Desert Shepherd : Rugged Land and Its People Leave Mark on Next Bishop of Orange

“I don’t see how a man could be an atheist in the desert,” said Bishop Norman F. McFarland, surveying the dramatic landscape of northern Nevada from behind the wheel of his white Oldsmobile.

Few places are as far removed from the bustle and prosperity of Orange County as the small towns and isolated settlements that make up the Diocese of Reno-Las Vegas, which McFarland has headed for the past 10 years. But on Feb. 24, the 64-year-old Northern California native, who describes himself as a Nevadan “by adoption and affection,” is scheduled to take over as the second bishop of the Diocese of Orange.

For much of his tenure in Nevada, McFarland has spent his weekends traveling the diocese--usually by car and alone--visiting different churches, saying Masses and delivering homilies, counseling priests and nuns. Last Saturday morning McFarland agreed to take a few passengers along on one of his final swings.

During the two-day trip the bishop provided an extended, personal insight into the man who will soon lead Orange County’s 600,000 Catholics, as well as his appreciation for the land and people he has served. Dressed in a white sweater with leather elbow patches, he began with a running commentary of the passing scene, dominated by the motif of the desert--its history, geography and topography.

The road he was taking, he explained, follows the half-moon course of the Humboldt River through the desert. For obvious reasons, it became the old covered-wagon route to California. Later it became the roadbed for the railroad and, later still, the route for Interstate 80.

As tumbleweeds blew across the road, he noted points of historical interest, such as where the ill-fated Donner Party passed, and where the film “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” was shot.

“I’m going to miss this damn land,” he said. “I’m going to miss the wide-open spaces. This land just goes on and on. It’s fascinating country. It always excites me to see the vastness. . . . There’s no place you can stand in Nevada and not see mountains.”

When he drives alone, the bishop said, he occupies his time listening to “easy listening” radio and tapes of Spanish language instruction, old Sherlock Holmes radio dramas and light classical music. He said he usually draws the line at Annunzio Mantovani--”he’s a little too saccharine”--and volunteered that “I like piano most of all.”

Many of the tapes he listens to in the car are recordings of church lectures, seminars, retreats and conferences he has not attended in person. “I’m not a great meetings man,” he confessed. “I get restless.”

In order to keep alert, he also fiddles with a dashboard computer on which he can calculate his average speed, estimated time of arrival and the distance he has traveled.

As the hours in the car passed, McFarland gave evidence that he is an avid reader, as well as a prolific and eloquent writer. He salted his conversation--like his columns for the National Catholic Register and the Catholic Twin Circle--with references to an eclectic range of personalities, including Lewis Carroll, Graham Greene, Meg Greenfield, Albert Camus, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Groucho Marx, Evelyn Waugh and Rabbi Harold Kushner.

Recommending Flannery O’Connor’s “The Habit of Being,” he marveled: “The insights of that young woman!”

From between the front bucket seats, McFarland pulled a packet of back issues of the Frontier Shepherd, pamphlets he writes mixing history and church development, which are sent to donors outside of Nevada. Each of the six yearly issues focuses on a single town or parish, and the bishop often returned to the theme of the demands a hard but beautiful land can make on people.

Reads While Driving

Among the bishop’s many talents is an ability to read while driving--”I hope this doesn’t make you nervous”--while bracing the steering wheel with his knees. But he was prevailed upon to pass the pamphlets to a reporter for more relaxed inspection.

In one issue, McFarland wrote, “The early fathers of the church sought the desert experience, for it is in the desert, close to nature--isolated and surrounded by a stark yet majestic beauty--that one feels the closeness to God.” In another, dealing with early priests on horseback, he compared the Humboldt River trace to El Camino Real in California, and wrote that “Bringing Christ to the people of her far-flung missions has always been one of the greatest challenges facing the (Catholic) church in Nevada.”

Like most of the bishop’s endeavors, the Frontier Shepherd operates in the black: last year it netted $50,000 for the diocese, he said. McFarland was first sent to Reno by the Vatican to return the diocese, which was $5.7 million in debt, to solvency.

In one column for the Los Angeles-based National Catholic Register, McFarland paid tribute to a predecessor, Bishop Thomas Kiely Gorman, a native of Pasadena who came to Nevada as the first bishop of Reno in 1931, after serving as editor of The Tidings, the journal of the Diocese of Los Angeles.

Gorman distinguished himself, McFarland wrote, by “traveling waterless ribbons of dirt and gravel roadways up and down and across a despairing Nevada that had been ravaged and left disemboweled by seekers of her precious metals.

“It was often a two- or three-day journey in his old Packard, blowing out tires with regularity, to reach skeletons of towns that had once flourished during the Comstock boom, to bring hope to Catholics and non-Catholics alike still clinging to the abandoned mining shafts, to remind them with his infectious optimism that God still cared though the world had stripped them of their wealth, that the church doors would remain open even though those of the banks were closed.”

Although the roads are paved and the cars air-conditioned now, the “awe-inspiring landscape not too unlike the lunar Sea of Storms” remains the same for Gorman’s successor. And McFarland has had some pretty hair-raising scrapes of his own in his late-model Delta 88.

An Eye Out for State Troopers

In the course of this two-day trip, the bishop kept the speedometer at just under 70 m.p.h., as is his habit, with a sharp eye out for state troopers. “I’ve been stopped occasionally,” he admitted. “Sometimes you’re driving along and you wonder where these guys come from.”

In Nevada, he explained, speeding up to 70 usually nets a $10 fine for “wasting resources,” and no points against a driver’s record, a practice that has put the state at odds with the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In Nevada, he said, the fine is much greater--$500--for hitting a cow in the road, something he has avoided, although “sooner or later every priest or sister hits one.”

