Ed.: In recognition of his five-year anniversary as Bishop of Helena, Bishop George Leo Thomas sat down to take stock of his ministry as the spiritual leader of Catholics in the Diocese of Helena. This is the second article in a two-part installment.


Q: As Carroll College celebrates its centennial, it seems a good opportunity to consider exactly what the moniker “diocesan Catholic college” means. What does Carroll’s Catholic identity require of you, of her trustees, her faculty and staff, her alumni and her students, particularly in light of the recent controversy surrounding Notre Dame’s conferral of the honorary doctorate of law degree upon President Obama?

A: Carroll College has a very unique history, one of a handful of diocesan colleges currently operating in the U.S. The centennial celebration has occasioned going back to the founding documents and Bishop Carroll’s own dream. Mount St. Charles was founded as a college to provide an education for the young men of this region, a passport from poverty, a portal of opportunity for those who didn’t necessarily have many opportunities, and to train and form an indigenous clergy.

Over time, this college founded by a diocesan bishop has become one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. The tension is finding ways to preserve that foundational vision of Catholic mission, Catholic identity, while at the same time respecting the institutional autonomy that is accorded every Catholic college or university. So there will always be a tension, and there will always be need for the diocesan bishop and the college administration to have regular, systematic and sustained dialogue about the practical implications of a Catholic college in the modern world. We have a guiding document created by the Holy See, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, that provides a blueprint for how these things can happen, but it doesn’t relieve the bishop’s and administration’s responsibility to find practical ways to carry this out.

I meet regularly with the college’s president, board of trustees, students and the chaplain. This dialogue has provided a lot of creative opportunities. It doesn’t mean that tensions will go away, but it certainly keeps the conduits open between the diocese and the college, and helps ensure that this Catholic vision is lived out in visible and concrete ways.

Some of the real strengths I see at the college are an exceptional and dedicated faculty, an engaged board of trustees, and an outstanding chaplaincy program. The students are very actively involved with the Church, with its sacramental life and service learning programs. In my five years, I’ve seen a real expansion of global solidarity, with students looking beyond the confines of Carroll College, with the Headlights program, teaching, nursing and engineering opportunities.


Q: In your April 2009 column, you addressed the Year for Priests, which began June 19. In the column, you note: But ministerial priesthood is “ontologically distinct” from the priesthood of the baptized, and the Holy Father will probe and articulate the doctrinal distinctions between the priesthood of the baptized and the ministerial priesthood.

As more and more parish communities face the reality of not enough priests for each parish to have a resident pastor, how do we successfully negotiate the collaboration of the lay faithful and the presbyterate?

A: The beginning point is a sound doctrinal understanding of the commonality and the difference between the priesthood of the laity and the ministerial priesthood. The New Catholic Catechism and other Church documents articulate very well the differences. We hold in common that the priesthood of the baptized flows from the sacraments of baptism and confirmation. Therefore, the whole community of believers is priestly. They exercise their baptismal priesthood through their participation in Christ’s mission as priest, prophet and king.

The ministerial priesthood of bishops and priests differs essentially from the common priesthood of the faithful. The ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood, and is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians. The ministerial priesthood is a means by which the Lord builds up and leads his Church to holiness, and to the goal of everlasting life.

The sacrament of Holy Orders has the task of representing Christ, the head of the Church, before the whole assembly, and also acting in the name of the whole Church when presenting to God the prayer of the Church, especially the Eucharist.


Q: About a year after your installation, you announced plans to form a new Diocesan Pastoral Council. Following their co-missioning in 2005, the pastoral planning process resulted in the Come to the Light pastoral plan, promulgated on February 2, 2007. How has the implementation of the plan progressed thus far, as we are now about half way through its five-year span?

A: The Church is at its best when the Church is in consultation. The Second Vatican Council has a wonderful line in Lumen Gentium, which I’ll paraphrase: the wise pastor knows that he himself was not intended to shoulder alone the saving work of the Church. So there’s a sense of shared responsibility that we have, among those ordained and the laity, serving the needs of the Church. The Church in consulting leaders widely and well taps into the wisdom and experience of the people.

