Bishop Leroy Matthiesen Interview, Part 2 of 2

LM: So, David, you were going to ask me a about - what was it we were going to talk about?

DT: Change coming to...

LM: Oh, yeah, change.

DT:I'd like you to talk a little bit about how you've dealt with both change and continuity in the church and how you've both comforted those who felt security in the traditions but also give some support for those who want to embrace new understandings of maybe better ways to do things.

LM: There is a saying which we use in the church and that is, the role of a prophet, prophet meaning a teacher, not somebody who sees the future, but a prophet who can read the signs of the times and says, "If you continue this way, this is what's going to happen." That's been the typical role of a prophet.

And so there's this saying that the role of a teacher, and the church is a teacher, I've been a teacher all my life, professionally and otherwise. And there's a saying that the role of a teacher or particularly a prophet, is to afflict the comfortable. And that, of course, irritates the comfortable but also then, to comfort the afflicted.

So plays a dual role of questioning what's going on and then dealing with that reality. That, of course, came very much to the front here because of of the assembly plant at Pantex assembling nuclear weapons. Many of the Catholic people here in Amarillo worked there, and of course, considered what they were doing was making a big contribution to the defense of the country; this was a high act of patriotism.

They were always encouraged to to do that work because it was to be patriotic. Therefore, it seems to be heresy to say that what you're doing is not right, challenging that. And, it was interesting to me what happened though when this became a national debate that and when I made a public statement questioning the morality of working on the assembly of this so-called neutron bomb, and in fact, of all the atomic weapons.

I received about 600 letters, interestingly enough, about 95% were supportive. The others were, of course, totally unsupportive. I remember, I had been pastor of St. Francis parish and when this statement came out, one of the parishioners who was a good friend of mine went to see his brother and he said, "I wonder what in the world the bishop thinks he's doing?"

And so his brother said, "Well," he said, "I'm going to go up there right now and tell him that." And his brother said, "Well, you better be a little bit careful; maybe he knows something that you don't know," - something like that. In fact, I didn't know a great deal about how the nuclear bomb was built or know that but I learned in a hurry.

I used to tell my story in terms of, I didn't know the gun was loaded, and I talked about my boyhood experience with guns, killing the cat, killing the deer. But I also had some near encounters with almost killing some friends of mine, or at least one friend.

We were riding in a pickup and I was in the middle. There were three of us in the cab,and I had my rifle on my lap, and for some reason reason or other, I had not unloaded it. It discharged. And that bullet went within about an inch of my cousin's head. And that got my attention.

And then when I was principal of our high school, one of the students had brought a pistol, one of these Saturday Night Specials, had it under the seat of his car out on the parking lot. And after school was showing it to some of his friends, and, well, I said in the cab, I didn't know the gun was loaded.

And and and this gun that this kid had went off and it struck one of the students across the parking lot in the neck and severed his spinal cord. And they called me right away and I went out and he was lying on the ground. He's still alive, but he's paralyzed.

And, you know, I said, of course, "What happened?" And this boy who had the gun said, "I didn't know it was loaded." And that was the theme I used in the talks that I gave around the country. I did not know that the nuclear gun was loaded, but now I know.

And, uh, and uh, I'm saying, you know, we need to be very, very cautious about how we use this weapon and, uh, we've already used it. Praise God, we won't use it again. That presentation with just my personal story was apparently pretty powerful.

Later on, after I studied and learned all about the mechanisms, I gave a talk down to the engineering students at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and it was a total disaster because they challenged everything I said. They were engineers; they were stuand. Later on a friend of mine said, "They got you on their ball field instead of the one you were playing on, and you better go back to your personal story," which I did after that.

So, you know, everybody has to do this. You have to tell your personal story. That's the most powerful thing and and, you know, I would think in something in terms of the environment and so on, this is what we have to do. This is what happened.

So how do you change things? First of all, you have to determine whether or not they need to be changed. I thought, in terms of the atomic thing, I thought and still think, and do, in both, that you overuse of pesticides and herbicides is going in the wrong way. And somebody needs to challenge that and come up with a better idea.

In terms of the nuclear weapon, I used to be challenged with, but we have to have this to defeat Communism. And my response was, "Communism is an ideology." It's a way of thinking about the world. It does not include God. It is it's an economic policy; it's a social policy. It's the haves and the have-nots, and the only way you can defeat that is with a better idea.

And we do have one; it's called Christianity. Problem with that is, G. K. Chesterton said, I believe it was G. K. Chesterton said, "The problem is not Christianity. The problem is that Christianity has not been tried meaningfully. " And that would be my message. That we need to assess what were doing, look back to what we have done before, keep those things that were good and, obviously, the backbone of this country.

