40 Months in Phoenix
with Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted

2003 was an especially trying year for local Catholics. Suffering from a nationwide crisis of faith due to abuse revelations, coupled with the sudden change in local diocesan leadership, one would have been hard pressed to find any sign of optimism.

In late November of that year, however, things started to turn around. Just days before Thanksgiving, local Catholics learned there would be a new bishop for Phoenix — Thomas J. Olmsted from Wichita, Kan. — giving the faithful here a reason once again to hope.

In the 40 months since being installed as the fourth bishop of Phoenix, Bishop Olmsted has reached out to the region’s half million Catholics, giving a renewed sense of urgency to Catholic Church teaching — making life and human dignity, prayer, vocations and evangelization cornerstones of Catholicism in the Phoenix Diocese.

The Catholic Sun recently sat down with Bishop Olmsted to discuss these hallmarks of his leadership.

PRAYER

Each morning you commit yourself to God through the Prayer of Abandonment (see sidebar). Can you share this prayer with our readers and why it’s something you start your day with?

BISHOP OLMSTED: To focus on God, to surrender to God, helps me to keep in perspective my day, my self, the Church and the people who I am called to serve.

Rather than thinking that everything is on my shoulders, it’s all on God’s, and I am just His servant. The whole prayer is surrendering to Him.

As we near Easter Sunday, why is it so important to remember the power of prayer? And what advice do you have for Catholics to carry forth the prayerfulness of this season to the rest of the year?

BISHOP OLMSTED: Prayer is closely linked with faith. Only those who have a deep faith in God, and deep trust and confidence in God, pray. In the sense of a real prayer, you have to really firmly believe that God created us, redeemed us, that He’s with us, that His words are true — if you ask, you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be opened. Only faith can really put those convictions within you.

When you have been blessed with that faith and renewed in that faith regularly, then you understand why prayer is the major way you serve the people and keep a perspective in your own life.

When we remember the event that changed all of history — Jesus’ death and resurrection — prayer helps us to listen again to that Good News, and to surrender ourselves to join Jesus in participating.

This weekend is Easter Sunday. How will you be spending the triduum? What advice do you have to best prepare, both spiritually and mentally?

BISHOP OLMSTED: I will be hearing confessions at Ss. Simon and Jude Cathedral together with the other priests there. I will be celebrating the wonderful liturgies of the Last Supper, the celebration of His passion and the Easter Vigil. I will have the privilege of baptizing those who are coming into the Church at Easter Vigil and welcoming those who are coming into full communion with the Catholic Church.

On Good Friday I will go to the abortuary to pray, because that’s where Calvary is today, where the innocent is killed without any legal protection, to ask for an end to that and to especially ask that, with God’s will, all of our mothers will be able to choose life for their children.

I suppose the main thing is that I would hope that Catholics would trust that God has a great future in mind for us. The atheist Jean-Paul Sartre, 20th century playwright and philosopher, wrote a play called “No Exit.” Well that’s what we believe if we don’t have faith. That as soon as we die, that’s it, which is a very dismal, despairing point of view.

Whereas what Easter is especially about is this exodus of Jesus from this world through His death and resurrection into the promise of eternal life. We can make that journey with Him. I would hope that Catholics would have a renewed hope in eternal life and that Christ will lead us on the passage to that.

In that sense, how can Catholics embrace that hope?

BISHOP OLMSTED: The sacramental life is absolutely crucial. To receive the mercy of God through the sacrament of confession, and be especially eucharistically focused. To make our Sundays days of rest, and of joy and of worship. And to make Sundays a day for the family.

VOCATIONS

It’s been said that the health of a diocese can be linked with the amount of priestly and religious vocations. This June you’ll be ordaining six men into priestly life, the largest class of new priests this diocese has seen in years. What does that mean to you as the spiritual leader of Phoenix?

BISHOP OLMSTED: It’s going to be one of the most joyful days in my life and in the life of this local Church. What a blessing that God gives us in the six new priests for our diocese. They are very gifted men, they are bright, engaging, and are men of faith and great joy. This is going to be a wonderful thing for our diocese.

I would attribute this primarily to the good example of our priests and the prayers of all those who pray for vocations, and also to the healthiness of the families from which they come. Vocations don’t fall out of trees. The Lord cultivates those through good Catholic families.

In the past couple of years the diocese has been blessed with an influx of religious orders, such as the Poor Clares of Perpetual Adoration in Black Canyon City, the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Phoenix, and the Legionaries of Christ in Queen Creek, to name a few. What has been your role in bringing priests and nuns to the diocese, why has this been a necessary blessing for Phoenix, and how do you see this trend continuing in the future?

BISHOP OLMSTED: We’re the fastest growing state in the United States. We have so many people coming in from all different places around the world, so I’ve seen it as my responsibility to invite religious and priests from other places to come and assist us in meeting this great need of Church here.

Thanks be to God it seems to be what God wants to happen, because the response on behalf of many of these religious communities has been quite positive, and they bring to us the richness of each of their particular religious communities, a freshness of faith, a vigor.

Continued

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