Will Tucson bishop light up Church's marquee?

A theater-loving bishop who wants the Catholic Church to "light up the marquee" with its message will be stage center the next two days U.S. bishops chose their new president and leading voice in the public square.

The expected choice: the Bishop of Tucson Gerald Kicanas, a Chicago-born and trained bishop mentored by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin who was known as a voice for social justice in the era when the U.S.Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote major pastoral letters nuclear weapons, the economy and AIDS.

In 2008, Kicanas won The Cardinal Bernardin Award for for his commitment to finding common ground within the Catholic faith.

The outgoing Kicanas (a fellow blogger) is expected to move up from his current vice presidential post to take over the presidency from Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. 

George, a noted theologian with a rambling approach to questions and prickly response to challenges, has finished his three year term. 

The bishops are holding their annual fall meeting in Baltimore beginning today and the vote is expected on Tuesday.

While his degrees are in educational psychology, guidance, counseling and theology, Kicanas has a personal passion for theater.

"We must tell our story to engage people as theater engages them," said Kicanas, speaking to Catholic lay leaders, academics and business executives at a National Leadership Roundtable meeting in Philadelphia in 2009. "

He listed the key ingredients of storytelling:

• Those telling the story must live it, embody it. "Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers." No "playacting " will restore the essential trust broken by the sexual abuse scandal still troubling the Church.
• The Church's message must be succinct, told with emotion, color and concrete language. "The church has to light up its marquee, to entice people to come in, hear its story."
• "Create a climate of candor...and when there is bad news run toward it."

Kicanas ran straight into bad news when Pope John Paul II appointed him to share the post of Bishop of Tucson in 2001 and succeed to the job when Bishop Manuel Moreno retired in 2003.

Anticipating Kicanas election, Rev. Thomas Reese, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University, wondered,

Will he be a moderate or a culture warrior?

Reese leans to the latter, describing Kicanas as a leader likely to be a listener and a consensus-builder, like Bernardin. While he's most certainly in accord with doctrines -- opposing abortion for example -- he's not going headline-hunting with pronouncements banning Catholic politicians who have supported abortion rights legislation.

Reese lays out a possible Kicanas platform on Catholic social teachings:

On economic issues, like the pope, he would be to the left of the Obama administration. Unlike the Tea Party, he has no problem with a robust role for the government in supporting the common good. He supports comprehensive immigration reform and strongly condemned the Arizona law instructing police to go after undocumented immigrants.

What will Kicanas be facing? The list from Reese is long and grim:

... a political atmosphere that appears willing to sacrifice the poor to deficit reduction; a controversial translation of the Mass that may go down poorly with the people in the pews; an exodus of young people out of the church and declining church attendance...

But first, Kicanas has to be elected and some think he's the wrong choice.

Among those Catholics who give the battle against abortion top priority in all politics, he's an inadequate voiced for the cause. LifeSiteNews uses his Bernardin-esque credentials as an attack:

Bishop Gerald Kicanas is among that cadre of US bishops who is himself well liked in Democrat and liberal Catholic communities for his vocal support for left wing and "progressive" peace and justice issues. Bishop Kicanas was praised by the aggressively abortion-supporting Governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, for his 'softer' approach to pro-abortion politicians using Catholic venues to publicize their positions.

They consider his position, one shared by several other influential U.S. Cardinals and bishops -- that Catholics should consider their political choices in the full light of Catholic social teachings on peace, economics, immigration and a multitude of other social issues -- as dead wrong.

And Sunday the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) demonstrated in Chicago against his election. 

They say , he allowed a known child molester to be ordained when he was a seminary rector. 

Kicanas has denied any knowledge that the priest, now in jail, had molested anyone.

Neither is it a lock that he'll win, despite decades of traditional succession at the U.S.C.C.B. 

The election slate has ten names for president and for the vice presidential spot including Kicanas and two others with markedly higher profiles -- the gregarious Archbishop Timothy Dolan in the powerhouse seat of New York, and conservative political voice Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver.

SIC: F&R/USA