Most Rev. Jerome Hanus

The questions and responses do not necessarily appear in the order in which they occurred during the conversation.

TH: When you grew up on the farm, was it a dairy farm?

Hanus: The first farm we were on was not a dairy farm. We had some cows. When I was just about ready to go into high school and had an older brother, dad said well, I've got two good workers here, I think we'll go into a dairy operation, so he bought a half share of a dairy operation. We did run a dairy for a couple of years. Then when I went to the seminary he said, "Oops, I lost one of my workers," so he sold the dairy and went back to normal row crop, corn, soybeans and typical Nebraska farm.

(Concerning the size of the archdiocese, which covers 30 counties, which results in the archbishop logging more than 20,000 miles on the highway each year.)

TH: It doesn't help that you're headquartered in the extreme eastern part of the archdiocese.

Hanus: But that's the case with all the dioceses in Iowa. The headquarters are not located centrally. But we have most of our meetings in Cedar Falls at the Retreat House so people, when we do have - like this past weekend, I had the quarterly meetings of all the major counsels. We have those in Cedar Falls so the people can get to it more easily. That helps that everybody doesn't have to come to Dubuque.

That's an arrangement that Archbishop Kucera set up that every quarter, the major counsels would meet. He started having them meet in Cedar Falls at the Retreat House. It's really a very, very convenient way of getting everybody together. You've got to have a knack for meetings though, to start Friday night and finish Monday night. It goes usually 31/2 days of steady meetings. Different groups, though, of course.

TH: Do you physically drive all those miles or do you have an assistant who drives?

Hanus: I have two deacons and two priests who trade off with the driving, so I don't drive an awful lot.

TH: So you can get some reading done in the car.

Hanus: I do quite a bit of reading and resting, also. But I do read quite a bit in the car. I don't dictate, that's not the way I handle correspondence. I've been a computer person for 20 years. I just put the substance of the answer on the computer and just transfer it to (secretary) Mrs. Schueller and then she composes the letter. I don't take correspondence with me on those trips. It's more papers, studies, things like that to read.

TH: I would think that your predecessors - prior to e-mail and cell phones and so on - either didn't travel as much or they just didn't have as much of a work load.

Hanus: E-mail is really a wonderful thing. We communicate an awful lot in this archdiocese by e-mail. I think we're probably the most advanced of the dioceses in terms of being connected on e-mail. It's been that way since '95, the first year I was here. We made a decision that every institution, every parish, every school would be on e-mail so that we could communicate easily. So we have a closed e-mail system that we can communicate without getting all the junk mail.

(Concerning the sexual-abuse scandal and Archdiocese of Dubuque policies.)

TH: My understanding is that the Dubuque archdiocese and then your previous diocese (St. Cloud, Minn.) were really among the first to have a policy like this (that no one found guilty of sexual abuse of a minor will be reassigned).

Hanus: Yes, I worked on it up in Minnesota. Many of the policies that have been in place were based on the work that we did up in Minnesota in the late '80s. But each state is different because of things like mandatory reporters. Whether clergy are mandatory reporters or not makes a difference for the way we relate to sexual abuse of minors. Iowa does not include clergy among the mandatory reporters. Minnesota did. So there's a major difference there.

The charter from Dallas stated that any allegation of sexual abuse of a minor by any Church personnel will be taken to the public authorities. So that would be a change. We're not required to do that in Iowa as clergy, but that's what we intend to do. Now how to do that, even though the law doesn't provide for that, requires dialogue between us and public officials.

TH: You had appointed a victim to the panel, as well. Have some of your fellow bishops and archbishops included victims on their panels?

Hanus: The national panel has a victim on it, also. Who has identified himself as a victim. I think the person himself has to identify himself as a victim. When I asked this particular individual to serve on the board, I said can we, "Do we have your permission to say that you are a victim?" When that permission was given, then I could say the panel does include a victim. But then he, himself, said it himself to the reporters. I think it was right on the front page, wasn't it?

TH: Has this (crisis) affected vocations, or has it changed how the Church pursues vocations?

Hanus: Anything that happens in the Church can have impact on other areas of the Church. It is interesting to note that some dioceses that responded to the abuse in the '80s, that apparently the Holy Spirit then really works hard in those dioceses because they've had an increase in vocations. Like Lafayette, La., that had one of the earliest, really terrible cases of abuse, of sexual abuse, by priests. Once they handled it, then got back to work as a Church, they had an increase in vocations. Looking at it spiritually, looking at it from a religious point of view, the Holy Spirit sees that there needs to be some special hard work done.

