Robert Vasa, the bishop of eastern Oregon, is a son of the American
Plains, a no-frills man of the cloth who once described himself as
“common as an old shoe.”
Born and raised on a Nebraska dairy and row-crop farm, the 59-year-old cleric came 11
years ago to the vast Catholic diocese where he helped convert a horse
barn into a retreat center and wired the church office for a computer
network.
With a theological steadfastness that belies his homespun ways, Vasa gained national attention by stripping Bend's major hospital of its Catholic affiliation for performing tubal ligations.
He
also imposed on lay teachers and administrators a pledge of fidelity to
Catholic prohibitions on pre-marital sex, masturbation and
homosexuality, calling them “gravely evil.”
Named
in January as successor to Santa Rosa Bishop Daniel Walsh, Vasa
(pronounced “Vasha”) was introduced to local Catholics at Mass last Sunday
morning at St. Eugene Cathedral.
Vasa
declined to say what his initial priorities will be, other than getting
to know the priests and parishioners of the 165,000-member North Coast
diocese.
His record suggests that he could depart from the largely tolerant approach to church doctrine attributed to his predecessors.
Plain,
if not blunt, in speech, the man who will be Santa Rosa's sixth bishop
is inclined to squeeze a dime hard. He won't pay for cable TV and he'd
rather eat beans out of the can with a spoon than dine on French cuisine
off fine plates and silver service.
“People say I am penurious at the risk of being cheap,” Vasa said in an interview.
Called at young age
Vasa
will share the bishop's residence and work alongside Walsh, 73, until
Walsh retires later this year from the post he has held since 2000 and
returns, he hopes, to serve as a parish priest in his hometown of San
Francisco, where he was ordained in 1963.
Vasa, who said he felt called to the priesthood in grade school, takes over a diocese still
recovering from an extended sex abuse scandal that surfaced in 1994 and
drained $25 million from church coffers in compensation to victims.
He
will face an immediate challenge in replenishing church finances, while
his doctrinaire style raises questions about how he will mesh with the
North Coast's liberal inclinations.
Santa
Rosa's bishops generally have allowed the members of their flock to
follow their own consciences, said Yvette Fallandy of St. Eugene's
Parish in Santa Rosa and a former member of a lay advisory council to
the bishop.
“The
assumption has been that Catholics who turn up at Mass believe firmly in
the Apostles' Creed and practice their Catholicism as best they know
it,” she said.
Bishop
Walsh is a “commonsensical conservative” who issued no pronouncements on
church law while bringing stability to the scandal-plagued diocese,
Fallandy said.
There
remains tension, however, over the doctrine of a 2,000-year-old church
ruled by Rome but spread over a spectrum in America from traditionalists
who favor the Latin Mass to advocates for change in keeping with the
21st century.
Disputes
over the church's opposition to abortion, birth control and
homosexuality, and its adherence to clerical celibacy and a male-only
clergy are enmeshed in the split.
“There are many flavors of Catholics,” Fallandy said.
Vasa,
a canon lawyer who was named bishop of Oregon's Baker diocese in 2000,
describes himself as a moderate, “standing in the very heart of the
church.”
“I get criticized from both sides,” he said. “I must be moderate.”
No moral wiggle room
But
even his admirers say that Vasa does not deviate from church doctrine.
He has waded into controversy, supporting the excommunication of a
liberal Catholic group and suggesting the Catholic politicians who
support abortion rights may be guilty of heresy.
Discussing
some of his initiatives in Oregon — cutting ties with a hospital that
performed tubal ligations and holding lay ministers to an oath of
fidelity — Vasa maintained there was no moral wiggle room.
Catholic
health care directives do not allow sterilization surgeries, he said.
St. Charles Bend, a regional medical center serving 240,000 people in
central and eastern Oregon, refused to discontinue tubal ligations, so
Vasa said he ended Catholic sponsorship of the hospital.
It
was a “cordial relationship,” he said, that involved no management or
financial connection.
But as a Catholic hospital, founded more than 90
years ago by a group of nuns, it was “in many ways operating in my name”
— a situation he said he could not condone.
Nor could he tolerate any unauthorized teaching by lay ministers, Vasa said. An “affirmation of faith” he promulgated in 2004
required acceptance of the church's prohibition against contraception
of any form and defined pre-marital sex, masturbation, fornication,
pornography and homosexuality as “gravely evil.”
Critics
in the Baker diocese said the pledge focused on “pelvic issues” and
alienated volunteers and parishioners, according to a Spokane
Spokesman-Review report.
“I
just made it very explicit,” Vasa said. “You are not teaching your
opinion, you are teaching the principles of the Catholic Church.”
Straightforward oath
When
Vasa imposed the oath, “people were going bonkers,” said Rev. Joe
Reinig, vicar general of the Baker diocese, who was a parish priest at
the time.
Reinig recalled
that he summoned his lay ministers and lecturers and explained that “if
you can't agree with this, you can leave now.”
“Nobody left,” Reinig said.
The
bishop's oath was “pretty straightforward,” he said. “If you want to
call yourself a Catholic, you follow what the church teaches.”
Reinig,
who now holds the No. 2 post in the diocese, said he considers Vasa as
“orthodox,” meaning he “follows the church's teachings as best he can.”
“He will not deviate from the truth,” Reinig said.
Mark
Brumley of Napa, head of the Catholic publishing house Ignatius Press,
said the term orthodox — which he would apply to Vasa and Pope Benedict
XVI — defines the middle ground between Catholic traditionalists and
advocates for change.
“It
is not always the most comfortable place to be,” said Brumley, a member
of St. Apollinaris Parish in Napa, part of the Santa Rosa diocese.
