Bishop Gainer speaks on Pope Francis, Catholic social teachings in public square

By Suzanne Cassidy
Lancaster Online
April 13, 2014

http://lancasteronline.com/news/local/bishop-gainer-speaks-on-pope-francis-catholic-social-teachings-in/article_d1126300-c1cb-11e3-8190-001a4bcf6878.html

Jeff Ruppenthal/Staff

The newly installed 11th bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg still had, on this day, some unpacking to do.

Somewhere in the boxes stacked in Bishop Ronald W. Gainer’s office was a lump of coal.

He’s kept it with him always, he said, and “it will be on my desk when I find it, just to remind me of my mom’s dad ... who was a deep coal miner from Slovakia.”

Gainer said his family was “not at all wanting, but there were times when my dad [a bricklayer] was out of work because construction wasn’t happening, so we knew what it was to sometimes live close to the edge.”

He’s never forgotten his family origins, he said. “That’s the reality that I want to keep before my eyes every day.”

Said Gainer: “I hope that people will not see a pretense to a silver spoon or anything like that.”

Pope Francis is reining in bishops who live in luxury. And he has said he wants bishops who will be pastors, not bishops who have the “psychology of princes.”

So a bishop whose prized possession is a lump of coal seems in keeping with the new mood in the Catholic Church.

In an hourlong interview in his office at diocesan headquarters in Harrisburg, Gainer spoke of the effect Pope Francis is having on the church.

He also spoke about his eagerness to make the case for Catholic social teachings, and about the “disgrace” that was the church’s past handling of clerical sexual abuse cases.

He said he intends to hold town hall meetings with the diocese’s Catholics — he held more than 60 such forums in Lexington.

He’s already done a forum with seniors at the Harrisburg diocese’s seven Catholic high schools. (In that closed-circuit forum, he held the line — in the face of some resistance from students — against gay marriage.)

For now, he said, “My absolute No. 1 priority is learning. I want to get my head and heart and hands around what is the reality of the Harrisburg diocese, and so listening and learning are my two main postures right now.”

Son and mother

Gainer, 66, is a native son of Pottsville.

He served in the Diocese of Allentown, first as a parish priest and campus minister, then as a diocesan official, before he became a bishop in 2003.

He returns to Pennsylvania after serving for more than a decade as bishop of the Diocese of Lexington, Ky.

That diocese stretches across 50 counties in central and eastern Kentucky, and serves about 46,000 Catholics.

It has more than 60 parishes, but 40 of those parishes, mostly located in the impoverished Appalachian region, rely on outside funding.

The 15-county Diocese of Harrisburg, by contrast, includes 89 parishes — 18 in Lancaster County — eight missions and more than 249,000 Catholics.

Karen Abbey, chancellor of the Lexington diocese, said some of the parishes there have fewer than a dozen families.

When Gainer would travel to confirm one or two children in those tiny parishes, “he would always go with the same heart ... as he would to our cathedral parish,” where he might have been confirming a hundred children, Abbey said.

Confirmation was the only time she saw her bishop when she was growing up, she said. “That is not Bishop Gainer’s style.”

He read storybooks to second-graders; he held open forums with high school students; he celebrated Mass for prisoners.

Abbey and others who knew Gainer in Lexington described him as a down-to-earth, approachable bishop, whose office door was always open.

Gainer said his mother, Anna, who lives with him (he’s an only child), “keeps me grounded to the realities of daily life and humble. She’s not afraid to say — well, no one should be afraid — but she least of all is afraid to say, ‘You forgot this. You didn’t do this.’”

Anna Gainer, 90, fell ill on the eve of her son’s installation as Harrisburg’s bishop. She had a pacemaker implanted a couple of days later, and is “doing well,” the bishop said.

“They are so devoted to each other,” said Abbey, who served as Gainer’s executive assistant in Lexington. “He is a direct reflection of her ... She is a woman of deep, deep faith and understanding.”

The changing church

In keeping her son humble, Anna Gainer may be doing the work of Pope Francis.

The pope recently accepted the resignation of a German bishop who spent $43 million renovating his residential complex.

Earlier this month, Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta announced he was selling his new $2.2 million residence. Noted Gregory: “The world and the church have changed.”

Gainer said he thinks lay Catholics welcome this change.

“Part of the teaching office of the bishop is not just what we say, but it’s the way we behave. And I think in any position of authority ... those who are somewhat at the top can begin to feel that ‘I deserve this.’”

 Pope Francis, Gainer said, is calling bishops and other clergy to “gospel detachment” from material goods.

“The idea is that the kingdom of God must be our priority,” the bishop said.

The church, he continued, needs “temporal goods” such as office buildings, but “the attitude with which we use the goods we have is a teaching moment.”

Pope Francis, he pointed out, is a Jesuit who took a vow of poverty.

But even diocesan priests and bishops who don’t take poverty vows are being reminded by Francis — by word and example — to heed “our Lord’s call to us to embrace poverty,” Gainer said.

Speaking in public square

In Lexington, Gainer was one of four bishops on the board of the Catholic Conference of Kentucky, the church’s public affairs arm there.

He will serve as president of the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference.

He signaled his eagerness to weigh in on issues such as poverty, abortion, the death penalty, gay marriage.

“I do want to be involved in speaking on our rich social teaching in the public square,” he said.

He believes the church and people of faith have a role as conscience to the government.

And, he said, “Every bishop has the obligation to articulate the church’s teachings and the truth revealed to us by Jesus for the common good of society.”