That similar thing has been observed among the men who are studying for the priesthood now. They take this as a challenge that the Church needs good priests now and I'm going to be the best possible priest I can be. It is edifying to see the positive response of men studying for the priesthood.

Our numbers have remained about the same. The number of seminarians and the number of persons interested in the priesthood. But it's kind of hard to determine cause and effect in regard to that. That is an interesting phenomenon that when the Church is suffering, when times are hard, people do respond with sacrifice and with generosity and respond because they know the need is so great.

(Concerning the changing demographics of Iowa and the archdiocese.)

TH: Does this tie in with the expansion of the Hispanic ministry in the archdiocese?

Hanus: Our Hispanic ministry is a response to the presence of new Iowans. That has only been a development of about 10 years. We did not have any formal Hispanic ministry until 1993 because there simply were not that many Latino people in 30 counties.

It happened first in Marshalltown that a good number of people from Mexico came to Marshalltown to work and they wanted to pray. They looked for a place to pray. They were welcomed at the Lutheran church because I think the Lutheran pastor knew some Spanish. He would pray with them. But they wanted to pray in a Catholic manner, so after a while he said, "You're really in the wrong church. Let's walk down the street." So he led a procession of the people from Mexico down the street to St. Mary's and told the pastor, "Here, these are your people." So the pastor said, "Fine, come in, but I don't speak Spanish. We'd better get to the archbishop and see if he has somebody that he could assign here that speaks Spanish." Archbishop Kucera asked Father Paul Ouderkirk and Sister Anna Maria Manternach to go there and to work with the Hispanic people in Marshalltown. That was 1993.

Then, in '94, we realized there are a good number of people in Waterloo. That was the second place.

In '95, we commissioned a Spanish-speaking woman to take a survey of the rest of the archdiocese to see where the people are. She spent about four months just traveling around, talking to people in schools and in the community and in the churches and just walking the streets. We discovered there were significant numbers here in Dubuque, as well as in Cedar Rapids and in the Webster City area, so we started three more centers of Hispanic ministry.

A year later, we noted the phenomenon of Postville, which not only had the Hasidic Jewish population, but with the two meat-processing plants there, Postville was attracting a Hispanic population also. That was the sixth place where we have a center for Hispanic ministry.

(Concerning future challenges of the Archdiocese of Dubuque):

Hanus: Just financing the church has become much more complex that we didn't anticipate two years ago that it was going to be what it is, not even counting Sept. 11, 2001. I just saw recently where the general wealth of the United States since March, 2000, when the economy started going down, has decreased by 41 percent. Forty-one percent of the wealth of the United States has evaporated since March of 2000. That's almost half!

TH: Of course, that can affect the church assets, but it also can affect what you see in the collection basket each week.

Hanus: Running schools. Just our Catholic schools are $40 million, $50 million a year, the combined budgets of them. When you consider Catholic health care in the archdiocese is probably half a billion dollars because we have five major hospitals that are part of the church. That's half a billion dollars. If 41 percent of the wealth has disappeared, it has to affect health care. Catholic colleges don't have that kind of budget. Health care is a big operation, and the Catholic presence in health care in northeast Iowa is very, very significant. I don't know what the number is, but probably half of the health care delivery is connected with the Catholic Church. There are four major hospitals in each of the metro areas in Mason City, each of them, at least half of the care is Catholic.

TH: When Lyn (Jerde, then of the TH) did an interview with you in '95, she raised the specter of you serving for 20 years, if you served until you were 75. At the time you said that you really don't think someone can handle this job that long. Do you still feel that way?

Hanus: In fact, I was just asked that at one of the council meetings this weekend, "How long are you going to be our archbishop?" I said, "I doubt that I'm going to have the kind of energy and the ability to concentrate and to do the work much after I'm 70." But I said if I'm feeling well and if people think that I'm getting the job done, I'm quite willing to continue on the job.

My guess is that when I get to 72, I'll be like Archbishop Kucera, that I'm really not able to do the job the way I want to do and therefore, I'm going to ask the Pope to accept my resignation. But a lot of that depends on how you're feeling. If your health is good and if you have good collaborators. I have a wonderful staff that makes it possible for me to get my work done.
Copyright 2002 Telegraph Herald

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