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Chapter One Earthen Vessels
By G. Wayne Miller 1. At precisely 6 a.m. on Thursday, March 31, 2005, the Vatican posted a brief announcement on its Web site. It was noon in Rome, four days after Easter.
“RINUNCIA DEL VESCOVO DI PROVIDENCE (U.S.A.) E NOMINA DEL SUCCESSORE,” the posting began. “The Holy Father has accepted the renunciation of the pastoral governance of the Diocese of Providence (U.S.A.), presented by H. E. Msgr. Robert E. Mulvee, in conformity with canon 401 par. 1 of the Code of Canon Law. “John Paul II has nominated as Bishop of Providence (U.S.A.) H. E. Msgr. Thomas J. Tobin, lately Bishop of Youngstown.” Across New England, phones began to ring. Since Feb. 15, priests and interested others in the Diocese of Providence and elsewhere had engaged in speculation. That was the day that Rhode Island’s Roman Catholic leader, the Most Rev. Robert E. Mulvee, turned 75, the age at which the Vatican requires a bishop to submit his confidential letter of resignation. The Vatican does not have to accept it, but many knew that Bishop Mulvee did indeed want to retire and they suspected the pope would grant his wish. The betting was that Rhode Island, the nation’s most Catholic state, would be getting a new bishop. Many believed that the odds favored someone with strong New England ties. Bishop Mulvee was a Boston native who had been the auxiliary bishop of Manchester, N.H.; his predecessor, Bishop Louis E. Gelineau, was a Vermont native who had been Vicar General of the Diocese of Burlington. Seven bishops had led the Diocese of Providence in its 133 years; only the first, an Irish immigrant, was not a New Englander. Perhaps John Paul II would reassign a bishop from one of New England’s smaller dioceses, or elevate a monsignor. One early candidate was Providence’s own Salvatore Ronald Matano — until, on March 3, he had been named bishop of Burlington. Few New Englanders had heard of His Excellency Thomas J. Tobin, and fewer still had met him. His diocese of Youngstown, Ohio, was a minor enclave — only the 74th largest of America’s nearly 200 dioceses. The Diocese of Providence, with its nearly 700,000 Catholics, more than two-thirds of all Rhode Islanders, was the 25th largest. It was also near New York and Boston, both major centers of the American Catholic Church. The Youngstown diocese, in an economically depressed area across the Ohio border from Pittsburgh, hadn’t even been established until 1943, when it was divided off from Cleveland. Its three leaders before Tobin had all died as Youngstown bishops. In the American hierarchy, Youngstown was something of a backwater. But the Vatican, like the Lord sometimes, as the faithful might say, moves in mysterious ways. Curious Catholics Googled the new bishop’s name. They learned that Tobin had graduated from Rome’s Pontifical North American College, been ordained in 1973 and served as assistant pastor in two Pennsylvania parishes before accepting an administrative position in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, in 1984. Eight years later, Pope John Paul II appointed him auxiliary bishop of Pittsburgh; he was only 44, one of the youngest American bishops of the modern era. In 1996, he received his own diocese, Youngstown. Bishop Tobin wrote regularly for his diocesan newspaper, and his columns were available online and had been collected in a book, Without a Doubt, which many priests ordered from Amazon.com on the day of the announcement. He covered broad territory: liturgy, matrimony, prayer, the Virgin Mary, the meaning and challenges of Christian ministry and faith in a materialistic society. He mined moral and theological high ground — with a common touch and an occasionally corny, frequently self-deprecating humor, a trademark also of his homilies. He seemed a man with a serious calling who didn’t always take himself quite so seriously. In drawing the lessons of his favorite participatory sport, for example, he wrote: “Golf for me, and most golfers I think, is more than a game. Golf is a paradigm of life itself, a fierce test of virtue, a cosmic struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, light and darkness, life and death. OK, I’m getting a little too dramatic!” In another column, he wrote about a childhood musical interest: “I wasn’t a very good accordionist. In fact, I was pretty bad. So bad that my first accordion teacher, a young guy named Jim, got really frustrated one Tuesday night, left our house, disappeared, and was never heard from again. I was so bad that the novel Accordion Crimes was written about me. My second accordion teacher, Johnny, was a gentle and patient man who stayed with me three years, bravely enduring his penance, richly meriting the eternal reward he now enjoys.” BISHOP TOBIN had received secret word of his new assignment 10 days before the official announcement, and he flew into Rhode Island the afternoon of March 30, 2005, to prepare. A news advisory that would be released simultaneously with the Vatican posting was written, and the retiring Bishop Mulvee treated him to dinner at the members-only Aurora Club, on Providence’s Federal Hill. Bishop Tobin slept at the Cathedral of SS. Peter & Paul Residence, and early the next morning, he said his first Mass in Providence — at the diocesan seminary, which he had deliberately chosen to symbolize the regard with which he held his priests and priests-to-be. After Mass, he shared breakfast with a small group of them. They judged him likeable and smart. He was young for a bishop. He had energy. 
Bishop Tobin, left, and outgoing Bishop Robert Mulvee meet the Rhode Island media on March 31, 2005, after Bishop Tobin's appointment to the Diocese of Providence. He previously had led the Diocese of Youngstown, Ohio. Journal photo / Mary Murphy Three hours later, the new bishop introduced himself during a media conference at the diocesan offices at One Cathedral Square, across a brick plaza from the cathedral. This was not the 21-year-old man with his tie too short posing with his working-class parents the weekend after Woodstock 1969. Sitting beneath a crucifix and wearing his bishop’s ring and pectoral cross, and with his neatly combed graying hair, this man projected poise. He had no media training, but unlike some of the bishops who had gone before him in Rhode Island, he was at ease with microphones and cameras. He did not dodge questions or prevaricate. He joked. Bishop Tobin noted that he would turn 57 the next day, April 1 — April Fool’s Day, a coincidence he’d found amusing since he was a kid. “I’m not sure what the future holds,” he said; hopefully, his birthday would not prove an omen. “It means I will have been here a day and aged a year. I hope that’s not a sign of things to come.” The bishop was moving to Rhode Island with few preconceptions; he had only briefly visited the state, and most of his knowledge of the diocese derived from dry statistics he had read in a Catholic directory. “Everything will be new for me — the priests, the people, the parishes, the geography, the programs and procedures,” he said. “My first priority will be to listen and learn.” What he did not say, but what people would soon discover, was that he was a quick learner. Death was much in the news on that March 31. 
The bishop (then a priest) visits Pope John Paul II in the 1980s. At a 1998 meeting, the pope told him, without explanation: "You will suffer a great deal." Photo courtesy of Bishop Tobin Eighty-four-year-old Pope John Paul II’s health had deteriorated dramatically as winter had turned to spring, and he had recently been released from the hospital, almost certainly to die in his chambers. And he did, just two days later. Bishop Tobin had great affection for the pope, and he recalled his meetings with him as among the most thrilling moments of his life — although he was still sometimes troubled, if not haunted, by the cryptic prophecy the pope had shared with him in one meeting, in 1998. “You will suffer a great deal,” the pope told Bishop Tobin, without explanation. As it turned out, sending Bishop Tobin to Providence was John Paul II’s last appointment of an American bishop. Tobin didn’t quite brag about that, but it was another unusual connection to the late pontiff and was a certain point of pride to the Providence prelate. Comatose Terri Schiavo, subject of a bitter dispute over removal of her feeding tube, was also in the news that March 31; in fact, she had died that very morning. A reporter asked the new bishop about her. The medical and legal issues were complex, he said, but the morality, to him, was simple and clear. “The way people treated Terri Schiavo was a moral disaster,” he said. “I think it’s another step down that wrong road where we have now starved and dehydrated a person to death.” Asked about Catholic politicians, such as Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who support abortion rights, Bishop Tobin said he was not familiar with them specifically. “I don’t know their histories or what the current practice has been in the diocese.” Nonetheless, “I think the work of the church is to encourage all its members and our friends and neighbors in society to be committed to human life.” Catholic office-holders, he said, “have special obligations. No one, including Catholic politicians, is exempt from the moral law or the disciplines of the Church.” 