Fresh, vital happenings in parishes feed
Murnion's hopes for the church
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff New York
In these times of low morale and high stress among the clergy,
when a priest like Philip J. Murnion is labeled a priest's priest, it matters
who he is and where he came from.
That's because priestly formation is not something that happens
only in seminaries.
For Murnion, a priest of the New York archdiocese, formation began
in the 1950s, when his mother's landlord was increasing the rent.
Frances Canavan Murnion, a widow raising four children alone since
the 1940s, had moved off welfare to part-time work at her Catholic parish.
Later she would take a full-time job at New York's Columbia Presbyterian
Hospital.
But at this moment, the landlord wanted more money -- and that was
critical.
The Bronx Irish tenants organized. The protest letter was typed,
hunt-and-peck style, on the family's secondhand typewriter. In his mind's eye,
the monsignor of today still sees that scene. He was the lad at the old
Underwood keyboard. He can't remember whether the letter had the intended
effect.
Today Murnion is involved in different sorts of projects. He
travels the country on behalf of the National Pastoral Life Center,
brainstorming with other priests and their pastoral staffs.
He has gained new prominence as the fulcrum of the Catholic Common
Ground Initiative, recently inaugurated with the encouragement of the late
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin (NCR Aug.23). The project has been criticized
on the left by Fr. Richard McBrien and on the right by Mother Angelica's ETWN,
The Wanderer and Cardinals Bernard Law of Boston and John O'Connor of
New York.
Murnion and Bernardin together conceived the idea of Catholic
Common Ground, a program that sponsors public meetings where Catholics who
disagree can talk. The hope is that constructive dialogue in "a renewed spirit
of civility" will help to heal breaches over a variety of divisive issues.
The Catholic Common Ground Initiative grew out of a four-year
conversation, a sort of Catholic intellectual swap meet, involving a dozen or
so Catholics in an exchange of articles and ideas. Murnion agreed to find funds
and provide staff to expand the work.
Murnion can mix with all kinds of people.
On an occasional evening, the soft-spoken, silver-haired priest
blends in easily with Manhattan's Park Avenue cocktail crowd. By day, he might
be found working alongside some of the nation's bishops.
But at day's end, he goes home to the red brick Holy Name Center
for Homeless Men on the grubby divide where the littered Greenwich Village
fades into the less salubrious but improving Bowery.
Where the heart is
If home is where the heart is, Murnion's heart for two decades has
been in this Elizabeth Street residence, with its formidable streetside doors
and locked steel screens. It is home, too, to the National Pastoral Life
Center, which Murnion runs. The center, founded in 1983 to support pastoral
ministers, is the offspring of the U.S. Catholic bishops' Parish Project of
1978-82.
Murnion's daily life isn't cardinals, cocktail crowds or even
homeless men. It is other priests -- priests and their parishes.
For Murnion, somehow, everything focuses on the parish, whether
he's in New York, or, as he was recently, in Fort Davis, Texas, 200 miles from
El Paso, where he met with priests, sisters and lay pastoral workers from 12
parishes.
One major reason he's rarely despairing about the Catholic church,
he said, is "I'm almost never with people who are cynical, who have given
up.
"When the Lower East Side pastoral workers meet, we ask each
parish what's happening," he said. "It always blows me away -- always something
vital, hopeful, fresh. It builds up each other's confidence hearing all the
hope."
The pastoral life center publishes the quarterly,
8,000-circulation Church magazine (Karen Sue Smith, editor). The center
also organizes conferences (Sr. Donna Ciangio, coordinator), serves as
consultant, produces focus packs for parish staff-generated activities, and
center papers on topics such as diocesan reorganization.
For Murnion, parish is his life's work-in-progress. Even his
reading is about parishes, lately William McGreevey's Parish Boundaries
(University of Chicago Press) on race and parish life in urban areas.
His interest in parishes goes back to his early life in an era and
in circumstances when the parish was the extension of the family. For him, that
was St. John's in Kingsbridge, just below the Yonkers' border, where he
worshiped with his parents, William and Frances, and his siblings, Bill, Rose
Mary and John.
William, a former Ford factory foreman, was sexton at the parish
until his death as a young man in 1941, when Philip was three. Oldest child
Bill entered seminary, was ordained and later laicized. He and his wife have
marked their 25th wedding anniversary. Rose Mary, a teacher, delayed college
and career until her children were grown. John is a mystery writer, but even
the family doesn't know his nom de plume. Frances died in 1989.
Studies in sociology
After Philip was ordained in 1963, he was sent to St. Thomas the
Apostle Church in Harlem and told to look into courses at Columbia University.
He decided on sociology, viewing it as a good underpinning to moral
theology.
Malcolm X was on Harlem's streets in those years. Martin Luther
King's March on Washington came two months after Murnion arrived. He rode to
the march with a telephone worker, a black woman active in the Bronx Catholic
Interracial Council.
