Much has been written about the lengths and depths to which some men have gone to advance in the Catholic Church, sometimes to the detriment of those they were ordained to serve. Blind ambition is not the sole province of the Church, of course, but it is one of the core cultural components of the current crisis. On the contrary, good leaders put people first. Great leaders place them even above their own aspirations. Those stories deserve to be told, too.
You’ve heard the elevator speech about Wilton Cardinal Gregory – south Chicago born and bred, wanted to be a priest before he was Catholic, ordained bishop in 1983 after barely clearing the canonical bar of being 35 years of age and 10 years a priest. Brilliant, articulate, brimming with pastoral presence and armed, for good measure, with an earned doctorate in Sacred Liturgy, a bright red sky was the limit. All he needed to do to reach the highest levels of the Catholic Church he loved so much was to keep his toes squarely on the company line.
Those qualities certainly figured in Pope John Paul II’s decision to dispatch this city kid to the far end of his home state when the mostly rural Diocese of Belleville was being decimated by allegations of sexual abuse of minors by clergy in 1993, nearly a decade before Boston opened our eyes to what had gone on in so many places for so long. By the time then-Bishop Gregory was installed in February 1994, nine priests and a deacon had been found unfit for ministry, and more would follow. Nearly every parish had housed at least one of the accused, making the scandal for southern Illinois Catholics both deeply personal and pervasive.
Nothing about those days was charted. Survivors didn’t trust the new bishop and he didn’t expect them to, the bad priests protested their removals, the good priests were being lumped in with the bad priests, and the faithful felt betrayed and preyed upon. As it soon would across the country, the focus throughout the diocese had shifted from Christ to crisis. It was going to take someone with a unique set of skills and a firm grip on the Gospel to have any hope of shifting it back.
Then-Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory prays during a 2006 Mass at St. Thomas More Parish in Decatur, Georgia. Cardinal Gregory was named as Washington’s archbishop in 2019 and was elevated to the College of Cardinals in November 2020. (Georgia Bulletin photo by Michael Alexander)
I met Bishop Gregory when he interviewed me on July 30, 1994 to be his Vice Chancellor. He was searching for the ecclesial equivalent of a Chief of Staff, someone to run his office while he was busy dealing with the darkness he’d inherited and tending to the wounded people of God. I was working across the Mississippi in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, but I had grown up in the Diocese of Belleville and my heart and my family were still there. The combination of a desire to be part of the healing of my home diocese and the opportunity to work with this remarkable new bishop inspired me to throw my hat in the ring and leave my fate in the hands of God and Bishop Gregory. I will never forget the moment in the interview when the bishop looked at me a bit exasperated and said, “Dave, I could spend 24 hours a day dealing with these priests. I need one person in my office constantly tugging on my sleeve and reminding me that there are 110,000 other Catholics in this diocese who need a bishop, too.” I started on Aug. 29.
In that Midwestern chancery I had the privilege of watching “Bishop G” bring our battered diocese back from the brink through 11 years of nonstop prayer and sacraments, policies and promises, pastoral visits, farm blessings, and too many gut-wrenching conversations to count. He met continually with survivors, clergy, staff, and lay Catholics who just couldn’t seem to settle on an emotion – anger, confusion, hurt, disappointment, disbelief, disgust, and, as we Catholics are wont, faith in a future informed by but far beyond that wholly unholy moment. I was one of them. To his credit, Bishop Gregory listened much more than he spoke and, to borrow from Robert Frost, that has made all the difference. A member of his diocesan pastoral council once told me, “A person may only get to spend a minute or two with the bishop at Confirmation or some other gathering, but for those 60 seconds he makes you feel like you’re the only person in the world.” Bishop Gregory evoked that response roughly 110,000 times.
Fast forward to November 1998 and the fall meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Bishop Gregory and nine others had been nominated from among all the active American bishops for the presidency. He left for the meeting having assured our priests that he certainly wouldn’t be elected and have to split his attention between Belleville and Washington. “It’s not my time,” he tells them at their convocation, “and I have plenty to do here.”
His brother bishops had other plans. He’d led a diocese for less than four years, but they recognized his prayerful, powerful demeanor and sent him back to southern Illinois as vice president. We immediately began to consider the incredible pastoral opportunity it would be for the Church if tradition held and he acceded to the presidency in three years. He would be the youngest bishop ever to hold the office, the first African American, the first convert, and the first serving in a mission diocese at the time of his election. The folks back home were pleased because not only had his service to us been publicly recognized, he’d given us something to celebrate. And though we would have to share him with the conference, the additional workload may be sufficient to prevent him from being whisked off to a larger diocese at least until his term was over.
On Nov. 13, 2001, barely two months after 9/11, Bishop Gregory was elected president of the USCCB. We were inundated with requests from Catholic and secular media outlets, all wanting to know more about him and asking to hear his agenda for the Church in the United States in the midst of so much uncertainty. Before he was able to complete that first round of congratulatory interviews, though, on Jan. 6, 2002, the Feast of the Epiphany, The Boston Globe published the first of its Spotlight articles on what had transpired in that archdiocese, and we felt the foundation crack. We knew instantly that Bishop Gregory’s presidency would be less about evangelizing new cohorts of the unchurched and marginalized as we had hoped, and more about trying to act quickly and decisively enough to keep those already in the Church from joining them.
We also believed it was God’s Providence that had put our bishop in that place at that time, just as he had been placed in all the settings that had prepared him for it. The lessons he had learned under Joseph Cardinal Bernardin in Chicago and applied under fire in Belleville would be tested nationally in ways no one could have imagined, responding to a crisis of organizational hypocrisy the likes of which few institutions in the United States, let alone the Catholic Church, had ever seen. Priests hurt kids and bishops knew it, and through it all Jesus wept. Which brings us back to where we started.
