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Home  / News & Publications /  Michigan Catholic News / 2010 / Wagner retires after nearly 40 years of serving the Archdiocese of Detroit

by Robert Delaney of The Michigan Catholic
Published July 2, 2010

Catherine Wagner is retiring as director of the archdiocesan Department of Parish Life and Services.

DETROIT – Looking back as she retires from nearly four decades of service to the Archdiocese of Detroit, Catherine Wagner says it was perhaps it was "no accident" that she was so involved with the Church.

"When my mother was pregnant with me, she was ill for several months, and I was a seven-month baby," says Wagner, who retired at the end of June as director of the archdiocesan Department of Parish Life and Services.

An aunt who was a Mercy sister at Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital in Detroit asked Fr. Solanus Casey, the famous Capuchin friar, to come and pray with her mother.

"He patted my mother on the shoulder, and said, 'Don't worry, you and the baby will be just fine.' And I was," Wagner says.

Now, at 65, she says, "It's time to move on, and let new leadership take over Parish Life."

Last Friday, it was announced that Archbishop Allen Vigneron had appointed Lory McGlinnen, Wagner's long-time chief assistant, to succeed her as director of the department.

Wagner grew up in St. Cecilia Parish on the west side of Detroit, and attended the parish's grade and high schools. In high school, she became involved in the Young Christian Students group, which she says was a new kind of youth ministry that encouraged students to apply their faith to issues such as poverty and racism.

"We were encouraged to 'observe, judge in light of the Scriptures, and act,'" she recalls.

At Wayne State University, she pursued what she thought would turn out to be a career in social work, graduating in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree in child psychology.

While in college, she became involved in Christincom, which was short for Christ in Community, a group started by Fr. William Cunningham, who co-founded Focus: HOPE in the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit riots.

Besides Fr. Cunningham, she got to know Focus: HOPE co-founder Eleanor Josaitis, Fr. Kean Cronin and then-Fr. Thomas Hinsberg (who later left the priesthood) through that group.

Also, during that time, she worked part-time in the office at St. Alphonsus Parish in Dearborn, where Msgr. Bud Kern was pastor, and worked summers for the Diocese of Lansing in a project involving migrant workers and their children.

Immediately after graduating from WSU, Wagner went to work for a state agency, doing work with the children of migrants, but things were happening back in the Detroit Archdiocese that would lead to her coming back here.

For one thing, Cardinal John Dearden had returned from the Second Vatican Council convinced that local Catholics needed to have a better understanding of people in other parts of the world and the conditions in which they lived. Then, too, after Synod '69 was held in the archdiocese, there emerged a plan to set up an archdiocese World Justice and Peace Office.

Fr. Hinsberg was named its director, and there was an opening for an assistant director. That was the position for which Wagner was hired, and began her just-now ended career with the archdiocese.

"Our charge was to help parishes understand that we were a global community, and to try to develop a global outlook," she recalls.

To further that goal, Wagner was part of a group of volunteers who went down to South America to experience Third World poverty firsthand. But the reality of what she saw was overwhelming.

"I went with two Adrian Dominican sisters to Callao, Peru, and we stayed at a convent there for seven days. It really was just startling to me; people lived in such poverty that I could hardly comprehend it.

"I really had a 'dark night of the soul,'" she says.

Wagner says she spent long hours in prayer, wrestling with questions of how such conditions could exist and "Where was God in all this?"

But she emerged from the experience with the confidence that "God has promised to be with us all days."

"That was how I experienced it, praying in that chapel at night – that He doesn't abandon me, and He won't abandon the poor," Wagner says.

Then, in Brazil, she met Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara (1909-99), the famous archbishop of Olinda and Recife, who urged the delegation from Detroit when they got back to the United States "that we have to always do everything conscious of the people that we met" on their South American trip.

When Fr. Hinsberg left in 1974, Wagner became acting director of the office, which she was successful in having renamed simply the Office of Justice and Peace so that it could deal with issues from the global level to the local level.

"With the help of Fr. Jerry Brezinski, who was at that time director of religious education, we began to develop lesson plans on justice and peace that could be used with the religious education textbooks. In the years that followed, the textbook companies did it themselves," Wagner says.

Then, when Fr. Richard Cassidy was named the department's director, she went back to being assistant director.

A pivotal event of that decade was the 1976 Call to Action, held at Cobo Center. "It was a wonderful example of the Church in action, of talking about the response it should have to the rest of the world."

In 1983, Wagner became assistant director of the archdiocesan Office for Continuing Education under Jane Wolford Hughes. "That's were I developed my facilitator skills," she says.

