Denver Archdiocese: the future of Catholicism

David Scott

Contents - Aug 2001 - Buy a copy now Editorial: The Assumption of Our Lady: 15 August - Michael Gilchrist Melbourne's new Archbishop receives Pallium from John Paul II - AD2000 Report News: The Church Around the World After 14 years: why does AD2000 continue? - Michael Gilchrist Denver Archdiocese: the future of Catholicism - David Scott US bishops implement papal teaching on Catholic universities - Charles E. Rice Appreciating the Mass: a successful new publication - Fr Robert Egar PP Australian scholarship for African priest Letters: Balanced presentation (letter) - Denis O'Leary Letters: BEC success stories (letter) - Errol P. Duke Letters: BECs not new (letter) - John Barich Letters: Radical feminists (letter) - Dr T.R. White Letters: Statement of Conclusions (letter) - Mark Power Letters: Orthodox seminary (letter) - Paul Chigwidden Letters: Finding more priests (letter) - Theo Silvas Letters: Evolution/Original Sin (letter) - John Schmid Letters: Vatican II 'ambiguities' (letter) - George F. Simpson Letters: Choosing life (letter) - Mark Whybrow Letters: St Thomas Aquinas (letter) - Valentine Gallagher Letters: Generous response (letter) - Fr Stephen B. Muchemwa Letters: Mass leaflet (letter) - Stephanie McClarty Letters: Correct statement (letter) - Elizabeth Carr Books: Genetic Turning Points, by James Peterson - Bill Muehlenberg (reviewer) Books: The Cross of Anzac, by Tom Johnstone - Mark Posa (reviewer) Books: Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God, by Scott Hahn - Catherine Sheehan (reviewer) Books: Learning to Pray, by Julie Keleman - Anthony Cappello (reviewer) Books: The DNA of God: Newly Discovered Secrets of the Shroud of Turin, Garza-Valdez - Anthony Cappello (reviewer) Books: The Christian Travellers' Guides: France, Britain, Italy, Germany - F.T. Long (reviewer) Events: Victorian Thomas More Winter School 2001 in Ballarat, 3 - 5 August 2001 Events: Cardinal Lustiger to visit Australia, 6 August 2001 Events: Second National Chesterton Conference, 30 Sept - 1 Oct 2001 Reflection: Clerical celibacy: Giving ourselves up completely to God and the people He loves - Fr Dennis W. Byrnes PP

The Archdiocese of Denver, Colorado, under the leadership of Archbishop Charles Chaput and his predecessor, Cardinal Francis Stafford - who now works in the Vatican - has become one of the most vibrantly Catholic in the United States, pointing the way to a "new springtime" of Catholicism in the third millennium.

The following profile of the Denver Archdiocese (here abridged) first appeared in a recent issue of the US Catholic monthly 'Crisis'. Its author, David Scott, was editor of 'Our Sunday Visitor', a national US Catholic newspaper, from 1993 to 2000, and is currently writing an introduction to the Catholic Faith for Loyola Press and a study of Dorothy Day for Our Sunday Visitor Books.

At 10:30 on a recent Friday morning at St Vincent de Paul School in Denver, about 20 blue-and-white uniformed fifth-graders kneel silently, fidgeting only slightly, in a small chapel lit only by the flickering of a thick red candle. Two floors down in the school building, a fresh-faced nun in full black-and-white habit paces the well of a large, bright auditorium. Smiling, moving her hands like punctuation marks, she gives a rousing talk to a sixth-grade class on the importance of learning how to make the "right" decisions.

In yet another St Vincent's classroom, down a long narrow corridor festooned with colourful paintings and construction-paper banners, students hunch in front of sleek teal-blue iMac computers, working the bugs out of their latest assignment: to create a multimedia presentation about their favourite saint, incorporating sound, text, graphics, and animation. In the principal's office, another young nun in wire-rim glasses is explaining it all to a visitor. "In Denver, the faith is young and alive and being lived," Sister Mary Jordan says. "It's exciting here. The parents know their children are the future of the Church, and we're working with them to try to make them good Catholics."

Sister Jordan is a member of the St Cecilia Dominicans of Nashville, Tennessee, a tiny but fast-growing religious order whose nuns are all in their mid-30s. She and four of her fellow sisters were invited to Denver four years ago to run this elementary school of about 500 students serving a middle-class parish. With their straight-backed gaits, full habits, rosaries, and devotion to the Eucharist, they seem right out of 1950s American Catholicism. But St Vincent's is no blast from the past. In fact, with its mix of old-time Catholic feeling, high-tech sensibility, and nuns talking about "mission" and "the new evangelisation," this seems like a school headed back to the future.

