Portrait of a Bishop : Brom Wins Support With New Style of Leadership

Here is Robert H. Brom, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of San Diego:

* To a classroom of first-, second- and third-graders at the St. Therese Academy in Del Cerro, he’s explaining the significance of his formal wardrobe. “Sometimes I feel like a great big billboard,” he says, adorned in the fancy black-and-red garments that reflect his clerical ranking.

“When I was made bishop, I went to the bishop’s store to get the things I would need. I asked the man what the shape of the celebration hat meant and he said, ‘I don’t know. Just pay your bill.’ ”

After his engaging show-and-tell--during which he dresses one of the students in bishop regalia--first one and then another and then the entire classroom of children spontaneously breaks ranks to give the bishop a hug.

* Dining with about 50 lay leaders at St. Therese Parish that night, he says he can excuse them if they feel intimidated by his presence.

“For three days after I became a bishop,” he deadpanned, “I could hardly sleep with myself.”

* To a luncheon meeting of the San Diego Rotary Club, made up of some of San Diego’s most powerful and influential businessmen--by and large, a tough and non-Catholic audience--he’s explaining his agenda to address the region’s most pressing social needs, primarily involving ethnic diversity and the woes of Third World immigrants to San Diego.

Afterward, he is rewarded with a reaction not commonly meted out by these professionals and civic leaders: a standing ovation.

“He wasn’t what I expected at all,” offered Rotary President Dr. Fred Frye, former commodore of the San Diego Yacht Club. “At that level, you don’t normally find someone as charming as the parish priest.”

* In a field in North County, he celebrates Mass in Spanish for several dozen migrant farm workers, remarking later that he’s never witnessed--except by way of missionary films--such poverty. The scene strikes Brom as all the more stark because it is framed by San Diego’s wealth.

After Mass, Brom surprises the farm workers by staying with them for lunch, mingling in their ranks. He speaks with such conversational ease in Spanish that even a Spanish-speaking priest who was an initial critic of the appointment of an Anglo bishop to San Diego is amazed by how quickly Brom has learned the language--and won the hearts of these awed laborers.

* At a Murrietta Hot Springs retreat center, he meets for three days with his priests and elicits from them what they want of him as boss. He introduces a new finance officer for the diocese--a layman--and then surprises the group by laying out for their own inspection the diocese’s audit report.

It’s a breakthrough in a diocese previously marked by such distrust over the historic management of finances that some pastors discreetly squirreled away parish funds in community banks rather than entrust them to the diocese accounts--and the spending plans of Leo T. Maher, the previous bishop.

“Priests are still guarded, but they’ve come out of their bomb shelters, put down their weapons and have taken off their helmets,” said the Rev. Jim Rafferty. “They want to believe what they think they hear, that Brom is with us in all things, and that he’s even-handed and aboveboard,” said Rafferty, contrasting Brom’s self-described collaborative style of leadership to the patriarchal control of his predecessor. “Morale (among priests) is cautiously high.”

* In his converted, three-bedroom seminarian apartment on the campus of the University of San Diego, this man who cooks for himself prepares his favorite dish for guests: spaghetti ala carbonara--olive oil, egg, bacon and Parmesan cheese.

If he’s alone, he’ll be torn between reading a Vatican document or the morning newspaper while listening to classical music--or watching baseball on television.

He’ll get up at 6 the next morning, do calisthenics, fix himself breakfast, fulfill his morning prayer regimen, celebrate Mass at 8 and be in his office by 9 for a day that probably won’t include lunch.

His mother thinks Robert Brom is most at peace when he puts on some old work shoes and a pair of jeans and gets up to his elbows in potting soil. “I think he misses his yard,” said Lucille Brom, by phone from the family home in Winona, Minn. “He liked to putz around in it.” In San Diego, Brom will find solitude by walking on the beach or in the hills around Julian.

Here, then, is the spiritual executive for San Diego’s 600,000 or so registered Catholics, a man whose appointment in April, 1989, surprised some because he was a lily-white Minnesotan whose idea of “bilingual” was English and Latin, assigned by the Vatican to shepherd a diocese where Latinos make up the majority of the Catholic population, estimated at more than 700,000.

Among his first orders from the Vatican: Learn Spanish. He did, after intensive schooling in Mexico for a month and follow-up tutoring in San Diego.

During that first year here, he served--more ceremoniously than functionally--alongside the retirement-bound and cancer-stricken Maher, the controversial, strong-willed and political Irishman who led the San Diego diocese through 20 years of explosive growth.

During that yearlong transition, San Diego Catholics were introduced to a man who smiles as readily with his brown eyes as he does with his mouth, a fit-and-trim man with graying but only slightly thinning hair who could, in a business suit, easily pass as the doctor or lawyer he once considered being.