Vasa,
who was ordained in Lincoln, Neb. in 1976, is not a doctrinal
“hardliner,” Brumley said, but someone who “values clarity about what
the church teaches.”
“He's very interested in winning people over, not excluding them,” Brumley said.
Cindy Vrooman of Sonoma, a former nun, isn't so sure.
Bishop
Walsh, in her estimation, is aware of the divisions among local
Catholics but tolerates them all “for pastoral reasons,” she said, like a
patriarch keeping a diverse family together.
Vasa
may be less inclusive, said Vrooman, who was involved with the church
for 50 years but no longer attends Mass and belongs to the reform group
Call To Action. “I get the feeling Vasa will impose his will,” she said.
Vasa
was vicar general of the Lincoln diocese in 1996 when it moved to
excommunicate local members of Call To Action, an independent
organization that claims 25,000 members nationwide and advocates change
of Catholic policy on issues such as celibacy for priests, the male-only
clergy, homosexuality and birth control.
When
the Vatican upheld Lincoln's decision 10 years later in 2006, Vasa —
then six years into his tenure as bishop in Baker — expressed approval,
according to the Catholic News Service.
“There never was any question of the bishop's right to do this and the suitability given the circumstances,” Vasa told CNS.
In
an interview, Vasa said he was supporting the Nebraska bishop's right
to order the excommunication, calling it “a prudential decision on his
part.”
Vasa
said he saw no need to take such action in Oregon, and that he did not
know if such a need exists in the Santa Rosa diocese.
'The right-to-murder heresy'
On
another hot-button issue, Vasa asserted in a Catholic newspaper column
in 2006 that pro-abortion rights Catholic politicians might be
considered heretics, a label he acknowledged as “terribly harsh.”
“Nevertheless,
there are those of the household of Faith who obstinately deny some
truth that is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith,” Vasa wrote.
“There is some question, for instance, about whether those who openly
profess to be pro-choice are, in fact, holding to a heretical position.”
Acceptance of abortion rights, he added, has been called “the right-to-murder heresy.”
In
an interview, Vasa said that an abortion-rights advocate could no more
be “in communion with the church” than one could be “in communion with
the black caucus and be a member of the KKK.”
Rep. Mike Thompson, the North Coast's seven-term Democratic congressman, is a pro-abortion rights Catholic.
“I
support a woman's right to make decisions about her health care,”
Thompson said, adding the he separates his role as a lawmaker from his
Catholicism.
Thompson said he and Vasa, whom he has not met, “probably agree on more things than we disagree.”
Vasa
said he could not comment on Thompson's situation because he knows
nothing about the congressman's voting record or any
conversationThompson may have had with diocese officials.
Deviations not condoned
Vasa said he understands “cafeteria Catholicism,” the practice of personally following some church tenets but rejecting others.
It
is human nature, he said, to embrace concepts that reinforce one's own
beliefs. But he does not condone deviations from Catholic principle.
“Catholics
must believe what Christ teaches through his church is good for us,”
Vasa said. His duty as bishop, he said, is to teach and explain those
lessons.
“Every teacher challenges us to move from where we are to a different place,” he said.
Lay
Catholics assert that church law gives them the right to act according
to their conscience, and numerous rules, such as the prohibition on
birth control, are routinely ignored.
Many
of the church's controversial policies involve sexual behavior, Vasa
said. In what he described as a “slight nuance” in its position on
contraception, the Vatican has said that “it might be deemed more
charitable” to use condoms to prevent the spread of AIDs and other
diseases.
But that does
not change the fact that “promiscuous sexual activity” is both immoral
and the cause of AIDS transmission, Vasa said.
In eastern Oregon, Vasa was on far more politically conservative turf than he is on the North Coast.
His
sprawling diocese covers 66,800 square miles, all of Oregon east of the
Cascade Range, a land of wide open spaces where cattle outnumber people
by more than 2-to-1. It is nearly six times the geographic size of the
Santa Rosa diocese, which stretches from Petaluma to the Oregon border.
Vasa's
diocese closely matches Oregon's 2nd Congressional District, the only
one of that state's five districts with a plurality of Republican
registered voters (41 percent). Rep. Greg Walden, a Republican who has
represented the district since 1998, was re-elected in 2008 with 70
percent of the vote.
In the past three presidential elections, the
district voted twice for George Bush and for John McCain in 2008.
The
Santa Rosa diocese, which closely matches Thompson's 1st District,
voted for Democrats Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama.
Democrats hold
a 46 percent plurality among registered voters and Thompson, who has
also been in Congress since 1998, got 68 percent of the vote in 2008.
Acknowledges blunt style
Brumley,
the Catholic publisher, said Vasa doesn't appear to be the type of
bishop sensitive to secular politics. Among the incoming bishop's
concerns, he said, will be developing candidates for the priesthood from
within the diocese.
Cafeteria Catholicism is by no means unique to the liberal North Coast, Brumley said. “It's everywhere.”
But
Vrooman, the advocate of change, said she thinks Vasa's orthodoxy may
grate on some local Catholics.
“People like Bishop Vasa treat it (church
policy) like it's black and white,” she said. “There's no room for
dissent.”
Vasa himself seemed to acknowledge his blunt style in a farewell statement posted on the website of the Baker diocese.
“I
am also painfully aware that some have found me too difficult and I can
assure you that I have often carried them with me to the chapel in
prayer and at Mass,” he wrote. “I am sure that I have not been all that
you hoped I could be for you and I ask that you pray that I do better in
the future. Please do not judge me too harshly.”
Vasa
said he has no regrets about his 35-year bond with Catholicism, “called
by God's grace to be a person who tries to live a life for others.”
Priests engage with their parishioners in moments “of peak joy and deep sorrow,” including birth, marriage and death, he said.
“It is all joy and grace and blessing.”