If I were the new Bishop of Saginaw, I would

[_veritas]

frommi:

It’s difficult to ascertain how different one bishop is from another…at least in my experience of living/working in three different diocese now…

You will know them by their fruits… All anyone has to go on is the effects of an episcopate.

Carlson’s diocese has incredible numbers of faithful Catholics, numerous conversions to the faith through RCIA, and tons of vocations. Carlson himself has a reputation for personal orthodoxy and a committment to teaching the truth of the Church and leading people to heaven.

How has Saginaw been? I have never heard anything but silence from across the lake on any of these matters (at least, nothing encouraging.) The only time I’ve ever see the diocese in the news is when there was some VOTF event going on. Granted, your bishop was ailing, so it’s likely that he was not able to be as active as he might have liked. (?)

frommi:

But I would be curious as to what your outsider’s perspective is on the “problems” of Saginaw?

What I know comes from friends there, plus seminarians studying here from MI, plus what has been reported on various web boards, blogs, and call-in shows over the years, not from any one source – and no, not directly (as I said before).

The most serious problems seem to be the continued presence of dissenting organizations (VOTF) and heretical theology/catechesis taught at schools/religious ed, along with “do-what-you-want” liturgical practices, and a disregard of, and irreverence for, the tabernacle and the sacred space of a Catholic church (ie, “environmental” changes).

I have never heard any of this denied, and the only people I have ever heard in favor of your diocese’s practices are people who are favorable to dissenting organizations, “I’ll do it my way” liturgies, and “spirit of Vatican II - get with the future, leave the past behind” gym churches.

I’m sure there are plenty of good parishes and priests around, but of course, all we hear about is the bad news. Thus, this has been the general impression of your diocese from west of the lake. Please feel free to correct any of this if you feel it is incorrect. It would be nice to be wrong.

+veritas+

 

[frommi]

+veritas+:

I have never heard any of this denied, and the only people I have ever heard in favor of your diocese’s practices are people who are favorable to dissenting organizations, “I’ll do it my way” liturgies, and “spirit of Vatican II - get with the future, leave the past behind” gym churches.

I’m sure there are plenty of good parishes and priests around, but of course, all we hear about is the bad news. Thus, this has been the general impression of your diocese from west of the lake. Please feel free to correct any of this if you feel it is incorrect. It would be nice to be wrong.

+veritas+

I think one of the things that Saginaw has had going against it for several years is a lot of people who “hear” things are a particular way, when that is simply not the reality of what truly has gone on…

Just to give you a couple of examples…

From what I understand, VOTF is active in Saginaw, but it is active in many diocese, and I’m not sure what is dissenting about this organization. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Call to Action (which is somewhat active in Saginaw)?

In many many years of going to church in Saginaw, I never received an impression of “do what you want” liturgical cathecesis. Yes, many churches do not have kneelers, a practice that started under Bishop Francis Reh, largely because the bishops of America were preparing to have this country join the rest of the world in not kneeling during the Eucharisitic prayer. Who knew that would never come to fruition?

As far as Church architecture…as with all things in life, there are some beautiful churches, and some down right ugly ones (I’ll never understand who thought it was wise to paint my home parish pink…even if it is a color in the stained glass windows). And yes, tabernacles were put in chapels in many cases, but there was a theological/liturgical basis for such an action. Even if you don’t agree with it, I’m not sure it’s a sign of the apocalypse.

You mentioned a problem with “leave the past behind” mentality. My experience in saginaw was that Bishop Untener believed very much in the traditions of the church, but believed that those traditions stretched further back than the middle ages, when many of the practices that continued up until the 1970s were brought into the catholic rite.

In short, Bishop Untener loved the church, he simply loved the Gospel more, and that’s why he spent more of his time writing scripture reflection books and having his priests work tirelessly on their preaching.

His writings are very insightful, and not all that unorthodox. If you go to the diocese’s website and look under “what we believe” you’d be hard pressed to find a heresy in anything he says. His language is more casual, perhaps more metaphor laden, but that was how he got his point across.

Saginaw is not a perfect place, the lack of vocations is a concern, and something that troubled and continues to trouble many people in the diocese. And yet, bizzare statements were made such as “The Bishop doesn’t want priests”, or “People he rejected have gone to other dioceses and been ordained”. When in fact the first wasn’t true, and the second happened one time with a man who subsequently left the priesthood.

