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By Gretchen Keiser, Staff Writer
BALTIMORE, Md.—While the life of Archbishop Eugene A. Marino,
SSJ, seemed broken to human eyes, “God had a master plan,” his
longtime friend and fellow Josephite priest said at a memorial Mass Nov. 16.
Gathering in St. Francis Xavier Church, the nation’s oldest
black Catholic parish, at one of several Masses around the country in his
memory, those who knew the archbishop as a Josephite priest, a Washington
auxiliary bishop and a charismatic black Catholic leader came to pray, love and
remember.
“God was very kind to Archbishop Marino,” said Bishop
John Ricard, SSJ, speaking on behalf of the Josephite order, as the Mass began.
Expressing sentiments of many others, Bishop Ricard said the last years of the
archbishop’s life were a time of spiritual healing and fulfillment.
“(God) gave him the opportunity of coming to terms with himself, with his
God and with his community, the church. For this we express our thanks
tonight.”
With three cardinals seated at the altar—Cardinal William
Keeler of Baltimore, Cardinal James Hickey of Washington and Cardinal Bernard
Law of Boston—some 20 bishops, including Archbishop John F. Donoghue, and
50 priests concelebrating the Mass, and with the white-draped casket in the
center aisle, the solemnity of the moment was evident.
But in his homily, Father John Harfmann, SSJ, drew upon his
memories of “Bishop Gene,” the man he had known since they were in
the seminary together 40 years ago, a funny, humble and gentle person, and, in
his view, a Job-like figure who had received much, lost much, and, in the end,
was given back even more than he had lost.
Even as he began, Father Harfmann said, “Bishop Eugene Marino
liked a good party. Let’s give him a party,” and people started to
applaud and then stood up clapping.
The bright smile of the archbishop, captured in the 1988
photograph from his installation Mass in Atlanta as he bowed to the crowd and
doffed his zucchetto, “that’s what I remember,” Father Harfmann
said.
When he resigned as archbishop of Atlanta two years later amid
scandal, “God still had a master plan,” the priest said.
Archbishop Marino was “a humble man with tested faith ... He
said he only wanted to be a priest in a parish in the South” where he was
born, the priest recalled. Instead he would be called to leadership, first in
his order, then as a trailblazer among black Catholic bishops in the United
States.
He “would always clown,” Father Harfmann said, a
favorite trick being to switch the hat he wore on his “big head” with
another priest’s smaller size hat, so the two would come out of a
restaurant like Laurel and Hardy. “A humble man does that because he can
laugh at himself.” When he was chosen to be the vicar general of the
Josephite order, he was cleaning the dust chute in the building in his old
clothes, the priest continued.
“You never felt Gene was putting on airs, did you? And who
could ever forget the bright smile that would make little children smile and
priests hug him ... That’s the humble man who was tested in faith.”
“This gentle spirit was also a suffering servant,”
Father Harfmann said. “This gentle man tried to help everybody ... This
gentle spirit was given by God the task to suffer with him.”
He asked “how many of us” could go through being on the
front page of newspapers and on television as the center of a scandal,
“being in a hospital in New York and having a television camera pointed at
your window” trying to peer inside the room.
“Blessed are those who are poor in spirit, who need
God’s power in their lives,” Father Harfmann said. “(Blessed
are) the poor, the anawim, of which Gene wanted to be one.”
Despite the intensity of his fall from overwhelming acclamation to
public brokenness, “he always said, yes, Lord,” his friend commented.
“Bishop Gene became a witness of what God’s goodness does when you
suffer and you remain faithful.”
“We would have written a different plan,” Father
Harfmann said. But in God’s providence, “a man who is frail, and
often almost broken, gives himself back to God and God uses him.”
Rather than a sour note in an otherwise beautiful symphony, the
years of suffering, he suggested, were a necessary movement, essential for the
full and lovely music God intended in his life.
For “those in AA, those in NA, those searching in their own
lives for the God he believed in—how he made them see God’s
goodness.”
In addition to the ministry of recent years to struggling clergy,
Father Harfmann said, his ministry as a black bishop must be remembered.
“He raised the question, why is there racism in the church,” and he
and the other black bishops in the United States wrote the pastoral letter
“What We Have Seen and Heard.” Through the Thea Bowman Foundation,
which the archbishop helped to launch, “60 young people passed four years
of college and graduated.”
“We would be misled if we allow the newspapers to tell us who
Gene Marino is,” he concluded, and people broke into applause.
“We’re going to allow God to tell us.”
