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Perspective
He lived an embattled dream
By PATRICIA LYNN
MORRISON
As I read the angry, accusatory
letter from a subscriber, I decided newspaper editors should have as their
motto: “We aim to please … but never succeed.” The writer was
blasting the newspaper for not providing promised coverage of an event. She was
also convinced the editorial staff (led by me, the editor) had embarked on a
crusade to silence and ignore this particular constituency by refusing them
space in “their” newspaper.
To make sure her message was received, the writer had sent a
similar letter to the publisher. But more disconcerting to me than the
writer’s letter was a reply I was holding. Our publisher had written a
soothing, conciliatory letter to the writer, apologizing for the
newspaper’s failure to cover this newsworthy event, and promising that we
would do better in the future.
I was seeing red. Not only had we sent a reporter/photographer to
cover the event, we had given it full-page treatment, plus a half-page photo! I
was angry that our publisher had replied without first checking with the
newsroom to see what had actually happened, and told him so in a memo that
included a copy of the article. His stepping in to “fix” the
situation, I suggested, made us both look foolish, since we were apologizing
for not covering something that had been given significant play in the paper.
Furthermore, it made it clear that that the publisher had not read his own
paper.
The following day, the publisher was in my office -- seven miles
distant from his own. “I wanted to talk to you here, not in my
office,” he said, closing the door. As he sat down and reached into his
breast pocket, I wondered if a pink slip would emerge. Although my memo was
respectful, it had been strong. He pulled out the writer’s letter and my
memo.
“I owe you an apology, and I’m here to give it,”
said my publisher, Bishop James Hoffman, with his characteristic directness.
“You’re right. I should have talked to you first and let you handle
this. In my wish to smooth some ruffled feathers here, I micromanaged
...”
I muttered something about no apology being necessary, but he
continued. “No, I promised myself I would never do that, and I’m
sorry. In the future, I will make sure I contact you when something regards the
paper. That’s your job, not mine. And you’re right; I made us both
look foolish. I’ll do better from now on.”
He smiled, extended his hand to shake mine, and was gone as
unceremoniously as he had arrived. After the bishop’s departure, I was
speechless. The number of bishops who would react with such genuine humility
and graciousness to a criticism from a lay staffer was, in my guess, rather
small.
I had just experienced the best of Jim Hoffman. That is just one
story that sheds some light on the life of a man who determined to exercise the
ministry of bishop as servant, not lord. In the days since his death Feb. 8,
stories like that have been multiplied like gospel loaves.
When I learned of Bishop Hoffman’s death to cancer that
Saturday afternoon, I felt a tremendous sadness. Not just that he was gone, and
so quickly -- less than three months since the diagnosis -- but sadness at the
great impoverishment of the church of Toledo, Ohio, and the whole U.S.
church.
Every bishop, by definition, leads his own diocese, but many also
put a distinctive mark (for better or for worse), on the life of the wider
church. Jim Hoffman’s passing in some ways marks the end of an era, a loss
of a unique kind of servant leadership that is, sadly, not much in evidence in
the contemporary ecclesiastical scene.
Named a bishop in the heady days after the Second Vatican Council,
the shoe salesman’s son from Fremont, Ohio, had caught the council’s
flame. He envisioned a church that could break free of its bureaucratic,
barnacled heaviness; a church enriched by the gifts of lay women and men, not
because the hierarchy “permitted” lay involvement but because the
gospel insists that all God’s people work together to build the
kingdom.
It was not Utopia. Like all mortals, James Hoffman discovered that
the reality didn’t always match up to the vision and ideals he laid out
for himself and the church he led. Gifted with brilliance and precision of
thought, Jim Hoffman might have been happiest in an academic setting, studying
and teaching scripture and theology. Instead, like most bishops, he found
himself fielding building plans, sitting in seemingly endless meetings,
mediating conflicts. Despite his own pastoral approach, a major downsizing he
approved for Toledo’s diocesan offices left an open wound of bad feelings
that still persists. Most recently the gut-wrenching reality of sexual abuse in
his own presbyterate took their toll on the man and the priest. He also
discovered, in a way that touched him personally and painfully, that not
everyone takes kindly to empowerment and collegiality. A small but vicious
ultra-conservative element in the diocese never missed an opportunity to
complain to Rome about him or his policies; even a few priests, viewing
themselves the defenders of orthodoxy, criticized his every decision, or lack
thereof, even in the final days of his illness.
The dream to model and mold a different kind of church can
sometimes feel worn down before the day-to-day tugs of war and walls of
resistance, the construction and defense of self-aggrandizing structures that
lesser souls can believe are important. Jim Hoffman learned, early on perhaps,
that he had to renegotiate his dream. It was embattled, but it never died.
For his 20th anniversary as diocesan bishop in 2000, Bishop
Hoffman’s staff organized a celebration at the diocesan center. Amid
balloons and crepe paper festoons and letters from school children (one
wishing, “I hope you get to be pope”) was a photo display. There were
family and seminary shots. Pictures of the bishop in his Elmer Fudd-like hat,
ice fishing on Lake Erie. And pictures, lots of them, of him as a young priest
and bishop, surrounded by “just folk.” Soft drink in hand, wearing
his familiar plaid sweater vest over a not-new clergy shirt, the bishop walked
around, enjoying the photos of an earlier era. He gazed for a long time at a
candid shot of himself taken shortly after his episcopal ordination. He shook
his head a bit and smiled. “I was much freer then,” he said, to no
one in particular.
Pat Morrison is NCR managing editor. She was
editor/general manager of the Toledo diocesan paper for seven years.
National Catholic Reporter, February 28,
2003
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