When Hughes retired, Wagner became director, and through some mergers, the office became the Office of Leadership Formation in the mid-1980s, with responsibility for promoting parish pastoral councils. "Jim Kiefer joined the staff, and we developed parish council training, and worked in conflict resolution, as well as directing Spectrum, the large annual conference for education conferences that continued into the early 1990s," she recalls.

Next to come was a phase of her career that was to involve some controversy. In 1987, a task force was named under then-Auxiliary Bishop Patrick Cooney to develop a plan for the Church in the City of Detroit.

When that report, which called in 1989 for the closing of 39 parishes, was approved by Cardinal Edmund C. Szoka, Wagner and Deacon Wyatt Jones were given the task of facilitating the decisions.

"Because we were the first diocese in the country to do this, I can say, in hindsight, that communication with the parishes could have been better," Wagner says.

It was, she remembers, "a very conflicted time" and "Deacon Jones and I became the lightning rods" for everyone who opposed the closings.

Looking back on that time, Wagner says she "has no doubt that something had to be done" and that she believes Cardinal Szoka came in for a lot of unjust criticism. But she acknowledges there "are still hurts and many different opinions about the process and the decisions."

As to her own role in it all, "I think I'll leave that to history to judge."

With the arrival of Cardinal Adam Maida in 1990, there was a further reorganization of the diocese that brought her office and a number of others under the new Department of Parish Life, with Wagner as director. (The name became Department of Parish Life and Services years later when the responsibilities of the former Department of Christian Service were divided up between it and the Education Department.)

With its overall object "to help parishes become stronger," and its experience with facilitating programs and conflict resolution, the department was positioned to play a key role in the first decade of the new century, as dwindling numbers of priests forced the archdiocese to once again enter a process that could lead to parishes being clustered, merged or close.

But this time, it would be the parishes themselves that would have to look at their sacramental life, their demographics and future prospects for sustainability and growth, in the process called Together in Faith. The role of Wagner's department would be to facilitate this self-examination process.

"Given that change is inevitable, we asked parishes to look at how they would meet the changes. Change is hard, but how the parish deals with change can make the community stronger," she says.

If the process is done with an open mind, and with prayer, Wagner says she believes parishes will almost always come to a realistic appreciation of their viability themselves: "If it is done with prayer and discernment, shared wisdom will bring a solution."

But she also understands that feelings can run deep, and that dealing with the closing of a parish can be like dealing with the death of a parent.

So, once again, Wagner became, to some, the woman who wanted to close their parish. Or even worse, she often became the face of the archdiocese – along with the late Bishop Kevin Britt or Bishop Walter Hurley – delivering the news of the removal of a pastor during the Clergy Sexual Abuse crisis as it developed from 2002.

No one likes taking unfair criticism, but Wagner accepts the fact that it has come with the territory.

"I have been asked by the archbishops to do my best to be of service to the diocese. I may have failed in many ways, but I think I have been successful in many ways," she says, summing up how she views her record.

Asked to name some of the clergy and lay people who have had an influence on her, Wagner names far too many to repeat here. But working with those dedicated bishops, priests, deacons and lay people has been part of what Wagner says has "certainly deepened my prayer life."

Calling it a privilege to have been able to work for the Archdiocese of Detroit, she says, "I have been graced with a wonderful experience."

No matter what challenges she has faced in her work for the Church, Wagner says she has always asked herself the same question: "Does this bring me closer to Jesus?"

And she adds, "And I try to find a way that it does."

Wagner has served four archbishops – Cardinals Dearden, Szoka and Maida, and now Archbishop Allen Vigneron, and has good things to say about each of them.

"I'm delighted I was able to work at least a year with Archbishop Vigneron," she says, calling him a good leader and praising his "vision and dedication to the diocese."

Beginning in 1992, Wagner had to cope with multiple sclerosis, and though it is now in remission, she will be undergoing some physical therapy to overcome some of its effects as her first order of business now that she is retired.

Then, after maybe another month or so to organize and file all her papers and memorabilia from her career, she says she intends to begin rereading the works of Flannery O'Connor and other favorite authors, and to find some kind of volunteer work.

"I want to be open to what the Lord wants me to do, but I have a feeling that there's something significant I can be a part of," Wagner says.

Speaking of her experience with MS, she says she realizes it could have been much worse: "I only had two attacks; it's been a mild case, so I'm very lucky."

Of course, for someone who has spent so much of her professional career serving as a facilitator, Wagner acknowledges that it has been a problem that, because of MS, she can no longer write on a flip chart.

But she adds, "I'm just amazed at how many people want to help me. It's been a great blessing to me."