2. On one of the most momentous days of his priesthood in the three decades since his ordination, the Most Rev. Thomas J. Tobin rose at his regular hour, around 6:30 a.m. It was May 31, 2005. In a few hours, he would be installed as bishop of Providence. Starting in 1875 with the founding prelate, every bishop of Providence had lived at the Cathedral Residence; the retiring Bishop Mulvee, along with other clergy, lived there still. But the residence, a rambling old aristocrat of a building next to a convent, was not for Bishop Tobin. The new man had a dog, his beloved Molly, a cross between a cocker spaniel and a poodle, and he knew not everyone appreciated pets. He liked open space. With a bishop’s endless obligations to visit parishes, schools and other corners of his diocese, he valued solitude. Living a half-minute walk from his office would make it difficult to separate leisure from work, and he did not want to go home every night to the continuing company of his employees, no matter how much he might like them. He had never lived that way. He suspected it would be suffocating. When he learned that the caretaker’s house at a Diocesan cemetery in East Providence was available, he thought: Wow! There’s a cemetery! He’d always liked cemeteries; he’d discovered long ago that he did some of his best thinking strolling among the dead, for whom he always offered a prayer. “It’s peaceful,” he explained. “Reflective.” On the morning of the announcement, he visited the caretaker’s residence, a ranch-style house, empty for years. “This will work,” he said. Some priests, who thought their new boss required a degree of distance to achieve the changes they believed the diocese needed, applauded his decision. Others interpreted his break with tradition as an unfriendly gesture.“You get the impression of someone who lives in a tower, thinking everything through — then, in written form, he tells us,” one priest would later say. This perception would prompt the priest to describe his boss as “enigmatic.”
ON THAT MORNING of May 31, 2005, the bishop checked on the news and had breakfast with his friend and houseguest, the Very Rev. Walker Nickless, a seminary classmate who would soon be named bishop of Sioux City, Iowa. The two had driven to Rhode Island the previous weekend in a rental van containing the bishop’s clothes, books, memorabilia and religious items. He brought only one piece of furniture, a grandfather clock that had sentimental value. Molly had been left in the care of his old housekeeper until he settled in. The bishop did not yet know his way around Rhode Island, and so Msgr. John J. Darcy, the diocese’s chancellor and secretariat for ministerial services, drove him and Msgr. Nickless into Providence. After a reception at The Westin Providence for family, friends, local priests and the 40 bishops and 6 archbishops who were in town, Bishop Tobin went to the Cathedral Residence, where he dressed in white-and-blue vestments and miter, his bishop’s cap. Under his chasuble, or liturgical vestment, he wore the pectoral cross that John Paul II had given him the year before. It was a sign of respect for the recently deceased pontiff. Carrying his favorite gold crosier— a pastoral staff, symbol of a bishop’s role as shepherd of his flock — he joined a procession of clergy of many faiths that was headed across the plaza to the cathedral. The sounds of the Gregorian Concert Choir and Orchestra carried out into the warm afternoon. A few people affected by the priest sex-abuse scandal protested in the plaza. The cathedral, Rhode Island’s largest, was the life work of Providence’s first bishop, Thomas F. Hendricken, an Irish immigrant who suffered from declining health during the near decade it took to build. Hendricken’s funeral, in June 1886, was the first Mass held in the new church; when it was over, his eminence was entombed in the basement crypt, where he remained, undignified and mostly forgotten, the dust accumulating, for 119 years. Bishop Tobin had just discovered this, and he believed his predecessor deserved better — a sarcophagus upstairs near the altar, perhaps, where no one could forget. Bishop Tobin had great reverence for the dead. One of his prized possessions was a relic of Mother Teresa, a snip of her hair that he kept in his home chapel with other religious treasures. Bishop Tobin put Bishop Hendricken on his list of priorities. He wasn’t in power yet, but the list was growing. 
