Bishop Tom Gumbleton: Has there been a more evil bishop in America?
By Jay McNally
Three days before the funeral of the Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit is good time for me to start publishing my Substack column titled “I Saw it With My Own Eyes.” It is intended to be a memoir of my life as professional journalist based in Michigan going back 40 years.
This first Substack column offers some needed honest reporting – let’s call it “fact checking” – about Gumbleton, who I first met in 1969 while I was a high school senior at Sacred Heart Minor Seminary.
Gumbleton is a big name in the Catholic Church and needs no introduction to those who are even mildly attentive to goings-on in the Church. He died at age 94 and will be buried on Saturday, April 14, at Blessed Sacrament Cathedral in Detroit.
I first interviewed Gumbleton for the National Catholic Register in 1980 and have since written half a million news articles and commentary denouncing his and his colleagues’ sometimes diabolical antics. A simple way to describe Gumbleton is as a ceaseless anti-Catholic provocateur. This article and subsequent dispatches will detail some of it.
A bit of background about me, for those who don’t know me: I spent 20 years as a newspaper editor, evenly split between running newsrooms full-time at secular and Catholic newspapers, as well as writing scores of investigative reports for several of the national Catholic publications that lean right of center. Most of that free-lance work focused on – for purposes of this column, let’s call them “social justice issues” – was invariably on the opposite side of Gumbleton and his hordes of disciples and fellow travelers.
Additionally, aside from my writing career, I’ve been deeply involved in the conservative and pro-life movement since 1980 as an activist and consultant and organizer. Fun fact: I was a paid “community organizer” operating in tandem with the Catholic Church pro-life stance, before Obama was recruited by the Catholic Campaign for Human Development for his first job out of college in 1985 to push the Culture of Death in Chicago.
By any measure, Gumbleton must be considered one of most influential Catholic leaders in the United States since Vatican II (1965). Under Detroit’s Cardinal John Dearden, he was named auxiliary bishop in 1968, and much was made of his youth in the media: At first he was celebrated as “the youngest” bishop in the country, then he was the “most progressive.”
After the Call to Action Conference (CTA) at Cobo Hall in Detroit in 1976 more and more faithful Catholics labeled him a “heretic.” CTA was a shocking wake-up call for faithful Catholics who had no idea that vast parts of the Church had already been taken over by revolutionaries who were agitating for every imaginable change in the Church. Gumbleton was always deeply involved in CTA and rarely, if ever, presented a “conservative” view on issues like abortion, and the other hot button issues.
It’s easy to estimate that most of the staff in the Detroit chancery when I worked there in the early ‘90s were either hard-line liberal leftists or prudently silent on the divisive issues, lest they be shown the door that day. Gumbleton no doubt hired most of them and he was known as an iron-fisted administrator.
Michigan’s Bishop Alex Sample came pretty darn close to calling Gumbleton a heretic 15 years ago, in 2009, when Sample formally and publicly banned Gumbleton from giving a speech in Marquette due, he wrote, to "... Bishop Gumbleton’s very public position on certain important matters of Catholic teaching, specifically with regard to homosexuality and the ordination of women to the priesthood ...".
It is the rarest of occasions when an American bishop publicly disowns one of his peers. Thus, Sample’s directive –- and others like it -- should be part of the current news coverage about Gumbleton’s life, which is being widely published in Catholic and secular media.
If you don’t know who Gumbleton is, you get an idea by reading glowing and intentionally dishonest coverage here: from the Detroit Free Press and this awful piece from the Archdiocese of Detroit’s online publication, Detroit Catholic. Btw, I was editor of the Detroit diocesan newspaper for five years, from 1990 to ’95, when we had a staff of 13 people. You can be sure no article as dishonest as this one would have been published while I was there.
The Detroit Catholic artice ignores:
Gumbleton’s stance in favor of Communist revolutions in Central America, which was a big deal in the ‘80s.
His role in the creation of the homosexual priests sex club Dignity/Detroit, which expanded to other dioceses, especially Lansing.
His never-ending lobbying for hard-left stances and legislation that promote abortion, the LGBT agenda and even euthanasia.
His false narrative that suggests he was not part of the get-along, go-along machinery of the Detroit chancery when he had the power and authority in the ‘70s to oppose sex-abusing priests. He protected pedophile Fr. Berthiaume, as did his fellow leftist colleague Detroit bishop Joseph Imesch while Imesch ran the diocese of Joliet.
Those are reasons why I’m writing this column focused on Gumbleton: You’re not going to get anything close to honest coverage about Gumbleton from the local secular and Catholic press.
For the rest of this dispatch, I present one my most interesting interactions with both Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron and Gumbleton which took place 1998, when I and a group of grassroots Catholic activists forced Vigneron to finally man-up and stand against defiantly anti-Catholic political shenanigans of Gumbleton.
The following paragraph is the full text of a statement released by the Archdiocese of Detroit the day of Gumbleton’s death. I think it’s profoundly dishonest and is just one of many reasons Vigneron did not ordain a single priest two years ago, the first time in at least 100 years for a Detroit ordinary. What kind of man would want to be ordained by an archbishop who would issue the silliness below?