Last July 10, the 75-year-old Maher formally retired--seven months before his death--and Brom, 52, for six years the bishop of Duluth, Minn., took over. Some say that, although Maher’s legacy is a diocese with ample flesh and bones, now it needed a heart and soul.

And those who have encountered Brom or been affected by his decisions are now talking--in some cases, almost gleefully--of what’s in store for the San Diego Diocese, which includes Imperial County.

They say Brom already has, in one year, done more to bring the local Catholic Church in line with the historic revisions called by the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s than did Maher during his 20 years in office.

The Vatican Council, which opened in 1962 under Pope John XXIII and concluded in 1965 under his successor, Pope Paul VI, was intended to spiritually renew the church on several fronts.

Among other things, the laity was called to take a greater role and responsibility in the church. Its bishops were called to be more pastoral. The liturgy, or church ceremonies and rites, was revised to be more meaningful and of relevance to the laity--leading, among other things, to the celebration of the Mass in the vernacular versus in Latin.

The physical layout of the church building itself--by bringing the altar out into the congregation and for the priest to say Mass by facing the people, rather than having his back to them, for instance--was ordered. And friction between Catholics and Jews, and between Catholics and other Christians was addressed by a new church call for ecumenism and mutual respect for all God-based religions.

Priests and lay church leaders in San Diego who have watched Brom in action say he embodies this Vatican II spirit, primarily through the simplicity and constancy of his spiritual message of love and of how all church followers, regardless of rank, have a role in ministering to one another.

Brom has introduced lay leaders into some of the diocese’s highest-ranking posts; he has applauded new, untraditional church designs, and he has aggressively set out to meet rank-and-file Catholics on their own turf--in the parish hall--rather than hold court in his bishop’s office.

It’s clear, already, what Brom won’t be.

Unlike Maher--who grabbed headlines for his pointed outspokenness on school-based health clinics and for publicly banning Communion for Catholic state Sen. Lucy Killea (D-San Diego) because of her political position on abortion--Brom says he hopes to keep his name out of the newspapers.

He says any discussions between him and Killea are private, and he says he has no intention of being baited into public pronouncements on specific abortion and birth-control issues. (For her part, Killea will say only that she has talked with Brom but won’t discuss the content. She continues to not receive communion in San Diego--but does receive communion in Sacramento.)

Brom says he would like to avoid issues that, in the long term, may be considered flash-in-the-pan.

Earlier this month, for instance, the diocese office released a statement saying, simply, that it would not oppose the establishment of school-based health clinics as long as they do not include abortion or birth control services, counseling or referrals. Brom says he doesn’t anticipate the diocese specifically campaigning for or against individual health clinics because the general statement should suffice.

But that statement angered some anti-abortionists who say the diocese should flatly oppose such clinics altogether because they could ultimately provide such services, once established on school campuses.

Brom says he--or his delegates--will provide generic statements on church teachings, practices and policies so Catholics will know the church’s guidelines and direction and apply them to their own lives.

But, he said, the diocese should not be drawn into specific issues because it could result in an endless volley of public debate.

“To get unnecessarily involved in contemporary issues and topics is to trivialize the office of the bishop,” Brom says. “The bishop proposes the teachings, and says what is inconsistent with those teachings. But in terms of follow-through, he can’t mandate conformity. He can do no more than teach and propose, and call the people to enflesh these in their political decisions, regarding the social and political life of our country. It’s up to the people to apply the guidelines and principles to the particular situation.

“I’m not trying to dodge my responsibility, but to carefully and responsibly exercise it with pastoral discretion.”

In another distinction between his leadership and Maher’s, Brom is decidely moving away from his predecessor’s unilateral management style and embracing, instead, post-Vatican II attitudes and mandates towards the laity’s involvement in church operations.

Observed Msgr. Fred Florek of the two bishops’ styles: “Maher was formed in the old church, where the bishop was lord and teacher and took strong stands. Brom is a model of the post-Vatican II church, of collaboration and dialogue.”

As telling as anything, Brom quickly brought a 14-chair conference table into his office.

And Brom wasted no time in initiating a sweeping restructuring of the local church’s internal bureaucracy, dramatically widening the role of lay church members by placing them in key positions of authority and delegating them powers that his predecessor guarded for himself.

A diocesan advisory council is made up predominantely of lay people. One of Brom’s two personal assistants is a layman. Lay people head diocese offices on stewardship and development, ethnic affairs, human life and development, and as of June 1, the diocesan Office for Financial Affairs--a post dictated by Vatican II 25 years ago as it encouraged priests in general to relinquish administrative chores for pastoral and spiritual ones.