Leaders. Specifically, great leaders.
Bishop Gregory had studied hard and worked harder. He’d been dispatched to a diocese in peril and engaged every soul in its 28 counties to redeem it. He’d been elected to conference leadership over others with far more episcopal experience and status on strength of character alone. All he had to do to stay in the good graces of the men who controlled his destiny, some of whom were under intense scrutiny for their woeful mishandling of abuse allegations, was to take his place before the body of bishops at their spring meeting in Dallas on June 13, 2002 and, in front of twice as many members of the media as bishops, offer a few words of fraternal support, saying something like, “Mistakes have been made, but this scandal is being propelled by antagonistic media and anti-Catholic forces that want to see us fail. These bishops and cardinals are good and holy men – friends and colleagues of mine – and they would never do anything to hurt the Church.”
The trouble is, they would. The fact is, they had. So instead of downplaying, defending or deflecting, Bishop Gregory took the podium that day and, with those same powerful men staring up at him, led with this:
“The Catholic Church in the United States is in a very grave crisis, perhaps the gravest we have faced. This crisis is not about a lack of faith in God. In fact, those Catholics who live their faith actively day by day will tell you that their faith in God is not in jeopardy. It has indeed been tested by this crisis. But it is very much intact.
“The crisis, in truth, is about a profound loss of confidence by the faithful in our leadership as shepherds, because of our failures in addressing the crime of the sexual abuse of children and young people by priests and church personnel.
“What we are facing is not a breakdown in belief, but a rupture in the relationship, in our relationship as bishops with the faithful. And this breakdown is understandable. We did not go far enough to ensure that every child and minor was safe from sexual abuse. Rightfully, the faithful are questioning why we failed to take the necessary steps.”
We failed, he told them. You – the men who hold my fate in your hands – failed. Now, let’s deal with this once and for all so that one day we and our successors can get back to proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ with the integrity He both demands and deserves. And if we fail again, may His Father have mercy on our souls.
In a file photo, then-Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, as the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops speaks at the opening of their 2002 meeting in Dallas, where under his leadership, the bishops adopted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, which included a zero tolerance policy on priests who abuse children. (CNS photo/Bob Roller)
There were those who said Bishop Gregory’s career would never recover. The old boys’ club simply couldn’t abide such a palpable lack of fraternal esteem within its contracting circle of wagons. He had to have considered the impact of his words, especially when he encountered those men in the halls. He knew he might spend the rest of his days in rural southern Illinois, and that would have suited the local faith community and him (and his Vice Chancellor) just fine. If you’ll excuse the indigenous bias, “God’s Home in the Country” is not a bad place to live, work, worship and raise a family, and unlike a lot of dioceses it had already been forced to face its demons. Still, we all believed God had much more for him to do.
That Dallas meeting ultimately resulted in the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the fluid framework that engages competent professional laypeople – most of whom are parents, some who are survivors – on review boards and in chanceries to assist in making Catholic parishes and schools some of the safest settings in these United States, as they should always have been.
Shortly after the conclusion of Bishop Gregory’s term as USCCB president in 2004, with the scope of the scandal and the wisdom of his words and actions having caught up to the rest of the Church, the Holy Father named him as the archbishop of Atlanta, where he oversaw remarkable growth for 14 years. As a testament to his openness to unrelenting candor, he invited me to join him there; and as a testament to my respect for his unwavering commitment to doing the right thing for Catholic families, I accepted.
He had presumed Atlanta would be his last pastoral stop, but then the apostolic nuncio called in March of 2019 and, in a moment of ecclesiastical déjà vu, told him the faithful in Washington, D.C., needed a shepherd with a unique set of skills and a firm grip on the Gospel….
Meeting Cardinal Gregory at my interview in 1994, standing at the back of the room as he delivered that 2002 presidential address to his fellow bishops, hearing him preach at his installation in Washington a year ago, and countless other public and private moments that have repeatedly revealed his innate understanding of what’s important and what’s at stake all came rushing back on Oct. 25 when I heard the news that Pope Francis had named him to the College of Cardinals. Contrary to some who have worn the red hat and besmirched it, Cardinal Gregory came about it not by ingratiating himself to clerical kingmakers, but by calling them out, challenging them, and continuing to promote Christ’s healing and reconciliation even as he was being vindicated a thousand times over by time and the truth. Having heard Pope Francis’s marching orders to the new cardinals at the Consistory on Nov. 28, I’m confident that selflessness is now the rule and will never again be the exception.
In case you’re curious about what renders a person worthy of this distinction, Canon 351, §1 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law says, “The Roman Pontiff freely selects men to be promoted as cardinals, who have been ordained at least into the order of the presbyterate and are especially outstanding in doctrine, morals, piety, and prudence in action.”
In the quarter century I have known and worked with Wilton Cardinal Gregory, I have never heard him say, “I’ve paid my dues. Let someone else fix this,” even when at age 71 he was asked to care for the shell-shocked Archdiocese of Washington just as he had done for the similarly suffering Diocese of Belleville when he was barely 45. He is the same prayerful man of faith whether he is publicly preaching the Gospel, responding to a question from a reporter or grade school student, or privately wrapping up another grueling day in the office. And every time he has been called upon to choose between what was best for the Church – for us and our families – and what was best for him, he has unselfishly set aside his own ambition and put the rest of us first.
God knows that’s what great leaders do. And it’s a story that the Church deserves to hear.
(David Spotanski serves as the Chief Operating Officer for the Archdiocese of Atlanta.)
