‘Never say no to Jesus’
Pastor of America’s largest Catholic church fears conservative reformers
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — He started his Charlotte career in 1974 as the first priest ordained in the brand-new Catholic diocese here. He ends it this month as pastor of St. Matthew, the largest Catholic parish in the United States.
At 75, Monsignor John McSweeney will soon leave the affluent Charlotte neighborhood of Ballantyne — where this parish named for the patron saint of bankers was built — and move to Jamaica or Haiti, where he hopes to spend his retirement years living with and ministering to the poorest of the poor.
“I’m going to try to walk in the sandals of the Lord,” he says.
He exits Charlotte with a wish that the city had more affordable housing and less traffic congestion, but says a more diverse Queen City has done a better jobw in recent years in integrating its various cultures and developing more green space.
His parting advice for Charlotte and its leaders: “Remember that it is a city for all people, not just a select few.”The native New Yorker also is not shy about sharing his strong opinions about what needs to change in the church and the 46-county diocese he’s served for more than 40 years. (St. Matthew is the 12th parish he’s led.)
During an interview, he spoke candidly about a Catholic Church he thinks has often put the Book of Law before the Book of Love.
Echoing Pope Francis — the fifth pontiff to reign during McSweeney’s time as a priest — he’d like the church and the diocese to be more about hospitality and less about judgment. That means, he said, being more welcoming: Of divorced-and-remarried Catholics, of LGBTQ persons, and of others who have long felt excluded by the church.
With too few diocesan priests, including in Charlotte, where the Catholic population is booming, McSweeney said he’d also support the church re-opening the door to married priests by making celibacy optional — as it was the first 1,000 years of Roman Catholicism.
The monsignor — a title for priests who have rendered valuable service to the church — said he’s been around many married Protestant ministers who are “doing great work.”
“And many men I was in the (Catholic) seminary with would be great priests today except for one thing,” he added, that one thing being their desire to get married.
McSweeney said he’s also “very concerned” that many of the priests graduating from seminaries these days are too conservative and could spur a revolt by Catholics in the pews against the priests’ efforts to stifle the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Also known as Vatican II, this council in the 1960s embraced church reform, including expanding the role for lay Catholics and celebrating the Mass in the local language more so than in Latin.
“The population that is the worshiping Catholic community have no understanding or history of pre-Vatican II,” he said. “They weren’t born (yet). The same with these young priests.”
McSweeney said Vatican II called for active lay participation in the liturgy, or Mass. “What I see happening (at some parishes) is that is not happening,” he said. “It’s being stopped.”
Lay people, particularly women, are not being permitted, for example, to dispense Communion as Eucharistic ministers. Altar boys are allowed, but not altar girls.
These young priests, McSweeney said, “are trying to reform the reform ... I don’t endorse what they’re doing to God’s people.”
Recently, at a Catholic church in Waynesville, which is part of the Charlotte diocese, the pastor resigned after many from the congregation left to protest his insistence, for example, of replacing popular hymns with the ancient Gregorian chant.
McSweeney said such rebellion could also happen in some Charlotte parishes, adding only half jokingly, “I’ll lead it.”McSweeney’s advice to his successor: “Stay out of the way a little bit and let God’s people do what they’re called to do. I’ve been quoted and I mean it, that the star here is not a priest.” It’s Jesus, he said, and the church is like a jigsaw puzzle, with each person fitting in in some capacity.
McSweeney also points to the front of St. Matthew’s weekly bulletin, which calls the church “a welcoming parish” no matter what your status is with the Catholic Church or your current marital situation or your sexual orientation — to name just a few of the examples listed.
In his next phase, McSweeneey plans to work with the Missionaries of the Poor, a Catholic group at work on the ground in Haiti or Jamaica. He feels called. “I’ve had the privilege of being in many different roles in ministry . ... But I think I need now to experience (poverty),” McSweeney said. “I have a little motto: ‘You never say no to Jesus.’ And he keeps talking to me.”