St Vincent's is a lively symbol of the new kind of Catholic Church that is emerging in Denver eight years after Pope John Paul II celebrated World Youth Day here and predicted "a new springtime of faith." All across this sprawling 39,000-square-mile Archdiocese that spans northern Colorado are the signs of a young and energetic Catholicism that is trying to position itself along the cutting edge of the third millennium.

New religious orders like Sister Jordan's have transplanted themselves to Denver, as have more than a dozen missionary groups and spiritual renewal movements from Latin America and Europe. A new seminary has opened - the only one between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean - and already it is filled to capacity and drawing up expansion plans. More than $80 million worth of new schools, churches, and outreach facilities are being built to meet the demands of preaching the gospel in this boom town of the new global economy, with a population that is among the youngest, best-educated, most technologically "wired," and wealthiest in the world.

Contrasts

The Denver area itself is a study in spiritual and cultural contrasts. A leading centre for evangelical Protestantism and Mormonism, it is also an unofficial capital of the New Age movement, boasts an increasingly influential gay community, and is headquarters of the Hemlock Society, the nation's leading advocate of the "right to die." Catholic officials say the 375,000 Catholics who live in the Archdiocese of Denver are a reflection of the culture around them - a farrago of rich and poor, white and dark-skinned, tradition-minded and progressive.

The Catholic Church in Denver is young. The first missionaries came here in 1860, not long after the gold rush that earned the region the nickname "the new El Dorado." Roaming from mining camps to shanty towns, celebrating Mass on a makeshift altar in the back of a horse-drawn buggy, Denver's first bishop, in 1887, was an adventuresome Frenchman, Joseph Machebeuf, close friend of the legendary evangelist of the American Southwest, Jean Baptiste Lamy.

Though less dramatic, the background of Denver's current Archbishop, Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap, also has a bit of a storybook quality about it. A Potawatomi Indian, who is part-French and a Franciscan friar, he has a heritage that bespeaks the new multicultural and missionary image that the Church here wants to portray. At 53, Archbishop Chaput (pronounced SHA-poo) was the youngest Archbishop in the country when he was installed in 1997.

In nine previous years as Bishop of Rapid City, South Dakota, he had established a reputation for solid teaching and a prayerful, simple way of life: he still does his own laundry and cooking and answers all his own mail. Nationally, he is regarded as among the best and brightest of a new generation of Rome-minded bishops appointed by John Paul II.

In Denver, Archbishop Chaput took over an archdiocese that had been patiently refashioned during the ten-year tenure of J. Francis Stafford, a theologian and intellectual who is now a cardinal and head of the Pontifical Council for the Laity in Rome. It was then-Archbishop Stafford, observers say, who first identified Denver as an "emerging city" and set about building a local Church to match its energy and dynamism. He brought in top lay advisers, encouraged new religious orders and movements to relocate there, built close ties with Latin American Church leaders, and made the Church a respected voice on issues ranging from urban sprawl and "hyperdevelopment" to evangelisation and the Internet.

Archbishop Stafford drew the scorn of Denver's "progressive" Catholics, squeezing them out of parish and archdiocesan positions and refusing to permit them to use church grounds for their gatherings. They waged a bitter campaign against him, at one point staging a "church council" to nominate a replacement for him. But his efforts earned Rome's respect. To the surprise of nearly every Church observer, Denver was selected as the site for the celebration of World Youth Day in 1993.

Officials here point to World Youth Day - which attracted an estimated 450,000 young people - as a powerful turning point in the Archdiocese's understanding of itself and its place in the universal Church. "It was a special moment of grace - there was a dramatic change from before to after that visit," says Anthony Lilles, associate director of liturgy for the Archdiocese.

Archbishop Chaput describes his work as building on the graces of World Youth Day and the foundations laid by Archbishop Stafford. One of his first moves was to relocate the archdiocesan headquarters to a grassy 40-acre campus that includes two seminaries, his own small stone house, soccer fields, a baseball diamond, and a perpetual adoration chapel. Visitors to the complex are greeted by a life-size statue of the Pope and a sign indicating Denver's new attitude: the "John Paul II Centre for the New Evangelisation."

Archbishop Chaput has been outspoken about the need for bishops to be "apostles" and not "managers." Nevertheless, he is regarded as a shrewd and skilled administrator, who delegates well and takes a hands-on approach to fund-raising. He is said to prefer small-bore, mission-driven initiatives to bureaucratic structures and programs. "I think the role of the bishop is to try to discern and not get in the way," he says. "We need to take risks all the time. Growth is never accomplished without trying new things. I don't think I've ever been afraid of failure, because if it's of the Holy Spirit, it will survive. If it doesn't survive, it's a good sign that we ought to try something else."