“Bishop Gumbleton was a faithful son of the Archdiocese of Detroit, loved and respected by his brother priests and the laity for his integrity and devotion to the people he served. We in the Archdiocese join his family and friends in praying for the repose of his soul and asking God to grant him the reward of his labors.”
In the early 1990s, Gumbleton formed Catholic Caucus, a group of hard-core leftists to formally lobby politicians in Lansing, sometimes in opposition of the efforts Michigan Catholic Conference (MCC), which is the formal lobbying organization for the Catholic Church in the state and is headed by a board of directors comprised of the bishops who head up the seven dioceses in Michigan.
While I was editor of The Michigan Catholic, my boss was Msgr. John Zenz, who was as moderator of the curia was the biggest of priestly cheeses in the chancery. He told me the nun who ran the MCC was really, really miffed that she faced opposition from Gumbleton.
Even though Catholic Caucus had no official standing in the Catholic Church, Gumbleton and several priests routinely and personally lobbied politicians. He was always virtually untouchable in his political and theological activism. Part of the reason is most of the hierarchy was, and still is, friendly to the broad socialist and LGBT+ agendas favored by the left.
Two years after I left the Michigan Catholic in 1995, I became the editor of a new Catholic newspaper in Ann Arbor, Credo, funded by Tom Monaghan. I was simultaneously executive director of Call to Holiness (CTH), and Catholic group based in Detroit specifically to oppose the left-wing antics people like Tom Gumbleton who were under the umbrella group Call to Action. Our group held annual conferences at the second largest hotel in metro Detroit, with attendance topping 2,000 for its first several years. The first conference took place the same three days as CTA’s 20th anniversary conference at Cobo Hall. The Detroit Free Press published a large article the Saturday of the 1996 conference and for at least six years thereafter various local media gave it coverage of some sort, and I’m told this was duly noted in the Detroit chancery.
Our group’s mission statement stated we were formed to “defend” the Catholic Church, whereas CTA was dedicated to radical change across the board. Thus, CTH periodically sponsored pickets and protests of notoriously errant bishops and priests in the Detroit area. One of those protests, in 1998, led to the formation of the Ave Maria School of Law, which I will recount in a future dispatch here on Substack. Vigneron was well aware of CTH’s advocacy and our ability to generate widespread media visibility, especially on local TV.
The Michigan ballot in the November 1998 election included a referendum that would legalize euthanasia. As they did as every election season, Gumbleton and the Catholic Caucus were lobbying hard for their liberal stance and hosted pre-election events with speakers. One was held at Sacred Heart Seminary in August of ’98, which I did not know about at the time, and another was slated for late October at the seminary, nine days away, and close to the November election. I was determined to see it scuttled the moment I learned of it.
It was called General Assembly Meeting, and both Gumbleton and Msgr. Gerald Martin, former rector of the seminary and the newly installed editor of The Michigan Catholic. He was widely known as Gumbleton’s friend and participant in many liberal events involving Gumbleton and Call to Action. Both Martin and Gumbleton spoke at Catholic Caucus events.
The problem for me – and the whole of the pro-life movement – was that Catholic Caucus and similar groups always claimed to “ignore” the abortion issue so they could best focus on their litany of leftist causes. I called the spokesman for Catholic Caucus and asked him directly if the group opposed euthanasia. He refused to answer, stating that they were “neutral.”
Another problem was that the sponsor of the euthanasia referendum was State Rep Lynn Jondahl, who had spoken at the previous event at the seminary and was scheduled for the upcoming event.
At that time, I was on good terms with Vigneron and he took my phone call on Oct. 10. I told him our group, Call to Holiness, was prepared to put on a “full-court” press including press releases and pickets against him personally and the Archdiocese of Detroit if he allowed Catholic Caucus to host the planned pre-election event or anything else in the future: No more meetings of Catholic Caucus at Sacred Heart.
He was, I think, taken aback at such a direct threat. He hemmed and hawed about this and that, mainly how the seminary building was also a “conference center.” He said he personally had absolutely nothing to do with Catholic Caucus and its activities.
To which I replied that nobody in the public would think ANY event sponsored by a bishop — Gumbleton — on the seminary grounds is not really “at the seminary,” and Vigneron was the top boss at the seminary. Our group was unwavering. I told him we could, and sometimes did, assemble on a moment’s notice as many as two dozen people to our protests and would do it against him if he did not shut down Catholic Caucus.
He did the right thing and said “OK …” he would cancel the events. On the day of the event there was a notice on the seminary public entrance door noting the Catholic Caucus event was cancelled. This was a monumental victory for the pro-life movement a monumental. I was quite please that Gumbleton had been finally stiff-armed by another Detroit bishop.
Msgr. Martin was supremely miffed, and other major forces in the chancery fought back against Vigneron on this matter, several sources told me. One seminarian about five years later who knew nothing about my involvement told a small group that Vigneron was quite proud of what happened, was he was delighted to be seen as a defender of Catholic Truth by shutting down Catholic Caucus.
So, the question persists in my mind: How can any Catholic bishop call Gumbleton a “loyal son of the Church” when his whole career consisted in large part in criticing its teachings and advocating day in and day out for public policy that expand abortion, euthanasia, genital mutilation, same-sex relations, etc.
Details to follow in future installments.
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