Vocation spans 50 years marked by change, challenge

From the lower east side of Detroit, Alexander Joseph Brunett pursued his vocation wherever his bishop, or the pope, called him and he did it with a sense of hope and a sense of humor

Archbishop Alexander J. Brunett was ordained to the priesthood in Rome on July 13, 1958.  His vocation has taken him across the country and around the world.  He began his priestly journey immediately prior to Pope John III’s call for an ecumenical council, and he assumed the role of pastoral leader for the Archdiocese of Seattle on Dec. 18, 1997, less than five years before the clergy sex abuse scandal shook the confidence and trust of Catholics throughout the United States.  On several occasions over the past year 10 months, Archbishop Brunett has agreed to be interviewed about his early years in Detroit, the diverse roles and responsibilities he has assumed within the church and the changes that have taken place in the church since his ordination.

Archbishop, you grew up in a large Catholic family in depression-era Detroit.  What was it like having so many brothers and sisters and trying to fit everyone around the dinner table? 
It was crazy trying to fit everyone around the dinner table.  We were 15 children, 6 brothers and 9 sisters.  One sister named Therese was a full term baby that died at birth.  My father buried the baby in the backyard and put a rose bush around it.  That is why they named the baby Therese, after Therese of the Little Flower. 
My mother was a very good cook.  She worked very hard at creating a diet of different foods.  We didn’t eat the same thing every night. She was very big on health.  It was crazy at table because you had the older ones that were kind of vocal and noisy and then you had the younger ones in highchairs sitting around who were also vocal and noisy.  It was a lot of fun.

Young Alex joins his father, Raymond, by the garage behind their Detroit home. Active in his church and with Catholic service organizations, the elder Brunett had a wonderful sense of humor, his children said. His son, Bill, remembers the time somebody wanted a bowling ball for a gift, so his dad wrapped a rutabaga in black tape and drilled holes in it.

You grew up in modest circumstances on Detroit’s lower east side.  How would you characterize the neighborhood?
It was a blue collar neighborhood, low income people, many of them worked in the factories, the Ford factory, the Chrysler factory which was down Jefferson Avenue about two miles from our house.  Or they were skilled tradesmen, like my father who was a plumber, and there were carpenters and brick layers.  At that time it was not a high-paying thing, and the unions were just getting started. Everyone eventually belonged to the union because it was the only way to ensure that you were going to get enough money to live on.

How would you describe your mother?
She was probably the closest thing to a saint you would see because she raised all of these kids, and she did a wonderful job as a mother, and she was never an angry person.  She was very sentimental in a way and she was easily hurt. If you said something mean, angry or shouted, she would cry very easily.  She wasn’t a demeaning person.  She didn’t really discipline us in the physical sense.  She would leave that to my dad. 
She must have been an outstanding accountant because we didn’t have much money to live on, and there was always enough to put food on the table.  She made our clothes.  She would buy a big bolt of material and all the blouses of my sisters and all the shirts of my brothers were all the same material.  She was always able to save money that way.  She would darn socks.  If you had a hole in your sock, you wouldn’t throw them away, she would darn them.

What about your Father, Raymond Henry Brunett?
Well, my dad was a funny man.  He had a great sense of humor.  I think I inherited a little bit of that.   A practical joker.  He liked to do funny things.  He was not one of these angry people.  He wasn’t a shouter or a gruff person.  It was hard for him to discipline people.  I think he must have been a little bit of a character when he was a child growing up.
He talked about the third grade and that he couldn’t read very well and he had a hearing problem.  There was some other problem and they put him out of school in the third grade. He always brought that up to me.  So, he was really self-educated.  He did a lot of reading as he got older.  He had to learn to read and write himself. 
He would tell stories about being a little devil as a kid with the streetcars – pulling the trolley off.  He would sneak up behind a car and pull it off the line and the street car couldn’t go  anywhere.  All throughout his life he enjoyed a good joke, he always enjoyed laughter, jokes and he was a

“[My dad] would do things to throw people off guard, things they didn’t expect.  He never did anything to my mom, but he would do it to us kids.”

practical joker.  He would do things to throw people off guard, things they didn’t expect.  He never did anything to my mom, but he would do it to us kids.

Your parents were devoted Catholics.
We always went to church together.  We had a pew. My father did not often sit with us because he was an usher.  He ushered for years and years.  He belonged to the Knights of Columbus.  He loved the Knights of Columbus.  That is where he met my mother, at a Knights of Columbus dance on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Mr. & Mrs. Brunett must have been proud that one of their sons became a priest.
They took great pride in every one of their children.  So much so that when people would tell my mother how lucky she was to have a son that was a priest she use to say, ‘You should meet the rest of my children.’  She always said that.  It wasn’t like they got lucky on one.  She never felt that way.

You attended Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit as a day student following World War II.  What was that like?
It was on the other side of the city, so it was a long, long way to go and I did it by streetcar every single day.  It would take an hour and a half to get there.  You could go several different ways by streetcars and then transfer.  In one case, you transferred twice and in the best scenario you transferred only once.  It didn’t save you any time but you thought the streetcar was more on schedule. 
In those days everybody traveled by streetcars and bus.  The streetcars were always jammed.  It was 1947 and not everybody had a car.  A lot of people were totally dependent on public transportation and with Detroit being the motor city everybody wanted to get a car.  All the advertising was to get beyond the buses, the crowded buses, and have your own vehicle.

Detroit had a large Catholic population.  Did you live in a Catholic neighborhood?
We didn’t live in a ghetto because we had a wide variety of blue collar neighbors.  We had Lutherans and Seventh Day Adventists.  We had every possible religion and we had a lot of battles about religion.  Arguments about the Bible and things.  I can remember many fights with the local Lutheran on the corner on whose Bible was correct.  I don’t know if it ever came to blows, but then we would put those things aside and play baseball.

What were your earliest experiences of the church?
I went to Mass, I served Mass and I served Mass on Sunday.  I enjoyed serving Mass.  We went by schedules and I would always be happy that I was scheduled.  They knew I wanted to serve Mass and, even though I was the farthest from the church, it seemed like they gave me the earliest Mass.  That prepared me well for the priesthood because the lowly assistant to the pastor always got the early Mass.

What about your personal prayer life and spirituality when you were young and discerning your vocation?
I always experienced it as the prayer life of the church.  I always went to Perpetual Help Devotions on Tuesday night and Holy Hour on Thursday night.  That was a common routine, and Mass on Sunday.  I always say my spirituality is the gathering with community and praying together. When I went to the seminary, of course, we had a wide variety of routines in prayer and there was a lot of private time when you could go into the chapel and pray.  It would be more like mediation than a lot of words.  I think sometimes words can get in the way.

Were there priests that influenced you in your decision to study for priesthood?
There were some young priests at St. Ambrose that were very good priests.  Father [Daniel] McGrath, I remember him.  At one time my mother had been sick and I can remember the priest coming to the house to bring her communion.  I would meet him at the door with a candle and lead the way.  There were three assistants in the parish.  They were good priests.  Very much controlled by the pastor, but they were dedicated, caring and the ones that I knew worked very hard.

And you had a special connection with an uncle who was a priest, didn’t you?
I had an uncle, my father’s brother, who was a priest named Alexander Joseph Brunett.  He was ordained in 1933 and I was born in 1934.  When I was born it was the depression, and he promised his brothers and sisters that if anybody named a child after him, he would give them $20.  During the depression that was a lot of money. 
I was named after him, but I don’t remember much about him.  He died in 1936, only three years after being ordained.  This was before the time of antibiotics and medical procedures and he had a kidney infection.  In those days when you said Mass on Sunday, you couldn’t break your fast.   You could not drink water or eat anything, and if you had the 12:30 p.m. Mass you were fasting a long time.  He had a kidney infection and it took his life.

When you told your parents you were going to be a priest, what was their reaction? 
I always talked about going to the seminary but my mother said “We are happy that you want to go to the seminary, unfortunately we can’t help you.  We don’t have the money and we don’t have the time, I have all these other children to take care of.  If you want to go to the seminary, you are on your own.”
As I said, the seminary was a long trip and I could not afford being a boarding student, so I had to be a day student.  I had to go out to the seminary high school every day and back at night time, which was a very long trip and in Detroit with snow and ice on the ground it was a difficult trip in the winter.

The college graduating class from Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit included Alex J. Brunett, in second row, second from right.

You excelled at Sacred Heart Seminary.  You were an editor of the paper, the athletic director and you were the valedictorian of your college graduating class.  Then you went to Rome.  What do you recall about your studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University and life at the North American College?
In those days it set you in a category by yourself.  You are a Roman student and it was good in the sense that you got a good exposure to the way the church functions and how it operates; the role of the papacy, the different Vatican offices, the great historical tradition, architectural and cultural history of the church.  It is really a great thing.  Part of our program was to visit every church, every cultural center around the city. 
The disadvantage is that it isolated you from your classmates because for four years you had very little communication back and forth.  If you wanted to make a phone call to the United States you had to go down to the post office, which controlled the telegraph, and make an appointment to use the Atlantic cable line for a certain day at a certain time. 
A lot of guys called home around Thanksgiving or Christmas time.  I never did.  It was very expensive.  My mother was always faithful in all of this.  She wrote me every single week.

And what was it like to study in Rome?
All of our courses were in Latin. My Latin was good, but I wasn’t perfect.  But this certainly sharpened it.  I was one of the few students that could take notes in Latin.  We had to help one another because a lot of them did not know Latin at all.  I had a lot of Latin and Greek in high school.

And after you were ordained and returned to the United States, you continued your academic career.  In addition to studying at Marquette University for your Ph.D. you also did international studies in ecumenism.
When I got involved in ecumenism no one else was doing it.  At that time Cardinal [John Francis] Dearden, my archbishop, said he wanted me to do that, so I said, “Well, I should really learn something about it.  So, he let me travel and I spent some time at the Vatican Secretariat learning how the Vatican functions.  I lived in Paris a short time and did some study at the Institute Catholique.  I went to Germany to learn German and to be in contact with the professors there, and then I went to Jerusalem to the [Tantur Ecumenical] Institute.  Fortunately, it was at the time when they were working on the Dead Sea Scrolls.  I got to see some of that, even the excavation that was going on, and to be involved in that.

You’ve participated in ecumenism and interfaith efforts for nearly 40 years, from the local level to international dialogues.   How do we bridge the gaps with the Jewish community, Islam, the Orthodox Catholic community and other Christian traditions?  Given the distance that seems to separate us, How can we as a church bring people and cultures together?
I think the most important thing is to put the right people in touch.  It is like a diplomatic effort.  You have to establish rapport and trust with people.  Every one of the dialogues I have been involved with, there was a lot of time having meals together and praying together in our own traditions.  So, we see ourselves not as a people that are negotiating some kind of economic situation, but these are matters of faith and the meaning and impact of faith on our life.  So, we always begin with a lot of prayer in these meetings, tied together outside of the dialogues and then it can lead to dialogue. 
Each one of the dialogues [I participated in] has been a little bit different depending upon the personalities involved.  Right now I am co-chairman of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission.   It is a very interesting dialogue, but when you put a new one together you start again, you are starting over to learn each other, learn how to appreciate each other and to understand each other and not be quick to judge.  You have to really know one another or you are not going to get very far in dialogue.
Trust is a factor.  Trust often times leads to friendship.  If you come there with the right mind and right attitude, you do establish a rapport.  That rapport will go a long way in making it possible to hear what the other person is saying and for them to hear what you are saying.

How far have we come in our dialogues and building trust between Catholics and our friends in the Jewish community?

On ecumenical/interfaith dialogue: “Trust is a factor.  Trust often times leads to friendship.  If you come there with the right mind and right attitude, you do establish a rapport.  That rapport will go a long way in making it possible to hear what the other person is saying and for them to hear what you are saying.”

We have come a long way in that particular dialogue.  In the beginning there was a lot of distrust and a lot of misunderstanding.  When I got involved in the dialogue in the early 70s, I was involved in putting together the first National Jewish-Roman Catholic dialogue.   The first one was in Dayton, Ohio, and we were together with a small number of people, mostly from the Midwest. 
For the first years the two issues the Jewish people wanted to talk about were the Holocaust and the existence of the State of Israel.  That dominated because they felt that we never thrashed that out and put blame where it belonged and apologized.  Every dialogue we had centered on those two points and they didn’t want to move off of those until they had satisfied their need to have their position understood, and we were also able to relate to that.  It was only later that we were able to branch out.