Long before he died, Bishop Ken said something that makes a lot of sense for those of us locked in some of these “orthodoxy”, or “liturgical” battles…

“Come the kingdom, the great issues in today’s church will be about the same. … They’re important, but they’re relative. The Lord smiles as we make them seem so absolute, much as we smile looking back to the first grade. … There are two ways to relativize. The first is not to care about anything, and that is the wrong way. The second is to be in touch with the great mystery of God, to experience firsthand the breadth and the depth of the magnificent reality that lies at the heart of our lives and spreads out in a panorama that the whole universe cannot hold. Altar railings? Economics? Issues to be sure, but how they pale in the brilliant light of the great mystery.”

Saginaw will now move on with a new leader, who I’m sure will lead the church in a way that honors the legacy of all 4 men who went before him in that role. It’s all about building the kingdom.

 

[Anna_Elizabeth]

frommi:

From what I understand, VOTF is active in Saginaw, but it is active in many diocese, and I’m not sure what is dissenting about this organization.

FROMMI, I am interested in what you have to say, but perhaps you should make an effort to familiarize yourself with VOTF, if you want others to pay attention. Also:

And yes, tabernacles were put in chapels in many cases, but there was a theological/liturgical basis for such an action.

Really? Please explain that for us and give references. Also:

In short, Bishop Untener loved the church, he simply loved the Gospel more,

What does this mean? Also:

Saginaw is not a perfect place, the lack of vocations is a concern, and something that troubled and continues to trouble many people in the diocese.

Could it be that possible candidates for the priesthood loved the Church (upper case C), but simply loved the Gospel more?

Many of us have developed a deep interest in the future of this diocese, so I hope you can explain these things for us!

God bless,

Anna

 

[frommi]

Anna Elizabeth:

FROMMI, I am interested in what you have to say, but perhaps you should make an effort to familiarize yourself with VOTF, if you want others to pay attention.

Could it be that possible candidates for the priesthood loved the Church (upper case C), but simply loved the Gospel more?

Many of us have developed a deep interest in the future of this diocese, so I hope you can explain these things for us!

God bless,

Anna

On a couple of counts, I can honestly not speak to much to do with VOTF, my impression was that it was an organization that sprang up from the Boston scandals that was asking for greater accountability from the leaders of the church. Perhaps I’m mistaken.

To answer a couple of questions…

• Even in current Roman documents such as Redemptoris Sacrementum mention is made that the remaining Eucharist needs to be reserved in a tabernacle which can be located in the main portion of the church or a suitable chapel. It is one of those things that is left to Bishops and pastors to determine. Clearly there is a diversity of opinion on the topic. For the record, I’ve never seen anything but very suitable and sacred places for adoration in the diocese of saginaw.
• When I said Bishop Untener loved the Gospel more than the Church, I was simply making the point that he was more pre-disposed to worrying about the poor and the outcast than choosing to get involved in battles over kneelers. He was also a man who saw himself as shepherd of the local church of Saginaw. It’s worth noting that he once said if he were pastor of a church he’d ring the Angelus 3 times a day, and he’d give each child a rosary and teach them how to use it.
• I’m not convinced that the lower number of ordinations is the pure result of so-called “orthodox” candidates going other places. I can think of only one case where a priest-son of the Diocese was ordained somewhere else.

Frankly, I think quite often the people of Saginaw are dramatically misrepresented, and the good work that goes on their for evangelization, and the liturgical life that has been fostered, is lost in concerns over very small issues.

 

[BayCityRickL]

I am a native of the diocese of Saginaw but I lived elsewhere for 16 of Bishop Untener’s 24 years of office. The only time I saw and heard him in person was when he visited my parish in Illinois.

I know firsthand that he expressed his disagreement with the Pope on the issue of ordaining women, because I heard him say so. Whereas the Pope said 11 years ago that he doesn’t even have the power to make that decision, Bishop Untener, 7 years after the Pope’s statement on the matter, maintained that he saw no obstacle to ordaining women, except for the incumbancy of John Paul II.

In contrast, here’s what Bishop Carlson has stated in his essay “Duties of Bishops”

“The Mystical Body of Christ cannot functionally exist without a hierarchical structure to ensure its organic unity. . . .
The ordinary magisterium of the Pope should not only be adhered to, but spread.”

So, I see an organic difference between the outlook of the last Bishop of Saginaw and that of the incoming Bishop.

As one concrete example for those apologists for Bishop Untener, this illustrates very clearly that Bishop Untener, at the very least, made up his own mind about issues in the Church.

From private communications with a current priest in the diocese, I can also state reliably that Untener believed the Popes have been wrong on the matter of birth control. And, Untener was also aligned with “Catholics” who believed they had a right to abortion.
According to this priest, he and Untener believed that the Pope was simply another bishop in the Church who happened to have a different opinion. Take that to the bank.