Clergy file out of the Cathedral of SS. Peter & Paul after the May 31, 2005, installation of Thomas Joseph Tobin as bishop of Providence. Nearly 1,400 people filled the cathedral, including most of Rhode Island's active priests. The two-hour ceremony was covered live on TV. Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl NEARLY 1,400 PEOPLE filled the cathedral, the mother church of the Diocese of Providence. Most of the diocese’s nearly 200 active priests had come, together with monks, nuns, deacons, lay people, and print and broadcast reporters. The two-hour ceremony was being covered live on TV. Bishop Mulvee welcomed everyone, and the Vatican’s Washington emissary, the apostolic nuncio, read a letter from the late John Paul II appointing Tobin as bishop of Providence. The nine priests serving on the Diocesan College of Consultors, a largely advisory board required by the Church’s Code of Canon Law, accepted the letter, the congregation applauded and Bishop Tobin took to his chair on the high altar. His coat of arms was embroidered on the back of the chair. Made to his design, it consists of a shield with three silver crosses, a larger cross above, a candle atop all, and his motto: Strong, Loving, Wise — three virtues espoused in St. Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy. Some saw this as boastful, if not arrogant; when asked, Bishop Tobin said these were his aspirations, which he does not always achieve. After thanking a long list of people, Bishop Tobin struck a note of levity. He mentioned having already received many letters, including from one fifth-grade student who admonished him for enthusiastically following Pittsburgh football. He read from it. “I heard you are a Steelers fan,” the child wrote. “I am a Pats fan. We are all Pats fans. Too bad for you!” The bishop paused, then added, to laughter: “Obviously, I have a lot of work to do up here!” He told the story of shopping at a Youngstown supermarket some while back. It was a Friday afternoon, and the bishop was dressed in lay clothes. A man approached him and said: “You know, you look like Bishop Tobin.” “Really?” the bishop said. “Yes, sir,” the man said. “I don’t know,” the bishop said. “I think Bishop Tobin’s a lot younger and better looking.” “Well, that’s true,” the man said. Then the homily turned serious. The bishop pledged to work hard, and he sought God’s blessings on all. He struck two fundamental themes that he had emphasized in his ministry since its start, 32 years before: discipleship, the Catholic following of Christ, and Christian values, taught by Jesus. These values, he said, included a commitment to help the poor, the weak and the needy; a desire to promote common decency in the secular culture; a longing to live in peace and forgiveness; respect for life, from conception to natural death; and honesty, integrity and civility in one’s personal and professional lives. Also, the bishop said, Catholics should hold a “non-negotiable belief in Holy Matrimony as designed by God and blessed by Jesus — a union of one man and one woman joined together in a lifetime commitment of life and love.” Among the many politicians in the congregation that afternoon was Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, a practicing Catholic who had attended Catholic schools until college. His sister, Margaret Lynch, is gay and involved in a long-term relationship with a woman. Two years later, Margaret and the woman would wed in Massachusetts, the first state to allow same-sex marriage. 
The bishop is greeted by nuns who work at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital in North Providence after he said Mass on Ash Wednesday at the hospital's chapel in February. He is chairman and treasurer of the hospital's trustees, one of numerous boards on which he serves. Journal photo / Mary Murphy 3. As the end of his second year in Providence drew within view, Bishop Tobin celebrated Mass at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital in North Providence. He was chairman and treasurer of the hospital’s trustees, one of numerous boards on which he served. It was Feb. 21, 2007 — Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. In his homily, the bishop revisited themes from his installation. “We live in a world and a culture and a society that is challenged and fractured by the reality of sin in all of its consequences, and that’s a truth we need to be aware of,” he said. Abortion is sin, he said; so is embryonic stem cell research, although not research with stem cells from non-embryonic sources, which the Church supports. The bishop urged the faithful to embrace Catholic morality, to reject “unchallenged homosexual activities, the pornography and obscenity that we read about in our culture today on our college campuses, the political corruption we hear so much about in our state and elsewhere, the violence that takes place in our streets and in our homes, the marital infidelity and premarital sexual activities that seem to be so widely accepted today.” “All of these things,” he said, “are almost unquestioned and unchallenged as part of our society and culture today, so is there any reason to suspect that we don’t have to reform and renew and hear God’s word as He calls us to repentance?” When he returned home that evening, the bishop turned on the news. The state Board of Governors for Higher Education had asked Attorney General Lynch if Rhode Island should recognize same-sex marriages that had been legally performed in Massachusetts. In a non-binding opinion, Lynch had said yes. He subsequently confirmed that his sister had wed her partner six days earlier, across the border in Attleboro. The timing of Lynch’s announcement – Ash Wednesday — offended the bishop, and, he believed, all Catholics. Unwilling to be silent, he went to the secular media. 
