Rope dancing at the offertory

 

Retired bishop of Sacramento returns to diocese

A bishop who said he has been “addicted to the desert” is leaving it. Francis A. Quinn, retired bishop of Sacramento, is returning to Sacramento, according to an Oct. 1 diocesan news release.
Quinn, 86, has spent the last 13 years working with the Yaqui and Tohono O’odham Indian nations in the deserts of southern Arizona. He was a priest of the San Francisco archdiocese for 33 years before becoming bishop of Sacramento in 1979. He retired in 1993. In 1994, he moved to Arizona at the invitation of then-Bishop Manuel Moreno of Tucson.
Quinn spoke about his work with the Indians in a story published in 2005 in Sacramento’s diocesan newspaper The Catholic Herald. While living in a motor home behind the Tucson bishop’s residence for several years, Quinn worked with two Trinitarian priests, visiting seven churches on the Yaqui Reservation -- most of the church buildings being lean-tos. He worked as well on the Papago reservation and said Mass for a group of religious sisters.
The Yaquis, said Quinn, “are Roman Catholic to the core.” Their liturgies have been inculturated, including rope dancing at the offertory, he said, and “doing smoke blessings in the four directions instead of the penitential rite.” He noted, “It’s amazing that, out of a church of 200 people, about 150 will go to confession.”
Quinn said his spiritual life developed in working with the Indians. He used to find the Liturgy of the Hours “more of a burden,” but “now I get something out of reading it” -- even at night, when he normally would be reading Robert Ludlum or John Grisham. “The Mass means more to me now,” he said. “I don’t know why it takes so long truly to appreciate what the Mass is.”
Quinn said he thought lay involvement in the Church “a beautiful development.” “I think God has allowed this shortage of clergy and religious for a reason,” he said. “We can learn so much from laypeople.”
Quinn said, as bishop, he tried to encourage Catholic politicians, not to “just dodge” moral issues such as abortion and capital punishment, but to speak about and promote their “faith conviction” about them. As for giving communion to politicians who are pro-abortion, “in most cases,” he said, “you should not deny Communion publicly to anyone who comes to the Communion rail, because you do not know the present state of their conscience…” When, in 1989, San Diego’s Bishop Leo Maher refused communion to pro-abortion Assemblywoman Lucy Killea, Quinn welcomed her to communion. "No priest in this diocese will ever refuse to give you communion," he said at the time.
In 2005, Quinn was listed as a member of the advisory board for Priests for Life.
For 30 years, Quinn said he has carried in his wallet the words, “good, guts, wise and true.” “They are not in my character,” he told the Herald. “I suspect they are the pillars on which a bishop (or any person) can live an effective, moral life. It’s easy enough to say the four words, but to do them is another thing.”