He has had a battery explode and a radial tire blow out. On one occasion, he did a complete spin-out when he “might have dozed off” at the wheel, an experience that he said “scared the hell out of me.” As precautions, the car is now equipped with a citizens band radio and chains in the trunk for icy roads.

While the economic times are not as desperate as the depths of the Depression when Gorman drove the circuit in his Packard, it is still difficult to scratch a living from the earth in northern Nevada towns like Fernley, Lovelock and Winnemucca.

Last weekend’s first stop, Fernley, has a population of less than 500 and, according to Father Bob Simpson, about 150 townsfolk show up for Sunday Mass at St. Robert Bellermine church. Simpson proudly showed off the small church’s new carpet, paint and pulpit, to which the bishop replied, “That’s great!”

Before arriving at the next town, Lovelock, and visiting the next priest, Father Harold Vieages, McFarland explained: “I just want to say hello. This guy lives alone. I admire these guys so much. It takes a certain temperment to cope with the isolation and loneliness, so that you’re not climbing the walls.”

For a long time, the bishop said, Vieages lived in a tumbledown house next door to the church, St. John the Baptist. “I finally persuaded him that he should have a better place to live,” he said. The old house was torn down and replaced with a modular home.

Farther Into Desert

Lovelock, with a population of about 2,000, is a step up from Fernley, but it is farther into the desert from civilization and it appears to be a dying town, the kind of place that hopes for a state prison facility to keep it going. Its circular courthouse is one of its few claims of distinction.

Vieages was happy to see the bishop, and laughed as McFarland recalled a faux pas long ago in the town, when, as newly installed head of the diocese, he inadvertently took a barber chair out of turn.

“In a little town they never forget anything,” Vieages, a native of Louisiana who has spent 16 years in Lovelock, said with a rueful smile. The priest then asked McFarland to inspect the old green clapboard church and sign the register for the last time.

Before leaving, the bishop noticed that the church needed new siding and other repairs, and asked how the contract on the improvements was coming. Vieages explained the situation, and asked for help in moving things along through the bureaucracy, apologizing, “I know you’ve got one foot out the door.”

Vieages bade the bishop farewell, saying he was sorry the visit was “so short and sweet.” McFarland recalled that the priest used to have a dog who understood French, but the animal had died.

“You have to have someone to talk to,” Vieages said.

The bishop bypassed Humboldt, little more than a stand of trees and half a dozen buildings, since it was too small to support even a mission church, and tiny Imlay.

‘One Moccasin’ Town

Winnemucca, population 4,280, which advertises itself as the “Hub of Northern Nevada” and “The City of Paved Streets,” was the weekend’s primary destination. The word Winnemucca, McFarland explained, is a contraction of Indian and English words meaning “one moccasin,” the name of a Paiute Indian leader.

Times have been hard here as well, especially since Interstate 80 was routed around, rather than through, town. The front page of the local paper reported on the closing of another gold mine, and how many jobs the closing will cost. The area is also Basque country, where many sheep are raised by the children and grandchildren of Spanish immigrants from the Pyrenees mountains.

As planned, McFarland’s itinerary brought him to St. Paul’s church in Winnemucca with just enough time to freshen up at the adjoining rectory before Saturday afternoon Mass.

Two guitarists played a hymn as the bishop’s entry from the rear of the Spanish-style church with Msgr. Thomas Meger, a former chancellor of the diocese, caused a small stir among the 200 or so congregants.

McFarland is a physically imposing man--6 feet, 5 inches, 250 pounds, and a full head of white hair--made even more so when attired in clerical robes.

Meger welcomed McFarland on behalf of the congregation and introduced him as “the shepherd of the diocese.”

Repeated Homilies

At the afternoon Mass on Saturday, and the three Masses on Sunday, the bishop spoke in a sure, confident, sometimes booming voice, giving essentially the same message and homily at each service. He said the repetition, sometimes six times on a weekend, is “the same type of thing as acting,” and acknowledged that “you get a little tired.”

Each time, he read from the Prophet Isaiah, another voice in the wilderness, and spoke about John the Baptist. “John was a solitary,” he reminded them. “He lived in the desert.” In the desert, he said, quoting an unnamed poet, where “the air is purer, the stars are brighter and God is nearer.”

McFarland then explained what most of the worshipers already knew, that he was addressing them for the last time, since he would soon be departing for Southern California, although he said he had “no inclination or intention of leaving.” Because “I have always been at home here,” he told them, “it is difficult to sever the bonds.”

At receptions following each Mass at the church’s new social hall, McFarland towered over the many children, frequently leaning over to ask them questions. On Saturday night, he received a parting gift: a large, framed photograph of a flock of sheep and several shepherds.

“Our loss is your gain, that’s for sure,” said parishioner Verna Willis.

Driving the 167-mile return trip to Reno on Sunday afternoon, McFarland reflected on his career in the church.

“I had only one ambition in life--to be a priest.” He said he hoped to minister to a single parish, much like the three priests he visited over the weekend. “It didn’t turn out as I planned it.”

Studied Annulment Requests

Instead, McFarland was sent to study canon law at Catholic University in Washington. After that, he spent 19 years with the marriage tribunal in San Francisco, deciding which marriages could be annulled under church rules, and then was appointed auxiliary bishop and vicar general, assigned to Mission Dolores in San Francisco.

In part because “I’ve always been fascinated by figures and statistics,” he said, he was sent to bail out the financially troubled Reno-Las Vegas Diocese and, two years later, was named diocesan bishop.

This largely administrative career, moving steadily to greater and greater responsibility, he said, “wasn’t my idea. I’ve always been happy wherever I’ve been.”

McFarland said he would like to continue his practice of visiting a different church each weekend when he comes to Orange County.

“It’s something I’ve enjoyed,” he said. “You can’t have long conversations with people, but you can say hello.”