He added: “We’re not lobbying for the sake of the Catholic Church. ... These positions aren’t simply for the advantage of the Catholic Church, but really I think to respect the dignity of the human person and the common good in society.”

Statute of limitations

The Pennsylvania Catholic Conference has been criticized by child welfare advocates for opposing statute of limitation reform.

Under current law, a victim of child sexual abuse has until he’s 30 to bring civil action against his abuser.

Advocates say it takes some victims decades before they’re ready to seek justice.

 “The church wants to stand with those who have been victimized in this horrible situation,” Gainer said. “And I think we have made laudatory and massive efforts to correct what had existed in the church, and secondly, to be part of the healing process for those who have been victimized.”

Within church law, he emphasized, there is no statute of limitations.

If an accusation were to be made about a priest abusing a child decades ago, “that would be examined as though it happened yesterday,” he said.

In accordance with the U.S. bishops’ Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People — often called the “Dallas Charter” — there is now a “one-strike-and-you’re-out” policy on sexual abuse, Gainer said.

“So we can genuinely say that we’re offering the safest environment that we can humanly achieve for children and young adults.”

But he is wary of amending the statute of limitations for the same reasons the conference has resisted such change: the difficulties an accused person might have in marshaling evidence in his defense decades on; and the exclusion of public organizations from such legislation.

State Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Democrat from Berks County, said he’s tried to address the conference’s concerns in House Bill 2067.

That bill would enable victims up to the age of 50 to bring civil suits against their abusers; this brings it in line with the criminal statute of limitations.

And public officials and institutions could not claim sovereign immunity.

“I don’t care if you’re a priest, a teacher, a coach, my uncle, my brother, my sister, everybody needs to be accountable,” Rozzi said.

Rozzi was sexually abused by a Catholic priest who died in 2002 after being charged in Texas with the sexual assault of a child.

“It’s time for the church to accept responsibility ... and say, ‘We have committed crimes in the past, and just like anyone else in the real world, we have to be held accountable,” Rozzi asserted.

‘A great scar’

SNAP, or the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, has criticized Gainer for the way he handled sexual abuse allegations against two priests in Kentucky.

Gainer said the one priest was the responsibility of another diocese.

The allegations against the other priest, he said, were investigated thoroughly by the Lexington diocese, and were deemed to be unfounded.

According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, however, a separate investigation, in a neighboring diocese, “resulted in a six-figure settlement” with that priest’s accuser.

Gainer said he hired a full-time employee to implement the Lexington diocese’s safe-environment program, and retained the services of a sex crimes investigator who works with the Lexington Police Department.

Gainer said he understands the pain that continues to be engendered by the church’s abuse scandal.

“It’s a tragedy the way these cases were handled,” he said.

“We’ve taken our current context, which is the right one, but we’ve made it retroactive, saying what should have been done those many years ago,” he said.

Nevertheless, he said, the scandal remains “a great scar” for the church because “a small percentage” of priests abused the trust that was placed in them. “That is a disgrace and it is a wound for our church.”

On Friday, Pope Francis said he felt "compelled to personally take on all the evil that some priests — quite a few in number, though not compared to the total number — and to ask for forgiveness for the damage they have done by sexually abusing children.”

Spurning labels

Gainer once was described in a news article as being conservative on sexual issues, and progressive on matters of social and economic justice.

He spurns such labels.

“The terms progressive, conservative, liberal, really belong or come from the political sphere, and I don’t like to apply them to the church,” Gainer said.

To those in the political realm, Catholic positions on social issues seem to be diverse, he said.

“Our [stance] on the unborn, and the right to life of the unborn, is seen as an ultraconservative position. And our position against the death penalty appears to be very progressive or liberal.

“But the fact is, there’s only one principle that underlies those diverse positions, and that is the sacredness of human life and the dignity of the human person.

"What appears to be diverse from a political point of view ... is simply consistent with the one teaching of the church."

Gainer drew national attention when he said, in a brief interview at the March for Life in Washington, that he wanted Catholic lawmakers who voted for abortion rights to refrain from taking Communion.

He said the reporter didn’t include the preamble: that he would want to meet with those lawmakers — more than once if necessary — and make the case for the church’s position.

If that didn’t work, he said, “I would hope that someone would say, ‘Well, I am not with the church on this issue, and this is essential, and therefore ... I ought to honestly disqualify myself, not from coming to church, but [from] engaging in that one act that’s so important to Catholics.’

“I think that’s a matter of integrity.”

Said Gainer: “I think that’s a better measure than having the bishop issue a decree saying Congressman X or Senator So-and-So is barred from Communion.”

The death penalty

Asked if he’d expect the same from a lawmaker who supported the death penalty, Gainer said the church “recognizes that the state has the right to use capital punishment. The issue is that that right should be exercised rarely — if at all.”

The church, Gainer said, believes life imprisonment is a better alternative, so a guilty person has “the opportunity to receive God’s grace ... and repent of the crime they committed.”

Gainer has been drawn to prison ministry over the years. As Lexington’s bishop, he visited inmates in the five federal prisons and nine state prisons within the diocese’s boundaries.

And he spent time with the only woman on death row in Kentucky.

“She has undergone an amazing conversion to Christ, and if she is executed, she’ll go to her Maker as a converted person,” Gainer said.

People don’t always repent of their crimes, he said.

But “there’s no secret who suffers from the death penalty. It’s the poor.”

Moreover, he said, too many people have been exonerated after the fact to “pretend that our criminal system is so precise and exact and just that we can be confident with the sentence of the death penalty.”