By Ana Rodriguez Soto - The Archdiocese of Miami

Photography: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC

MIAMI | He’s been a bishop longer than he was a priest. But Archbishop Thomas Wenski still misses the one aspect of priesthood that eludes him as a bishop: closeness to the people.

On Sept. 3, 2022, during a Mass attended by family, close friends, and bishops from Florida, Haiti, Jamaica and the Bahamas, the archbishop marked the 25th anniversary of his ordination to the episcopacy. He and his “twin,” the late Bishop Gilberto Fernandez, were ordained auxiliary bishops of Miami during a trilingual Mass – English, Spanish and Creole – celebrated before an enthusiastic crowd of thousands at the (now demolished) Miami Arena.

Archbishop Wenski suggested the date: Sept. 3, 1997, which would have been his parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Archbishop John C. Favalora, who ordained him and whom he would succeed as archbishop of Miami, agreed.

A few weeks before the anniversary, Archbishop Wenski reflected on his 25 years as a bishop while conversing in English and Spanish on the archdiocesan podcasts,What the Faith, Miami? and Cuéntame Católico.

Comparing the last 25 to his first 18 years as a priest, most of them with the Haitian community at Notre Dame d’Haiti Mission in Miami, Archbishop Wenski said that as a parish priest, “You're seeing the same people in front of you and they're growing up with you. You're growing up with them. You see their kids grow up and you know their stories. As a bishop, you arrive at a parish, and you know they know who you are. You know some of them. But you don't know them as much as you would have the opportunity to do that in the parish.”

That, plus travel, and “a lot of meetings,” are the biggest differences between the roles, the archbishop said, because “when you're a bishop, you're not just a bishop of a particular local Church, but you have a role to play in the universal Church.”

Those duties have included serving on U.S. bishops’ committees dealing with migration, international and domestic justice and peace, religious freedom and respect life; and visiting dioceses throughout the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean.

As archbishop of Miami, he is also the metropolitan of the Province of Miami, which includes the seven dioceses of Florida. Some might misconstrue that role as having a say in how his fellow Florida bishops run their dioceses. But that is not so.

In fact, he joked, “being the archbishop basically settles the argument, who's the first in line?”

In the podcasts, Archbishop Wenski reminisced about his early years as a priest, spoke about the joys and difficulties of being a bishop, and repeated a warning he often shares with Miami’s priests: Don’t take for granted this growing, vibrant Church. Don’t neglect to see the people who “are bleeding away.”

Following is an edited version of the conversation, which can be heard in its entirety at: https://bit.ly/mia_wenski_25_podcast_eng.

WTFM:How do you think your 18 years of priesthood, [mostly] in Little Haiti, prepared you to be a bishop? And, of course, you're trilingual: Spanish, English, Creole and even Polish.

ARCHBISHOP: My Polish is weak, but in any case, I was ordained May 15, 1976, bicentennial year, and my first assignment was Corpus Christi Parish in Miami.

WTFM: By then you already knew Spanish.

ARCHBISHOP: Which is, I think, why I was assigned there. But it was interesting because the pastor was from Spain, the other associate was a Cuban and I was the gringo. So I did the English Masses on Sunday. But since the parish had changed demographically, the English Masses were not as well attended as the big Spanish Mass. So the pastor, once a month, gave me the Spanish Mass so that I would have that opportunity of being exposed to the entire parish community.

It was at that parish that the first Creole Mass was celebrated because in the early ‘70s the Haitians started arriving in Miami. Father Charles Jackson, an African American priest who had spent some time in Martinique, and therefore had some exposure to French and Creole, was assigned by Archbishop [Coleman] Carroll to tend to the Haitian community.

So when I got to Corpus Christi in 1976, I found the Haitians there. But it was a pretty small community, mostly men. I remember going in the back of the church — Corpus Christi is a very large church — and these 50 or 60 men would fill the church up with their music, with their song...

The community began to grow, and I learned by accident that there was a Creole class being offered, sponsored by FIU, at one of the local public high schools near Little Haiti. I signed up for it and as they say, the rest is history. Basically, the archbishop at the time, Archbishop [Edward] McCarthy found out and in June 1979 I was assigned fulltime to work with the Haitians.

So in June 1979 I went to Haiti and I spent three months in a parish. When I got to the parish, the pastor thanked me for being there and said he takes a vacation every three years and so he'll be back in three months. So I was left in charge of the parish for three months. That gave me the opportunity to practice my Creole, to learn about the pastoral realities of Haiti, and to learn to ride a mule and a jeep. 

WTFM: Then, after being auxiliary bishop of Miami, you were made coadjutor of Orlando in 2003. A lot of people may not even know what coadjutor is or what that entails.

ARCHBISHOP: Well, coadjutor is basically auxiliary bishop with a difference. He has the right of succession so that when the bishop retires, the coadjutor automatically becomes the bishop of that locale. Archbishop McCarthy came to Miami as coadjutor and when Coleman Carroll died, he was automatically the archbishop of Miami. So I went to Orlando in August 2003 and later, at the end of 2004, Bishop [Norbert] Dorsey retired and I became the fourth bishop of the Diocese of Orlando. I spent six very happy years in that role and then came back to Miami on June 1st, 2010.

