Published: March 9, 2011
“Nothing else really matters”
Getting people to heaven is ‘ultimate purpose’ of Santa Rosa Coadjutor Bishop Robert Vasa
Bishop Robert Vasa, coadjutor of the Diocese of Santa Rosa, has a “single ultimate purpose” as he prepares to lead the North Coast see: to get people to heaven, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat reports.
“Nothing else really matters,” said Bishop Vasa in his Sunday homily at St. Eugene’s.
“That ‘ultimate purpose’ will guide him as he travels throughout the 165,000 person North Coast-area diocese and learns the names of the parishioners that Pope Benedict XVI unexpectedly called him to serve, Vasa said,” the Santa Rosa newspaper reported.
Bishop Vasa, who had been Bishop of Baker, Oregon, since 2000 and developed a reputation there as a tough and outspoken defender of Catholic orthodoxy, was named Coadjutor Bishop of Santa Rosa on Jan. 24. Current Bishop Daniel Walsh requested the help of a coadjutor, a diocesan statement on Bishop Vasa’s appointment said.
“The appointment as coadjutor bishop confers on Bishop Vasa, 59, the right to succession to Bishop Daniel F. Walsh, current bishop of Santa Rosa,” said a press release from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Bishop Walsh is 73, two years shy of the mandatory retirement age of 75.
“The message from the Nebraska-born bishop resonated with many of the Catholics who flocked to the Montgomery Drive cathedral to meet him,” the Press Democrat reported.
“He's a person I could have in the kitchen while I cook, but he's also stern in his beliefs,” Mary Ponseti, a parishioner at Holy Spirit Church in Santa Rosa, told the Press Democrat.
“He doesn't want to bend (Church law) according to our times,” Marty McCormick of Windsor, told the Santa Rosa newspaper. “Politics shouldn't influence religious laws, said McCormick, a father of 10 children who attended St. Eugene's school,” the Press Democrat reported. “‘It's tough to be Catholic,’ McCormick said.”
A separate profile of Bishop Vasa published by the Press Democrat described him as “a no-frills man of the cloth” whose “theological steadfastness… belies his homespun ways.”
The profile cited Bishop Vasa’s decision to yank the Catholic affiliation of a Bend, Oregon, hospital for performing tubal ligations. “He also imposed on lay teachers and administrators a pledge of fidelity to Catholic prohibitions on pre-marital sex, masturbation and homosexuality, calling them ‘gravely evil,’” said the Press Democrat.
“His record suggests that he could depart from the largely tolerant approach to church doctrine attributed to his predecessors,” the Santa Rosa newspaper’s profile of Bishop Vasa said.
While in Bend, said the Press Democrat, Bishop Vasa “helped convert a horse barn into a retreat center and wired the church office for a computer network.”
“Plain, if not blunt, in speech, the man who will be Santa Rosa's sixth bishop is inclined to squeeze a dime hard,” said the Santa Rosa newspaper’s profile of Bishop Vasa. “He won't pay for cable TV and he'd rather eat beans out of the can with a spoon than dine on French cuisine off fine plates and silver service.”
The Press Democrat’s profile drew a critique from Ignatius Press’ Insight Scoop blog entitled “The mean orthodox bishop vs. the caring, sensitive dissenters.” Insight Scoop said the article was “not really that fair-minded and objective at all.”
To read Insight Scoop’s full critique of the article, Click Here.
To read the Press Democrat’s full profile of Bishop Vasa, Click Here.
I don't think I ever, heard a sermon which plainly stated that the Church's main purpose was to get people to heaven. My daily ejaculation is "Jesus, Mary, I love You: Save souls!"
Deacon John
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