OSV STORY FOR OCTOBER 20

In the abyss of God's mercy

Leaving Denver for Rome, Archbishop Stafford reflects on prayer, death, the smile of a mother and the mystery of the priesthood

By Colleen Smith

Since his 1986 installation as archbishop of Denver, rumors have circulated that Archbishop J. Francis Stafford would one day soon be joining the Roman curia.

So Pope John Paul II's announcement this summer that Archbishop Stafford would be the new president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity came as no surprise.

He is no stranger to Rome, having taken a theology degree at the North American College there and having served as a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's top theological office, since 1990.

In his new Vatican position, which he begins next month, Archbishop Stafford will coordinate and promote the laity's participation in the mission of the Church, including the annual papal event, World Youth Day, which was held in Denver in 1993.

During his 10 years in Denver, Archbishop Stafford championed the resurgence of Catholic schools, successfully redesigned the stalled primary fund-raising campaign, convened a convocation on the laity, advocated affordable housing and spearheaded the drafting of a pastoral plan leading to the year 2000.

But the crowning moment of his episcopate was co-hosting with Pope John Paul II the 1993 World Youth Day, which brought 260,000 youths from 60 nations to Denver.

"The young people revolutionized my own ministry. Everyone commented upon their gentleness and their humor," Archbishop Stafford told Our Sunday Visitor.

World Youth Day put the archbishop in touch with youths of the world and perhaps deepened his sense of the grace of his own youth. Born July 26, 1931, in Baltimore, he grew up an only child of Irish, English, Moravian and German ancestry.

At age 3, he was stricken with a serious illness -- scarlatina, or scarlet fever.

"The gentleness of my mother in caring for me and her optimism was a basis for my hope in the goodness of God," he said. "The smile of a mother is one's introduction to the beauty of life. My mother and father and their families on both sides were deeply aware of the presence of God. It was a natural part of the air we breathed."

His paternal grandfather was an Irish immigrant in the furniture business. His large, Edwardian home outside Baltimore included a beautiful prominent altar on the second floor corridor.

As a boy, the archbishop would gather flowers from the woods and fields to decorate the altar during May.

One of his cousins was a nun and two others were diocesan priests. As for his own vocation, the archbishop points to his second- and third-grade teachers and, later, the signs of the times.

"The racial injustices of the late '40s and early '50s bothered me," he said. "There was a great deal of social guilt prevalent then, as now. A profound fear and anguish seemed to be replacing faith. It was not true only of racial relations within our country, but our relations externally. The invention of the nuclear bomb was a cause of fear. It didn't seem to jibe very well with my mother's smile."

Ordained in 1957, he took up his ministry in the inner city of Baltimore and later became head of Catholic Charities there.

Named an auxiliary bishop in 1976, he passed up a stately residence with a housekeeper to live, instead, in one of Baltimore's poorest neighborhoods.

A bishop for three years in Memphis before moving to Denver in 1986, Archbishop Stafford is recognized as a theologian, an intellectual and a historian. But he sees himself first and foremost as a priest.

"The life and ministry of a priest is a mystery. It is a mystery of vocation, election, of decision," he said. "The prayer of bishop and prayer of priest are the same. We are called to be mediators, intercessors between God and man. The life of a priest is a life of prayer: intercessory prayer, prayers of praise and repentance for mankind and for one's personal sinfulness.

"Our time is devoted to the family of Church, not to one's wife or children. The priest devotes himself to the Church and mankind, John says in the Apocalypse, like an angel of intercessions."

Archbishop Stafford turns to prayer and sacrament as the tools of his intercession, especially the hymns in the Latin breviary prayed before dawn.

"The Liturgy of the Hours provides the cord of continuity in my prayer life. The psalms enable us to express the deepest thanksgiving and sorrow before the majesty of God and the glory of Christ," he said, stressing that a prayerful life culminates in the Eucharist.

"All of the sacraments lay bare the reality of life, especially the Eucharist. The deepest reality is to be cast into the abyss of God's mercy. We are called to walk in a trackless and map-less way with Christ in faith. The Mass is central to that journey. When the Mass becomes routine, it's a sign of mediocrity, and a mediocre priest or bishop is the greatest danger to the Church," he said.

"God has taught me that the way of suffering is the way of love. The Mass is that transcendent reality always present. Redemptive love transforms everything. The key to the Mass and its strange logic is love: the love of God for us in Christ."

