Path to Priesthood Opened Early in Bishop McFarland’s Life

Norman Francis McFarland, who will be installed this evening as the second bishop in the history of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, first learned the body language of a priest as an 8-year-old boy in this picturesque Northern California town.

Already an altar boy, the young McFarland was chosen by a nun to portray a priest in a pageant at St. Catherine’s Church, which was right across the unpaved street from the McFarland home. In a series of now-yellowed family photographs, the boy wearing a priest’s black biretta over bowl-cut hair gracefully demonstrated the evocative hand gestures of the clergyman he would become.

“He had an inclination early,” said his younger brother Glenn, a retired pharmacist.

Family, friends and colleagues interviewed in the Bay Area last week were nearly unanimous in describing the 65-year-old bishop, who stands 6 feet, 5 inches and weighs 240 pounds, as a bulwark of faith and tradition. At the same time he is seen as a man of reason and rationality who is always accessible.

The bishop’s contemporaries in the church are part of a generation of diocesan priests composed of essentially conservative white men, mostly Irish and Italian, frequently from working class or lower middle class backgrounds--a profile that has historically formed the backbone of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in America.

“Am I a liberal or a conservative?” McFarland asked in an earlier interview. “I don’t know what those words mean. I’m a man of faith.”

Because of the family name, many of Norman McFarland’s friends, classmates, colleagues and parishioners over the years assumed that he was Irish. In fact, he is the son of a Scottish father, who was a Southern Pacific Railroad worker and convert to Catholicism, and a devout woman whose family came from what is today Czechoslovakia.

Glenn, who inherited Norman’s bedroom when his older brother went off to a Catholic preparatory school, recalled the “magnificent view” from the bedroom window, which faced the church, and imagined its impact on his brother.

“Some nights you could see the full moon behind the steeple,” he said.

Not that young Norman was always devout.

According to Louis Menesini, a fellow altar boy who lived behind the church, those altar boys who lived nearby were liable to be drafted for additional masses, summoned by a whistle by the priest, if someone else failed to show up on schedule.

Once, however, both boys took off in opposite directions when they heard the whistle, with McFarland hiding in the woodshed behind his house.

As the bishop noted shortly after his appointment as head of the Diocese of Orange, the greatest influence on him, next to his mother, was “personal contact with a priest who was happy,” a gifted young priest named William Reilly.

“I don’t know of any more joyous priest, who was more liked, than Father Reilly,” said Meninsini.

The youthful, gregarious priest, on his first assignment in Martinez, captivated and inspired the youngsters in everything from religious belief to marble shooting.

Home to Immigrants

Founded by Mexican settlers in the Alhambra Valley in the early 1800s, Martinez became home to Irish, Italian and Portuguese immigrants and had taken on a strongly Catholic cast by the time McFarland grew up there. There were truck farms, vineyards--including one operated by the Christian Brothers before they moved to the Napa Valley--and fishermen, before the Legislature banned commercial fishing in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The church grounds were considered “just like your backyard” by the young people, Glenn McFarland said. Nuns instructed youngsters under the olive and pepper trees, and olive pits were carved into rosary beads. Young people made cardboard sleds to slide down grassy Thomas Hill, not too far from the home of California naturalist John Muir.

At the age of 11, Norman McFarland left for middle and high school at St. Joseph’s College in Mountain View, near San Jose, followed by studies at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park.

At the seminary, classmate Denis Foudy found him “very clear-minded, very forthright.” He was a vigorous and active participant in intramural athletics and, in football, “he could kick like a son-of-a-gun,” said Foudy, who also went on to the priesthood.

First Mass at Home

After being ordained in 1946--just old enough at 23--McFarland returned to St. Catherine’s in Martinez to serve his first mass.

McFarland asked his old friend, Louis Menesini, to serve as an altar boy. Menesini agreed but all through the service wondered nervously how to address his boyhood buddy. After the service, he asked the new priest.

“It’s ‘Norm,’ Louie,” Menesini recalled being told, as McFarland put him at ease.

Despite his academic bent and his early inclination to pastoral work, after only two years as a parish priest in Oakland, McFarland was sent to study canon law--a subject Foudy said was not his favorite--at Catholic University in Washington. When he returned he was assigned to the San Francisco Diocese’s marriage tribunal.

On the panel, which decides which marriages can be annulled or dissolved, “he was kind of a strict constructionist,” said Msgr. John Foudy, brother of Denis Foudy, who worked at the diocesan headquarters during this period.

