San Diego Bishop Shows New Style of Church Leadership : Catholics: After year in office, Brom appears more involved with laity and less patriarchal than his predecessor. Unlike Maher, he keeps low political profile.

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’s 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.

* 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 Murrieta 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 Father Jim Rafferty. “They want to believe what they think they hear, that Brom is with us in all things, and that he’s evenhanded and aboveboard,” said Rafferty, contrasting Brom’s self-described collaborative style of leadership to the patriarchal control of his predecessor.

In his converted, three-bedroom seminarian apartment on the campus of the University of San Diego, Brom cooks for himself.

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.

Here, then, is the spiritual executive for San Diego’s 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. He was 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.

During his 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 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.

On July 10, 1990, 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 have 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.

Among other things, the laity was called to take a greater role and responsibility. 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 instead of in Latin.

Priests and lay church leaders in San Diego who have watched Brom in action say he embodies that spirit.

He 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.

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--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.

In another distinction between his leadership and Maher’s, Brom is decidely moving away from his predecessor’s unilateral management style and involving the laity in church operations.

A diocesan advisory council is made up predominantly of lay people. One of Brom’s two personal assistants is a layman. Lay people head diocesan offices on stewardship and development, ethnic affairs, human life and development.

Although Brom may be seemingly less accessible 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 pastoral visits to spend three days at each of the diocese’s 99 parishes, where he teaches the youth, preaches at Masses, visits the sick, administers the church’s sacraments and socializes with parishioners.

So far, Brom has visited 29 parishes.

Despite his outreach efforts, Brom has still been criticized by members of the diocese’s largest ethnic group--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.

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.

Brom’s agenda, say those who have watched him closely, is decidely more spiritual than was Maher’s. Even as he uses bureaucratic-looking flowcharts 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.

“Many times I wonder if I’ve led 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.’ ”