BishopAccountability.org
	Oakland Bishop Reflects on Two Years By Randy Myers rmyers@cctimes.com Times [Contra Costa CA] September 6, 2005 OAKLAND - Bishop Allen Vigneron faced enormous and complex challenges during his first two years heading the Oakland Diocese. He confronted 56 sexual abuse lawsuits that not only stained the 43-year-old diocese's reputation but also questioned the veracity of its former leaders. He vigorously sought financial and emotional backing for building a distinctively designed $131-million cathedral near Lake Merritt in Oakland. He united the faithful in prayer as a beloved and long-ailing pope entered the final stages of his life in April. Soon after he asked parishioners to join together again and pray for a successor. As spiritual leader of the East Bay's more than half-million Catholics, Vigneron inherited a diverse slate of issues that showed the church at its best and its worst. He took over for Bishop John Cummins on Oct. 1, 2003. Most challenges continue today: Staunching the decline in enrollment at older parish schools; responding to the call of Tri-Valley Catholic parents for a high school in Livermore; reaching out to the culturally and economically diverse regions in Alameda and Contra Costa counties; and weighing in on hot cultural topics -- such as embryonic stem cell research and same-sex marriage --that counter church doctrine. Reflecting on his eventful two years, the 57-year-old Michigan native views handling the sexual abuse cases and the cathedral project as his greatest practical challenges. In the coming years, he wants to become more familiar with clergy and parishioners in both counties. These past two years he dedicated much of his efforts to address clergy sexual abuse. One of Vigneron's first steps was to launch a series of apology services at parishes where abuse occurred. He also testified in the trial of two former Antioch altar boys who received a $2 million award in April. Frequently the bishop showed up for court proceedings. The 56 lawsuits against the diocese were the result of a 2003 state law that lifted the statue of limitations by one year on sexual abuse suits. Vigneron approached the challenges the abuse cases presented, along with other issues, with his trademark sense of purposefulness and preciseness. In person, he comes across as a reasoned and personable man, one who steers clear of hasty decisions. Lee Nordlund, spokesman for the Cathedral of Christ the Light project, describes Vigneron as a cautious man. He remembers cathedral volunteers expressing worries that the newly arrived bishop might decide to pull the plug on the project. Instead, Vigneron studied and analyzed the issue, then only when the careful study was done, threw himself entirely behind it, Nordlund said. "Once he decided it was a worthy project, he committed himself to fully assisting with the fund-raising efforts," Nordlund said. The Times sat down with Vigneron to talk about his upcoming two-year anniversary and past and future challenges facing the church. Here are his responses, some edited due to length: ON THE AFTERMATH OF THE $56.4 MILLION SEX ABUSE SETTLEMENT: "I have a sense that we've finished a particular chapter in dealing with the lawsuits. And we're already talking with our ministry committee, the ministry to abuse survivors, on what's the next thing we need to do to continue our ("No More Secrets") ministry. "So, by no means do I think the settlement of the suits means that we just walk away from this, we've got nothing more to do. We need to continually evaluate our safe environment program and we need to continue to reach out to victim survivors." ON WHAT HE HOPES THE CATHEDRAL ACHIEVES: "My aim is for it to be a new heart for the whole Catholic community of the two counties of the East Bay. A church that is a second home church for everybody and in bringing everyone together, giving them that shared home, that shared place of identity, to create new energy -- new energy for their own faith and new energy to share the faith and new energy to serve. That's very important. "Also, I would like the cathedral and its plaza to be a place that the whole civic community feels very much at home in. It's a witness to profound spiritual values and goods, and there are lot of people I know who don't share our faith, but they share those values and I hope that they find the cathedral a symbol and a reinforcement and expression of those values and truths." ON THE EAST BAY'S CULTURAL DIVERSITY: "(There's) diversity in a lot of senses. One of the ones that we think about first right away is ethnic and that's certainly very true. But there's also socio-economic diversity and diversity of cultural attitudes. From, say, think about starting in Oakley and stretching all the way back to Berkeley and we come down from Berkeley, Richmond, Oakland, head all the way down to Fremont. "And I'm very