Archbishop Chaput has also made a name for himself as a tenacious and effective recruiter of religious vocations. "You should see him work the crowds," says David Warner, whose 20-year-old son is a first-year seminarian in Denver. "After every Mass, he's saying to parents: 'Well, is your son going to become a priest?' That was so out of vogue for decades."

In addition to talking to parents, the Archbishop freely gives out his home phone number and keeps up a brisk e-mail correspondence with those he meets at youth rallies and other diocesan events. A crack racquetball player, he regularly invites students and others to join him for a match and a postgame chat about their faith and their vocations.

"We joke that the crozier he carries is really a hook he uses to bring guys in," says Tom Smith, a 30-year-old former Protestant minister in his second year at the seminary. Smith met Chaput after one of the youth Masses that he celebrates every Sunday evening at Denver's Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

"Immediately upon meeting me, as he always does with any young man who isn't married, he raised the question," Smith recalls. "When he found out I used to be a minister, he said, 'You had a pastoral call in your life, and it's still here. Why not give your life to God as a priest?' As we would talk in the weeks that followed, every excuse I had, he would just blow right through it."

There are 60 young men studying for the priesthood in Denver's two archdiocesan seminaries. St John Vianney Theological Seminary was opened by Archbishop Chaput in 1999. On the same campus is Redemptoris Mater, operated by the missionary movement Neocatechumenal Way, which has men from more than a dozen countries training to be Denver priests. The Neocatechumenate, as it is also called, is a Spanish spiritual renewal movement founded in the mid-1960s.

Denver's future seminarians take classes from some of the world's leading Catholic educators, who were attracted here by Archbishop Chaput's invitation to help create a new model for priestly formation, based loosely on that developed by Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger in Paris. Along with rigorous course work in philosophy, doctrine, Scripture, and spirituality, Denver's seminarians are required to wear clerical attire at all times in public and to spend several hours each day in prayer and Eucharistic adoration. The program includes strong doses of pastoral experience in parishes, homeless shelters, Catholic schools, hospitals, and elsewhere.

The young men also receive intensive instruction in the "spirituality of celibacy," in the hope that they will be able to avoid the sexual confusion and scandals that have dogged the Catholic priesthood in recent decades. "When I was in seminary, celibacy just wasn't talked about," says the rector, Msgr Samuel Aquila, who was ordained in the mid-1970s. "We want our men to be formed by the gospel, not by the culture."

Lay renewal

Another expression of Denver's missionary feel is the flourishing of international lay renewal movements and apostolates. Archbishop Chaput has encouraged parishes to welcome these groups, which typically stress a personal encounter with Christ and forming small faith-sharing communities. Older, better-known movements such as Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ have come to Denver, as have newer ones such as the Polish-based Families of Nazareth and the French-based Community of the Beatitudes, the latter a radical experiment in community living and contemplative prayer. The lay groups are a "gift of the Spirit" to help the Church deal with the aggressive forces of secularism and radical individualism in urban and suburban culture, says William Beckman, a member of the Neocatechumenal Way who serves as Archbishop Chaput's special adviser and liaison to the renewal movements.

At Saints Peter and Paul Church in the suburb of Wheat Ridge, the Peruvian-based Christian Life Movement has been eagerly embraced by young parents looking for ways to deepen their prayer lives and to share their faith journeys with other families.

"It's been wonderful," says Lorena Capone, who has been married for five years and has two children, ages three and one, and a third due in the fall. "There are a lot of young families in this parish who want to live the right way."

Since taking up residence in an empty convent near Saints Peter and Paul Church two years ago, members of the movement, laywomen who have taken vows of celibacy, have been providing spiritual guidance and inspiration to about a dozen Denver-area families. They gather for weekly pot-luck suppers and picnics that mix serious Bible study, prayer, and devotion with personal conversation and mutual support. Capone and others say the newcomers have helped them find religious meaning and purpose amid their hectic, activity-crammed suburban lives.

Youth ministers here are realistic about the serious hurdles the Church faces in a cultural climate that rejects moral norms and encourages sexual permissiveness and lifestyle experimentation. But, Sherwin adds, "realism" does not translate into a retreat from unpopular Church teachings. "Young people here are all over the place on these issues just like they are everywhere," he says. "What they don't want, though, is wishy-washy answers. They want the Church's position, and they want it taught clearly so they can make a decision. I've found that if you're real with them, they will listen."

Denver's young are "hungry for the truth," agrees Curtis Martin, an energetic convert and founder of FOCUS, a national campus ministry program for Catholics. Archbishop Chaput invited Martin to establish his headquarters near the University of Northern Colorado. His two-year-old program - which sends recent college graduates back to campuses as missionaries - has been successful not only in winning converts but also in sparking vocations to the priesthood and religious life. "Students respond to the truth with intensity because they're tired of the relativist drivel they get in the classrooms," Martin says.

