Bishop René Henry Gracida has died. We will miss him.
Bishop Gracida was a stalwart defender of the faith and of the republic, and grateful to both.
Of how many shepherds can we say the same today?
Bishop Gracida and I met long ago, in the early 1980s. I realized quickly that he was a patriot as well as a prelate.
At the time, the bishop, ordinary of the Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee, had already become well known as an American hero. A New Orleans native, he served in the Army Air Forces in World War II, flying 32 combat missions in the European theatre.
When we met, I was staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. My tasks involved frequent official visits to countries south of the border. State Department embassy officials who hosted me in various countries were often surprised when I requested the opportunity to visit the country’s Catholic bishops, not only in the capital but in the hinterlands.
When those bishops were advised of my request to see them, they were surprised as well, but they were also pleased: most of them had little contact with the embassy. Apart from representatives of agencies administering USAID’s foreign aid programs, they usually saw few American officials at all.
In those meetings, it didn’t take long to allay any suspicions on the part of my hosts (uh-oh, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help”). We quickly put those concerns aside and focused on fundamentals.
Of these, two were most prominent: First, many Latin American bishops in the 1980s were not Liberation Theology fanatics. On the contrary: they realized that millions of the faithful had left the pews when revolutionary doctrine had mounted the pulpit. In fact, many of their priests had been radicalized, some of them even defiant in their support of the revolutionary movements active in their own countries.
Those bishops weren’t revolutionaries. And they quickly recognized that, unlike their American episcopal colleagues, I wasn’t either.
I was surprised at how strongly many of them supported President Reagan’s efforts to help Latin American countries combat the leftist revolutionaries that threatened their people. Mario Cardinal Casariego, archbishop of Guatemala City, told me bluntly that some of his priests simply refused to desist from their outright and public support of the violent revolutionaries terrorizing the country.
And there arose the second fundamental: America’s bishops. “Why are your bishops supporting the Sandinistas and the other leftist movements down here? And why is Catholic Charities working with all of those agencies that are pushing contraception on our people,” they asked.
They were right. The “Social Justice” crowd that Joseph Bernardin had installed in the U.S. Catholic Conference’s permanent bureaucracy in the 1970s was now running the show in Washington, and they adamantly opposed President Reagan’s policies, including his efforts to prevent Communist takeovers throughout Latin America.
Moreover, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s programs throughout the hemisphere were focusing on population control, and our State Department had succeeded in forcing countries who accepted aid to include “family planning” as part of their “healthcare” increment in AID assistance programs.
I had several contacts at the U.S. Catholic Conference’s tiny pro-life office in those days, but of course they could do nothing to help. In the late 1970s, Catholic historian James Hitchcock had already described the collapse of the USCC’s pro-life efforts in the run-up to the 1976 presidential elections, and the profusion of “Call to Action” radicals in the USCC’s bureaucracy in Washington.
Finally, in 1982 I made an appointment to visit Pio Cardinal Laghi, the papal nuncio in Washington, to share with him my concerns and those of his brother bishops.
Unfortunately, when I arrived at the Apostolic Nunciature, Fr. Blase Cupich, the American secretary, informed me that the cardinal was unfortunately “not available.”
He listened to me, stone-faced, for half an hour, saying nothing. It is fair to say that he was perhaps somewhat unreceptive.
Enter Bishop Gracida
But one American bishop was not. On a pleasant evening in early 1982, I found myself seated outside a Washington restaurant next to Bishop Gracida. After a long conversation, he told me that he would recommend me as a lay adviser to the USCC on Latin America.
But recommend to whom?
A certain John Carr was a member of the USCC staff. He had already worked for Bill Clinton as the executive director of the White House Conference on Families — yes, plural: gay marriage was on the rise.
Carr would eventually direct the USCC’s Department of Social Development and World Peace. He was Bernardin’s point man in the radical operation that my Latin American host prelates had condemned.
Needless to say, I never heard from the USCC.
While Bernardin might not have listened to Bishop Gracida, a lot of American Catholics sure did. For more than 40 years he became a fearless and trusted truth-teller.
In 2004, still-Cardinal McCarrick was expected to convey to the USCCB Cardinal Ratzinger’s explicit instruction regarding the application of Canon 915 to pro-abortion politicians employing Mario Cuomo’s notorious “I’m personally opposed, but . . .” mantra.
Instead, at the bishops’ 2004 meeting in Dallas, McCarrick covered it up.
Bishop Gracida was not pleased. Four months later he issued “A Twelve Step Program For Bishops” on the application of that canon that should be distributed to every American bishop — indeed, to every American — today.
An excerpt:
“Now, without doubt, the integrity of the Christian faith is under attack not just from without, but worse, from within the Church. It is under attack by Catholic politicians who publicly and obstinately support what in all truth is nothing less than heresy. By heresy I mean an obstinate denial or doubt of a core, nonnegotiable dogma of the faith proposed by the Magisterium as revealed doctrine, as set forth in Canon 751 of the Code of Canon Law of 1983 and amended in 1998.
“In my recently published essay, ‘The Arian Heresy Revisited,’ I tried to show that the heresy of the fourth century which denied the divinity of Christ, is the mirror-image of our modern heresy which denies the sanctity of the human person redeemed by His Incarnation, Passion, Death, and Resurrection.
“Heresy is indeed committed by supporting either the moral rectitude of abortion as a ‘human right,’ or absent that, professing merely the ‘civil right to abortion.’ Both of these errors are so diametrically opposed to the demands of Christian witness that to obstinately adhere to them automatically cuts one off from any hope of salvation. Any one Catholic who supports these two heresies risks eternal damnation. I say this to all who have fallen into this error with all the voice of reason and clarity possible, with the full and earnest hope of their swift return to the one Body of Christ.”
Bishop Gracida’s title is well-chosen: in 2014, USCCB President Cardinal Dolan admitted that bishops “don’t think it [Canon 915] is something for which we have to go to the mat” when addressing the problem of pro-abortion Catholic politicians.
What to do?
The title of the first pastoral letter issued by the newly formed U.S. bishops’ conference in 1919 read, A Program of Social Reconstruction. Perhaps today we might amend Bishop Gracida’s title to read, “A Suggested Twelve Step Recovery Program for the Theological Reconstruction of America’s Bishops Lost in the Social Justice Swamp.”
May Bishop René Henry Gracida rest in peace.