The bishop talks with Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch at a reception after Bishop Tobin dedicated a new athletic complex at St. Raphael Academy in Pawtucket on Sept. 18. Journal photo / Mary Murphy Bishop Tobin had used the media before to condemn same-sex marriage. After reading a story in autumn 2006 about two gay women from Providence who had married across the border, he wrote a letter to The Providence Journal stating that the women’s “homosexual relationship is disturbing and morally objectionable.” He did not, however, judge them as people. “The Catholic Church has consistently taught that homosexual persons are children of God, our brothers and sisters, and must be respected,” he wrote. The women responded with their own letter, published a few days later, accusing Bishop Tobin of perpetuating discrimination. This time, the bishop issued a press release. Lynch’s decision to recognize “so-called ‘gay marriages,’ ” the bishop said, was “very disappointing.” The attorney general, he declared, “has been influenced by the relentless gay agenda so prevalent in our state. It is ironic, however, that his decision was announced on Ash Wednesday, when so many citizens of our state were beginning a special time of repentance and prayer.” Lynch would later say that he was unaware it was Ash Wednesday, and the timing was coincidental. “If we could do it again I would have never issued it on that day,” Lynch said. The calls to talk-radio began, and on Friday, the bishop himself appeared for the full opening hour of the top-rated Dan Yorke Show. He outlined his convictions again, and Yorke, a practicing Catholic, took his first call, from a man who identified himself as Jim. “I was calling really to thank you, Bishop, for your leadership on this issue,” Jim said. “I think that Catholics statewide, if not nationwide and worldwide, are looking for that kind of leadership.” The next caller shared those sentiments, then asked: “I don’t want to put you on the spot, Bishop, but would it at some point call for something like a public ex-communication for the attorney general?” “To answer your question very simply,” the bishop said, “no, not at all.” Then Wendy Becker phoned in. Her marriage to her long-term partner had prompted the bishop to write his letter to the editor. Becker said it was somewhat intimidating “to go up against the bishop,” but she spoke nonetheless. “For you to say things like marriages are deteriorating because of marriages between gay couples or civilization is somehow getting worse is just plain silly. And, in fact, if you think that marriages are adrift, as I believe you said, let’s focus on divorce. Let’s focus on domestic violence. Let’s focus on poverty. Let’s focus on real issues that are impacting real marriages in this state.” The bishop responded. “Thanks, Wendy, and we do focus on all those things. We deal with those issues in different ways every day. One of the things you said is very instructive. You said, ‘Bishop Tobin, if this is your opinion.’ This is not a question of my opinion. This is something that derives from the Old Testament and the New Testament and the constant teachings of the Jewish-Christian tradition and most cultures through the generations and ages. This is not something I’ve flipped a coin on and said, ‘Yeah, I think I’ll be against this.’ This is something that’s been developed from the beginning of human civilization and reflected in every culture and every religious denomination.” The final caller was John. “For me as a gay man who’s 42 years old and has been gay since he was born — is the only way I can get to heaven by being celibate?” “Sure,” the bishop said. “The constant teaching of the church again, John, is that sexual activity is proper only within the sacrament of matrimony. So what applies to you — the need to be celibate — applies to me just as well.” But in the end, John said, doesn’t God judge a person by taking into account the whole picture? Wouldn’t “good, kind works of charity” be worth something? “God judges all of our lives as a package — our good deeds and our bad deeds,” the bishop said. “God judges our consciences, and we recognize that’s where the ultimate judgment will be. So I can’t decide or I can’t begin to guess who gets to heaven and who doesn’t get to heaven. That would be the sin of presumption.” 4. A crucifix and a statue of the Virgin Mary greet visitors when they step off the elevator into the second-floor lobby of One Cathedral Square, an architecturally bland building that stands in ugly contrast to the adjacent cathedral. A photograph of Pope Benedict XVI hangs on one wall of the lobby, facing a larger photo of Bishop Tobin. A china cabinet holds a collection of plates with images of the late John Paul II. Copies of the diocesan newspaper are available on coffee tables. Long corridors lined with doors and paintings of bishops stretch to the right and left. The atmosphere is serene, with a hint of mystery. 
