Just to start off, tell me a little about yourself.
Where are you from and what has been your path through life?

   I grew up in rural Nebraska, about thirty miles north of the capital of the state, which is Lincoln, Nebraska on a farm, actually a dairy farm. I have four brothe rs and two sisters. There are seven children in the family and obviously my parents. I was fortunate enough to go to Catholic grade school in a little rural community five miles from my home and subsequent to that Catholic high school which was a centralized high school about twelve miles from my home. I have attended Catholic education from first grade through graduation from high school. Right after high school I entered the seminary in Denver, Colorado for the Diocese of Lincoln and was ultimately ordained out of the University of Dallas in Texas in 1976. I served as a priest in the diocese of Lincoln for 26 years until I was tapped by Pope John Paul II to be bishop in Baker, Oregon in 2011 tapped for bishop of Santa Rosa.

What are your overall goals for the diocese and what would you like to see the diocese become?

   I look at the Church in global and say it really has got to be the instrument for the promotion of the message and teachings of Christ and I'm a firm believer that the message of Jesus are not only good news that they are also good for mankind and that leads me to a position of particular strength if you will or the conviction about the necessity of making sure that those Catholic teachings are taught and consistently taught in the entire diocese and so I take a strong if you will catechetical model that says we have to know the faith and so I consider myself to be always teaching and one of my favorite books is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. At my previous diocese I went through that two or three times in different ways and different forms and if you look at this particular book, I go through it and each time I teach it I put in different highlights and different quotes. I scribble various things in there and I just keep going through the book over and over and different things strike me and I just think it is important for the Catholic faith to be in tune and in touch with this particular book which is fully consistent with the scriptures, fully consistent with the traditions of the Church, fully consistent with where the Church wants us to be relative to the liturgy. My role as bishop is to be the conservator if you will of the faith and the promoter of that faith. All I'm trying to do is make sure that all of these institutes that have some relationship with me are as fully as possible consistent with what this book and what the Church herself teaches. This is not because I am a rigorist, although people could say I am, that the reality is that I believe that this contains a truth which is good for mankind and that is consistent with whom we are as humans and creatures of God. I would be doing a disservice to anyone if I in any way water this down out of fear that well, they do not really understand or appreciate it. I can understand that which is why I need to teach clearly and consistently what is in this book and not to avoid or evade it. There should be a headline in the newspaper that says "The Good News is really good." But we have this mentality that the good news is really bad and we have to tolerate it, we have to endure it, see it as a burden and as a necessary evil that we have to endure. We have it backwards and that good news is good and it is the best possible news for us. God our father loves us. He created us and he knows what is really good for us and has given us the Church to tell us what is good for us. We do ourselves the greatest harm if we avoid or ignore what he has promoted for us. Example: you could read the owner’s manual for the car you drive. You may think you have a better idea than the owner's manual, which says put 10W-30 oil in the crankcase. You may think 'I have some leftover antifreeze. I think I should put antifreeze in the crankcase. It's liquid and it feels kid of slimy so it will work.' You can believe that all you want but you put that kind of material in the crankcase and you are not going to get ten miles down the road because it is bad for the car because the manufacturer told you what good for the car. Now this book tells us what the manufacturer says. Humanity: what is good for you? Well, we get a different idea. You know what, you got to look at God, the creator, and what does his instruction manual say and in the briefest possible terms, the instruction manual is the Ten Commandments or the life and teachings of Jesus. Why can't we just simply say 'Let's try to understand what Jesus really taught as opposed to what are all these ideas are, let's take a poll to find out who thinks oil is best for the car and who thinks brake fluid would be better. Let's take a poll and then let's vote. That doesn't change the fact that the manufacturer's recommended viscosity and product and what's likely most best. So my goal is to teach and to make sure that the institutions, parishes, schools, and in a particular way the priests themselves and the catechists and CCD programs are consistently teaching and promoting that which the church authentically promotes.

What are your overall goals for Cardinal Newman in general?

