Trinidad Sees Its U.S. Archbishop as Vatican Slight

When the Vatican named the Rev. Edward J. Gilbert archbishop of this cosmopolitan and welcoming country, some of his new priests branded the appointment an “insult,” “a disfigurement of Caribbean identity” and a step toward the “cultural annihilation” of Trinidad.

Nothing personal, the priests insisted in their rare public protest.

It’s just that Trinidad and Tobago’s newly installed Roman Catholic archbishop isn’t Trinidadian. He’s American and a native of New York City. He’s white. And he’s replaced a beloved ethnic Trinidadian prelate who, for more than three decades, played a major role in shaping the Roman Catholic Church here and in keeping the racial and religious peace.

The appointment has staggered a church already in crisis, sending shock waves through an institution that represents a third of the nation’s 1.3 million people.

Here’s how the Rev. Clyde Harvey, a Trinidadian priest for a quarter of a century, put it: “I have nothing against Bishop Gilbert as a person. He is a very charming man. However, I never thought that I would see this archdiocese made part of the process of recolonization of our people--American-style.”

Gilbert’s response? He turns the other cheek: “No offense taken.”

“I’m well aware,” the Brooklyn-born prelate added, “that this is all part of a far broader debate.”

It is, in fact, a burning debate among Catholics worldwide about the relationship between the so-called local church and the universal church headquartered in the Vatican.

Nearly 40 years after Rome ushered in a radical policy of “indigenization” to root the church more firmly in its local cultures, several Trinidadian priests say Gilbert’s appointment hints at a trend toward “re-Romanization” to put the church back in the hands of doctrinal, foreign administrators.

The Caribbean church’s ranks have been declining for a decade as many have left the faith for evangelical or Pentecostal orders largely based in America. One long-serving Trinidadian priest, Christian Pereira, calls them “quick-fix entertainment religions marketed as consumer products.”

What’s more, the Catholic Church has been the target of growing verbal--and even physical--attacks. In January, two self-proclaimed Rastafarians now on trial for murder in the Caribbean nation of St. Lucia said they were doing the work of their God, Jah, when they beat a nun to death, set fire to a priest who later died and maimed several parishioners during high Mass in that country’s main cathedral.

Gilbert’s appointment this month and the debate about the church’s direction here and elsewhere in the developing world also feed into even deeper concerns about a U.S.-driven world economy that threatens to overwhelm local cultures and customs.

“The church is one of the few institutions--some would say the only one--which have the spiritual and organizational resources to help regions like our own combat the onslaught of globalization,” Trinidadian priest Martin Sirju wrote in an essay blasting Gilbert’s appointment.

“The tragedy of this appointment is that it sends the message that the Caribbean church is not ready for this prophetic role. . . . To appoint an American bishop to the See of Port-of-Spain . . . sets the church here back 25 years.”

Trinidad is, by far, the United States’ closest ally in the Caribbean, an enthusiastic and strategic partner in the war against drugs.

U.S. companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this oil- and gas-rich economy, the Caribbean’s largest. U.S. television, music, fashion and architecture are the rage here, and one Trinidadian newspaper columnist recently suggested that Gilbert’s appointment as prelate was thus most appropriate.

Oddly, perhaps, Gilbert bristled at such logic. He may well adore baseball, football, golf and the nation of his birth, expressing deep pride in his long church career in administration, teaching and canon law in New York, Virginia and Maryland. But he sounded even more passionate than many of his priests about the threat of so-called cultural pollution.

“I’m very afraid that globalization is going to swallow the values of cultures and create the international society, where everyone is going to look alike, talk alike, dress alike,” he said. “It’s a much bigger issue than Trinidad, although it’s a very important issue here.”

In an interview in his spartan office at the British colonial-era Archbishop’s House in Port-of-Spain, the 64-year-old Gilbert projected himself as a tough, silver-haired administrator and self-described “structuralist” who shepherds his flock as piously as his faculties of faith.

“My style is to be close to the people but all business,” he said, insisting that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. “I’m a bottom-line person.”

He flatly rejected persistent local speculation that his appointment was a message of supremacy from Rome. “One of the things they will see very, very quickly,” he said, “is that all the major appointments in this archdiocese will be with local people.

“If I try to debate the broader philosophical issue of local church and universal church, I can’t win it. I’m going to show them by involving them, by encouraging them to articulate their own identity and their own future. I’m going to help them make more precise what their identity is.”

