Catholic presence in the diocese Vann will lead.

Following decades of immigration from Latin America and Vietnam, regions with strong Catholic traditions, Catholicism is now a prominent religious and cultural force in a county historically known as a birthplace of evangelical Protestant megachurches.

Thirty-four percent of all Masses in Orange County are said in Spanish. Fourteen of the diocese's 57 parishes say at least one Mass every Sunday in Vietnamese.

Vann, a near-fluent Spanish speaker who has been learning Vietnamese, arrives in Orange County with extensive experience reaching out to immigrant faithful.

Nearly a quarter of Catholics in Fort Worth are Hispanic. Six thousand are Vietnamese.

Last year, Vann consecrated the 29,000-square-foot, $6.8 million Vietnamese Martyrs Church in Arlington. After addressing a crowd of more than 2,500 at the church entrance, Vann threw open the doors and led worshippers inside, where he blessed the altar, the crucifix and a special chapel containing a relic of a Vietnamese martyr's bone.

After the consecration, Vann stayed for a feast of Vietnamese-style shrimp, fish, beef and lobster, listening while parish leaders gave speeches and Vietnamese pop stars flown in from Orange County serenaded the crowd.

"The bishop is very beloved in the Vietnamese community," said Khiet Nguyen, a longtime Martyrs parishioner whose architectural firm designed the new church.

Stephen Jasso, pastor of All Saints Church, a predominantly Spanish-speaking parish near downtown Fort Worth, said Vann was just as visible to his community.

The diocese of Forth Worth's 89 parishes sprawl across 24,000 square miles of Texas prairie. Yet Jasso said Vann somehow managed to drop by his church nearly once a week for lunch and a chat.

"I always told him, 'I've seen you so many times!'" Jasso recalled. "I'm surrounded by the best Mexican food in Fort Worth. He loves that."

Jasso said Vann pushed to finance a major renovation of All Saints' school, the diocese's only Catholic school serving a predominantly Hispanic community.

"When he comes to you, he's just a person you can approach," Jasso said. "He doesn't have an arrogant attitude – 'I'm the bishop.' That doesn't work with him."

"He's going to be a blessing for Orange County."

CALL CAME AT NIGHT

Vann was born May 10, 1951, in Springfield, Ill., the oldest of six children. His mother was a nurse, his father a postal worker.

"Faith was always important" in the household, Vann recalled. One of his aunts was a nun and his parents were "very involved in our parish." Priests were frequently at the house for meetings and meals.

Vann thought about pursuing ordination during high school but then decided to go to college, earning a B.A. in medical technology at Millikin University in Decatur, Ill. For three years he worked the night shift running a laboratory in a Catholic hospital in Springfield.

It was during those long night hours that Vann felt his religious call intensify.

"Working at night in a hospital is a whole different world than in daytime," he said. "Night is scary for people dying. ... Being with folks when they're dying and suffering brought back that early desire" to become a priest.

Vann attended seminaries in Illinois and Missouri, then studied canon law in Rome. He was ordained in 1981 and pastored parishes ranging in size from 35 to 1,300 families.

One day in Springfield, Vann was invited to a breakfast hosted by the city's small Hispanic community. "He went there and fell in love with the people and decided to learn the language, and he became very active in the Hispanic community," businessman Dickerson recalled Vann telling him. Vann was named the diocese's minister to Hispanics.

Ordained bishop of Fort Worth in 2005, Vann candidly told priests there "he needed support and didn't have experience, and this was a large step for him," recalled Monsignor Stephen Berg, Vann's vicar general.

Vann set about touring the diocese, often spending weekends driving miles and miles to celebrate Mass at remote parishes.

For a short time he tried living at the official bishop's residence, a palatial house in a historic Fort Worth neighborhood newly renovated to remove the smell of the previous bishop's six cats.

But Vann "gets his energy from being with other people," Berg said, and he soon grew lonely. He moved into a tiny attic apartment in a rectory shared with five other priests adjacent to the downtown cathedral.

There he often celebrated morning Mass, sometimes asking Dickerson and his wife, Pat, to go to breakfast with him afterward at Esperanza, a favorite Mexican restaurant where the bishop liked the huevos rancheros.

He is an accomplished pianist, once raising nearly $14,000 for the diocese by auctioning an evening piano performance by himself and Berg at a Fort Worth country club. His favorite music: ragtime and showtunes, which he plays on two pianos, an upright and a grand, both being shipped from Fort Worth to Orange County.

OLD ISSUES, NEW ENERGY

On more controversial matters, Vann has hewed to positions taken by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

He has been an advocate of immigration reform, telling the Register last week that "when you journey with people in their lives, you see their pain and suffering and ... the challenge of being separated from their families and not able to return. Those are my concerns as a pastor."

Earlier this year the Fort Worth diocese filed a federal lawsuit contesting provisions in the Affordable Care Act requiring religiously affiliated institutions such as hospitals and universities to provide insurance coverage for contraception.

In 2004, Vann told an Illinois newspaper he'd be "reticent" to give communion to the state's Democratic U.S. senator, Dick Durbin, because of the senator's pro-choice stance on abortion.

Tahira Merritt, a lawyer who has represented numerous victims of clerical sexual abuse in Fort Worth, said "there was a shift" in the diocese's handling of abuse cases when Vann became bishop.

"He is very pastoral and I think he tries hard to at least listen to what the victims have to say," Merritt said. "But if it wasn't for victims pushing the envelope with litigation," the diocese likely would not have acted to resolve cases, she said.

Merritt said one of her clients was "stonewalled" by the diocese for two years until he filed a lawsuit in January alleging abuse by a priest at a Fort Worth parish in the 1980s. The suit was settled last month for an undisclosed sum.

Asked about the case, Vann said it would "not be appropriate" to comment. Vann said he would have to "study" more before deciding whether to make public a list of priests credibly accused of sexual abuse in Orange County.

Tita Smith, executive director of Catholic Charities in Santa Ana, said Vann arrives in Orange County at a pivotal time for Catholics. With the church on its way to recovering from its own sex abuse scandals, as well as the economic downturn, worshippers are ready for "a fresh perspective on the role of Catholics in Orange County," she said.

"Welcoming in a new energy is exciting," Smith said, especially as Catholics look forward to transforming the Crystal Cathedral into a spiritual and cultural center for the entire county. The diocese is currently raising up to $100 million to renovate the cathedral along with schools and parishes countywide.

Vann, who will shepherd renovation, said he envisions the cathedral as "a spot where God is known for everyone who comes that way" regardless of faith background.

"My first calling is to get to know and love and serve people where they are," Vann said.

He said he's being sent to Orange County "to be a pastor and a guide and a friend and a leader."



Contact: jimhinch@gmail.com