“I can’t do this.”

It was a wail from the bowels of the Archdiocese of Detroit chancery office by a promising young priest, tasked with framing the agonies of failed marriages into bloodless canonese so that couples might please the powers in Rome to grant their annulment. It was a necessary penance and rite of passage for the clerically upward bound, chosen ones already by virtue of this assignment, some fantasizing about that oh-so-tall bishop’s miter that could someday be theirs — when it would be received, of course, “in all humility.”

For Fr. Thomas Gumbleton, it was 1960 and priests simply and unquestionably did what the archbishop bid them do. Better known to his seminary classmates as scrappy, hard-charging “Gump” — a guy who could take it as well as he could dish it out in hockey, football or even handball — he certainly was not a hierarchical climber….