“If Bishop Maher had formally named anybody to be a finance officer, they didn’t perform,” said Vincent Whelan, a San Diego attorney specializing in financial matters who is the diocese’s new finance officer. “I haven’t found a single document signed by a finance officer. I think Bishop Maher felt he had everything under control and was doing fine and didn’t need a finance officer, thank you very much.”

The delegation of authority to lay people and various commissions has upset those people who had little difficulty seeing Bishop Maher in the old days.

“Bishop Maher told me last year, ‘Joan, be sure to make an appointment right away to see Bishop Brom, and tell him you’re considered a leader in the diocese on this (anti-abortion) issue, that you’ve worked closely with me. Let him know what kind of work you’ve done,’ ” said Joan Patton, a Catholic and president of the Right to Life Council of San Diego County.

But Patton says she’s been unable to meet with Brom, and instead has been referred to the diocese’s human life and development office to press her case for diocesan involvement in anti-abortion issues.

“I’m saddened and depressed and am so frustrated that I feel like throwing in the towel,” Patton said of her inability to meet the bishop. “There must be a reason that some of us are called upon to take this kind of punishment.”

Brom’s response to those who haven’t been allowed to see him at his office:

“People say they want to see the bishop himself and I say, ‘What happened to Vatican II?’ Vatican II called for collaborative leadership. My agenda is to accomplish the mission of the church in a collaborative style, and to move to an organizational style that reflects the theology of the church.

“First there was Big Daddy,” he said, referring to the bishop’s traditional role in a diocese. “Then we gave them Big Brother and Big Sister,” he said, referring to lay leadership’s emergence in recent years, “and the people loved it. But when they don’t like what Big Brother and Sister do, they want Big Daddy still.

“Well, I’ve enabled (lay leaders) to be an extension of me (as bishop). And if I’m going to validate that system, then people will have to follow it. If I allow end-runs around my delegates, I deserve to have this management system collapse.”

Not everyone is thrilled with the delegation. Jim Holman, editor and owner of the Reader and himself an active and conservative Catholic, said he was frustrated that, in trying to promote anti-abortion issues, he was steered away from Brom and to the office of human life and development.

“The idea of delegating authority is smart--if you have people who can be trusted,” he said. “My complaint is that people he’s chosen to delegate to seem to be extremely anxious to distance themselves from the pro-life issue.”

For that reason, Holman last year began publishing San Diego Catholic News Notes, a four-page monthly distributed free to, he says, 7,000 persons.

Rosemary Johnston runs the office that rejected Holman’s requests that the diocese support various anti-abortion ads in the diocesan newspaper, the Southern Cross, as well as promise financial assistance, at the parish level, for unwed mothers, and to allow a voters’ guide on abortion issues to be distributed outside church doors after Sunday masses.

Johnston said the ads were too graphic, that the promise of financial aid to unwed mothers was an unfair financial burden to parishes and that the voters’ guide was too narrowly focused, based on a lawyer’s opinion from the headquarters office of U.S. Catholic bishops.

Holman got no appeal to the bishop. “People buy into this empowerment of the laity, but then the advocacy groups all still want the bishop at their meetings, to make statements on their issues, to meet with them,” Johnson said. “And we want to avoid those kinds of end-arounds.”

While Brom may be seemingly less accessible in his office than was Maher--who frequently held court for visitors--Brom clearly is more in evidence in his parishes, where Maher usually would only appear for formal occasions such as church dedications or to confirm young Catholic adults.

Brom has embarked on a three-year schedule of so-called pastoral visits to spend three days at each of the diocese’s 99 parishes. The visits usually are conducted about every three weeks, on a Friday-through-Sunday.

Spending virtually every waking hour in that parish, he teaches the youth, preaches at Masses, visits the sick, administers the church’s sacraments and socializes with parishioners.

“He wowed them,” said one San Diego pastor after Brom visited his parish. Most of the parishioners, the priest said, had previously only seen a bishop from a safely reverent ceremonial distance, at best, and on this visit they were able to shake the bishop’s hand, talk with him, laugh with him, and, at dinner, share a cocktail.

In contrast, Maher typically would preach from the pulpit and stand outside of church to politely greet exiting parishioners but, otherwise, usually retreated after such parish appearances to the local rectory, for dinner with his priests.

So far, Brom has visited 29 parishes in the diocese, a road tour that is showcasing the man’s charisma and generating for him the kind of rank-and-file popularity that Maher never enjoyed.

“I’m getting to see everybody in the world,” he beamed. And he holds that the life of the Catholic Church is found, ultimately, in its local parish people.