   I love Cardinal Newman. I went to Catholic high school myself for four years and I taught in a Catholic high school when I was first ordained for three years and we have to continually, as individuals, undergo a kind of introspective ongoing conversion because we constantly gravitate, at least I do, to the more elemental desires. You know, I want to postpone my alarm clock five more minutes every day. I want to get up later. I want to sleep more. I want to eat more unhealthy foods. I want to eat those things that I enjoy. I want to avoid exercise and all the things that are bad for me are the things I am going to gravitate toward. Institutions are made up of human persons so we tend to gravitate toward that which is easier or which is more sociably acceptable, less burdensome, less arduous, and unfortunately sometimes we gravitate toward that which is less godly and part of the ongoing conversion that we have to constantly do this updating and conversion is evaluating and reflecting on who are we, why are we here, what is our goal, our meaning, our purpose. A Catholic school is not only a school run by Catholics. It seems to me that we have a danger, a possibility, that that can become the definition that that can become the definition of the school as opposed to where the church comes from and says that listen, we really need to invested in Catholic schools because Catholic schools are those schools where the Catholic faith is centrally lived and taught as the very core curriculum of it and that everything in that school flows from its catholicity and catholicity is not something that is one class among many but is really at the heart of the institute and drives and determines everything, that it has to be the recurring focus. How does this action that we are proposing touch our catholicity and we can get away from that really quickly. I mean people talk about the athletic program and you can kind of get focused on that and it is good in and of itself. But when someone stops and asks, 'How does this connect with our catholicity,' and then you try to say, 'Let's find a connection,' as opposed to saying, 'Wait a minute. It flows directly from this already so we don't have to make a connection or create a connection or find a connection. The connection is already there. That is true about all of the subjects and even all of the teachers, that the whole place becomes this microcosm of faith where faith filled people come to experience that, particularly young men like yourself Joshua, I would hope that Cardinal Newman can give you perhaps the only possibility in your lifetime of really experiencing what I would call a Catholic culture. What the Scriptures talk about is that they see how good and pleasant where men and women dwell as one. Now that it is this wonderfully vibrant experience of faith reinforced and lived and celebrated in this joyful unified kind of way that says that's where I really came to understand what it means to be a fully faith filled committed Catholic, what Pope Benedict would call an 'island of spiritual concentration.' We can go there and discover something about ourselves and about others and say it has given me an image and an idea of Catholicism that I can now carry with me and I can strive to create that same kind of Catholic entity in the family that I will form, in the community of which I am a part of, in future parish that I will be connected with, because I have experienced something of the wonderful vibrancy and life and beauty of the Catholic Church and if it doesn't give that to our young people, you question, 'Well, it could be very good, but if it isn’t doing that, then we are missing out on the very best part of what a Catholic school has the potential and the power to be. So, I want it to be that. Now, is it to a large extent? Well, it depends on who you talk to. Some people say, 'Yes. It is wonderfully that,' and there are elements of it certainly that are just exemplary. There are other elements that you can say well, is there room for improvement. I am not necessarily a half full glass kind of guy, but I'm also not one who is readily convinced that it is a hundred percent of what we can be. And yet I want to commend the good that is done but I also want to continue to challenge and unfortunately perhaps my propensity to challenge is seen as criticism and it isn't. We have to keep pushing ourselves to see is what all we can do. Any coach on a football field will never say, "Gosh, you guys did great, we don't have to work anymore." He is always going to say, 'Push the envelope. Raise the bar. Challenge and surpass their previous personal best.' There is room for improvement and I think there's great room for improvement in the modeling, witness, and teaching of our Catholic faith.

Do you see Cardinal Newman becoming more religious or more academic as far as education?

   Well, I don't know if it is a question of one or the other. I think there is a propensity perhaps to measure and I've mentioned this at graduation ceremonies to measure the effectiveness or the productivity of the school based on how many scholarships did we get, how many presidential awards, how many people got some sort of a grant to particular university and let's add up all the grants we got and there's our measure of success. Well, that is a good measure of success in terms of a high school, but what is the measure of success relative to a Catholic high school? Should it be something different and I get it, I come from Nebraska and the Catholic high school where I went to high school, there was a religious sister teaching English, a religious sister teaching science, a religious sister teaching speech and debate, there was a religious sister who was the librarian. The priest from the local area, oddly enough, one of them drove the bus. And then freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior, year I had priests teaching me three different years. I had religion by a religious sister one year. But there was a priest principal, a priest superintendent, a priest dean of discipline if you will. Granted, that was thirty or forty years ago now, but in the Diocese of Lincoln, and I don't necessarily say that's the ideal model, but that's still the way the schools are structured. Those priests are still in those positions. They have a large number of Catholic priests and religious sisters teaching in the schools so that the young people see religious throughout the course of the day. Religious vocations are sort of perpetually on their minds. They really can't get away from it because they see the religious and the priests active in the school to the same extent that they have lay teachers active and it creates a kind of leavening process in the school that creates a different environment that I think is very very good and wholesome and healthy and it generates religious vocations to both the priesthood and the religious life. So how do you measure the success of the school? If it is a Catholic school, you'd want to have some sort of measure that says well knowledge of the Catholic faith would certainly be an element of that. The vibrancy of the faith practiced within the school is certainly a part of that and certainly the Newman studies that are done are wonderful and the service projects that are done in the senior year are marvelous examples of covering, if you will, the seventh commandment of justice, particularly social justice but I would like to comment that it is one commandment out of ten. The first commandment is the first commandment for a reason. Do we put as much emphasis on the first commandment as we do on the seventh? If we don't then we've kind of taken some sort of model and said the seventh commandment becomes the epitome and the first commandment is a sort of also ran. And it's like, honor and worship of God is primary and key and central. Do we focus on that where God is at the center as opposed to our human activities and some sort of service project being at the center? Who is the focus of that? How do we make sure that God stays at the center of the whole idea and notion and operation and even our Lord himself said you know what, the first two greatest commandments: you shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind, and your whole soul and your neighbor as yourself. But it really flows from the second to the first and if we have people who love their fellow man, that's a great, great thing, but it's not necessarily, in and of itself, religious in the sense of being centered on God. So that's kind of thought of what I would like to see at Cardinal Newman: vibrancy or as I've explained at other venues, a kind of unashamed robust Catholic faith. I'm Catholic and proud of it, and I'm Catholic and proud of all that my church teaches as opposed to this, and I don't want to say this applies to Newman, but a tendency to be somewhat apologetic about our faith, to say, 'I'm sorry that my church is this way or that way, but it's just how it is.' It is like no. We have to understand that faith in such a way that unabashedly acclaim, 'This is what my church teaches and this is why what she teaches is good.' That would be a synopsis of it.