WTFM: After 25 years as a bishop, what have been the most memorable moments? The most difficult moments? Maybe the happiest moments.

ARCHBISHOP: The moments that are happy and joyful and very moving for me is when I have the opportunity to ordain new priests. Fortunately, every year we've had ordinations, some years more than others. So I've ordained a number of priests both in Orlando and here in Miami. I have also ordained several bishops since I've been the archbishop and metropolitan in Florida, so those are very touching, moving experiences.

WTFM: The difficult things?

ARCHBISHOP: Well, there's a lot of heavy lifting involved in being the archbishop. You have to make sometimes difficult decisions, but I don't see anything that has been particularly crushing. I guess I'm very resilient. I used to tell people that my years at Notre Dame were harder than my years as being a bishop.

WTFM: Is that still true?

ARCHBISHOP: Well, less so as the years go on. We've had some difficult times. But they’ve been good years. Here in South Florida, we are incredibly fortunate because we have a very alive Church. Our Church is young, our Church is growing. It's growing because of people moving into the area from Latin America and from up north, too. They come from different places with different experiences, and because of that they enrich us tremendously with a variety of pastoral viewpoints, pastoral experiences. A lot of people had experiences with different movements in different parts of the world and they bring them here and they get transplanted here. So we have a very vibrant Church.

Up north, a lot of times, you hear bishops talking about closing churches and closing schools and merging parishes. It seems very depressing, like the Church is dying, like people are leaving the faith in droves. We do have increasing secularization which is a very serious pastoral challenge up north and down here as well. But up north the changes are demographic. There are less people. You go to Buffalo. Buffalo had a population in 1960 that was probably 60% larger than it is today. You go to upstate New York, Schenectady, that used to be the base for GE. GE had big factories there. All those factories moved down to Mexico and people moved out and because of that, schools had to close, parishes had to merge. That demographic shift can be very discouraging for a bishop or priests up in that area.

Here, we're still building new churches. We're going to have a church dedication next year — that'll be beautiful, in Key Biscayne. We're building a new church for St. Ann's Mission; that will be built sometime next year. We built Our Lady of Guadalupe, Notre Dame de Haiti. So there's excitement here. Our parishes are generally very alive and successful. We have lots of ministries in our parishes. So that's all good.

But I always tell the priests that one of the things we have to be careful about here in South Florida is not to become complacent and to neglect to see the people that are bleeding away. Because if you have somebody sitting in that front pew and he doesn't show up next Sunday, because of the mobility in South Florida, chances are there will be somebody else sitting in that pew and you can forget to say well, what happened to that person? And if you forget to ask yourself what happened to that person, then you forget to seek him out and seek her out and bring her back or see what happened. So that's one of the things we have to be careful about. We have to evangelize and keep people coming to us, but we’ve got to make sure we're not neglecting those that might drift away or bleed away. We have to keep them engaged in the Church.

WTFM: Anything else you still need to do as a bishop in this community?

ARCHBISHOP: Oh yeah, I need to get up every morning and say my prayers. I need to preach the Gospel. I need to continue to make decisions on areas of good governance. So I don't see my job as finished at all. And again, we do have to improve our game in many, many areas, especially after COVID. COVID was a great disruptor and changed many things, changed many people's ideas. I think most of our priests in our parishes did well in trying to maintain contact with their people, but it challenged us. Because COVID, like everything else today, becomes very quickly politicized. You have to have a very prudent approach in accompanying your people so that they don't get caught up in that politicization or the churches don’t get sucked into it. So yeah, we have lots of things still to do.

I would like to make sure our Catholic schools are better positioned to not only give an excellent education but also to communicate the faith to the future generation. The way that the faith was communicated in previous years or generations, we can't rely on that anymore. Before, the culture kind of supported faith. Culture supported belief. Which is why 60, 70 years ago, if somebody drifted away when they went to college, nobody was too concerned because they said, well, once they get married and have kids they’re going to come back to church. Well, that's not as true anymore.

So that requires a whole new way of looking at things. We have to transition from a Church that could count on the support of the broader culture to one that is brought increasingly into conflict with that culture. That requires sometimes different skills. Certainly, it means that our priests, bishops, our people, too, don't necessarily get any accolades from the broader culture because they’re churchgoing people. Sometimes they're attacked for it, or discredited for it, or might be cancelled because of it. So we're looking at a different time that requires the acquisition of different skills and perhaps different spiritual virtues.

ENDOWMENT CREATED FOR SEMINARIANS

Photographer: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC

Before the conclusion of the Mass, Father Michael Davis, left, and Father Rafael Capo prepare to present Archbishop Thomas Wenski with a 25th anniversary gift: the Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski Endowed Seminarian Scholarship Fund, with an initial balance of $ 250,000, donated by archdiocesan parishes, schools and individual donors.

To mark his 25th anniversary as a bishop, archdiocesan parishes, schools and donors combined to create the Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski Endowed Seminarian Scholarship Fund, with an initial balance of $250,000.

That amount will be invested, and the proceeds used by the archdiocese each year, not to give an individual seminarian a scholarship, but to cover seminarian tuition and expenses, in keeping with the rules of the Catholic Community Foundation.

To find out more, or donate to this endowment, go to:  https://adomdevelopment.org/foundation/about-ccf/.