Strength, faith drive Cleveland's new bishop
Arlington, Mass. -- His grandfather and his great-uncles brought blocks of stone in horse-drawn wagons to build the magnificent church on the side of a hill overlooking Massachusetts Avenue in suburban Boston.
Cleveland's next bishop grew up around the corner, and went to school and served as an altar boy at St. James the Apostle par ish. He said his first Mass there, and buried both parents from that church.
Yet today, the banner on the front of the massive edifice proclaims St. Athanasius the Great Greek Orthodox Church. Outside the old parish school, weathered hoops with broken or missing rims face the blacktop that was poured over the gravel and stone where Richard Lennon and his friends played football.
Lennon grew up to become auxiliary bishop of the Boston Archdiocese, where Cardinal Sean O'Malley gave him the thankless task of overseeing church consolidation. St. James, his beloved home parish, was among the churches closed and sold.
That he took on the job and showed no favoritism in implementing an unpopular but necessary plan is a sign of the strengths many people in the Boston area say that Lennon will bring to his new job as the 10th bishop of Cleveland.
Those who know him say the man whom Pope Benedict XVI chose last week to replace retiring Cleveland Bishop Anthony Pilla is a faithful son of the church. He is a man who did the best he could when he became the temporary replacement for Cardinal Bernard Law during the sex-abuse scandal and then being the front man for large-scale church closings.
People who worked with him say that Lennon, the son of a firefighter, will be straightforward in facing the hard realities in Cleveland, where the diocese has long postponed church closings despite a declining and aging priesthood and massive movement of parishioners from the city to the suburbs.
"He's a natural leader," said Ken Hokenson, chief development officer of the Boston Archdiocese. "He's not afraid to make the hard decisions."
Some of those decisions were too hard, say his Boston critics, who characterize Lennon as an insensitive bureaucrat too quick to put the interests of the institutional church above those of abuse victims or parishioners devastated by scores of parish closings.
But former parishioners, colleagues and friends last week described Richard Lennon as a compassionate leader, one who worked alongside firefighters rescuing trapped neighbors during the blizzard of 1978 and who bathed and dressed a dying priest friend in his final days.
And his friends say that, above all, the 59-year-old former parish priest is true to his sense of church.
"First and foremost," said the Rev. Thomas Maguire of St. Helen Church in Norwell, Mass., "he has a love for the church, for God and for the people, and it's genuine."
First parishioners
still miss him
"Lord, hear our prayer." The loud, strong reply during Thursday Mass at St. Mary of the Nativity Church in Scituate, Mass., comes after the appeal for the health and well-being of Bishop Lennon in his new job in Cleveland.
Some 24 years after he left his first parish assignment, Lennon is still treasured by the people in this coastal community about an hour south of Boston.
The Cleveland Diocese, longtime parishioner Valentine Baker said, has been "given the gift of a man who is so filled with holiness and humanity."
It was not always obvious that Lennon would enter the priesthood. His only sibling, Albert, one year behind him in school, said Richard was the "obedient" son, but also an exceptional student and an ordinary kid on the playground. When kids from the neighborhood would choose sides for football, baseball or street hockey, Richard was always in the first half of the kids picked, Albert said.
After receiving SAT scores of 1560, including a perfect 800 in math, Lennon entered Boston College as a mathematics major. In his sophomore year, he surprised his brother and his "overjoyed" parents with his decision to enter the seminary.
"He was extremely shy, very very shy, obviously brilliant. But just so faith-filled. It radiated out of every pore," Baker said of Lennon as a young priest in his first assignment.
At St. Mary, where he served from 1973 to 1982, Lennon was a Fire Department chaplain and sometimes helped out, including during the blizzard of '78 when people were trapped in their homes by floodwaters.
At the church, he energized the religious education program and started a children's choir, although Lennon is described as tone deaf. Each year, he took the altar boys to a Boston Red Sox game and the children's choir to the Ice Capades.
A dozen people interviewed outside Mass on Thursday talked about Lennon going above and beyond his duties. For Peggy Mahoney, it was a remembrance of him getting on his knees to console her child in the hospital. For another parishioner, it was Lennon seeing her mother at the bus stop and driving her where she wanted to go.
Even today, Lennon still sends personal notes and Mass cards to many parishioners on the anniversaries of the deaths of their loved ones.
"I think our heart still aches that he isn't here," said Kristen Gotter, 36, a member of the first children's choir.
Loyalty sometimes
works against him
Pictures of children whose lives were forever altered by sexual abuse line the wall of the suburban Boston offices of Bishop Accountability.org, a national organization documenting the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
In going through the transcripts of cases in Boston, Anne Barrett Doyle said she became convinced that Lennon knew that some priests had abused children, but he apparently did not share that information with civil authorities or the public.
"He's a consummate order-taker," said Doyle, a co-director of the group. "You're getting a loyal son of the church who will keep their dirtiest secrets."
As interim successor to Law and the point man for parish closings, Lennon is not universally admired in Boston.
The battle against parish and school closings involved sit-ins, and at one point the creation of tent camps with the names "O'Malleyville" and "Lennonville" -- named for the bishop and the cardinal who ordered the consolidation.
But many of Lennon's colleagues say he performed admirably in near-impossible circumstances.
"This is what the church is asking of me, and therefore I do it" was Lennon's attitude, Maguire said. " If people are going to criticize me, I'm doing it for one reason only: to serve the church.' "
Church observers said that as interim administrator, Lennon, who had been a bishop only a little more than a year, had neither the time nor the power to establish the sweeping changes many people sought after Law's departure.
And, they say, playing the bad guy in the church closings was a role the cardinal assigned him.
“He’s loyal to a fault,” said the Rev. Jack Ahern of St. Mary of the Assumption Church in Brookline, Mass. “Because of that loyalty, sometimes he’s gotten bad press here.”
On Friday, during an interview in his chancery office, Lennon said it was hard to imagine the frenzy of those days in 2002, when media trucks were parked at all hours along Common´ wealth Avenue facing the chan´ cery offices.
Lennon says he attributes some of the criticism to lack of understanding.
"When all the facts come out, they will show that the abuse practices were closely guarded secrets known only by a few, Lennon said.
“I feel I did the best that I could in the situation I was in,” Lennon said. “Could I have done more? I would have had to have known more to have done more.”
Caring for a friend until the end
The Rev. Joseph Trainor was dying of cancer, and the Mary´ knoll order wanted the mission´ ary to come back to its home for aged priests.
Lennon and Ahern, who lived with Trainor at St. Mary of the Assumption, said no, they would care for their friend.
And even though Lennon went to the office as early as 5 a.m. and often worked until 10 p.m., he adjusted his schedule to care for Trainor, Ahern, the pastor of St. Mary, remembered.
"That could mean dressing him and helping him with his personal needs. In the evening, Lennon would come home for dinner at 5, then play cribbage with Trainor, putting off his own work until late.
The night before the mission´ ary priest died, the two men were at Holy Thursday Mass together.
“All that stuff comes pretty natural to him,” Ahern said. “You’re getting a great guy.”
There is another side to Rich´ ard Lennon, a friendly, jovial, compassionate side that is not always evident to the public, those who know him say.
He does take time off. Family gatherings are a priority. The bishop also likes to go to muse´ ums and watch sports on TV. He loves powdered sugar jelly doughnuts, except during Lent.
The first task he does every year is mark 100 dates on his cal´ endar, reminders to send per´ sonal notes to people on signifi´ cant anniversaries, such as the death of a parent or a sibling.
“When they lose a loved one, that pain is always there,” Lennon said. “I don’t see it as being a big deal. It’s being pastoral. It’s caring about people.”
Ready to meet challenges ahead
The 6-foot-2 Lennon smiles easily and often in his modest of´ fice as he talks about how much he looks forward to May 15, when he is scheduled to be in´ stalled as the next spiritual leader of the Cleveland Diocese.
“I feel very excited,” he said Friday. “I feel really happy.”
Lennon is heartened, he said, by what he has learned about the success of programs here such as Catholic Charities and efforts to bring adults into the church.
"While in Cleveland last week, he traveled throughout church offices trying to greet everyone he could.
There will be challenging times ahead. The Cleveland Dio´ cese is in the middle of a process called Vibrant Parish Life, that is taking a close look at how church ministries can be shared, partic´ ularly in light of fewer priests.
As other major dioceses such as Boston, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Chicago have had large-scale church closings — some more than once in recent decades as the number of priests declined and members moved to the sub´ urbs — Cleveland has avoided such cuts. While Boston, for ex´ ample, has fewer than 300 churches to care for 2 million Catholics, Cleveland has 233 par´ ishes for 800,000 Catholics, two fewer than it had in 1970.
Rather than consolidating some urban churches that have a small number of parishioners, the Cleveland diocese has kept them open. That has put pres´ sure on many suburban churches, which have only one priest to tend to thousands of families.
Lennon said it will take him a while to learn the needs of the Cleveland Diocese.
“A lot ... will depend on the situation in Cleveland,” Lennon said of possible parish closings. “What are their hopes and aspi´ rations coming out of all this?”
Catholics in Cleveland can be sure of one thing about his brother, Albert Lennon said.
“He’s 100 percent teachings of the church, church doctrine, canon law. And he’s not going to waver,” Albert said. “Those are the laws of the church. That’s it.”
His wife, Nancy, added, “When you understand that, you under´ stand Richard.”
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: dbriggs@plaind.com, 216-999-4812