So, hey! I can dispense with the name calling, and I will concede that Untener had a lot of friends. Read his essay of “why I became a priest” and read for yourself how Untener was his own boss. He wanted to do things his way.

Golly, why did he insist that homilies be limited to four minutes? What an artificial and heavy-handed proclamation. What also a heavy handed thing to do, to have all the main altar crucifixes removed and replaced with these “touch down Jesus” figures?
And, how about all the women giving sermons at Mass instead of the priests?

The apologists for Untener don’t even want to talk about these things because they want to keep doing them and they don’t want anybody to know what’s going on. And, they want these things to grow.

I’ll give you three guesses why Rome gave us a bishop from WAY over there in SD. Stay tuned, kiddies. Oh, and I personally predicted that our next bishop would be a politician. First, he’s an expert in Canon Law. Then, have you heard his statements, so far? “Give me a chance.” “I will LISTEN to the people.” ‘Listen’ for sure, but wait til he acts.

 

[Anna_Elizabeth]

frommi:

• When I said Bishop Untener loved the Gospel more than the Church, I was simply making the point that he was more pre-disposed to worrying about the poor and the outcast than choosing to get involved in battles over kneelers. He was also a man who saw himself as shepherd of the local church of Saginaw. It’s worth noting that he once said if he were pastor of a church he’d ring the Angelus 3 times a day, and he’d give each child a rosary and teach them how to use it. .

frommi,

Are you suggesting that the Gospel speaks only on the subject of “the poor and the outcast?”

If, as other posters have maintained, Bishop Untener (here “Ken”), had no trouble bucking the Church re ordaining women, birth control and abortion, why ever did he hesitate to tell his priests to get those Rosaries into the hands of the children and say the Angelus three times a day? What, pray tell, would have stopped him? He was, after all, bishop of the diocese!

Ah, talk is so cheap! By their fruits…

I will pray for your diocese; in fact, I will pray to St. Jude.

Anna

 

[BayCityRickL]

someone I know was a youngster growing up in Untener’s early years in Saginaw. The state of religious education had already deteriorated to the point that the parish school was more a parody of itself than anything else.

This person grew up with a consciousness of being Catholic, aware of the attractive superficial aspects of Catholicism, but was lacking in orthodoxy of 6 years of Catholic school, even the amount of orthodoxy that a Muslim or Jewish or evangelical Christian child gets in a year.

I don’t know about elsewhere, but that’s what it was like in Saginaw.

I wish I would have had a tape in the VCR and pushed the rec button the Christmas that Bishop Untener had the children’s Mass on TV. He dumbed things down so much (ala “children’s Mass”) that he had about 8 minutes left over in a 30 minute broadcast. He stretched the production out by gathering the children around him and leading community singing of SECULAR Christmas songs. It was quite…mmm…noteworthy to watch him singing Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer as a wrap up for the Catholic Mass. God help us!

 

[Wolseley]

I live in the Grand Rapids Diocese, and we don’t have a bishop, either…Bishop Robert Rose has retired, and his replacement, Bishop Kevin Britt, unexpectedly died after only a few months in office. At the present time, we have Adam Cardinal Maida from Detroit acting as Apostolic Administrator.

The only contact I ever had with Bishop Untener was in the form of the seasonal devotionals he used to put out—the “Little White Book, the Little Black Book, and the Little Blue Book”, for Easter, Lent, and Advent. We got them up here in the GR Diocese too, and I really used to enjoy those. (Admittedly, every so often I’d find a historical, doctrinal, or theological error in them, but they were still nice.)

I don’t know much about the Saginaw Diocese; I know that here in the GR Diocese, you run the gamut from extremely conservative old Polish parishes to trendy “yuppie” parishes where the liturgy resembles a dog-and-pony show. (One that comes to mind is the priest in Muskegon who uses a boom mike attached to his head during Mass—sort of like attending a liturgy with Garth Brooks as the celebrant.)

I remember one church in the Gaylord Diocese I went to while visiting my wife’s relatives…it was really sad. They had taken a beautiful old neo-Gothic structure and ripped the pews out, then re-installed them sideways down the entire length of the nave, so the congregation sat there and looked across at each other like spectators across a football stadium…probably done in some plan cooked up by another self-appointed “liturgical specialist” who took “community” totally out of context and decided that “we are church” and the people had to worship each other.