Franciscan, Jesuit and Trappist traditions have left their mark upon him. But Archbishop Stafford said the lodestar of his spirituality is a verse from Psalm 91 for Compline. He uses the Latin, but the English translation reads: "He will cover you with his pinions and under his wings you will find refuge."

Archbishop Stafford said, "The Catholic understanding of reason is that it is prophetic. But we must first be cast out, evicted. We must first totally surrender to God, His call and His election of us, and only then do we know freedom. We are first under the protective wings of our God, and once there, everything else falls into place."

If, as Archbishop Stafford believes, the priesthood is mystery, he embodies that enigma. Few know that he grows African violets, or that he rarely turns on the television and stepped further out of media hype when he stopped reading the newspapers.

The archbishop appreciates fine art. He is extremely well-read. Along with Church documents, he reads everything from history to poetry and praises authors he considers "confessors of the faith," especially the Catholic writers Annie Dillard, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy.

At age 63, Archbishop Stafford increasingly embraces asceticism. Only occasionally does he display his wit or his sense of humor, though he readily offers his gentle twinkle of a smile that ripples his pensive demeanor. He used to play tennis, ski and backpack, but he has traded sport and adventure for interiority.

Often pigeonholed a conservative, Archbishop Stafford's stance on certain social issues -- housing, welfare, capital punishment -- smack of a liberal bent.

He gives little consideration to political correctness, but upholds the Church's preferential option for the poor, as when he wrote a pastoral letter chastising developers of the state's ski resorts for ignoring the working poor living in the shadows of those resorts.

Each Christmas Day and Easter Sunday, he celebrates Eucharist with inmates at correctional facilities. He anointed people with AIDS and welcomed Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity to Denver to minister to men dying from complications of AIDS. And he locked horns with Colorado Gov. Roy Romer over gay rights.

He acknowledged that he is leaving the American Church at a time when it seems to many like a house divided. But he doesn't worry about division.

"The unity of the Church is not ours to produce," he said. "Oneness is a total and complete grace that can never be taken from the Church, never lost."

Nonetheless, he concedes the gravity of the crises of the Church in the United States.

"All of us -- bishops, priests and laity -- must entreat, beg, ask God for nobility of heart, a courtesy that was so much a part of St. Francis of Assisi, and honesty, which has characterized the Church since her beginning. We must cherish, above all, sincerity and truth," he said.

"God is simplicity. All we have to do is be childlike enough to surrender to that reality. Freud has taught us to be very complicated. But the deepest reality we are called to plumb is the abyss of God's mercy, not the abyss of our unconsciousness."

Since he discovered skin cancer on his nose that required surgery a couple of years ago, Archbishop Stafford sports a hat winter or summer to protect himself from the sun. While the diagnosis gave him pause, his cancer did not give rise to a dread of death.

"All of us will face death, but we create all these distractions. It's not going to be all nice sunsets and picnics. St. Francis called death 'Sister Death.' If we are called to live with God forever, we are not without hope -- it's one of the signs of our dignity and eternal calling and election by God. Death is not a disaster after Christ," he said.

The archbishop was with his father, Emmett, when he died in 1985 and with his mother, Mary Dorothy, when she died 10 years later.

"Suffering is transformed by love," he said of the experiences. "Love transforms everything. Everything. That is what Jesus' via cruxes taught us."

Archbishop Stafford underscored the dangers of misunderstanding death.

"Ours is an immensely rich life, if we are open to its mystery," he explained. "But not only are we not open to the mystery of the body, we're especially not open to the mystery of the soul -- birth and death, the coming from abyss and the going into abyss.

"Our last moments on earth are not to betray our first moments. We cannot betray the first important dawn of trust before our mother's smile. Death itself is a birthing into a new life, when we're on the verge of seeing the smile of our eternal father."

And along with forgiveness, which he says is a place where we acquire some of our most intimate knowledge of God, he believes that such deliberations on mortality and eternity are the key to life.

"Life is not reaching its fulfillment here on earth," he said. "If this life is going to be livable, we must be rooted in the awareness that we are called to eternal life."

Smith, a regular contributor to Our Sunday Visitor, has worked with Arch-bishop Stafford for the last seven years

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor 1996; from the 10-20-96 edition

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