Some critics fault Archbishop Chaput for speaking with what they say is a muted voice on social issues. "There is no deep commitment to the poor - the priority now is with these very conservative theological efforts," complains Loreto Sister Anna Koop, who has run a Catholic Worker house for Denver's needy and homeless for nearly 25 years. Sister Koop complains that Archbishop Chaput has done little to protest against gentrification and development efforts in Denver or the skyrocketing cost of living, all of which have displaced hundreds of poor families and made housing unaffordable except for the very wealthy. The Archdiocese's "only legislative interest is in pro-life and anti-gay and lesbian things," she says.

Archbishop Chaput's supporters do not deny that he has been staunch in his defence of Church teachings on abortion and homosexuality. But charges that he has abandoned Denver's poor are way off the mark, says Francis Maier, Chancellor of the Archdiocese and a close adviser. The Archdiocese, Maier notes, is by far the region's largest private provider of social services, and its charitable work is extensive - ranging from Head Start and job-training programs to AIDS ministry and farm-worker advocacy. Furthermore, "the gentrification issue bothers the Archbishop very much," Maier says, adding that Archbishop Chaput has responded with concrete initiatives aimed at helping the poorest urban dwellers.

The Archdiocese maintains seven grammar schools in Denver's inner city, where the student body is largely black and non-Catholic. In addition, the Archdiocese has raised more than $5 million from local business leaders for an endowment that funds scholarships so that disadvantaged families in these neighbourhoods can send their children to Catholic schools.

For his part, Archbishop Chaput professes to ignore the carping on his left and right. "If you're watching your backside you're never going to be moving forward," he says. "There's a line in Don Quixote where he says to Sancho Panza something to the effect that, 'The dogs are barking. We must be moving forward.' If people are yapping about what you're doing, sometimes it's a sign that you're doing the wrong thing. But oftentimes it's a sign that you're moving forward.

"This is not the Church of the 1940s," the Archbishop adds. "Nor is it the Church of the 1960s and '70s. It's the Church of the new millennium. And all of those kind of loyalties to past paradigms - whether they're conservative or liberal - get in the way of the freedom to look at things in a new way."

As he looks forward himself, Archbishop Chaput sees the face of his Archdiocese rapidly becoming Hispanic. The ordination in March of Auxiliary Bishop José Gomez, a 49-year-old Mexican priest of Opus Dei, marked another turning point in the Archdiocese's understanding of itself, Archbishop Chaput says: "We will begin to see ourselves as a diocese that is inherently bilingual, inherently multicultural."

Throughout the Archdiocese, parishes are trying to keep pace. Two years ago, only eight of the diocese's 114 parishes offered Masses in Spanish. Today, 41 do. Anticipating continued growth, every seminarian now being trained in Denver will be expected to be able to celebrate Mass, preach, and hear confessions in Spanish. Despite the growing pains, Archbishop Chaput sees the newcomers as part of God's plan to maintain a vibrant Catholicism in Colorado. "The immigrants from Mexico," he says, "are a new infusion of fresh blood into the life of the Church."

Shrine

On a radiant peak in the Rockies just outside of Denver, a shrine sits on property once owned by St Frances Cabrini, an Italian immigrant nun who died early in the last century and was the first American citizen to be canonised. Mother Cabrini, something of a roving missionary herself, came here in 1912 to establish an orphanage for the large numbers of children left fatherless by fatal accidents in the region's mines. Pilgrims still climb a steep path to draw water from a spring that is said to have started flowing when she struck a stone with her walking staff. They also come to pray near a large image of the Sacred Heart that she fashioned from several hundred white stones.

No longer a wild western outpost served by circuit-riding priests, Denver today is the hub of a sophisticated, outward-looking culture. But the challenge facing the Church remains in many ways the same - to preach the gospel in an indifferent and at times hostile culture. And despite the signs of growth and vitality here, success is far from a foregone conclusion, Church administrators say. "There are plenty of dead parishes still in Denver," notes one.

But Church leaders in Denver say they at least have a clear sense of what their mission is: to create a new brand of Catholicism, one capable of speaking to and compelling the loyalty of this highly secularised, dizzyingly diverse and wealthy population, a people flush with success and yet still hungering for meaning and community. That mission, they say, is the same as it was when Bishop Machebeuf preached here and Mother Cabrini walked these paths - to tell the good news in the glorious Rocky Mountains.

To subscribe to 'Crisis' (a publication we recommend) contact 'Crisis', Subscription Services, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-9203, USA. Non-American subscriptions (surface mail) cost US $41.95.

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 14 No 7 (August 2001), p. 8