From Cathederal Square, Bishop Tobin oversees 152 parishes and 300 priests. He controls 53 schools, 10 homes for the aged, a seminary, 2 hospitals, 37 cemeteries and other property -- total value over $1 billion. He earns $36,000 a year, plus $7,000 to $8,000 in gifts and stipends. Journal photo / Mary Murphy The corridor to the left leads to Bishop Tobin’s suite. His office occupies that entire end of the second floor, with windows facing the cathedral plaza on one side and the Route 95 service road on the other. Bookshelves heavy with Catholic volumes and photographs fill the longest wall. The bishop has a photograph of his parents on his ordination day. A shot of him with his dog. With immigrants at a 2006 rally in Providence. With the Dalai Lama at Salve Regina University. The papal declaration naming him auxiliary bishop of Pittsburgh. The decree that brought him to Providence. In the middle of it all, the bishop has placed a cartoon of a long sculling boat with several rowers, only one of whom is actually rowing. He sometimes uses it when he’s asked the question: What’s it like to be a bishop? “It’s sort of like this,” he will say. “Everybody’s hollering at you and one person’s doing the rowing, instead of the other way around. That gives me a little comfort every once in a while!” The bishop’s desk is impossibly clean, a symptom of what he jokingly calls his obsessive-compulsive disorder. (“It’s deceiving,” he explains, pointing out files, “because in these folders are lots of things that need to be done.”) The desk has a digital clock and a plastic photo cube with pictures of the Youngstown cathedral, his parents, Bishop Nickless, and Annamarie Stauffer, 36, a longtime friend from Pittsburgh. MSN.com is the home page on his computer, which he operates with a mouse on a Pittsburgh Steelers pad. He is a regular reader of “Whispers in the Loggia,” the insider-Catholic blog that has become enormously popular with clergy in the U.S. and abroad, receiving more than 10,000 unique visitors a day. From this desk, the bishop runs an enterprise unique in Rhode Island — one that, in many regards, is a microcosm of the worldwide Church, with its 1.1 billion members. Bishop Tobin publishes seven Web sites and a 30,000-circulation weekly newspaper. He employs a State House lobbyist. He sits on the 12-member corporation that governs Providence College, and he is a trustee of Salve Regina University, another Catholic school, in Newport. Almost 25,000 students — from pre-kindergarten through graduate school — fall under some degree of his influence or control. Nearly 300 priests are under his jurisdiction, together with about 100 deacons and nearly 4,000 lay people; some 600 religious sisters and nearly 200 brothers and monks are also in Rhode Island. The diocese has been legally structured such that its 152 parishes, each with its church, rectory and other property, is a separate corporation, and the bishop of Providence is the head of each. He also has ultimate control of 53 schools, 10 homes for the aged, a seminary, 2 hospitals, a school of nursing, a rehabilitation center, a dental clinic, 37 cemeteries and numerous other holdings, including Warwick’s 75-acre waterfront Aldrich estate, with its boathouse, chapel and 70-room French chateau, a favorite for wedding receptions. The appraised value of all these properties is in excess of $1 billion. Excluding the hospitals and several of the schools that are run by their own boards, the combined annual operating budgets of entities under the bishop’s authority total about $260 million. For this, the bishop earns $36,000 a year, plus another $7,000 or $8,000 from gifts and stipends — certain speaking fees, for example. The diocese pays for his health insurance and a retirement plan, and provides him a house and daily living expenses. A Rhode Island dealership, Tasca, allows him free use of a car. Bishop Tobin has no formal business training, but in entrusting him with this enterprise, the Vatican recognized financial skills he learned on the job in Pittsburgh and Ohio. Like all of the Catholic Church’s 4,986 bishops worldwide, Tobin — in these earthly affairs, at least — answers only to the Pope, whose oversight in ordinary circumstances derives from reports every diocese must file annually listing names of key officials and numbers of priests, Catholics and similar statistics. A more comprehensive filing, the so-called Quinquennial Report, is filed every five years, in conjunction with a bishop’s obligation to visit Rome twice a decade. 
