Cardinal Tobin, New Newark Archbishop, Cites ‘Chasm Between Life and Faith’

By James Barron
New York Times
January 06, 2017

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/nyregion/cardinal-tobin-new-newark-archbishop-cites-chasm-between-life-and-faith.html

Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin greeting members of the church on Friday during his installation as the archbishop of Newark at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

A procession enters the cathedral in Newark for the Mass of Installation for Cardinal Tobin.

Cardinal Tobin speaks at the Mass of Installation where he became Newark’s archbishop. He said he was thankful for the job, though he described it as a “daunting proposition.”

NEWARK — In a ceremony that combined pageantry with a promise of a different style and approach, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin was installed on Friday as the archbishop of Newark.

In his homily, Cardinal Tobin said he was thankful for his new job, though he described it as “a daunting proposition.” But he focused his remarks on what he called “the chasm between life and faith.”

He had cited that chasm, he told a congregation that included bishops, priests and elected officials, when a woman at a recent dinner party asked him what he considered to be the greatest challenge facing the church. He said it was not the answer she was expecting.

“I imagine that she was ready for any of the so-called ‘hot-button’ issues that dominate the discourse, both inside and outside the church,” he said, calling such topics “noisy and divisive” without specifying any in particular.

The installation ceremony filled the soaring Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, which sits atop the highest hill in Newark and was designed to resemble the ancient houses of worship in Chartres and Reims in France. The Newark cathedral was begun at the end of the 19th century; its first public service was the installation of one of Cardinal Tobin’s predecessors, Bishop Thomas J. Walsh, in 1928.

But for all the pageantry, Cardinal Tobin is inheriting a troubled archdiocese. The archbishop he succeeded, John J. Myers, was denounced for the archdiocese’s handling of pedophile priests and for allocating more than $500,000 for an addition to his weekend house in Hunterdon County, N.J. The Star-Ledger of Newark hailed Archbishop Myers’s retirement last summer with an editorial that declared, “Blessed are we to be rid of this man.”

Cardinal Tobin, 64, took a vow of poverty when he was ordained nearly 40 years ago, and his unassuming ways proved popular in Indiana. Like Pope Francis, who at first drove himself around the Vatican in a Renault with 190,000 miles on the odometer, Cardinal Tobin drove his own sport-utility vehicle as he crisscrossed Indiana.

By contrast, Archbishop Myers often used younger priests as drivers and traveled with a police escort. (Cardinal Tobin did get driven recently from Newark to a religious retreat on the Jersey Shore, a spokesman for the Newark archdiocese said.)

In Indiana, Cardinal Tobin exuded modesty and humility. To the bench-press crowd at the gym, he was simply Joe; to schoolchildren, he was Padre José. Archbishop Myers preferred to be addressed by the formal title Your Grace.

And when the Newark appointment was announced, then-Archbishop Tobin sounded stunned. “Sometimes I think that Pope Francis sees a lot more in me than I see in myself,” he said.

Cardinal Tobin made national headlines in 2015 when he faced off against Gov. Mike Pence, now the Vice President-elect. Citing security concerns, Mr. Pence had ordered a stop to efforts to resettle Syrian refugees. Calling that immoral and illegal, Cardinal Tobin said that the Indianapolis archdiocese would continue to welcome Syrians. A federal court has since overturned Mr. Pence’s order.

And the mood among parishioners is different than when Archbishop Myers took over. Archbishop Myers, an ally of Pope John Paul II, was installed 30 days after the Sept. 11 attacks, “a time,” he said then, “of great national sorrow.” He used the homily at his installation to explain orthodox views on marriage and abortion. He said that sexuality was to adhere to “its God-given purpose.”

Archbishop Myers turned 75 last July. That is the age at which bishops are expected to submit their resignations to the Vatican. His was quickly accepted. But Francis had already taken action to reorient the Newark archdiocese. In 2013, the pope named a Michigan bishop, Bernard A. Hebda, to be coadjutor archbishop in Newark. With that title, Bishop Hebda would automatically have become the archbishop when Archbishop Myers reached retirement age.

But in 2013, the pope reassigned Bishop Hebda to the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, and Francis did not name a new coadjutor archbishop for Newark. Cardinal Tobin’s appointment was announced in November; Francis had named him to be a cardinal the month before.

The oldest of 13 children, Cardinal Tobin grew up in Detroit, where his mother had been a public-school teacher and his father was a cost analyst for General Motors. In his 20s he joined a religious order called the Redemptorists, which ran the church he had attended as a boy. He rose to lead the order for 12 years, from 1997 to 2009.

In 2010 he became an official in a Vatican office that was investigating nuns in this country for taking on a “secular mentality” and moving too far away from Catholic doctrine. Cardinal Tobin questioned the Vatican’s intervention; he told The National Catholic Reporter that his view of the nuns was “extremely positive.”

That made him something of a hero to the nuns, but Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, transferred him to Indianapolis in 2012, three years before his five-year term at the Vatican was over. Francis later closed the investigations.

His new assignment puts him in charge of an archdiocese that serves a broad spectrum of Roman Catholics, living both in wealthy suburban communities and economically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. It is also diverse with large pockets of African-American and Latino adherents. Geographically, it is the smallest Catholic archdiocese in the United States, covering just over 500 square miles in four counties, a fraction of the territory that Cardinal Tobin was responsible for in Indiana.

But the 1.5 million Catholics in the Newark archdiocese far outnumber the 233,000 in the Indianapolis archdiocese.

More than 100 of Cardinal Tobin’s relatives were on hand, along with friends from his days in Detroit. One friend, Mary Ladensack, recalled visiting him when he was in Rome several years ago. “He’s the same gregarious guy I knew growing up,” she said. Her husband, John, added, “Without the robe and stuff, you wouldn’t know he was a religious person.”