Retiring, But Always A Priest:
End Game For Queens Bishop

By Tamara Hartman

Bishop Thomas Daily walked into the church office in Douglaston which will be his work space next week and handed a folded newspaper to his spokesperson. The sports page was on top. Inside was a front page about a funeral taking place at that moment in Forest Hills.

The mass was for a man who had ingested anti-freeze, a plaintiff in the sexual abuse case against the Bishop’s Diocese.

The Bishop said the front page should be read, and then focused on an interview about his 13 years as the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens.

They were years that would have been marked only by his innovative outreach to young Catholics and to new immigrants, if they had not included the devastation of the terrorist attacks and the eclipse of sexual misconduct allegations against priests and charges that the Church failed to protect its children.

But when Daily began to talk, there was no sign of the careful phrasing used by those who find themselves quoted on the front page. And he didn’t speak with the weariness of a man facing lawsuits or the burden of leading a congregation of almost two million through a tremendous test to their faith and their the values of their church.

Instead, he ministered in the easy tones of a parish priest.

He wandered in his subject from time to time, but his theme never left the path and it seemed to comfort him and give him direction no matter what the subject. It was a path of utter faith in God.

Sept. 23 marked Daily’s 76th birthday, and in anticipation of the Oct. 3 installation of his successor as leader of the diocese, he spoke of the transition process free of its formality.

Daily explained that on his 75th birthday and according to “the rules,” he wrote to the “Holy Father” and sent in his resignation. The Pope sent back the message that he “accepted it and I’ll let you know when” it takes effect.

On Aug. 1 of this year, the word came back that the resignation was accepted. Daily has since been serving as “interim administrator” until the new bishop takes up the post. Church services will install Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of the Camden Diocese as the new Bishop of Brooklyn and Queens this week.

At that time, Daily will take up residence in Queens at the Immaculate Conception Center in Douglaston, and Bishop DiMarzio will reside in the Bishop’s residence in Brooklyn. Daily will have office space, living quarters, and is expected to be in demand to visit local parishes.

He explained, “A bishop is kind of married to his diocese, just a priest is to his people” and now, “they’ve got to take care of me” he smiled, implying the role some wives play in caring for their recently-retired husbands. But he’s not expecting a “great Nirvana and to put my feet up . . . please God, I’ll have heaven for that.

“God has given me generally good health . . . I just want to be a priest,” he said in a theme that repeated itself throughout the interview.

But as for being free of his regular schedule, he admitted he couldn’t quite recall what that is like and couldn’t quite imagine what he would do with the free time. When he was a “young guy,” he enjoyed “the violent stuff” like hockey and football, where the physical strain offered a stress relief. And he admitted to often considering “putting a punching bag on the second floor” of the Center just for stressful moments.

But over and over, he characterized himself and his life – as Bishop and in retirement – the same.

“I figure I’m a priest . . . doing God’s work.

“I enjoy being a priest . . . doing what priests do. People’s response is tremendous . . . you are someone who speaks for God . . . they just want to be around you.”

Daily did not hesitate to take on the subject of how the Church and Catholic parents go forward in the wake of the sexual misconduct charges and lawsuits. However he didn’t focus on a plan of action or a process revision. He spoke about healing and faith.

“It’s a question of children’s safety and the victims . . . the victims who have been abused . . . the first thing is that we must take care of these children, wherever they are. The Church has betrayed them and that has ruined their faith . . . we have to see the reality of that. They have to live their own lives and save their own souls,” and the Church’s first priority now has to be supporting them as they find their way back from betrayal.

He described what has happened in the Church as an “evil” – that there are children and parents who trusted their priest were betrayed, but he believes the saving hope for the victims – and the Church – in this scandal is prayer. “They’ve got to pray. God is always faithful . . . his Church is made up of mere human beings” who can betray trust, but God is constant, he said.

He paused for a moment at the thought of the “poor soul” whose mass was going on in Forest Hills, and the desperation he must have felt, and the essential need to reach out to all people who feel lost.

Turning again to his advice for parents in the wake of so many accusations against the Church, he spoke of a quote from St. John’s gospel he had seen inscribed on a chapel ceiling: “He loved them to the end . . . God has to be faithful to us — the victims and all of us. We really have to turn around [and to God].”

“It’s a loyalty thing in a sense, to be hurt so badly by people [you trusted so much] . . . but where do we go? There is only one way really left. We have to work through this,” Daily explained.

When the scandal broke and Daily’s administrative choices were questioned by a lawsuit still pending in Boston, someone said he was “tarnished,” Daily recalled. I said yes that’s me I’m tarnished . . . [Everyone is] going to see me in the light of what has happened. It’s not easy . . . given the total reality of the situation . . . keeping the faith. There is no real closure to it for these victims . . . you have to live with that.”

He spoke about waking up with a pain in your stomach that just doesn’t go away.

“For a lot of people, this will destroy them. Some will reach out to other religions – even though this has happened in other places [faiths] . . . perhaps it’s the age we’re living in.” Even if people had to leave his Church to do it, “you have got to fall back on your faith, otherwise there is no meaning. That is where I come to some sense of peace.”

Daily spoke of answering questions for some deacons as the scandal started to control the headlines and his decisions as an administrator in the Boston diocese were coming into question,  “I told them I’m going to be here, trying to be a priest. If the Holy Father says I should go, I will go quietly or if the people of God want me to go, I will go. But until then, I am just going to keep trying to be a good priest.”

“There aren’t any solutions . . . you’ve just got to go to God.”

Daily said, “We live in a culture of death,” but what we need to remember is that “we want to live . . . please God, all I want to do is save my soul . . . [the loses of Sept. 11] will get behind us,  [but only] in time.

“But [when you’re Catholic], you don’t forget your dead . . . you remember them and you pray for them.” He stressed the message of Christ as “the way, the truth, and the light.”

He spoke of the upcoming Mel Gibson movie about the passion of Christ and described a clip of it that he has seen as “awesome in its cruelty.” He said that in today’s pop culture, “everything is reality . . . the gore in movies . . . maybe (the Gibson movie) is an answer to the reality TV . . . it was gory . . . the ugliness of sin, what sin did to Jesus Christ . . . but in that suffering there was redemption.”

And he said the message to New Yorkers and Americans is that we must “unite in suffering . . . and help find meaning for the poor souls left behind.”

As for the days ahead, Daily was ever confident about the work of the Church, the work of the congregants and the work of God.

And his final words on his work – and his retirement – were “It will unfold . . . I’ll take one day as it comes, and try to live by faith, hope and love as a priest and a bishop should, keeping the faith to the end.”

Faithful Numbers
The Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens is:

• The only totally urban diocese of the 195 archdiocese and diocese in the United States.

• The smallest diocese or archdiocese geographically in the U.S. at 179.25 square miles.

• The diocese with the largest Catholic population at 1,824,642. There are only four larger archdioceses: Los Angeles (4,206,875); New York (2,488,146); Chicago (2,446,000); and Boston (2,083,899).

• It is estimated that more than half of the Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens speak English as a second language.

• The diocese was founded July 29, 1853 and is celebrating its 150th anniversary.

— information compiled by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn