Last week saw the long-awaited nomination by Pope Francis of a head for the Vatican Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life. Irish-born Bishop Kevin Farrell, who turns 70 next week, moves from his current post as head of the Diocese of Dallas, Texas to take up the reins of this newly created body.
The new dicastery emerges from the fusion of the Pontifical Council for the Laity and the Pontifical Council for the Family as part of the Pope’s ongoing reform and rationalisation of the Curia. From September 1 these offices cease to exist and are replaced by the new department, whose statutes were published in June. Its responsibility concerns life issues, pastoral care of the family and the role of the laity.
Farrell’s name had not figured prominently among those tipped to take the new job. The choice of a prelate barely known outside his own diocese will cause little surprise when we see how his track record fits several of Francis’s known priorities.
The dicastery’s remit cover themes which have been at the centre of attention – and controversy – during the three years of the Pope’s pontificate. Francis wants the issues that Pope Benedict had termed “non-negotiable” – the sanctity of life in all its stages and the inviolable status of the traditional family with the indissolubility of marriage as its cornerstone – to be defended in a way that does not allow the Church to be seen as an unbending institution closed to dialogue. He believes that such a stance obscures the preaching of God’s mercy, which he sees as the heart of her mission.
So where does Bishop Farrell stand on these issues? There can be no doubting his pro-life orthodoxy – he attracted attention in the 2008 presidential campaign by stating that abortion was “the defining moral issue” of the age. And yet he has been careful to distance himself from the more robust “culture warriors” who often appeared as the rising force in American Catholicism under the preceding pontificates.
A clear example of this was an intervention by Farrell in the University of Dallas, the Catholic institution in his diocese. The college had opted for a robust affirmation of Catholic teaching which attracted many students in search of a strong Catholic identity, but which others decried as a strident, even aggressive “neo-conservatism”.
In 2009 Farrell spoke critically at the university of a “dogmatism, closed-mindedness (and) judgmentalism”. The bishop proposed instead that the Catholic identity of a place of learning should be marked by “honest debate, not confrontation – true dialogue where we seek to understand the other, not facile condemnation”.
These words might serve as a handy summary of Francis’s approach, at least when seen from a sympathetic point of view. Others might see it as naïve in a context where Catholic teaching is exposed to an unprecedentedly hostile environment where militant secularism will only accept dialogue on its own terms.
On the issue of Communion for the divorced and remarried, the most contentious in the areas for which he now assumes responsibility, Farrell has not directly taken up a position. He is, however, on record effusively praising Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia, echoing the interventions of Cardinal Christophe Schönborn, who has interpreted the document as a relaxation of the discipline.
It may be significant that Farrell’s rise to prominence came about under the patronage of the Washington DC archbishop, Cardinal Donald Wuerl. In 1976 Wuerl published a catechism for adults which reaffirmed the basics of the faith at a time of alarming doctrinal fluidity. More recently he has emerged as an opponent of a supposedly intransigent counter-culturalism, notably refusing to debar pro-abortion politicians from communion.
Farrell’s life story shows that he has made counter-cultural choices of his own. As a young man of 19 in Ireland, he joined the Legionaries of Christ. This order,