It will never be that way again. It doesn't need to be that way again, where almost every family was a farm family, was a rural country, but it's not that anymore. It's an urban country, and it will always be as the population continues to grow.

Which brings up another problem, but keep the things that are so meaningful, remember your history, remember your story, remember what your grandparents and your great-grandparents did, and keep those values, those values of respect and honesty and responsibility, the work ethic, all of that.

Keep that, but look at ways in which you can do that in new ways with modern technology. I'm all for modern tech technology. I wouldn't be here today if it were not for medical technology. Had heart valve replaced and I was told fifteen years before that happened that they would not have been able to to identify the bacterium that was destroying my mitral valve.

And if they had been able to detect it, they would not have been able to eliminate it, kill it. And if they could have even done that, they couldn't have replaced the valve. "You'd be pushing up lilies in Llano Cemetery in Amarillo."

So I said, I'll never complain about the cost of modern technology, although I think there's areas where that can be done. I think that's also suffering from, again, the bottom line, the dollar. That you have, you know, health management organizations. You have preferred providers and doctors have now come under the direction of the insurance companies. And they really ought to be released and freed to do what they've always done so well and that is to to deal with the patient in the best way that that doctor knows how to do it.

So many doctors are frustrated today because they cannot do what they want to do. The insurance company dictates how long they can put a patient in a hospital and cut a chart and all that sort of thing. That's part of our problem today. Modern medicine is just wonderful, but again, it has to be done rationally with common sense.

DT: You've mentioned two things just now that I think are intriguing regarding health care and what the bounds of medicine might be and population. The church has often been torn by the whole issue of contraception and...

LM: Yes.

DT: And abortion.

LM: Right.

DT: And yet, you've recognized that there are problems with the growing population and the stresses that it puts on the environment. How do you balance those two?

LM: Well, I think it's demonstrable that where you have an educated people, where you have a people that live good lives, I mean, in every aspect, that they have enough of this earth's goods to live with dignity and even, you know, beyond that because there's also the promotion of arts and science and all of that that needs to be done.

Once you have that, then I think it's demonstrable that the population growth begins to slow down. It is in those areas where you have extreme poverty, where children are seen. I mean, they they have such short lives, but they are seen as assets in terms of trying to, you know, scrounge up wood, scrounge up food, you know, to feed the family.

Not realizing that they're adding to the problem. And I don't think the way to do that, this is the position of the church, is to do like they did in China, you know, pass a rule that you can only have one child. The rest of them you have to abort.

And you can see why the Chinese did it, but we think that's going at it backward. What you need to do is to get to raise the level of the standard of living for your people and they will take care of that themselves. Because they will want to get those children educated.

And nowadays, the church has always preached that when you get married and if you're able to have children, you should have children, just enough to maintain the population level and increase it slightly. Well, like in my family, we were eight kids.

Now my brothers and and sisters and their their my grandchildren, they don't have that many kids. They have a higher level of of of of of education; they have a higher standard of living. Life is more than just being this immediate family where you have to have like when I grew up on the farm. We didn't have tractors We had horses, and you did everything by hand.

And therefore, it required a lot of hands. But today, like the brother who who owns that those five farms I'm talking about. He has two children. He adopted one; he died in an accident. But they only had two themselves. So, there's a natural... nature takes care of itself in these kinds of ways.

So, our thesis, my thesis is, that instead of putting barriers between Mexico and the United States, keep them out, all this kind of thing, what we ought to do is help Mexico become a democracy more than it is now. You know it's been controlled by the PRI, you know the revolutionary party, although the present president doesn't come out of that party and he's making very great efforts to get a two or three party system going in Mexico.

But what what we've got to do is have President John Kennedy's policy of a good neighbor policy, that we help them raise their economic level. Those people ,I know a lot of those people, that come up here, my brother employs them.

They don't come up here because they are lazy; they are the hardest people working people I've ever encountered. And my brother says, every week they come and they want him to send a money order back to their wife and family back in Mexico.

And they'll work up here just as long enough that they can live for a whole year down there. So, the good neighbor policy was intended to help the people raise their standard of living and that would take care of the population control.

Now, I do believe that historically, the church had had too much of a fixation on matters of sexual ethics and morals. It that's a whole new area that's being explored at the present time. That the creative power that was given to us as human beings was somehow wrong.

You know, Augustine preached that, he he believed that the body is bad and the soul is good, And, you know, that's just coming out of his Manichean. We studied that philosophy which saw the world as black and white, dark and evil, body and soul, all that kind of thing.

And, of course, he himself in his younger years was quite a roustabout. I mean he painted the town red. He had a child illegitimate child. But he did a complete turn, and ever since that time, the church has looked upon, while, you know, promoting good family life and all of that, nevertheless tries to control what people are doing in their individual... We don't look at it that way, but that's what it comes down to.

We're saying, that's wrong, this is right and this is wrong. And there's been a - you look at the calendar of saints, and most of the saints are not married people. I mentioned St. Isidore and Maria; they were and they are they are both canonized saints, or at least he is. I think she's kind of an informal saint going along with him.

But, at any rate, you have that and so that's a real problem, and I think the church honestly needs to look at all of that along with these environmental issues and these issues of war and peace and the nuclear weapons and all of that sort of stuff. It it does make those efforts, but it does have the image, and one must acknowledge that, of not being exactly how do you say that not enough concerned about the the growth of population.

You'll say, well, there's lots of space, I mean, you you know. You drive between Amarillo and El Paso and you can drive sometimes for hundreds of miles; you don't even see a jackrabbit. So there's lots of land out here; however, just no water.

You know, so how are you going to have somebody live there? So this kind of balance. There are voices in the church, I mean, its not that it's a, you know, just a one issue thing; there are voices in the church raising those issues.

DT: Well, you were one of the voices in the church as well through your publications. Can you talk a little bit about your journalism?

LM: Yes, yes. I was editor of our

DW: I have something too because, on that note, you defined a prophet as being someone whose job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. I'm coming from a totally different background; I'd always been taught that's the definition of a journalist. So I can see that as being a very interesting push-pull for what you're about to describe.

LM: Okay. Yes. After I was ordained a priest in 1946, the bishop had already known that I was interested in writing. I, in fact, I started a newspaper within the seminary called it Semaphore. And so, when I was ordained, he sent me up to Denver to study journalism for two years.

It was a working study. I read books for about six weeks, and I remember the editor-in-chief said he was a self-made journalist, said, "Well, read one of those books. If you've read that one, you've read them all." And then he asked me if I'd gone to a journalism school and I said, "No." And he said, "Good! I don't have to unteach you."

So he put me to work, and I was there and it was wonderful. I came back then in 48 and was named editor of the paper and then in 1950 I began to write a column in the paper which I call Wise and Otherwise.

And there I talked about these kinds of issues. In the beginning, of course, very much about farm life, about the environment, talked about growing up on the farm, that sort of thing. And I guess that was an educational thing, it got to be fairly popular. And then later on, of course, talked about other issues, particularly the nuclear issue.

So, I guess in that sense I was being a teacher, being a a a prophet. I think maybe that's what journalists should be. That's a question nowadays, you know. There's all these charges that, again, that the almighty dollar drives everything so that the the media are not as objective as they used to be because they have to be careful about who's paying the bills, that sort of thing.

That's always been there, that sort of problem. But, I think, among the journalists, you need to have investigative reporters; you need to have the kind of thing that you're doing in this project, to to educate, to teach, and to afflict the comfortable and then come back and comfort the afflicted.

I think that's what it means to be a prophet. II wrote that column for - until 1980 so for about 30 years. And we're currently - I"m writing a book called Wise and Otherwise-A Memoir. And I'm talking about all the experiences that I had, reflections on that.

I first, I was encouraged simply to reprint some of the best of those columns. But I submitted that to a publisher but he said, that won't work because one column I would write about farming, another one I'd write about violence, another one I'd talk about education and and that sort of thing.

So, I I"m submitting that manuscript here shortly to a publisher in the hope that it will get published because I think it has something to say on the lines that were talking about. I have a a chapter on on sustainable agriculture and the environment and that sort of thing.

So, yes of course, there's no question but that the media are very, very influential and powerful today and that, you know, we have so much information given to us and it's difficult to sort truth from fiction. It's difficult to find a voice that really is prophetic. But I think that's absolutely essential.

Society will never really survive in the way that it should unless there are prophets in our midst, and we have them in terms of what we're talking about, in terms of sustainable agriculture, and protection of the environment, protection of our water and air, soil, and all of that.

DT: Well, when you look into the future, what do you see as the big challenges or opportunities? In an environmental sense...

LM: Well, I I think there has to be, what I would almost call a revolution in our society. I don't mean armed revolution or taking to the streets or that kind of thing. But a revolution in our way of thinking. Going back again to, you know, what Francis did in in his period, at the beginning of the Middle Ages. That was a period of great prosperity. That was a period in which everything was just very blissful and and all of that sort of thing.

But Francis had an experience of what happens when you go to war, for example, as he did. I'm sure their battles were nothing like we experienced in the last century, obviously, just a local deal. But he began to look at life in a much different way, in a revolutionary way.

And in fact, succeeded in doing that even though it has not survived in the idyllic way that he first envisioned that, but it takes that kind of thing. And, you know, we've had prophets of the civil rights movements. Martin Luther King, the assassination of President Kennedy was a major shift in our way of thinking about things.