How do you think that God and Jesus are behind you and support you in your goals?

   Certainly the Lord's grace is abundantly plentiful and I am a firm believer in the grace of the sacrament of holy orders and the sacrament of holy orders to the episcopacy and it does give the gifts of the holy spirit, the same ones that you get at confirmation: wisdom, understanding, council, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord in an abundant way. I still do rely on consultation with other people in this office and I recognize that I make errors and mistakes and misjudgments and I don't have an absolutely clear picture of where things will line up in ten years from now, but I do know that I must be faithful to what is in my heart and what I have learned through my years both in Catholic grade school, Catholic high school, college, theology and through the years plus years of priesthood. You've got to be faithful to that and say what I have seen in my life is that there is a hunger in the world for the truth, the truth honestly and clearly told by the Catholic Church and I've just encountered over my years, hundreds of devoted Catholic folks who say, 'It is just so refreshing to hear that. We haven't heard that in a long time.' My confirmation sermon, I just go through and teach the seven sacraments. What is the outward sign of each sacrament? People come up afterwards, 'We haven't heard that in decades. That was wonderful.' It is just teaching the very fundamental elements of grace that comes to us through the sacraments. So for me as bishop, I believe in the grace of the sacrament of the holy orders and I do believe that that grace does sustain me and gives me a tranquility and a peace that at the end of the day, if I have done what I believe what I believe to be the right and the true and the good, and I do try to do that, you know, I can sleep peacefully. If, however, I see in myself something that, you know what, I overstated the case, I understated the case, I ran away from a challenge, I evaded a responsibility, like everyone else, my conscience bugs me and says, 'You know you missed an opportunity to stand up and to witness to the truths of the Catholic faith and as a shepherd, one of the readings that I like in the office of readings is from Saint Gregory the Great on shepherds. He says, 'A shepherd must know when to speak and when to keep silent.' Because sometimes when we speak we might say more than we should, and maybe drive people away. On the other hand, if we are silent, we perhaps allow the wolf to snatch away sheep that if you spoke, he would not snatch. Perhaps a word of correction could cause that person to amend their ways and come to conversion so it's always this prudential judgment: do you speak or do you remain silent. Unfortunately we are in a culture where the propensity is to observe what might be called a charitable silence. But I think in our culture, silence can no longer be presumed to be charitable. Sometimes that which is motivated at least internally by a kind of compassion and keeps a person from speaking the truth leaves the person in err when maybe they need to be corrected, and when is that? I mean, if you see a friend smoking crack, do you maintain a charitable silence or do you say, 'You know brother, that's not good for you. You shouldn't do that. And not only should you not do that, I'm going to report you to the principal and to the police because I care enough about you to take that hard step.' Or is it more charitable to say, 'Well, you know I'm your friend and I love you and care for you. I hope that doesn't destroy your life, but if it does, it's on you.'

At what point does the responsibility change?

   Well, not only responsibility but the prudence of do you speak or do you remain silent. And again, we tend to want to remain silent. We don't want to challenge that which our church says is a moral evil. You can't say that because you'll hurt their feelings, but they are hurting themselves and others and their relationship with God. Do I not have an obligation to care about that? And if I do, then maybe I need to speak. Sometimes we need to be compassionately silent, but more and more I'm thinking, you know, we do not do the world a favor by pretending that the errors which the world proposes somehow are as good as the truth which the Church proposes. Our silence can seem to give consent to some of the things that are clearly categorically errors. So as bishop, I have a responsibility to constantly weigh, do I speak or do I remain silent? And even though people don't believe this, I remain silent a whole lot more than I speak. People say, 'You should not speak as much as you do,' and there are other people that say, 'You should speak more than you do.' So I think I am right in the middle.

Is there anything you'd like to add?

   I could talk about many things for many hours. How do you get a clear and consistent and comprehensive message out? We are a sound bite people and we pick up sound bites and you could take this whole interview and you could pick out ten words that I said, and did I say those, well, yeah I did. Unfortunately, people are maybe victims of a secular press, which takes a sound bite from a person third hand and that becomes the message that drives the response. That's pretty far from what I've actually said the interpretation is 180 from what I said and what I meant. What it is that I can do is to communicate a clear and consistent message. Those people who don't like the message have no qualms about twisting it to their own advantage and using it as a skewer with which to impale the bishop. If you say nothing, you give them nothing to skewer you with but if you don't say something, you know what, you are failing a responsibility to speak the truth. I will probably try to keep speaking the truth as charitably and as forcefully and as determinedly as I deem to be good and or necessary and if there are consequences, for me to doing that, then I pray that God understands that I do this not out of drive for power or control or dominance but rather out of the conviction of the need to be faithful to the message of the Gospel. I don't know if I could do any less or anything else.