THE PAPAL VISIT : Speech to Pope Puts Priest in Spotlight, Creates Ripple

Until late Thursday, Father Frank J. McNulty found his prominence limited to Sunday sermons in his small, Roseland, N.J., parish, which he sometimes ditched to catch New York Giants games.

But then he stood six feet from Pope John Paul II in a Miami church and in a voice strong with conviction, offered an unusually blunt description--for a priest addressing a Pope--of American priestly concerns. More than 700 priests gathered around him broke into repeated applause.

To outsiders, the Thursday meeting was the most visible sign yet of the drift between Rome’s traditional Catholic dictums and the dissenting American church--and a remarkable departure from the commonplace submission of priests to the pontiff.

But not to McNulty. The man who caused a national ripple saw the meeting not as a confrontation but as a reaffirmation of links between the church’s highest officer and its 57,000 “unsung heroes”--everyday priests.

“He was so warm,” McNulty said enthusiastically in a telephone interview from Miami on Friday, still reveling in the memory. “As I finished, he stood up and kind of opened his arms, and I went up and he gave me an embrace. That was a great feeling. I felt like he was embracing 57,000 of us.”

The Pope’s first words, he said, were, “Thank you.”

It was a stunningly personal--yet public--moment for the 60-year-old McNulty, who has spent more than half his life in the calling he first felt while a boy in New Jersey.

The son of a laborer, McNulty and his two sisters were raised in a “very faithful” Catholic home.

“I got a lot of affirmation from friends when I said I wanted to be a priest--a lot different than what you get now,” he said.

He was ordained 35 years ago after studies at the Immaculate Conception seminary in Darlington, N.J. He spent nine years at a parish in Jersey City before returning to the seminary to teach.

A decade ago, he was appointed vicar of the Newark archdiocese, a post that made him minister to local priests. More than a year ago, he took over as pastor of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament Church in Roseland.

National Retreats

All of the posts--and a side job organizing national retreats for priests--gave him an insight into the thinking of Catholic officials that came in handy when, in December, he was told to prepare a speech for the Pope.

The executive committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops chose McNulty for the job, he suspects, because of the breadth of his experience and because he is a pastor, someone “they felt priests could identify with.”

He thought about it and prayed about it and eventually circulated six drafts to fellow priests and bishops “to know if I had the issues down,” he said.

The result was a speech tender in its reflection of the joys and worries of parish priests and frank in its assessment of the church’s current troubles.

The value of celibacy, he said, “has eroded and continues to erode in the minds of many.” He urged further exploration of the role of women in the church and called for “freedom” for theologians, a reference to recent Vatican crackdowns on liberal church teachers.

McNulty’s personal positions illustrate the difficulties surrounding change in the church. A self-described “centrist,” he has yet to come to a decision on whether he believes celibacy should be optional for male priests or if women should be ordained.

“We have to always read the signs of the times,” he said. “(But) I couldn’t even come to an opinion on either. It’s not an opinion easily reached. . . . Both are longstanding traditions.”

While John Paul did not discuss directly the controversial issues raised by McNulty, he did offer more general support for parish priests in his speech at St. Martha’s Church.

‘Direct Response’

“I was delighted,” McNulty said. “Over and over, (as the Pope talked), I said, ‘That’s a direct response to me.’ ”

McNulty sent a copy of his speech to Rome a month ago but was never asked to tone down his remarks, he said.

“At the beginning I felt very called to honesty,” he said. “To the end, I started to feel a real reverence for the Holy Father.

“I wanted to try to think of ways to show him, to make it human and warm. Mine is a storytelling style, and I like poetry. So I started with a story and ended with his own poem.”

The poem with which he ended the speech was, “Thought’s Resistance to Words,” an ode by Karol Wojtyla--now the Pope. “We stand facing truth,” it reads, “and lack the words.”

When John Paul II left the Miami church, he told McNulty privately, “You found good words.” Then he gave McNulty a rosary.

“His face was so accepting,” McNulty said. “I just felt he liked what I said.”

What mattered more, though, was the reaction of hundreds of priests and bishops who listened to the speech and came to him in thanks.

“Several of them,” McNulty said with a catch in his voice, “said I feel so much better today being a priest.”