NEW JERSEY
The Record
By ALFRED P. DOBLIN
RECORD EDITORIAL COLUMNIST
THERE IS a change coming in Newark, and it has nothing to do with Cory Booker’s departure for the U.S. Senate. On Tuesday, Bernard Hebda is officially welcomed to the Archdiocese of Newark as a coadjutor bishop. Archbishop John Myers will no longer be solo at the helm.
Myers is only 72, three years shy of mandatory retirement. When the announcement came in September that the Vatican had named a coadjutor archbishop, Myers said he had requested one. Maybe so, but as a longtime observer of bishops and their relations with Rome, the odds of the Vatican sending in a second-in-command three years before a bishop’s usual retirement for no reason other than a simple request for help are about as likely as Justin Bieber announcing he has a priestly vocation and is entering a seminary.
The Archdiocese of Newark is in need of a shepherd, not an autocrat. And Myers has been very good at the latter and not so hot at the former. The archdiocese may be on good financial footing; the cogs may be turning fine and dandy when it comes to processing money coming in and money going out. But when it comes to speaking to the people of his church, Myers has been less successful.
Today every Catholic bishop pays the price for what too many bishops failed for decades to do: stop pedophile priests from doing harm. Knee-jerk defenders of Catholicism contend that the media’s refusal to let this issue die is proof that most journalists are anti-Catholic.
Defending children is about as Catholic and Christian a thing as there is. The media doesn’t let the issue die because bishops can come and go, but the children who were scarred under their watch remain and someone has to shout to the heavens, “No more.”
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