James V. Johnston intends to bring healing as new bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese

By Brian Burnes, Judy L. Thomas, Robert A. Cronkleton
Kansas City Star
September 15, 2015

http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article35300139.html

The bishop who soon will lead northwest Missouri’s Catholics can cite both healing and heroism on his resume.

And he recognizes that a significant need for healing exists in the community still stinging from recent child abuse scandals, Bishop James V. Johnston Jr. said Tuesday as he was introduced as the seventh bishop of the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese.

“But I also believe that the one that truly heals is Jesus,” Johnston said at the Catholic Center in downtown Kansas City. “And so I see my role as the bishop as sort of being a physician’s assistant — to be a person that facilitates some of that healing.”

Johnston will move north later this year from the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, which he has led for seven years. He will be installed Nov. 4.

Pope Francis announced Johnston’s appointment a week before the pontiff makes his first visit to the United States and five months after Bishop Robert Finn resigned in the aftermath of a priest sex abuse scandal that roiled the diocese.

Johnston referenced the controversy briefly in his opening remarks.

“One of the challenges of the gospel, and one that Pope Francis has made a key theme of his papacy, is not to be an inward-looking church,” he said.

“Our energy and identity is to be in mission mode, to be mindful of the poor, the lost, those hungry and thirsting, physically and spiritually; of those needing healing, including people who have been harmed by those within the church.”

During his Springfield tenure, Johnston helped establish Catholic Charities of Southern Missouri about 18 months before a May 2011 tornado devastated Joplin.

He encouraged people to become priests and supported the Catholic Worker movement, approving what’s now the only diocesan-sponsored Catholic Worker facility, a Greene County farm that welcomes the homeless, the poor and those escaping family crises.

Johnston also spoke against the death penalty, same-sex marriage and a Springfield anti-discrimination ordinance that added sexual orientation and gender identity to the city’s list of protected classes. That ordinance has been repealed.

Johnston described his unique path to priesthood, working for three years as an electrical engineer before entering the seminary. He detailed the challenges of ministering to Catholics in Tennessee and in southern Missouri, where the percentage of Catholics among the general population is much lower than in the Kansas City-St. Joseph area.

And he smiled as Archbishop Joseph Naumann, who served as Kansas City-St. Joseph apostolic administrator after Finn’s departure, mentioned a 2005 Interior Department award for bravery received by Johnston and two other priests after they, during a Montana hike, saved a father and two children from being swept over a waterfall.

Many Catholics expressed excitement that a new bishop had been named after the sexual abuse controversy.

“We are eagerly anticipating his arrival in Kansas City and praying for him and continuing to pray for Bishop Finn and his future endeavors,” said Michael Murtha, a staunch supporter of Finn. “Anybody that could come and lead our diocese forward is really welcome. We need to see what he’s like, and he needs to see what we’re like.”

Mary Danaher, a lifelong Catholic, said she hoped Johnston would be the one to help rebuild the diocese.

“We’ve got to give him a chance, because I think he has a lot of things in his favor,” Danaher said. “He has visited every parish in his diocese, which is an enormous number of churches. It looks like he might be ‘of the people.’ He sounds like a person who can do something.”

Johnston comes to a diocese with 98 parishes and missions and a Catholic population of more than 133,000 people, about double the size of Johnston’s current diocese.

Closing the gap between conservatives and progressives in the diocese should be a priority, said the Rev. James Connell, a priest in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee who was part of the campaign to oust Finn.

“He’s walking into a situation where there’s a lot of healing required,” Connell said.

“He has to be open to listening to people. An open door policy; let people come in and say whatever they want to say. And if they need information, get it for them.”

The Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter, said the appointment “looks like good news.”

“He’s somebody who knows the issues,” he said, noting that Johnston served on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People. “It’s probably important, too, that he comes from Missouri, so he knows what’s going on.”

Reese said Johnston should be well prepared to help with healing in the diocese.

“Clearly, everybody knows that’s what the diocese needs, so I think that will be a priority for him,” he said. “The people of Kansas City want healing; they want to come together. They’ve had enough of the pain and the suffering, and I think they’re going to be receptive to any attempts on his side to try and heal things and bring people together.”

Johnston on Tuesday identified his motto as “The Love of Christ urges us on,” from the Second Book of Corinthians.

Southern Missouri colleagues of Johnston praised him for innovation. He has made a personal investment in Trinity Hills, the diocesan Catholic Worker facility, said Nicholas Lund-Molfese, the facility director who brought the concept to Johnston.

“He takes the time to come here and have dinner with the guests,” said Lund-Molfese. “It’s a real commitment to serving the poor individually.”

Others praised Johnston’s action in establishing a diocesan Catholic Charities office about 18 months before the 2011 Joplin tornado devastated that community, demolishing St. Mary’s church and school and damaging a hospital.

“We all responded as a team,” said Johnston, who blessed and dedicated the rebuilt hospital in March, and the new St. Mary’s church and school last December.

“The people of Joplin, they’re descendants of miners, so they’re a pretty tough bunch, so they bounced back really well,” Johnston said.

“But I was very proud of the role that our faith community, the Catholic Church, had in helping them get back on their feet.”

Catholics represent only about 5 percent of the southern Missouri population, Johnston said, and only about 2 percent in Tennessee. But his experiences in those communities, he said, may have been one reason why Pope Francis appointed him to lead the Catholics of the northwest Missouri diocese.

In such communities, Johnston said, “You’ve got to rely on each other, you help each other out. It requires a lot of teamwork.”

