NEW JERSEY
The Star-Ledger
By Star-Ledger Guest Columnist
on August 25, 2013
By Robert M. Hoatson
It was sometime in the late 1980s and I was working on my doctoral dissertation in my fifth-floor bedroom in a Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, walk-up occupied by the Irish Christian Brothers. I picked up a copy of the National Catholic Reporter and read a piece about a bishop from Peoria, Ill., John J. Myers, who was making a name for himself by stressing orthodoxy and recruiting large numbers of vocations to the priesthood for the Peoria diocese.
What struck me most glaringly, however, was how mean Myers was toward people who may not have lived up to his standard of Catholic teaching. It was clear from the article that Myers was on the fast track among the church hierarchy, but the faithful — some of whom were excoriated by Myers for this or that offense against supposed church teachings — did not quite know how to judge the new bishop of Peoria and found his methods less than pastoral.
It was while I was reading that article that I had a premonition that has stayed with me to this day. It was a voice — the Holy Spirit, no doubt — who communicated to me a message: “Someday, you will have to confront and stand up to this man.”
Fast-forward a decade. Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark had been named the archbishop of Washington, D.C., and the Newark Archdiocese was without a leader. A priest who had just been to a meeting at Newark Archdiocesan headquarters entered my office at Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in the inner-city of Newark, where I was the director of schools, and told me that there was a strong rumor that Myers was going to be named archbishop of Newark.
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