It has been almost six years because the death of Archbishop John R. Quinn, the previous archbishop of each San Francisco and Oklahoma City, however the rise of certain issues to the fore in church and society in recent months brought him to mind as I used to be poring over America’s archives. Beloved as a pastor by many, Archbishop Quinn was also a fantastic scholar of ecclesiology, church history and spirituality; I discovered the last for myself once I was blessed to have him as a retreat director in 2008. He was also a pioneering leader in implementing lots of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in his various episcopal appointments.
In his many articles for America over time (his first appeared in 1968), Quinn tackled issues starting from synodality to sex abuse to the priest shortage to abortion. Do those sound familiar today?
In his many articles for America, Quinn tackled issues starting from synodality to sex abuse to the priest shortage to abortion. Do those sound familiar today?
Born in 1929 in Riverside, Calif., Quinn was ordained for the Diocese of San Diego in 1953 after studying on the Gregorian University in Rome. He was made an auxiliary bishop of San Diego in 1967, then appointed bishop of Oklahoma City-Tulsa in 1971. (You’re reading that accurately: He was made a bishop at 38). When Oklahoma City was created as a separate archdiocese in 1972, Quinn became its first archbishop.
After five years in Oklahoma City, Quinn was appointed to move the Archdiocese of San Francisco in 1977. At the identical time, he was elected president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops for a three-year term, a signal of his growing influence amongst his fellow bishops.
During his tenure in San Francisco, Quinn appointed Mary Bridget Flaherty, R.S.C.J., as chancellor of the archdiocese, making Sister Flaherty the highest-ranking woman in any diocese on the earth. He also reacted swiftly to the AIDS crisis, which hit San Francisco particularly cruelly, by making a housing program to assist AIDS patients remain of their homes; he also donated a convent owned by the archdiocese to be used as a hospice.
At a synod of bishops in Rome in 1980, Quinn suggested the bishops find ways to handle the widespread Catholic dissent from “Humanae Vitae” on contraception. Within the aftermath, he released a press release affirming the church’s teaching, saying that “the intent of my speech was to suggest possible ways of constructing the church’s teaching on contraception higher understood and more widely accepted.”
Quinn was also not afraid to criticize the Vatican’s governance (cited by some journalists at his death as a consider his never having been named a cardinal), including in a 2001 article for America upfront of the October 2001 synod of bishops in Rome. “Bishops around the globe are dissatisfied with the treatment by Roman congregations of episcopal conferences,” he wrote. “This statement is just not based on mere hearsay. The bishops themselves within the continental synods (for Africa, Asia and others) have explicitly brought up the topic.” Why do I believe he can be delighted by the widespread consultation of so many groups within the church in the present synodal process?
Archbishop Quinn was also not afraid to criticize the Vatican’s governance, which was cited by some journalists at his death as a consider his never having been named a cardinal.
He took the remarkable step in 1987 of publicly taking a four-month sabbatical to cope with exhaustion and stress management. His willingness to be public concerning the pressures of his job “humanized the episcopacy,” Cardinal Blase Cupich told Tom Roberts of the National Catholic Reporter after Quinn’s death in 2017. “He had, I feel, the great common sense to comprehend that there are occasions if you need assistance and it is best to search for it. It’s a part of the human condition to do this. I feel he was very astute and honest—there was an actual honesty about himself, and I feel that bodes well for all of us.”
In the ultimate years of his tenure, Quinn faced criticism for his response to the archdiocese’s financial problems, which included staff cuts and parish closings; allegations of sexual abuse against several high-ranking San Francisco priests also made headlines within the Bay Area. Quinn retired in 1995 on the age of 66, long before the conventional retirement age of 75.
After his resignation, Quinn responded in a public lecture at Oxford to Pope John Paul II’s invitation in his encyclical “Ut Unum Sint” for suggestions on how Christian churches might seek closer ties. His talk drew considerable publicity for his criticism of the Vatican’s governance and treatment of bishops, ideas he expanded in his 1999 book The Reform of the Papacy: The Costly Call to Christian Unity. He died on the age of 88 in 2017.
When clergy sex abuse became a national story in 2002, Quinn wrote “Considerations for a Church in Crisis” for America, declaring that “the current crisis within the church should be compared with the Reformation and the French Revolution” and calling for a national policy on sex abuse by clergy, expanded powers for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and greater involvement of the laity in adjudicating sex abuse cases. “Clearly the church has arrived at a really critical moment in her history,” he wrote. “Clearly too, the long run of the church is in peril unless wiser men and girls are forthcoming.”
Though his fame (something reinforced in the numerous obituaries for him at his death) was that of a political progressive, he broke sharply along with his fellow travelers on the problem of legal abortion, which he denounced in a 1989 article for America. Beyond the indisputable fact that abortion was the taking of an innocent human life, he argued, a laissez-faire approach to abortion would only result in further violations of human rights:
If human life within the mother’s womb will be destroyed, what logic can prevent the destruction of the lifetime of incurables in mental institutions, of the chronically in poor health, of the ‘unproductive’ elderly and of others who could also be considered a ‘burden’ on society? The precise to life is the elemental right. When the correct to life is just not sovereign but will be violated for any reason in any respect, then all other rights are also in jeopardy. Abortion is the axe at the basis of the tree of human rights.
The fields of law and medicine, Quinn argued, had given in to pro-choice arguments out of expediency. But, he wrote, “If the soul of a nation is to be great, it should have great moral horizons. It may well never allow its judgments touching the inviolability of life to change into the pawn of expediency or allow itself to subordinate the correct to life to every other consideration.”
Quinn also wrote several articles for America in support of priests and men and girls religious. In 2010, America published an edited version of Quinn’s presentation to the National Federation of Priests’ Councils in Houston, Tex., wherein Quinn noted that for a lot of priests, the current milieu was a difficult one which could lead on to despair: “We priests and the Catholic Church are in a moment of humiliation and some extent of helplessness.” Nevertheless, he wrote, the church had engaged in an identical sort of struggle since its first days:
It’s a time for us, just like the Apostles in Acts, to present thanks that we’re counted worthy to suffer something for Christ. It is just not a time for us to be the martyr-victim however the martyr-witness. If anything is emphatic within the Gospel of John it’s that the Lord Jesus freely, knowingly and willingly invested himself within the Mystery of the Cross. This is unquestionably a time when every true priest is invited to freely and humbly embrace what Christ Our Lord freely accepted. We priests and the entire church are being called to evangelical humility and to a purer faith.
Archbishop John Quinn: “We priests and the entire church are being called to evangelical humility and to a purer faith.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Crossing the Jordan,” by Brooke Stanish. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
On this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular author or group of writers (each latest and old; our archives span greater than a century), in addition to poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this may give us a probability to offer you more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to a few of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
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Completely satisfied reading!
James T. Keane