Johnston, 55, left an engineering career to enter the priesthood in 1985. He had begun to ponder a religious vocation, he said Tuesday, while earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

“I began to reflect on the love of God for me, and how I might return that in some way,” he said. That process continued, he said, following his 1982 graduation and during three years of engineering work in Houston.

“The sense that I was being called not only never went away, but it kept increasing,” he said. He was ordained a priest in 1990.

Fifteen years later, he received another title. In 2005, the U.S. Department of the Interior awarded Johnston and two other priests the Citizens Award for Bravery for helping save a family in danger of plunging over a waterfall in Glacier National Park in Montana.

The priests were hiking in the park in 2002 when they saw the father and two children about 20 feet from the edge of the waterfall. The man, who had his young daughter in a carrier on his back, was trying to rescue his son after the boy had fallen into the creek. The three priests formed a human chain and pulled the family to safety.

The men rarely discussed the incident after returning to Tennessee, and the award “was a big surprise,” Johnston told the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Naumann on Tuesday said the Interior Department award was “emblematic” of Johnston’s character.

Johnston has been a vocal opponent of the death penalty and same-sex marriage. When President Barack Obama announced support for gay marriage in 2012, Johnston called it a regrettable decision, saying, “Equating same-sex unions with true marriage is unjust, and will lead to a further deconstruction of our nation’s culture and well-being.”

In January, Johnston issued a statement criticizing Mercy Health System’s decision to start offering benefits to same-sex spouses of employees.

“Recognizing God’s plan for marriage is not a matter of ‘the Church’s position,’ as Mercy characterized it, but rather, one of God’s own Word,” Johnston said.

And last fall, Johnston publicly opposed a Springfield City Council proposal to expand a non-discrimination ordinance, an issue that had been debated for two years.

“Do the people of Springfield really want to make criminals out of persons who are merely trying to live their faith?” he wrote in a letter called “Protecting Human Dignity and Religious Freedom.”

Johnston will succeed Finn, whose resignation came nearly three years after being convicted of failing to report suspected child abuse by a priest.

Finn was convicted in September 2012 for failing to notify authorities about a priest who later pleaded guilty to production of child pornography. The conviction made Finn the most senior U.S. Roman Catholic prelate convicted of criminal charges related to the church’s child sexual abuse scandal.

Finn stepped down as leader of the diocese on April 21. Neither Finn nor the Vatican provided a specific reason for the resignation. Finn has not yet been reassigned. He is on a pilgrimage out of the country and still resides in Kansas City, according to a diocesan spokesman.

Terry McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, a group that operates an online database of accused priests, said the fact that Johnston served in Knoxville under Bishop Anthony O’Connell — who resigned in 2002 after admitting that he had sexually abused teenage boys — raised some concerns.

O’Connell had been bishop of Knoxville from 1988 to 1998 before being transferred to the Diocese of Palm Beach, Fla. While there, he revealed that he had sexually abused the young seminarians while serving as rector of a high school seminary in Hannibal, Mo.

“He was chancellor in Knoxville for a couple of years overlapping with O’Connell, who was not simply an enabling bishop but actually an offending bishop,” McKiernan said.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests asked Johnston to remove a life-size bust of O’Connell from a spot at the Knoxville chancery in 2004, but the request wasn’t granted. Johnston told the National Catholic Reporter at the time that the bust was intended as a historical display and he found nothing inappropriate about it.

SNAP also said Tuesday that Johnston had ignored a recent request to reach out to those who may have been harmed by two priests who had worked or spent time in the Springfield diocese and had been “outed” as molesters in another state.

“Newly named Kansas City Bishop James Johnston is no friend of kids or victims,” the organization said on Tuesday. “His record on clergy sex crimes and cover ups is disappointing.”

Johnston addressed the O’Connell issue on Tuesday.

“He was the bishop that ordained me a priest,” Johnston said. “And finding out about his past has caused me to realize the importance of some of the things, a lot of the things, that the church is doing now in terms of prevention.

“But I also am very much aware, up close, of how much pain … the actions of priests and bishops have caused many people individually, and the importance of taking seriously the need for healing and for calling people to responsibility.”

There remains no excuse for such behavior, he added.

“If anyone commits sexual abuse toward minors it is inexcusable; it’s a crime and it’s a serious sin.”

Connell said one way Johnston can regain trust in the diocese is to conduct an audit of the abuse situation.

“Something independent, to help him and work with him to look over the files reports so he knows he has his feet on solid ground as he begins going down this road,” Connell said. “Maybe get a retired judge or a victim survivor to be part of the group. Let them work with the new bishop to review everything.”

Some Catholics say they hope the new bishop will continue a series of prayer and healing services for victims of priest sexual abuse.

The first was held last month at St. Thomas More Catholic Church and a second was last week at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church. Other services will follow over the next nine months at parishes in the diocese, leading up to a lamentation service on June 26, 2016, at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

The HOPE services — Healing Our Parishes through Empathy — are being held in connection with the Jubilee Year of Mercy, announced by Pope Francis in April.

Reese, author of “Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church,” said it’s likely that the Vatican saw the need for healing in the diocese as well.

“Sometimes these appointments take a year or more,” he said. “The fact that the pope is coming may have speeded it up a bit, but I think it’s more that they knew Kansas City needed help, needed healing, right now.”

Johnston said Tuesday that he was up for the challenge of healing the diocese and asked diocese members to pray for him as he went forward.

The diocese, he said, “is a family and we have to assist one another. But in order for that to happen, you do have to have trust.

“So that is what I am going to work on immediately.”