During the 1950s, while serving on the tribunal, McFarland also taught theology at San Francisco College for Women, founded by the Sacred Heart Order of nuns.

One of his students was Sharon Chadbourne, then a headstrong young woman with serious doubts about the Catholic faith, who used the classroom rather than a private meeting as a forum for her concerns.

“I threw every question in the book at him,” she said. “I couldn’t rattle him. I couldn’t make him angry. I never talked to him as a friend.”

At the time, McFarland was living at St. Brendan’s parish in San Francisco, where he was considered “in residence.” That meant that he had a regular job with the diocese and that whatever additional duties he decided to assume in the evenings or weekends were voluntary.

‘Extremely Popular’

In McFarland’s case, the involvement was considerable.

“He was extremely popular here because of his parish participation,” recalled retired Superior Court Judge William Mullins, who introduced himself to McFarland after one Mass at St. Brendan’s. “The parish response to him was just outstanding. And he was extremely well-prepared in his sermons.”

“We got really close,” Mullins said, with McFarland frequently having dinner with the Mullins family.

“He’d eat hot dogs if we were eating hot dogs,” Mullins said. For several years, McFarland joined the Mullins family for a week’s vacation at Lake Tahoe.

“He felt very much at home with us, probably because we didn’t give him any special treatment,” Mullins said. “He was very good with the kids. There was a certain warmth about him.”

While at St. Brendan’s, McFarland became reacquainted with his former student, Sharon Chadbourne, now Sharon Suhr and a young mother with four children.

It was the early 1960s, and Suhr again had questions, especially with regard to artificial contraception. Because “he’d always been so reasonable,” she said, she went to see him.

“I knocked on his door and introduced myself,” she said, and became reacquainted with his absolute commitment to telling the truth.

“He said he didn’t remember me,” she recalled. “He’s the soul of charm.”

But on substantive matters, much as she knew him when she was a student, McFarland was of great help.

“He didn’t pound the table. He didn’t get irrational,” she said. “He cleared my mind,” she said, by articulating the church’s position on contraception in a way she found she could accept.

“We started having him over for dinner,” Suhr said, eventually enlarging the dinner gatherings to a circle of married couples in their 30s and 40s.

Looking back, Suhr said her relationship with McFarland was “the most valuable friendship in my whole life. He’s always been so good about putting things in perspective.”

Even when she has disagreed with him, she said, “he wouldn’t let me be lazy intellectually.”

The process by which a young priest is singled out for advancement is never clear-cut, but about this time, his colleagues say, Norman McFarland evidently caught the eye of San Francisco’s Archbishop Joseph T. McGucken.

“McGucken had a great deal of confidence in him,” John Foudy said.

From that point McFarland’s career within the hierarchy was an upward trajectory of increasing responsibility: In 1965 he was appointed monsignor, and in 1968, in addition to his other duties, he was asked to update the statutes of the diocese, which comprise the rules and guidelines for priests.

Studies in Finance

Two years later, he was appointed auxiliary bishop and vicar general of the Diocese of San Francisco at the age of 48--then considered a relatively young age for such an appointment.

Just as McFarland had once devoted himself to the study of canon law, the subject he did not find compelling in the seminary, he threw himself into the study of finances and accounting--his primary responsibility as vicar general.

McFarland bought books on the subjects and studied them late into the night. He engaged the accounting firm of Peat, Marwick & Mitchell to compile the first comprehensive audit of the diocese.

McFarland also took seriously his pastoral obligations to parishioners at Mission Dolores. The historic church, founded by Father Junipero Serra, is also a working parish in the heart of San Francisco’s largely Latino Mission District.

Despite the belief that McFarland might one day succeed Bishop McGucken, few were surprised when he was appointed in 1974 to come to the aid of the Diocese of Reno-Las Vegas, which was then mired in debt. Nor were those in the church surprised two years later when, having put the diocese on the road to financial solidity, McFarland was appointed to head the diocese, a position he held until his appointment to the Diocese of Orange.

When Louis Menesini received a formal invitation to McFarland’s installation as auxiliary bishop of San Francisco, there was a handwritten note in a familiar hand beneath the signature. It read: “And it’s still ‘Norm.’ ”

The installation Mass for Bishop Norman F. McFarland is scheduled for 6 p.m. today at the Donald L. Bren Events Center at the intersection of Bridge Road and Mesa Road on the UC Irvine campus. It is open to the public. Free parking is available on most university lots after 5 p.m.

Three new auxiliary bishops were installed in the Los Angeles Archdiocese. Part I, Page 17.