As for the legacy of his predecessor--and friend--Archbishop Anthony Pantin, Gilbert said: “It’s a tough act to follow, if I try to be him. I have no intention of being him. I have my own gifts and my own abilities, and I’ll use them the best I can.”

Pantin, who died of a heart attack 14 months ago, was known as the “people’s priest.” He was Trinidad’s first native bishop, named to the post during the heady 1960s when the Vatican responded to black activism, nationalism and anti-colonialism with its policy of indigenization.

Pantin chose to live in Trinidad’s poorest parish during his first five years as archbishop. He drove a Volkswagen Bug. He picked up hitchhikers. He was adored by the poor. And he alienated many among the nation’s rich.

As a result, Trinidad’s wealthy have embraced their new U.S. archbishop almost as publicly and readily as poorer Trinidadians and their priests have voiced their concerns.

But the polarization that looms as a potential nightmare for Trinidad is not entirely economic. There is almost constant friction between the country’s two largest communities--the descendants of largely Catholic African slaves and those of the Hindu and Muslim East Indian indentured workers brought in to replace the slaves after emancipation.

The two communities each represent about 40% of the population; most of the remainder are of Middle Eastern, Asian and European descent. Trinidad’s two major political parties are divided largely along racial lines. The present government is the first of the predominantly Indian, Hindu party since Trinidad’s independence from Britain in 1962, and it has taken pains to not comment publicly on Gilbert’s appointment.

A similar racial divide in nearby Guyana has exploded in violence in recent years, crippling the nation’s economy. Many analysts fear the same here, noting Pantin’s role in defusing frequent crises.

Yet Gilbert, who served for the last seven years as bishop in the Caribbean island of Dominica--where he overcame similar early concerns to win high marks and respect--says he believes that Trinidad’s demographic dynamic contributed to his latest appointment.

When asked whether his foreign background would bar him from intervening in such delicate matters lest he risk charges of meddling in Trinidad’s internal affairs, he said, “Absolutely not.

“No. 1, because I am very smart. No. 2, because I’m none of the above. I am not African. I am not Indian. I’m not Lebanese. I’m not Oriental. And it wouldn’t surprise me if that wasn’t part of the decision that led to my appointment here.”

Gilbert professed ignorance of why the Vatican appointed him, a process that is complex and thorough--and secret. He says he was given no agenda by the apostolic nuncio, Swiss Bishop Emil Paul Tscherrig, who serves as the Vatican’s ambassador here, let alone by Rome. And Gilbert declined to speculate about the message it was intended to send to Trinidad and the region.

The nuncio only hinted at the Vatican’s logic, suggesting when it announced Gilbert’s appointment that the decision could be a “wake-up” call for the church in Trinidad and Tobago. And that combined with public speculation that Gilbert was some kind of CEO sent in to clean up the Trinidadian church triggered some of the most virulent protests here.

Many saw it as an attack on Pantin’s legacy and on Trinidad, a nation that houses the region’s only major Catholic seminary, a nation that has produced three bishops now serving in other Caribbean countries and a regional trendsetter with deep national pride.

During meetings with hundreds of Trinidadian priests, other clergy and the laity in the days since his May 5 installation, Gilbert said he has stressed: “You’re drawing the wrong conclusion. My appointment does not send the message that there are not people here who are qualified to do the job.”

In the interview, however, Gilbert appeared to have supreme confidence that he is up to the challenges ahead. He said he only “chuckled” at the “chief executive officer” description because, in many ways, he is.

“I’m a pragmatist,” he said, adding that he prides himself on his ability to improve administration and clarify doctrine, ethics and liturgy in a church that he and many others believe “have allowed them to become a bit foggy.”

He said he learned in Dominica that the church has lost members largely because it failed to go after them when their attendance lapsed.

What distances Gilbert from hard-driving executives in the corporate world, he said, is his realization years ago that patience pays off.

“The key to this is you have to give up six months to a year, because you have to spend that time listening,” he said, stressing that all of his priests--even critics of his appointment--have pledged to collaborate with him.

“I’m not saying I can’t play hardball when I have to,” he added, “but I rarely have to.”

The editor of the diocese’s weekly newspaper Catholic News, Trinidadian priest Michel de Verteuil, was among the earliest critics of Gilbert’s appointment. In recent weeks, however, the priest has had an even more positive spin than Archbishop Gilbert.

“I believe we are mature enough as a local church to move forward from this crisis,” De Verteuil said. “We will emerge stronger and more united--and also more real.”