Bishop Joseph F. Martino arrived unannounced at a Honesdale forum on faith and politics in October and insisted that abortion must be the primary voting issue for Catholics.“No social issue has caused the death of 50 million people,” he told the audience at St. John’s Catholic Church. Before he made his hasty exit, he added, “This is madness, people.”
Bishop Martino has emphasized that he is the “one teacher” in the Diocese of Scranton, but in recent months, word of the passion of his lessons has traveled far beyond the 11 counties where he has spiritual authority.
The prelate has taken a prominent role on the national Catholic stage for the strong anti-abortion stance he articulated at the St. John’s Church forum, as well as in an election-related anti-abortion letter he directed all diocesan priests to read at Masses and, most recently, at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Baltimore.
His name has appeared in The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The Associated Press and several Catholic publications as representative of the beliefs of the most strongly anti-abortion bishops.
In particular, he has gained attention for advocating denial of Holy Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights and for his declarations that abortion is the only election issue that matters.
As a result, Bishop Martino likely will be much more of a national and international public figure in the future, said John L. Allen Jr., a senior correspondent for the left-leaning National Catholic Reporter. He may be sought to keynote right-to-life conferences, and his writings will be studied by those who oppose abortion rights.
Bishop Martino’s advocacy may no longer have “to do exclusively with realities in Scranton,” Mr. Allen said.
“It also has to do with the kind of encouragement that he’s getting from this broader pro-life constituency,” he said. “In some ways, he’s emerging as their bishop, or one of their bishops.”
‘Our hero’
Bishop Martino’s comments have been highly valued and highly praised by those who oppose abortion rights.
Helen Gohsler, president of the Scranton chapter of Pennsylvanians for Human Life, said her organization is both pleased and proud that the bishop’s pastoral letter in October urged Catholic voters to consider abortion above all other voting issues.
“It’s something very much that the Catholics needed to hear,” she said.
The president of the American Life League, Judie Brown, said in an e-mail that Bishop Martino is “one of our heroes.”
“His clear opposition to abortion, his clear teaching that a Catholic cannot vote for a pro-abortion candidate, sent ripples across the country,” she said. “Never before have we seen such outspoken, direct opposition to abortion from the bishops.”
When asked to address disagreement over whether Bishop Martino’s statements about abortion were a political intervention or an example of him fulfilling his authentic teaching role, Mrs. Brown said it is always a bishop’s duty to teach the Catholic faithful to respect the dignity of human life.
“Every bishop in the United States should be shouting from the rooftops the sanctity of life,” she said.
At the national bishops’ meeting in Baltimore, Bishop Martino told his fellow bishops they eventually will have to address their collective “reticence to speak to Catholic politicians who are not just reluctant, but stridently anti-life,” then indicated that he is willing to deny Communion to such politicians.
His presence at the meeting was so notable that a popular Catholic blog, Whispers in the Loggia, announced his arrival in a separate post: “FYI, Bishop Martino is in the building.”
A national audience
People who watch the national church say the Internet and the 24-hour news cycle made the bishop’s recent prominence inevitable.
“The truth is that what the bishop of Scranton does can become news in Nigeria instantly, so these guys find themselves playing to a national or international audience,” Mr. Allen said.
The problem with the attention to Bishop Martino, says the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, is “that people perceive him to be a spokesman” for the U.S. bishops when “the views he has voiced do not represent the U.S. bishops as a whole.”
For example, he said, at the Honesdale forum Bishop Martino apparently dismissed the teaching value of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 2007 voting guide, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” — a document that was approved by the body of bishops by a vote of 221-4. (Bishop Martino reportedly did not attend the 2007 conference or vote on the document, but the Diocese of Scranton did not respond to inquiries about it.)
In another example, the Rev. Reese said, only a small number of U.S. bishops — he puts the number between 12 and 15 — have talked about denying Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights, and added that Pope John Paul II gave Communion to pro-choice Italian politicians.
“He’s trying to be more Catholic than the Pope, in that way,” he said.
The U.S. bishops are in strong agreement that the abortion issue as a top priority. In a consensus letter to President-elect Barack Obama that was crafted by the bishops at the Baltimore meeting, the president of the conference, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, wrote that the bishops are “of one mind” on the issue of “the legal protection of the unborn.”
Furthermore, Cardinal George wrote, “Aggressively pro-abortion policies, legislation and executive orders will permanently alienate tens of millions of Americans, and would be seen by many as an attack on the free exercise of their religion.”
Yet Bishop Martino is among a significant minority of U.S. bishops in claiming that abortion is the only voting issue that matters; Mr. Allen estimated about 45 percent of national bishops are in the same camp. The other 55 percent, he said, say abortion must be considered in the context of other social justice and “life” issues.
Despite the fact that Bishop Martino’s vocal frustration at the conference was “striking” in the “exaggeratedly polite” “gentleman’s club” of the annual meeting, Mr. Allen said, what other bishops think of the Scranton prelate is irrelevant.
“Martino is free to do in his diocese what he thinks is right,” he said.
Due to collegiality or tradition, the U.S. bishops have an unwritten rule not to criticize other bishops in public and especially not to criticize what they do in their own dioceses, the Rev. Reese said. And because the loose organization of national bishops has no legislative power over its members, “the bishops do not know how to rein in their maverick bishops,” he said. “We have no structure, no process, no procedures for doing that.”