What's coming out of I think what were what we're lacking now is people who are prophets, we're lacking people who are statespersons in government. It seems to me like we're getting back to being too nationalistic, closing in on ourselves, just being concerned about ourselves and not the rest of the world, except that they're all enemies out there or they're our allies.

And then we cherish or we hate them depending upon how they react to our interest. And, of course, we have to be concerned about ourselves. We do have the best form of life and government and all the good in the world, no question about that. But we have to guard that, keep that out of the past and try to implement that in the future.

DT: When we first started this interview, you talked about growing up in central West Texas and about looking over the hills and wondering what was beyond. I was curious if you could close with describing if there is a special spot that brings you peace and serenity when you go and visit that place, whether it's near your home or over the hill.

LM: Yes, yes, I I've gone back to visit the old farm and, of course, my family, remaining family there. And I've taken walks in the evening out to a field. The field washad been prepared for planting in the spring and I did what sounds kind of crazy. I just laid down in the furrow and felt the earth.

When we grew up, we were all barefoot, so I remember feeling the rich loam between my toes as Papa was planting and we'd follow along behind the planter as kids and feel that rich, warm soil in our toes. So I tried to recover that when I laid down. I didn't go barefoot, but I was trying to recapture the smell of that rich soil; this would be like in the springtime, before planting.

And I guess just bonding with and the looking up at the sky and seeing the stars. There's no pollution in that area; it's out in the country and, you know, you don't know how bright the stars are until you get into that away from the city lights and all of that. And even out in the farmland now, you know, there's all these guardian lights or whatever they're called, and so we lose some of that as well.

However, there, it's all free and open. The air is pure and you see the falling stars and you wonder about what's out there. We'll never really know; we're exploring out there further. That opens up new possibilities. But and then I walked down into a pasture where we used to go and we used to pick up arrowheads, reminding me of, you know, the Native Americans, the ones we called Indians, were there.

They would come to the Concho River to get the oysters and get pearls out of them, that sort of thing. And, I think that's a good thing for us to do, and just go back as much as we can to recapture some of the innocence of our childhood. We can never really do that. When I was a boy, everything looked huge to me. Now I go back and it looks small by comparison.

Others may have a different experience, grew up in a city and and maybe now the city's gotten so large it looks bigger than ever and it is bigger than ever. But, even so, and I think it's wonderful that some of the projects - I didn't mention that I was in the 4H Club. We grew up and we learned a lot that way.

I was a Boy Scout. Our Boy Scout master would take us to the Concho River and we'd go teach us how to swim and then teach us how to make ropes and teach us how to cook things in the ground and that sort of thing. So we were very, very close to to Mother Nature, the Good Earth, as Francis talks about, our mother, the Earth.

I think that's maybe it's trying to go back, in one sense, back into the womb, you know. But so what? I mean, it's that's how life began. We'll wind, we'll wind up in the womb of Mother Earth, but we hope for, and expect, and believe in a resurrection. As I think nature, you know, nature is very resourceful.

I I mention my my brother. One of my brothers is in the chemical business - fertilizer and chemical business. And each year one time I visited them and I found him in the office of his warehouse along with several farmers. And they had a they had a chalkboard there and they were plotting their strategy as to how to defeat the insects the coming season because they had discovered that the insects had gotten, what do you call that, "resistant" to the chemicals they used last year.

They had changed their structure and and so nature does that. Nature can do some wonderful things. Like those places in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other places, and particularly, of course, also in in Germany, in Dresden, in those places that were firebombed.

You go back there now and you'd never guess that those things happened, except for the Peace Park in Hiroshima. I've not been there, but I understand there is one there. Or maybe it's in Nagasaki. Nature does have a way of repairing itself.

Oh, you go down to the Yucatan; you go down to Guatemala and you see the Mayan pyramids and all of that, you know. And nature has just simply taken that back over.

That whole area is covered with mounds and they tell us that there's buildings underneath them, but they're not uncovering them be you know, except one at a time because they discovered that when they do, the things disintegrate. So then they have to they use some kind something to to preserve them.

So as we go into the future, I think there's great hope. We've create our own problems, but we also have the intelligence, and I think the good sense, to correct them. Sometimes it takes us a long time. It happens with the church, it happens in medicine, it happens in business, it happens on the farm. I think well get it right, but we need to work together to do that.

DT: Good. Thank you. Is there anything you'd like to add?

LM: No, I'm just impressed with the professionalism of what you're doing.

DT: Oh, well, you're very kind. Thank you very much for spending this morning with us. (misc.) [End of Reel 2211] [End of Interview with Leroy Matthiesen]