Raised in rural Earville, Ill., and sent to Rome for seminary training, Myers has brought home a taste for high Vatican style. His installation ceremony was so elaborate that some clergy promptly dubbed it “the coronation.” (Shortly after the investiture, concerned local priests formed the Roncalli Society–named after Pope John XXIII–to keep alive ideas of church reform.) Unlike O’Rourke, a man of simple tastes who lived in a modest bungalow, Myers collects fine art prints and Waterford crystal, and has installed a whirlpool bath in his residence. Most of his 15-hour workdays, however, are divided between phone calls and long periods on his knees praying before the blessed sacrament.
He is not a shy contemplative. Myers’s first pastoral letter last year was a nononsense treatise on abortion which advised–but did not command–pro-choice Catholics to refrain from receiving holy communion. When the local NOW chapter invited nun Donna Quinn, director of a prochoice Catholic group, to lecture on Myers’s views, he told her not to come into his diocese. She ignored his ban. This year, Myers refused to allow Monika Hellwig, a distinguished lay theologian from Georgetown University, to speak on Peoria church property before she first explained her views on the ordination of women and other issues unrelated to her lecture topic. Hellwig declined to be cross-examined and the lecture was canceled.
“I don’t like the label conservative,” Myers says. “Am I enthusiastic about the message the church has taught for centuries? Yes, I am.” Last spring, Myers made his enthusiasms perfectly clear. Displeased with the after-school religious classes offered to Catholic students, he ordered a review of the program by an outside consultant from Franciscan University, a small school in Steubenville, Ohio, with a history of ultraorthodoxy and close ties to the church’s eccentric charismatic movement. In a scathing critique, the consultant concluded not only that the educators were giving insufficient attention to the prerogatives of the papacy but also that they had undervalued the metaphysical difference between priests and lay ministers and the role of “the Holy Angels” in God’s “plan of salvation.” The entire religious education office resigned–a painful first step, Myers felt, in eliminating the theological “confusion” which he sees as the unfortunate result of Vatican Council II. “We’re not stuck in the 1970s and ’80s,” says the bishop. “The world has marched on and the church has marched on.”
Clearly, Myers is marching to the drumbeat of the pope. John Paul II is deeply concerned about the decline in priestly vocations and morale, and Myers insists he will reverse this trend. Since December 1990, he has ordained 13 new priests–one more than Los Angeles, the nation’s largest archdiocese, and as many as New York. By 1995, Myers foresees the “repriesting of our parishes.”
Myers canvasses the nation for staunchly conservative recruits, attracting them through spiritual retreats. Seven of the 11 men ordained this year came from outside Peoria, in most cases because they were drawn by the new bishop’s personal concern for them–and for his doctrinal purity. Explains Father Stuart Swetland, 32, a Navy veteran and Rhodes scholar: “I had experienced very fine leaders, the men who led us through the Persian Gulf conflict, and I see many of these same qualities in John Myers.” Peoria doesn’t have its own seminary and the recruits tend to be parceled out to right-minded schools. Privately, other clerics sniff at some placements, saying that the education is not first rate.
How is he playing in Peoria’s pews? “The back-to-basics folks are pleased as punch, but a lot of people are having problems,” says Marjorie Klise, president of a local publishing house and an active parishioner. “Those of us in the Vatican II generation have felt our participation was valued in the past. That feeling is no longer there.” Myers has told intimates that he expects to remain in Peoria no more than four to six years. One priest who asked not to be identified by name said, “He told me, ‘They have much higher things in store for me’.” For a Catholic bishop, the only critic that counts is one who has never been to Peoria. Though he travels a lot, he writes his reviews from Rome.