"Her assertion that a black person presumes prejudice on meeting
any white person I found outrageous," he recalled, "then gradually I came to
understand why you must think that."
Murnion disliked his next assignment -- teaching English in Staten
Island, N.Y. -- and was rescued when Columbia suggested he enroll full-time.
This son of Bronx Irish immigrants displayed a capacity for organization and
affability and, perhaps most important for the long term, dedication to the
belief that if he didn't do it, it wouldn't get done.
Murnion's fellow priests spotted these capacities early.
Following the death of Cardinal Francis Spellman, archbishop of
New York, in late 1967, a hardy core of archdiocesan priests wanted a stake in
the selection of a pastoral successor but they weren't naming names.
"We hadn't anyone specific we were agreed on," said Fr. Neil
Connolly, now a Lower East Side pastor.
The priests turned for help to junior colleague Murnion, ordained
by Spellman only four years earlier and fresh from Columbia University with a
PhD in sociology.
In their petition to Rome (which Rome ignored), the 500 priests --
more than a third of New York's clergy -- provided an outline of the
archdiocese's challenges by the year 2000 and recommendations for coping with
expected changes.
Early recommendations
Murnion wrote that outline, and his recommendations were widely
circulated. Almost three decades later he can say, "most of them were
adopted."
Thirty years later, too, the priests still turn to him.
He's served on both incarnations of their priests' council. He ran
their pastoral life conference for several years and still acts as a
consultant. He annually organizes a program for new pastors. About every six
weeks, he chairs the gatherings of New York's Lower East Side priests and
pastoral workers.
"Nobody knows the church at the parish level in this country like
Phil," said Jack Egan, the Chicago monsignor who gave urban ministry its
Catholic household name in the 1960s by forming the Catholic Committee on Urban
Ministry. "And if there was any justice, Phil would be the archbishop of New
York."
Egan became Murnion's mentor during his student days, when the
younger priest was living at St. Gregory the Great parish while studying. Its
pastor, Fr. J. Henry "Harry" Brown was on the newly forming board of the urban
ministry group and invited Murnion to its meetings at Notre Dame University in
South Bend, Ind.
Egan recalls that everyone was keen to have Murnion there because
he was great at summarizing what had been discussed. Later Murnion headed the
urban ministry committee and brought other New York priests, including his pal,
Connolly, onto the board.
Most Bronx Irish of Murnion's generation have the gift of gab, but
Murnion had to work at his.
"It was an excruciating experience," he said of his early days in
urban ministry, when he was expected to travel around the country and talk --
"excruciating because I'm an introvert. Meeting new crowds of people was very
painful."
But gradually, as he learned to relax, tell stories and use humor
-- the stuff of his heritage -- it got easier, he said.
Some people, he admits, are turned off because he sometimes tends
to argue his points too strongly, ranges widely over so many topics or seems to
have an awful lot of freedom to do what he enjoys. He's seen as "feisty,"
"sophisticated," "a problem-solver, "an engineer," inclined toward "anger but
not temper" over what he considers "inefficiency." He is also impatient when
people are "reluctant to resolve problems that could be resolved." He's said to
have "compassion and a passion for people who get hurt by things." Yet he
thinks of himself as "naive, not coldly analytical, because I expect things to
be better than they are."
These days, Murnion is in demand as a speaker and as a funeral
homilist.
Priests listen to him, but how does "a priest's priest" view his
colleagues? "I think that they're reasonably effective and open to constructive
ideas," Murnion said. "Sometimes they feel there's a lack of direction for what
they're doing -- 'this may all be good but where's this going?'"
Perhaps more than a vision, what they often lack is "a sense of
priorities," he said, given "all the things coming at them from the
diocese."
Support groups
Priests also become frustrated when they don't see how projects
coordinate at the diocesan level, he said. They want to know, "are we fitting
all this pastoral ministry together in some coherent way?"
"More priests these days are finding themselves in groups that
support and strengthen one another," Murnion said. "Once they used to get
together to play cards; now they get together to pray."
What keeps most of them going, Murnion said, is celebrating the
sacraments. They "feel most like priests" when they're celebrating the
Eucharist or, some say, the sacrament of reconciliation.
Murnion's own prayer life has shifted to the early morning, the
day's scriptures, readings from a booklet titled "Experiencing Jesus." He
thinks of God as "a person who's relationship to me is a demanding embrace.
This is somebody who loves me, and the love requires me to do something in
return."
And God is also connected to the father who died young. In their
prayers, the four young children would ask, "Lord have mercy on Daddy. And
Daddy dear, please pray for us."
"Parental images have a lot to do with your image of God," said
Murnion, who sees God as "somebody whose love is assured but whose expectations
are high."
"But father had a responsibility for us, too," he said. Frances
Canavan Murnion saw to that.
National Catholic Reporter, December 20,
1996
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