December 11, 2003 | Read Time: 9 minutes
The Rev. J. Bryan Hehir is going home. For much of Father Hehir’s 37 years as a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, he has been “on loan” to other dioceses. He spent 20 years at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in Washington, and for the last two years he has served as president of Catholic Charities USA, in Alexandria, Va.
But this summer, Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley asked Father Hehir (pronounced hare) to return to Boston to help him regain the trust of Catholics in the diocese as the church struggles to repair the damage caused by the clergy sexual-abuse scandal. On January 1, Father Hehir will become head of Catholic Charities Archdiocese of Boston. He will also serve as the archdiocese’s cabinet secretary for social services.
While Father Hehir’s tenure at Catholic Charities USA — which has an annual budget of more than $2.5-billion and serves more than 7 million people each year — has been short by some standards, it has without question been eventful.
He took office just two days before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and oversaw the organization’s response to the disaster. During his time at the helm, Catholic Charities saw increasing demand for its services, the result of a faltering economy and rising unemployment rates, as government was cutting social-service budgets. He also had to deal with fallout from the sexual-abuse scandal and the national debate about the role of religious charities in providing social services. The charity is still conducting a search for Father Hehir’s successor.
In an interview, Father Hehir spoke about his time at Catholic Charities USA and his new position in Boston:
What have been your major challenges at Catholic Charities USA?
Well, we faced the increase in poverty. You also have continuing increases in the uninsured regarding health care. Poverty and health are closely related.
Catholic Charities as a matter of principle seeks to work with federal, state, and county governments in meeting human needs across American society.
State governments are perhaps our primary partner in this process, and we are faced with a situation where the governors’ conference of the United States has said that state fiscal conditions are the worst since the end of World War II. There is a major intersection of rising human need and declining resources to meet it, and we are right at that intersection because about 62 percent of our budget is drawn from federal, state, or county resources.
In addition to all of that in the secular realm, there is the horrendous reality in the Catholic Church derived from the sexual-abuse crisis, and that has affected us also. Anybody who bears the name Catholic has had to explain their role and their purpose and their work. It has affected the church internally, and it’s affected our public standing, and that has also been an added burden in trying to do the work that we need to do.
How have you dealt with the aftershocks of the sex-abuse scandal?
The approach we took was to say, This is a problem that faces the whole church. Catholic Charities is part of the church, so even though we didn’t produce the problem in a major way, we ought to be responding to the challenge the church faces.
That response has meant that in some instances, dioceses drew upon skilled personnel from Catholic Charities to help with victims or their families.
Both in terms of the life of the church itself and the role of the church in American society, I felt that Catholic Charities was in an important strategic position to help rebuild confidence in the church because we are an agency rooted in the church, but we serve the wider society.
People ask about funding all the time. The crisis itself has not constituted a major loss of funds for Catholic Charities in most places. Some places with very deep problems — like Boston — have experienced clear drops, although that has come back too. But on the whole, it’s diocesan funding that has been affected by the crisis.
How long-lasting do you think the effects of the scandal will be?
It is a long-term problem. How long, I’m not sure. But it would be a mistake to think that one could respond to this in depth in the short term.
Essentially there’s a double question here. One question is regaining the trust of Catholics in their church, and that varies in different parts of the country.
The second challenge is regaining public credibility in the life of the wider society, because not only do we provide direct service to people, but we also have a large-scale public-advocacy program where we engage state legislatures and the Congress on issues that affect socioeconomic justice, the question of the poor, issues of immigrants, children, and families.
Which of those problems will be harder to solve?
That’s hard to say. They’re very different kinds of questions.
Public credibility is the standing of an institution in the eyes of others in the community. The way you regain that is by the quality of your performance in terms of direct service and by the way you use the resources entrusted to you. Public credibility also gets restored by the quality of your contributions to the public debate about issues that affect the work of your agencies and institution.
The question inside the church is a much more personal question.
People come to the community of the church for worship. They come for counsel. They come for support in some of the most significant moments of their life — birth, death, and marriage.
These are deeply personal issues, and there is the sense that this is a community and an institution that you can trust, that provides a safe setting for one’s life. That’s a much more personal reality, and you have to reknit that person by person, family by family.
Will dealing with the aftermath of the crisis be different in Boston than it has been at the national level?
Yes, there are very specific challenges in Boston that are simply not shared by the vast number of dioceses in the country. If you’re in Boston as a priest, you’re dealing with both pastoral trust and public credibility.
The sharpness with which this whole crisis is felt is much more evident in the parishes in Boston than it is, say, here in Northern Virginia. There’s no place in the country that wasn’t touched by this, but there are very definite realities that are not repeated in terms of their depth and severity in other places.
Is Archbishop O’Malley trying to strengthen the ties between the church and Catholic Charities by filling the job with a priest instead of lay person?
I don’t think so. If you go back 20 years or so, almost every Catholic Charities director in the country would have been a priest or a religious. That has changed dramatically.
We are overwhelmingly a lay organization across the country, and that is clearly the future direction of the church in this area of its work. We have really talented, capable lay people who want to do this kind of work in the church, social ministry. We have a declining number of priests, so you have to use the resources of clerical staff pretty carefully in terms of what you do.
So generally speaking, Catholic Charities is lay-directed — under the direction of a bishop, to be sure, but lay-directed. That’s a long-term trend, not a short-term trend.
Catholic Charities of Boston accepted donations from Voice of the Faithful, a lay reform group, against the archdiocese’s wishes. Is your appointment an attempt to rein in Catholic Charities?
No, I don’t think so. I mean, the Voice of the Faithful issue, from what I know, is a settled issue. They give money to Catholic Charities, and Catholic Charities takes it, and I don’t think there’s any particular problem.
What advice would you offer your successor at Catholic Charities USA?
When the country goes into a recession and comes out, it takes a lot longer for people at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder to recover from these kinds of things than it does for other people, because they have no savings. People who have been out of work as a result of the last two years are going to take a longer time to recover.
So as the country comes out of recession, Catholic Charities almost has to have a delayed reaction. We will be dealing with the consequences of recession even when the headlines are saying that things are getting better.
Secondly, a constant theme over the last couple of years has been the question of the role of religion and government in the provision of social services. That discussion will stay with us.
The interesting part about that, of course, is that for Catholic Charities that is not a new theme. We have been in collaboration with the government going back to the latter part of the New Deal. So in one sense the discussion, which sounds new to a lot of the country, is not new to us.
At the same time, the discussion about the faith-based initiative and about the role of religiously based social-service organizations has generated new questions about church and state relations, about how the government ought to deal with religious communities, and how religious communities ought to maintain their own identity even as they collaborate with the government.
ABOUT THE REV. J. BRYAN HEHIR, OUTGOING PRESIDENT OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES USA
Education: Earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at St. John’s Seminary, in Boston, and a doctoral degree in applied theology at Harvard Divinity School.
Previous work experience: Before serving as president of Catholic Charities USA, Father Hehir served two years as dean of Harvard Divinity School, the first Roman Catholic to hold that position. From 1973 to 1992, he worked at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, in Washington, where he held positions as director of the Office of International Affairs, secretary of the Department of Social Development and World Peace, and counselor for Social Policy. He also served on the faculty of Georgetown University from 1984 to 1992, and was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 1984.
What he’s reading: A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America, by Peter Steinfels, and Public Religion in the Modern World, by José Casanova.
Who he roots for: Boston Red Sox. “I’m saddened the way everyone is,” the Massachusetts native says of the team’s loss to the New York Yankees in the playoffs. “But we all learn to look to next year.” He adds: “I’m a Notre Dame fan too, so the fall’s not going so well.”