On Sept. 24, Bishop Tobin leaves the Chancery at Cathedral Square in Providence to tape a message for the diocesan Web site. As part of his job, he oversees seven Web sites and a 30,000-circulation weekly newspaper which he has had redesigned, updated and renamed. Journal photo / Mary Murphy Previous bishops who presided over One Cathedral Square were confronted with the priest sex-abuse scandal, with roots to the 1950s and earlier. By 2002, the scandal dominated national headlines. Although some cases, notably Los Angeles, were pending five years later, most dioceses, including Providence, had settled with victims. Many bishops, including Tobin’s immediate predecessor, had gone beyond cash awards to healing. With new safeguards, the American Church was emerging from the ugliest chapter in its history. Bishop Tobin had not inherited the worst of that ruinous turmoil. Still, like any American bishop, Tobin at the beginning of Lent 2007 faced a multitude of challenges. America, with its 69 million Catholics, had the fourth-largest population of Roman Catholics in the world, after Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines — but many Americans had turned their backs on the church. Priestly vocations throughout America had declined as the priest population had aged. In part because of the abuse scandal, attendance at Sunday Mass had also dropped, affecting not only spiritual life but also finances, as income from collections dwindled. Certain parishes in the Diocese of Providence were running deficits, had unpaid bills, or were depleting their reserve accounts, jeopardizing the survival of their churches and schools. Providence’s annual Catholic Charity Fund appeal, which subsidizes the Diocese’s many health, education and social ministries, was also in the red. Deficits are abhorrent to Bishop Tobin, who angered some in Youngstown when he made cuts to balance the budget during his first months in charge. “It’s just unfair and it’s irresponsible to spend what you don’t have and to expect somebody else to pay for it,” he said. “That’s not good stewardship. That’s not being accountable. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions here and now – a little bit of ‘tough love’ to help the whole family benefit in the future.” Breaking through in a culture that seemed more captivated by Britney than Jesus was another daunting challenge to a bishop with a message of God. In the era of YouTube and the 24-hour news cycle, the bishop planned new television programming and improved Diocesan Web sites. But it was the Diocese’s weekly paper, The Providence Visitor, that had become a pet peeve for the bishop, an ardent follower of religious and secular news. Unimpressed by the paper’s tired look and lackluster writing, he had hired outside consultants to critique it. Their report was scathing; it could have been a high school publication they’d analyzed. Bishop Tobin had authorized a complete makeover — he was even inclined to change the name, which struck his ear as better-suited to a Chamber of Commerce than the Church. He was not off-base. Tourists sometimes called The Visitor offices seeking tips on good places to eat. Bishop Tobin had accomplished much already in his nearly two years in Providence, but many items on his list remained incomplete. ON AN AFTERNOON shortly after Ash Wednesday this year, when the bishop welcomed a writer into his office, the gay marriage debate continued. A new flurry of letters to the editor had been published, and the bishop’s office had received telephone calls and letters. Opinions were mixed.What didn’t surface publicly was the reaction from some priests who had come of age in the 1960s and ’70s and who considered their new bishop too strident on the issue of homosexuality. One confided that Bishop Tobin was “brutal” and “uncharitable” on same-sex marriage — counter-productively so. This priest feared the bishop would alienate otherwise good Catholics. He wished Bishop Tobin had chosen other issues to take high-profile. But for the most part, dissenting priests kept their opinions to themselves and toother priests who shared their views. Not so a man who sent Bishop Tobin a letter. 
