Cardinal bans mission

By Michelle Martin
Staff Writer

When Bishop Thomas Paprocki was pastor of St. Constance P arish on the Northwest Side, the Love Holy Trinity Blessed Mission was using parish facilities for prayer meetings and other events.

Now, following an investigation conducted by Bishop Paprocki, the mission has been banned from using Catholic facilities and portraying itself as Catholic by Cardinal George; Archbishop Jerome Hanus of Dubuque, Iowa; Bishop Robert C. Morlino of Madison, Wis.; and Bishop Thomas G. Doran of Rockford.

The decisions, all announced in September, come amid complaints by the loved ones of mission members, saying the mission has isolated their family members and convinced them that they will be condemned by God if they leave.
“Over the years, I have heard many stories of the deepening of the spiritual life from Catholics who have been part of this group,” Cardinal George wrote in a Sept. 22 statement. “I have also heard stories from those who claim it is coercive of its members and theologically inadequate or even false.”

The cardinal could not come to a definitive conclusion as to the value of the group, he wrote, so he found it necessary, based on “pastoral prudence” to call Father Leonard Kruzel, who had been released to minister to the group, back to archdiocesan ministry, as well as to bar the group from meeting or distributing its publications distributing its publications at archdiocesan facilities. Kruzel’s new assignment was to be decided by Oct. 5.

The decision was announced after the mother and stepfather of Ashley Fahey, 19, of McGregor, Iowa, appealed to the cardinal and to the public for help communicating with Fahey, who announced her intention to become a “sister” in the group and left home the day before she was to enter Loras College in Dubuque. Since that day, Aug. 21, her mother, Lora Knott, has seen Fahey once, briefly, on a farm owned by the mission and otherwise has not been able to have contact with her daughter. She believes Fahey is in Chicago, possibly at the LHTBM’s building, 7011 W. Diversey Ave.

“If you see her, just tell her that I love her,” was Knott’s appeal to reporters she spoke to about the mission. Repeated phone calls to the mission were not returned.

Bishop Paprocki, who coordinated an inquiry into the mission requested by Cardinal George last year, said most of the problems came to light after the group announced its intention to become a religious order, and the majority of them seemed to come from its activities in eastern Iowa.

In Chicago, he said, the mission has attracted mostly Polish and Polish-American participants, who were encouraged to deepen their spiritual lives. When the bishop was pastor at St. Constance from 2001-03, it ran an occasional announcement in the bulletin inviting new members to prayer meetings, and otherwise was invisible to the wider parish community, he said.

So when Kruzel, then associate pastor at St. Linus Parish in Oak Lawn, approached Cardinal George in 2003 with a request to minister to the mission full-time, the cardinal asked Bishop Paprocki, the archdiocesan liaison to the Polish community and episcopal vicar for the area, to look into it. The bishop is both a canon and civil lawyer.

Kruzel had also encountered the group for the first time at St. Constance, when he was assigned to the parish as an associate pastor in the early 1990s. Although his assignments took him to several other parishes after that, he continued to work with and minister to the mission on a voluntary basis for 12 years.

The mission, led by lay woman Agnes Kyo McDonald, calls on members to proclaim and witness “to God’s people together, to help God’s people follow Jesus Christ and the Way of the Cross.”

By 2004, Cardinal George had released Kruzel so that he could serve the mission—not appointed him to the mission, as the mission’s Web site reports.

But right around the same time, several pastors approached the cardinal with concerns about the group’s theology and methods, Bishop Paprocki said, and people in the Archdiocese of Chicago began to hear rumors of trouble with the mission in Iowa.

At that time, the archdiocese asked two theologians from Mundelein and a canon lawyer to meet with people from the mission and review their materials to make sure they conformed with Catholic teaching, Bishop Paprocki said.

“That theological review was inconclusive, because they didn’t receive all the materials they needed,” Bishop Paprocki said. The canon lawyer made a recommendation that they not be allowed to present themselves as a Catholic mission.

In March 2005, the cardinal met again with Kruzel, who asked that the mission get another chance to make its case.

The next month, Bishop Paprocki said, he met with Kruzel, two priests of the Diocese of Dubuque, Iowa, and nine lay people. By then, the bishop said, they were going beyond seeking recognition as a Catholic lay organization. “They were asking what the steps would be to being recognized as a religious order,” Bishop Paprocki said.

He asked them once again to work with a canon lawyer and submit to a theological review, and to gather letters of recommendation from pastors who had worked with them.

“We only got one letter from one pastor, and that was mixed,” Paprocki said. “They said they couldn’t supply the written materials to the theologians, because most of what they did was oral.”

At the same time, there was more news from eastern Iowa, where members of the mission had bought a farm and donated it to the mission, and the mission began buying apartment buildings in Dubuque to support itself with rental income.

Iowa media reported that the mission said Vatican officials had told them they must be self-supporting to become a religious order, but Bishop Paprocki pointed out they could not do so without the approval of a local bishop—something they never officially asked for.

When the group had not fulfilled the bishop’s requests by a June 30 deadline, they sought an extension. Cardinal George gave them until Aug. 31, but in those two months the only thing that changed was the publicity given to Fahey’s situation and other families in Iowa.

Lora and Roger Knott came to Chicago in September and went to the mission’s headquarters and rang the bell. A man who identified himself as “Jacek” answered and gave her some literature, but no news of her daughter, Knott said.