What do you consider to be your greatest success in Catholic-Jewish dialogue?
The thing that was missing in the first dialogues was the fact that we didn’t get all the Jewish Committees there.  No one committee stands for the Jews, so you have the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, etcetera.  If one participated, the other didn’t participate.  The third national meeting was planned out of the basement of my rectory [at St. Aidan Parish] in Livonia, Michigan and I got a commitment from all the different Jewish Committees that they would come and take part.  It was the first time we had everybody there.  It was a very interesting dialogue. 

How vividly do you remember the call telling you the Holy Father was appointing you Bishop of the Diocese of Helena, Monanta?  What was that like when the phone rang and you picked it up?
Well I was pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower [in Royal Oak, Michigan], a very large, active parish.  The call caught me by surprise.  My secretary said someone from Washington wanted to talk to me.  I picked up the phone and when I said hello, the voice on the phone said, “Are you Brunett?”  He didn’t say Father Brunett and I said, “Well, I am not a blond or redhead.”  I remember I didn’t get a chuckle from him.  It was [the Apostolic Nuncio] Archbishop [Agostino] Cacciavillan.  He was just very blunt and straight forward.  He said, “Our Holy Father wants you to go to Helena, Montana as bishop there.”  I said “Me?” and he said  “Yes, do you accept, do you accept?”  I said, “Do I have time to think?” and he said “Well, the Holy Father has made the choice so I presume you will accept.”
So I said, “Sure I will accept.”  Why not give it a try if I could do some good.  I said, “Where is Helena?” 

The idea of leaving Michigan and going to Montana must have been a shock.
You know I am in the middle of Detroit, 2,000 miles away and I was trying to figure out what I said “yes” to.  But I remember going up to get my Catholic directory when I got off the phone.  I looked it up and I was impressed right away.    I said, ”Oh, Yellowstone National Park, a major National Park this is a great place to be.”  I had been out one time to Glacier National Park and there was a great flood so we couldn’t see anything, and we had to turn around and come back. 
I am saying to myself, “This is exciting.”  It is in the Rocky Mountains and there could be a lot of nice things there.  I subsequently found out it is a beautiful area, a great diocese with a great history.  There are some wonderful church structures there.  I thoroughly enjoyed being in Helena, Montana.  It was a wonderful place.

There’s a lot of ground to cover in the Helena diocese, isn’t there?
I had 54,000 square miles.  That is a lot of territory to cover.  The other bishop in the Great Falls area had 100,000 square miles.  I had all the great mountains and the national parks so it was always a joy.  You never got tired of seeing the scenery.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Helena is a great diocese and I could live my life there.  I really thoroughly enjoyed it.

You went from Detroit to Helena to Seattle.  How different is the Northwest from the predominantly Catholic culture where you grew up in Detroit?
People, particularly Catholics, don’t realize how different it is out here in the Northwest than it is in Detroit, mid-West or the East Coast.  Seattle is a beautiful city.  It has wonderful attributes to it.  There are wonderful people here, good Catholics, good priests, but the environment we work in is not favorable to religion. 
This area is called the “none” zone because if you do surveys and ask people “what is your religious preference,” the answer 65 percent of the time is “none.”  It is not a factor that they consider. We have only 12 percent of the population that might be Catholics here.  We have grown, but when you are working here you find that many people don’t even know what a Catholic is and don’t know what an Archbishop is.

Why is the Northwest culture such a secular, unchurched culture? 
When I first came here I asked people: “Why are there so many un-churched people here?”  You know a lot of migration out here in the Northwest is people getting away from the East Coast and they wanted to get out where they are free.  Their church is going hunting on Sunday or skiing in the mountains, so going to church was one of the liberations that they felt coming out to an area like this. 
I don’t know if you can verify it.  I just think that we are in an area that is deeply imbued with secular humanistic values.  They parallel many of the things that [Catholics] try to do in terms of outreach to people, but they also have their drawbacks and that is what we are dealing with.  But I love it here.  I enjoy my work, the people and the natural environment.  This is probably one of the most beautiful areas I have lived in.  There are a lot of beautiful areas to drive in and I never get tired of driving.  Every turn of the road is a beautiful scene.  Rivers flow everywhere.  Sometimes you have snow; sometimes you have rain and a lot of animals.  It is very beautiful.