Then, they took the altar from the front of the church and re-installed it in the middle of the aisle 1/3 of the way down the nave, so that everybody in the church had to lean out and crank their heads completely to the side to be able to see the celebrant; the pulpit had likewise been re-installed 1/3 of the way down the nave on the other end of the church, so you had to crank your head the other way to see the reader down there. By the time I left the Mass, I had a stiff neck and a headache.

There were liturgical abuses aplenty during that liturgy, but what I remember the most was the way they had butchered the inside of that church. They had totally disregarded the existing plan of the structure, which was the old traditional “straight line” formation, in which you entered the church through the vestibule and the eye was led along the length of the nave to the altar at the front, and tried to re-configure it into one of the “round” structures that were so popular during the late '60’s and '70’s----sort of like trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

I told my wife afterwards that if that’s what they’d wanted to do, they would have been better off to bulldoze the existing building and just built one of the “theater-in-the-round” churches where the congregation sits in a circle around the “stage” to watch the performance, rather than chop up a Gothic church the way they did. The abuses I saw in that parish made the abuses so prevalent in the GR Diocese look like a solemn high Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in comparison. I don’t know about the rest of the Gaylord Diocese, but I certainly wasn’t impressed with that parish, and that’s for sure.

Anyway, here’s praying that we both get steady and orthodox bishops soon in both GR and Saginaw.

 

[frommi]

BayCityRickL:

I know firsthand that he expressed his disagreement with the Pope on the issue of ordaining women, because I heard him say so. Whereas the Pope said 11 years ago that he doesn’t even have the power to make that decision, Bishop Untener, 7 years after the Pope’s statement on the matter, maintained that he saw no obstacle to ordaining women, except for the incumbancy of John Paul II.

From private communications with a current priest in the diocese, I can also state reliably that Untener believed the Popes have been wrong on the matter of birth control. And, Untener was also aligned with “Catholics” who believed they had a right to abortion.
According to this priest, he and Untener believed that the Pope was simply another bishop in the Church who happened to have a different opinion. Take that to the bank.

Golly, why did he insist that homilies be limited to four minutes? What an artificial and heavy-handed proclamation. What also a heavy handed thing to do, to have all the main altar crucifixes removed and replaced with these “touch down Jesus” figures?
And, how about all the women giving sermons at Mass instead of the priests?

The apologists for Untener don’t even want to talk about these things because they want to keep doing them and they don’t want anybody to know what’s going on. And, they want these things to grow.

I’ll talk about these things, but I won’t apologize for them…

Bishop Untener never specifcally called for women’s ordination, the closest he came was in 1990 at Notre Dame when he said he felt it was something that if the Church looked at it, they might find something they don’t expect to, but even he acknowleged theological bridges to cross.

The late Bishop did indeed have some issues with Humane Vitae. However, he simply felt it was necessary for the bishop’s conference to discuss the matter when everyone knew that many catholics (and many bishops) had major trouble with that document. Remember, Humane Vitae came out of a minority report, there were 9 cardinals that voted to change the church’s teaching versus 3 that chose to uphold it.

The pope is simply a member of the college of Bishops, and even the pope has said so. Once again, a Bishop of an individual diocese is really not answerable to anybody. This is what made a lot of the sexual abuse crisis so difficult for people to understand. They didn’t know why the pope could not simply step in an take control, but realistically he cannot.

Bishop Untener never to my knowledge said homilies should be 4 minutes long. He suggested to his priests that at the end of mass they consider doing 4 minute teachings on aspects of the Catholic faith, separate of the homily. The only homily he ever gave a suggestion on length to was the Easter homily, which he said ought to be brief, because words won’t do it when it comes to describing the power of the resurrection.

People other than priests were given the opportunity to preach because Bishop Untener knew that canon law gave him the right to be moderator of the word in his diocese.

Bishop Untener had a doctorate in sacred theology, and knew the work of theologican Yves Conger like the back of his hand. He often consulted with Avery Cardinal Dulles.

Those are my explanations. But I don’t find the need to apologize for any of it.

 

[BayCityRickL]

This thread is one that opens the door to the hypothetical, and so some latitude has to be given to people with different points of view. I think that’s what we’re here for.

Not only do we have different points of view on the hypothetical and whimsical topic, but it draws us into a retrospective on the status of the diocese, and we seem to differ a lot there.

I’m sure that we are all marking time until Bishop Carlson arrives. We are all eager to see “what he’s going to do.”

Perhaps (?) the best indicator is how Bishop Carlson views the vocation he has followed for some twenty years. Here’s the link:

catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=898

 

[aspawloski4th]

Theres lots of things that have to be done in Saginaw, but the first thing Id do is bring bach kneeling during Eucharistic prayer.