We went out with the DPC, about 25 women and men from across the diocese, to assess the pastoral needs of the local Church and how to meet them. Those needs were articulated and placed into a wonderful planning document, Come to the Light, and those needs spanned the entire geographic area. Some of the most important needs we have are the desire from our lay community to assist in ministry to youth and young adults, asking ways to have equitable distribution of priests across the diocese, and find ways to bring in new revenue streams and fiscal resources to meet these needs.

We’re at the mid-point right now and a lot of great things have been accomplished. The first is that we were in fiscal difficulty when I first came here; the diocese was teetering on financial insolvency, so there was a need for transparency and to let the people know the antecedents of our crisis. There were a number of causes, including the sexual abuse crisis, the market issues in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the turnover of bishops. We were facing a lot of red ink and it is difficult to advance pastoral priorities when the wolf is at the door. Therefore, the Diocesan Pastoral Council asked for stronger financial infrastructures and a capital campaign to address these financial challenges over time.

The key was telling our story – even though it was a hard story to tell, but it resulted in the from Age to Age capital campaign. Our people have been very generous, even with the current financial hardships and uncertainty. And many people also know that we received an extraordinary gift from Charlie Lincoln. Over time, with the combination of this gift and the capital campaign, we’ll be in a position to bring to fruition the pastoral plan.

The DPC process helped us rediscover our hallowed Guatemala mission and th e work of Father Hazelton, Sheila McShane and the BVM sisters, Sisters Mary Waddell and Ana Priester.

With the call to serve youth and young adults, we have been able to hire an extraordinary youth minister, Doug Tooke, and his ministry has had a positive ripple effect across the diocese. We have unprecedented numbers of youth and young adults participating in the life of the Church, with active campus ministries, a renewed interest in Legendary Lodge, and enthusiastic young adult ministers serving in our parishes.

We have also been blessed with a new class of candidates for the permanent diaconate. Presently we have 21 deacon candidates who, together with their wives, are engaged in a five-year formation process.

And we are introducing another project entitled Living Stones, which addresses the fact that we are unable to provide resident pastors in all the communities. So Living Stones will be another grassroots effort, to ask difficult questions about equitable distribution of our priests, and ensure that everyone has access to the sacramental life of the Church. The effort will require dialogue, creative solutions involving local parishes to ensure that we share our priestly resources well. We are bolstering our number of seminarians, and welcoming new priests from other dioceses who wish to serve in western Montana. We do so with a very careful vetting process to be sure we get very high quality priests and seminarians willing to serve our beloved people well.

Work continues through committees on other pastoral plan areas, including communications, promotion of vocations, consideration for the needs of our rural and Native American parishes, and, in time, the expansion of Catholic Social Services.

Finally, I see the need to engage a systematic plan based on the vision and values of Pope John Paul II’s New Evangelization, another human cry that came from our communities across the diocese. Many have left the Catholic Church over the past decades, and we have the obligation to invite them to come home and reengage themselves in the life of the Catholic Church. This is best done when individual Catholics take seriously their responsibility to evangelize or re-evangelize members of their family, neighbors, friends and co-workers who are no longer participating in the Church. Collectively, we also have the obligation to introduce those who do not know Christ to come to him by living lives of faith in the Church that is “one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic.”

I have a deep spirit of gratitude to God for allowing me to serve as the shepherd of the Diocese of Helena. We have a highly gifted and competent chancery staff, caring priests and lay leaders serving in the diocese. I never take this for granted; I think I have to earn my keep, so to speak, every day. I thank God for all we’ve accomplished, but never sitting on our laurels, and thinking we can just relax and let time go by. The challenges are real and the challenges are many. So I continue to work with the priests, the religious, the deacons and the lay people to find new and creative solutions that reflect the mind and ministry of the Church.