And the Catholic cultural communities are especially diverse and vibrant.
They are vibrant.  Again because they are living in this area and it is not favorable to religion they tend to stay together in communities.  Some of them need ministry in their own native languages and that has been a real challenge.  I just came back from Vietnam, Korea and the Philippines where I was visiting with the bishops and cardinals and seminaries to be sure that we keep the pipeline open so we can get priests that can help us minister here.
We have more than 50,000 Filipino Catholics here and a lot of them speak Tagalog, so we need priests that understand Tagalog and can communicate with them.  Maybe in a generation or two this may not be the case. 
We have about 20,000 Vietnamese Catholics here.  They are very active. I think we have 14 Vietnamese priests who help us in this area.  The very first Vietnamese priest ordained here is still working and he was my interpreter in Vietnam.  They do a marvelous job.  We have to get Korean priests to come in from two different dioceses in Korea.  So touching base over there is just to let them know that we do love them and we do appreciate them coming here.

The largest Catholic cultural community is Hispanic.  What are some of the challenges we face in ministry to this rapidly growing population?
They come from all over South and Central America.   I was asked recently to go to a very small parish, Belfair,which has a Hispanic community from Central America.  I prepared a sermon in Spanish and I am not that good at it, but I wrote it out and I gave this sermon, and nobody understands me because they are from Guatemala and they have their own language – Kekchi.  You run into situations like that.

Archbishop, Catholic education is a priority for you.  You are the product of Catholic education, you taught in a Catholic high school, you were a seminary professor and you have promoted Catholic schools as a pastor and bishop.  What led to the idea of the $40-million endowment fund in the Archdiocese of Seattle known as the Fulcrum Foundation?
The Fulcrum Foundation is something I began because we have 70 schools in our system.  These schools stretch over a large territory that includes poor urban neighborhoods and lumber towns and fishing towns that have pretty much been put out of business.  It seemed to me that we needed to have some vehicle to make quality Catholic education available to those that want to take advantage of it and especially where we had these schools. 
So it seemed to me that we needed to set up something that would be able to provide money to all of those different schools so that they could offer scholarships or offer money to children that could not otherwise afford to be able to go to those schools.  We began in 2002, and we built on it every year and we have had great success.  The Fulcrum Foundation has done very well and continues to grow.  My hope is that we continue to grow so that the money is available to help more people.

During the past six years while you have been Archbishop of Seattle, we have experienced a time of challenge – a time of deep sorrow for many people within our church.  What is your assessment of the sex abuse scandal, have we learned from our mistakes?
I believe we certainly have learned from our mistakes.  We have been trying to express adequately the deep sorrow and repentance that we feel for those that have been harmed or damaged by sexual abuse.  It is certainly a terrible thing.  It is an embarrassing thing for me personally.  I have to be quite honest with you, [at first] I didn’t believe that it was as extensive as it turned out to be.  Obviously there were a lot of things going on that I wasn’t aware of when I was growing up.  When I was a student in the seminary, when I was a pastor, these things were not part of my experience.  I didn’t experience them so I did not know of them.  As Bishop I have had 270 cases here in the 10 years that I have been here and that is a lot of cases to deal with and a lot of victims to deal with. 
We have tried to do everything we can to help victims.  We have tried to assure that all the people that are in ministry here working for this archdiocese and the church have gone through every kind of background check and we have set norms for people in ministry.  It is so easy for people to think that “Well it is passed” and no we don’t allow that.  It is a matter of trust now.  We have said trust me, we don’t want this and we don’t accept it, and if we don’t live by that and assure people of that then we could go back into that same trap. I think we are beyond that, but I hope we don’t go back again.

What about the impact on our priests?
We have tremendous priests, great priests and they do a fantastic job.  It is the ones that have embarrassed them and, in a way, deceived them with their lifestyle.  Maybe sometimes we were too trusting and not really realizing what was going on or not understanding or getting the implications of it.  But every time I have a case, I feel so bad and I always write a letter to all my priests and I really apologize and I am sorry this has happened again.  It is not a reflection on you, it is not a reflection on your ministry and you have no control over it, but we are going to do everything we can to make it right.