much enjoying my interaction with people of different ethnic groups. (He recalls going to a mass in Fremont for Indians, Pakistanis, Fijians, Sri Lankans, and a celebration for Samoans.) "I find that while they're very proud and rightly proud of their culture, they're very eager to share that with the other members of the diocese and also they want to participate in communities that are other than their own." ON SCHOOL ENROLLMENT DECLINING IN INNER CITIES: "The schools in older communities - I don't know that I would just say inner city - I would say wherever the community tends to be a little older, that's where we have the challenge. Some of that is the kind of demographics that the public schools, I think, see in a lot of the districts as well. And added to it is, of course, the ever-increasing costs that we have to pay to keep the schools going. "We're principally dependent on tuition and the offerings that come into the parish to whatever degree the parish is able to subsidize to the school. A very important thing is that we have several organizations that raise money for tuition assistance and that really makes a big difference in the lives of some. There are a number of kids who just wouldn't be able to come to our schools if we didn't have that." ON CHURCH TEACHINGS GOING COUNTER TO CULTURAL ISSUES: "I think one of my jobs, one of our jobs as pastors, is to give people the encouragement to be counter cultural, to hold it up as something they need to deal with, they need to recognize, and help them form good support groups because it's hard to be counter cultural when you're by yourself. If you have webs of support, communities of support, it's much easier to do that." ON MEETING THE DEMANDS OF THE CATHOLIC POPULATION: "We need to continue to strategize how to deal with the population shifts in the two counties. Some communities are aging, others are sprawling. . . . We need to continue to respond to that ... "We need to become more and more effective in giving pastoral care to people who are more newly arrived. We have a very high percentage of Catholics in our diocese whose first language is not English, who were not born here in the United States. "In a lot of ways they represent the future of our diocese. The principal group are Latinos, and most of those are Mexicans, though not all. Then the Filipino community continues to grow, as well as the Vietnamese community. Then there are the groups that keep growing, too, but they're not at all as numerous as those three groups." ON USING NEW MEDIA TO EVANGELIZE: "We're taking some new initiatives here in the central office to try to be more effective in getting the word out. We've restructured ourselves with a number of departments, trying to give them a sharper focus on faith formation and evangelizing. "And we're talking about trying ways to use new media. I find it interesting to see the ways that all sorts of newspapers today use the Internet and see that the net is a complement to what they do. I think we need to become shrewder at that." ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SUNDAY BULLETIN: "One of the things we've learned recently from some other kinds of surveys we did (is) that the most important communication parishioners have is the Sunday bulletin - the paper that they get in the parish every Sunday. "I'm convinced we need to think about how to get some shared energy from those parish bulletins, our own diocesan publications and the Web -- both the diocesan site and parish sites. "I mean tools are just that. They're not going to substitute for the substance of what you want to get across. But what we want to share is a vision of what human happiness consists of, and it doesn't consist in owning and accumulating. "It consists in living a life where you're able to give yourself away and you're really able to receive faithful love. And that's challenging. Because the tendency in so many parts of our culture is that if it's tough you just walk away." ON STEM CELL RESEARCH: "On that issue, I think it's very important to begin with a distinction, and the distinction is different kinds of stem cell research. There's a difference between stem cells that are obtained from the destruction of embryos and other kinds of stem cells. "The (church's) opposition to the destruction of embryos really is the teaching of the church. And that opposition is based on a sense of the dignity of the human person: that this is a human life, a very small, very vulnerable life, and that no human life should be turned into an instrument for the betterment of somebody else's life. "Because when you start down that road it leads to a hellish situation. ... No life is simply a commodity for the betterment of someone else's life. That's really what's at the heart of this. " Randy Myers covers religion and ethics for the Times. Reach him at 925-977-8419 or at rmyers@cctimes.com.