“The church will flourish in its parishes, or not flourish at all,” he says. “That’s where we hear the word of God, and have it explained, and where we celebrate the sacraments and hear the Beatitudes. For most believers, the parish is where it happens. And being in the parishes energizes me as bishop.”

But despite his outreach efforts, Brom has still been criticized by members of the diocese’s largest ethnic block--Latinos--for what they say is his insensitivity to their needs.

Daniel Munoz, editor of La Prensa, a weekly bilingual newspaper with 17,000 readers, says he has the names of 1,500 Latinos who are mad at the bishop for not recruiting and assigning more Latino priests to serve in Spanish-speaking parishes.

Munoz also criticized Brom for removing from Auxiliary Bishop Gilbert Chavez the title of Vicar General--or, essentially, deputy bishop--for Hispanic Affairs. Instead, Chavez is simply and more broadly Vicar General over the entire diocese.

Munoz contends that removing the more specific title was an insult to both Chavez and Catholic Latinos.

Roberto Martinez, a former diocesan employee who now works for the American Friends Service Committee, echoes Munoz’s complaint and says, furthermore, that he is upset that the Padre Hidalgo Center, a church-funded but mostly autonomous Latino evangelization and leadership training center in Imperial Beach, is being restructured as a unit within the diocese’s new Office for Latino Affairs, and may be relocated to the USD campus.

That restructuring, Martinez argued, is a slap in the face of Chavez, who established the center in 1972.

But Rodrigo Valdivia, one of Brom’s two personal assistants, scoffs at the criticism.

While clearly there are not enough Spanish-speaking priests in the diocese, Valdivia says, Brom is hardly in a position to recruit more from Mexico and Central America because there are even proportionately fewer Catholic priests to serve the faithful there.

The restructuring of the Padre Hidalgo Center is intended to ultimately provide the outreach center with even more diocese resources, Valdivia says.

Brom himself says that he removed the title of Vicar General of Hispanic Affairs from Chavez because church law doesn’t call for a person to hold that rank for a specific group within the church.

Brom acknowledges the frustration among Latinos that the diocese do more for Latinos. “They’re anxious because they want things done immediately,” he said. “Well, we have to bring about change in a way that won’t be Band-Aid or hit-and-miss, but be really precise and thorough and long-lasting. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Enrique Mendez has worked for the Padre Hidalgo center since 1973, and headed it since 1982, and credits the center for successfully lobbying the diocese to move more pro-actively in recruiting and utilizing Latinos as diocese and parish leadership.

And he says that he, for one, has enjoyed greater access to diocesan headquarters since Brom’s arrival. “In 10 years, I met with Bishop Maher three times. In the past year,” he said, “I’ve already met with Bishop Brom three times.”

Brom gets good marks from others in the community--including those from outside the Catholic Church.

“Bishop Brom is fostering new enthusiasm that there are a lot of things we can do, together, to promote social justice in San Diego,” said the Rev. Vaughan Lyons, executive director of the San Diego County Ecumenical Conference. “That feeling was not nurtured by Maher.”

Morris S. Casuto, director of the San Diego office of the Anti-Defamation League, recalled when Brom met with his directors and other Jewish leaders in San Diego to discuss how to improve relations between Catholics and Jews.

Reconciliation between Catholics and Jews already was occuring under Bishop Maher, he said, and Jews were anxious to meet Brom for the first time, as a kind of ice-breaker, to get an initial reading of what the future might hold with him.

“What impressed us was that he was extremely friendly and far less imbued with the sense of self-importance (than Maher). When one approaches a bishop of the Catholic Church, he looks at the office, not the human being. But Bishop Brom is extremely personable. He laughs easily, smiles fully, and was able to set a tone of general informality.”

Brom says he’s still amazed by the outpouring of support he’s received in San Diego. “I have never before felt so intensely welcomed for over such a long period of time,” he said.

He says he’s not sure how to measure what impact he’s had on the diocese.

Brom’s agenda, say those who have watched him closely, is decidely more spiritual than was Maher’s. Even as he uses bureaucratic-looking flow charts to illustrate his religious message, Brom’s theme from parish to parish is for the people to fall into communion with God and, once that unity is achieved, to become missionaries of God’s love.

He likes to tell teen-agers to join his version of a 4-H Club by expressing happiness, healthiness, humanness and holiness. “And if they ask me which is the least important, I tell them holiness, and to replace it with humor,” he says.

“Many times I wonder if I’ve lead people to communion with God or not, because that is the purpose of the mission in the church. Are they more in communion with God, for my having been there, for what I’ve done?”

But he says he won’t lose any sleep over the question.

“Every night, I say the prayer that Pope John XXIII said every night: ‘It’s your church, Lord. I’m going to bed.’ ”