Your vision statement and five-year plan for the Archdiocese of Seattle, “A Future Full of Hope,” was drafted in the midst of the sex abuse scandal, and yet it has become perhaps your crowning achievement as a pastor, the chief shepherd of a diocese.  Looking back to the time when you were developing this plan, did you have any idea it could meet with such great success in a period of such enormous challenge?
I think people have done a marvelous job of picking up on the priorities and moving ahead.  I have encouraged them and worked with them to see that happen, and I think the life, the vitality of the faith is very strong here.  I find it strong.  I know many dioceses are experiencing a drop off in numbers, but I don’t see that here.
I have always said, and I will contend to the day that I die, good pastoral ministry trumps every one of these problems.  Good pastoral ministry and, I don’t mean somebody saying Mass on Sunday and gives a good sermon, I mean his life and his ministry is on the line for his people.  He doesn’t see it as a job, he is committed and he is available to people and he is approachable and he is a leader.  I think when that happens you help people overcome the doubts and anxieties they have and they can see the future, and that the church is going somewhere and is not sitting back on its haunches.

Archbishop you are more a man of action than of words, but this is your Golden Jubilee year.  What has it been like to be a priest for 50 years?  What are your thoughts as you look back on your vocation spanning five decades?
Fifty years seems like a long time, but it doesn’t seem like that to me.  I have been very active my whole life, so I feel that I am about 40. God blessed me with a lot of energy and you could lose it all tomorrow but now I have it.  I want to use it in ministry and I have always been happy.  The years have gone by very fast for me.  When I hear priests say they can hardly wait for retirement, I say “What do you want to retire for?”  The priesthood is something you do not retire from.  It is a vocation, a ministry.   It is part of your life and you have to live it. 
When I look back, things have changed a lot.  I was ordained at a time before Vatican II.  I was in Rome at the time that Pius XII died.  In fact, I was one of the youngest priests in Rome when he died and I was there as an honor guard for his body.  I remember the election of John XXIII and going to St. Peter’s every day.  We had to go to class everyday but as soon as class was over we would go over there to see the smoke come out, and we weren’t getting any white smoke for two or three days.  I was there also when he went to St. Paul’s Basilica that same year and announced that he was going to call an Ecumenical Council.  That was a real shocking announcement.
I was ordained when everything was in Latin and so you had to re-gear your liturgy, your forms, rituals and things and change them into the new styles, and a change every week was coming out.  We went one-half Latin and one-half English and then 90 percent English and a little bit of Latin.  There were numerous changes like that, and then I got involved in ecumenism which was right on the cutting edge.  It was like, “Where do we start?”  You got these documents but there were no guidelines.  You know, “What are the parameters of this ecumenical encounter?”  These were kind of exciting years and some difficult years.
Then I was fortunate to go away and study and work on a doctorate in theology which meant that I had time to study all these documents and work on them.  I also did some work for Cardinal [John Francis] Dearden in terms of his participation in the Vatican Council.  He was one of the people on the major document, “Lumen Gentium.” 

More than 200 priests from throughout the Archdiocese of Seattle celebrated their varied ministries during Priest Days in June 2006

  

You grew up in Detroit and you obviously have Michigan blood.  Are you a Lions’ fan or a Seahawks’ fan?
Well, I hate to admit it but I have been a Lions fan my whole life.  They haven’t had good teams since I was in first-year theology back in the 50s.  That was the last good team the Lions had.  They have been to the playoffs maybe once or twice, and they never really progress very far.  The Seahawks are a great team.  They are a lot of fun to watch and I get to see a game once in a while.  I got to see the Dallas-Seahawks game, the [2006] play-off game.  It was a really good game.  It was kind of cold.

This report was compiled from interviews conducted in 2007 and 2008 by Greg Magnoni, Editor of The Catholic Northwest Progress and Rob Astorino, program director of the Catholic Channel on Sirius Radio.  Portions of this interview were prerecorded and aired on Sirius Radio 159 April 25-27, 2008.