“God gave him these last 10 years to bring it back together
because God had the master plan. Read the Scriptures of David, the shepherd boy
God called to lead his people. David rose and fell, rose and fell ... Read the
Book of Job. He lost everything ... at the end of the Book of Job, he got back
everything, but he got even more. He was renewed, restored.”
Archbishop Marino chose “Feed my lambs” as his episcopal
motto, the call of Jesus to Peter, who earlier had denied his Lord. “The
master plan had to unfold these last 10 years,” Father Harfmann said, as
the archbishop was reconciled through the church, through the community and
through his family “to begin again his ministry.”
“He needed the time and God gave it to him,” Father
Harfmann said.
Recently Archbishop Marino “ordained our newest
Josephites,” came to the order’s celebrations and went to a
celebration in his home parish in Biloxi, Miss. People were amazed at how he
had been restored, the priest said.
In 1962, referring to a popular song of the day, Father Harfmann
had written on the archbishop’s ordination picture, “You will never
walk alone.” The two priests and a third classmate, Father Bill McKenna,
SSJ, tried to live that out, getting together every five years, going on trips
together and supporting each other as priests.
At the memorial Mass he said, “Gene Marino, you will never
walk alone. You have Jesus in his fullness.”
“We need to celebrate when a man gives his whole life and is
poured out like a libation. We have been told often if you die with Christ, you
will live with Christ. Gene Marino did not die.”
As the Mass continued, a soloist from the choir sang, “His
Eye Is on the Sparrow,” the archbishop’s favorite hymn.
Cardinal Law spoke of his friendship with the archbishop, which
began when they were newly ordained priests serving “in the rather
exciting times of the ‘60s in Mississippi.”
It continued as they were each appointed vicars general and later
bishops. “Two or three weeks ago, Gene and I had a wonderful conversation
on the phone,” Cardinal Law said. They had planned to meet soon in Boston.
“We pray with gratitude. (His) gentle, loving soul was tried
with great suffering; he came through that without resentment, with great
peace, with great love.”
Father Robert Kearns, SSJ, superior general of the Josephites,
read a letter from Pope John Paul II offering his prayers for Archbishop Marino
and his apostolic blessing on those mourning his death. Father Kearns spoke of
the Marino family and their faith, of the Salesian religious community in New
Rochelle, N.Y., where the archbishop lived for the past five years, and of St.
Vincent’s Hospital in Harrison, N.Y., where he has worked as spiritual
director of a program for clergy.
“You were truly instruments of healing and support to
him,” Father Kearns said, “that enabled him to be an instrument of
healing to so many.”
The archbishop was invited to Rome a few years ago, Father Kearns
said, and met with the pope with only Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, prefect of the
Vatican Congregation for Bishops, also present.
When the archbishop spoke, he began by telling the pope who he
was. The pope responded, “I know who you are. I have one question.
‘Are you at peace?’”
The archbishop said, “I am,” and the pope responded,
“Thanks be to God,” Kearns said. They then spoke of what the
archbishop was doing in his ministry.
Dr. Richard Milone, medical director of St. Vincent’s, said
that it was the late Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, who had been
instrumental in starting the Clergy Consultation and Treatment Service, who
suggested Archbishop Marino for spiritual director when an opening came.
“After he had had his own difficulties and then a long
recovery and rehabilitation, he came five years ago to work with bishops and
priests who had been in difficulties,” Dr. Milone said.
As part of his work, Archbishop Marino came to the clinical care
conferences at the hospital. “He became really a very astute clinician in
the last five years ... He had great savvy.”
Priests come to the program from around the United States and
internationally, staying from three to six months.
“He was a powerful speaker,” Dr. Milone said. “He
would do (one presentation) on the spiritual health of the priests. He would
tell the men his story. He would say, ‘I lived a double life a long time
and you can’t do that.’”
“He would say, ‘When you stop praying, trouble
begins.’ He would literally walk with them around the building and the
grounds ... He spoke about the spiritual dilemmas of the priesthood ...
(saying) you have to keep praying.”
For the occasion of his 25th anniversary as a bishop in October
1999, Cardinal O’Connor offered Mass for the archbishop, his family and
some of his co-workers at Our Lady’s Chapel in St. Patrick’s
Cathedral in New York. The cardinal preached and all the auxiliary bishops in
the New York Archdiocese were there. Afterward he hosted a dinner at his
residence.
Archbishop Marino “was so happy,” Dr. Milone said.
“Talking about 1999, he said, ‘It was the happiest year of my
life.’” |
