NEW JERSEY
Whispers in the Loggia
Amid these long, strange months in the nation’s seventh-largest church, it wouldn’t be an ecclesial event in Newark if there weren’t protestors.
And so – even if the demonstrations outside yesterday’s Welcome Mass for Coadjutor-Archbishop Bernie Hebda were mostly the customary troupe of 50 guitar-strumming, drum-beating, full-out-rejoicing Neocat singers – three advocates for victim-survivors were likewise on the scene, toting full-body, all-caps signs blaring that incumbent Archbishop John “Myers must still go” and urging “Hebda: ignore Myers.”
If nothing else, that even the toughest crowd of all hasn’t demonized the new arrival – at least, not yet – underscores the extraordinary goodwill and high hopes invested in the figure the locals have dubbed “AB2.” But now that he’s wheels-down and taking anew to life in a college dorm, the question becomes how he’ll handle what archdiocesan officials maintain will be a three-year apprenticeship of one of American Catholicism’s most complex outposts.
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