Locally reticent
In some ways, the national attention is unusual for a bishop known for reluctance to speak directly to the local press or local parishioners. (Bishop Martino declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Many observers of the local diocese say Bishop Martino’s national prominence is an extension of his controversial tenure here, which has been defined by school and parish closings, battles with the Catholic teachers union he has refused to recognize, and other challenges both inherited and adopted.
Bishops have tended to shy away from outspoken advocacy on issues seen as political — such as publicly sanctioning politicians who vote to support abortion rights — because of how divisive those statements can be, said Mr. Allen, of the National Catholic Reporter.
“One way of looking at what Martino is doing is that he’s incredibly brave and therefore to be encouraged,” he said. “Another way of looking at it is, he’s splitting his diocese apart. That debate has been with us for a long time.”
When Bishop Martino was appointed to head the diocese in 2003, he acknowledged the challenges he would face here. Six months later, he indicated he intended to confront controversies directly.
“I have a right to speak up like any other citizen,” he said then. “And I have a right to remind Catholics — that’s my duty — to remind Catholics it’s not what they can do but what they should do. I think that’s something that they haven’t heard enough of, and they’ll hear it (from) me.”
Within the Diocese of Scranton, the prelate’s statements have met a divided audience.
J. Brian Benestad, Ph.D., a theology professor at the University of Scranton, said “people are fired up,” not just about the bishop’s statements about abortion, but also about his handling of the teachers union and his role in closing schools and parishes, all of which are compounded for some local Catholics.
“It seems a lot of people reject his leadership,” Dr. Benestad said, basing his comment on his private conversations and on letters to the editor published in The Times-Tribune. “Maybe half accept it and half reject it.”
He believes that Bishop Martino is fulfilling his authentic teaching role in instructing local Catholics that abortion is what the church calls “an intrinsic evil” that rises above the moral gravity of any other issue.
His more than 30 years of teaching Catholicism have taught him, he said, “that most Catholics don’t know their faith. They don’t understand it.”
He said, “It seems to me that priests and bishops have a responsibility to teach the whole faith, especially those aspects of it that are not understood or rejected. And abortion is probably one that’s rejected by a number of people.”
‘The dirty work’
But many local Catholics say it is often not the substance of Bishop Martino’s teaching, but his manner that alienates them.
“I don’t think that he shows a lot of pastoral care in insulting the people that he’s trying to lead,” said Robert Gan, a Honesdale dentist and Catholic who opposes abortion rights.
He recalled attending a Mass in Florida in August and speaking to the parish priest on his way out of the church. The priest, a Cleveland native who had recently been back to his home diocese, was familiar with the Diocese of Scranton, which he indicated was widely known for the way Bishop Martino went about closing parish churches and schools.
“He said, ‘They should be keeping those churches and schools open, and it’s sinful,’” Dr. Gan remembered. “He said, ‘Your diocese is kind of a laughingstock.’”
Gene Tagle, who coordinated and moderated the forum at St. John’s Church that Bishop Martino interrupted, said he has been stopped repeatedly on Main Street in Honesdale by Catholics and non-Catholics, those at the forum and those who heard about it and, “the sentiments tend to be that he did a foolish thing, a very heavy-handed thing,” he said. “Even (for) those who sympathize with what he said, his tactic had the appearance of being very heavy-handed.”
Two weeks after the forum, the St. John’s parish priest, the Rev. Martin Boylan, whom the bishop castigated for hosting the event, read a statement from the pulpit explaining that “the bishop’s office believed that the forum would not take place here (on parish property). In addition, the bishop’s pastoral letter, read at all Masses on Oct. 5, 2008, should have made such a forum as ours unnecessary.”
He concluded the statement: “Moreover, I want all to be thankful for our bishop’s coming to St. John’s parish, and I intend to so express our gratitude to the bishop while assuring him of our prayers always.”
At the same time that there were expressions of gratitude during the election, there were expressions of defiance among local Catholics.
William Parente, Ph.D., a Catholic and political science professor at the University of Scranton, pointed to the low attendance at the annual “Red Mass” the diocese celebrates for Catholic lawyers and judges as evidence of people’s dissatisfaction with the bishop.
A video of the Mass posted on the diocesan Web site reveals sparsely filled pews. Attendance was lower than anticipated and also was down from last year by about five or six people, Lackawanna County Bar Association president Frank Bolock confirmed.
“This was to a great extent the revolt of our Democratic attorneys against the bishop’s taking sides in the election or, more specifically, taking the wrong side,” said Dr. Parente, who is a conservative and says he agrees with the bishop politically and theologically.
But he believes local attorneys are not alone in being “irritated and alienated” by the bishop and that, in turn, has made it difficult for the bishop to be effective.
He said the bishop has “burned his bridges” doing the difficult work of closing schools and dealing with the Catholic teachers union, many of them challenges Dr. Parente believes the bishop inherited from his predecessors.
Dr. Parente suggested only a new bishop can regain the authority the diocesan leadership position has lost.
“It seems to me the solution to the problem is for the papal nuncio to promote Bishop Martino to a commission in the Vatican where he can start fresh and we can appoint one of the local clergy who would be more popular as the new bishop,” he said.
“Bishop Martino has been brought in to do the dirty work; he did the dirty work; he did it so dirtily, however, that now he’s disliked.”
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(Source: TTC)