Bishop Thomas J. Tobin, who has led the Diocese of Providence for 2½ years, says: "What could be better than to get close to God and help people save their souls forever?" Journal photo / Mary Murphy “Dear Thomas,” the man began. “I am writing to express severe angst at the Catholic Church’s DEVOUT adherence to a history of intolerance and teachings that on the one hand express love and forgiveness, but only with attendant caveats, and on the other condemn certain forms of love … the Catholic Church, with its asinine positions and inbred idiocy sees fit to vilify certain segments of a loving population… “Allow me to be blunt, Thomas: the Catholic Church will one day implode due to its arrogance, its devotion to ancient beliefs which have evolved, and its lackluster history in relation to subverting the criminal behavior in its own midst… “No reply is expected, nor will one be accepted. Anything sent will be tossed into the garbage where it would so rightly belong. Do go to hell, you goddamned ass.” MANY AMERICAN bishops have confined their teachings on abortion, homosexuality and immigration, three of the great fault lines of contemporary culture, to their pulpits and their Church writings. Bishop Tobin’s willingness to join the public discourse has set him apart. After almost two years in Rhode Island, he played a leading role in the city-state’s rough-and-tumble media arena.Some of Bishop Tobin’s followers lauded him a “culture warrior,” a term he himself did not use, preferring instead to be called “evangelist,” a role the pope asked Catholic bishops to take in following Christ’s example. Some of Bishop Tobin’s critics considered him a rigid, unforgiving adversary with a personal agenda — someone who belonged on the sidelines, but had taken the field with the notion he was quarterback. His life had never been threatened, but some in Bishop Tobin’s inner circle worried for his safety. They did not like that he lived alone in a cemetery, albeit behind a fence, with burglar alarms on his house and a nighttime cemetery guard on patrol. The bishop himself had experienced moments of anxiety, but he was not deterred. “The Church needs a voice,” he said. To him, it was that simple: evangelization, he believed, was essential to his calling. He was not competing in a popularity contest. On that afternoon after Ash Wednesday 2007, the bishop reflected on a related but larger theme: the paradoxical position in which humans called to God’s work find themselves. Priests, he said, are “earthen vessels,” as St. Paul in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians described the first ones, the apostles. He cited Henri Nouwen, a modern priest and philosopher who taught spirituality at Harvard Divinity School. Bishop Tobin said: “In this current debate about the gay marriage thing and everything, people will say: ‘Who are you to condemn others and judge others and so forth?’ I’m painfully aware of my own weaknesses and sins and failures and needs. … But the truth of the message has nothing to do with my personal sanctity. … The truth stands on its own. If we waited for perfect preachers, all of our pulpits would be empty. It’s important to convey the truth even though we are, to use Henri Nouwen’s phrase, ‘wounded healers,’ the earthen vessels that contain the glory of God.” So what were the bishop’s weaknesses or sins? The bishop laughed. “I’m not going to tell you!” And he didn’t. But he said: “Priests and bishops are thoroughly human. We have sins, we have weaknesses, we have needs, we have imperfections — but you need to forge ahead, do your job. And you constantly strive to close the gap between what you want to be and what you are, so that there is more integrity in your work and in your preaching. Saint Paul said the same thing in his letter to the Romans: "What I am is not what I want to be. And what I strive to be, I fall short of."
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On Monday, Oct. 29, Journal staff writer G. Wayne Miller hosted 
