Game For The Challenges New Seattle Archbishop Brings Reputation As Energetic Unifier, Defender Of Tradition

When the Most Rev. Alexander Brunett is installed this week as the leader for Western Washington Catholics, he will face challenges, but friends and acquaintances say he is likely to meet them with energy and wit.

Brunett, 63, will be installed Thursday in a Mass at St. James Cathedral. He succeeds Archbishop Thomas Murphy, who died in June.

Family, friends and colleagues paint a portrait of a man who remembers names and birthdays, loves linguine and swings a 3-wood with gusto, if not precision (22 handicap).

And while he calls himself shy, those who know him say he is gregarious and optimistic.

In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Brunett admitted to a little fear of the unknown.

“They don’t know me, and I don’t know too many people,” he told the newspaper.

“There’s a normal sense of fear. Will those people accept me? Will they be able to walk in my shoes, as I need to walk in theirs?”

For Brunett, the path began in Detroit, where he was born the second of 14 children. He often jokes that the reason he became a priest was to get his own bed.

Now, after three years as bishop of Helena, preceded by 35 years of ministry in Michigan, he is about to become the spiritual leader of 372,000 registered Roman Catholics here.

He faces challenges. With too few priests for 170 churches in Western Washington, the Eucharist - the central event of the Catholic faith - is absent from some churches on Sunday.

The Archdiocese of Seattle has thousands of paid and volunteer lay leaders who perform tasks once done by priests. Yet many lay leaders chafe under Vatican rules that stop them from preaching and performing the sacraments.

With a growing Catholic population, Brunett also will face pressure to expand Catholic schools, particularly in the suburbs east of Seattle and in Snohomish County to the north. The challenge is to hold down tuition costs to retain middle-class students while paying teachers a living wage.

In Montana, Brunett spent a lot of time driving his Jeep among the far-flung parishes in the 52,000-square-mile diocese.

“What (the years in Helena) did for me was confirm that being a bishop is a very pastoral thing,” Brunett said. “You must be out with the people and understand what the problems are.

“They tell you who’s seriously sick in the family, when a loved one is dying, whether it’s a good harvest, how the ranches are doing. You hear a lot about the beauty of the land, and they are very proud of it.”

In Michigan, where he was pastor of suburban Detroit parishes for nearly two decades, he drew respect for improving relations with other faiths while holding to church prohibitions on such issues as abortion and homosexuality.

“He’s a man of conviction. He knows what the church teaches. He’ll always be faithful to the Catholic Tradition - and you better spell that with a capital T,” said the Rev. Ernie Porcari, a college classmate and parish pastor in Northville, Mich.

Brunett, ordained in 1958, studied at ecumenical schools in Ireland and Israel in 1972, a profound experience that shaped his views on promoting unity among people of different religions.

In 1973, he began serving as director of ecumenical and interreligious affairs for the Detroit archdiocese. He also was appointed pastor of St. Aidan Parish in Livonia, Mich. He held both appointments for 18 years.

At St. Aidan, Brunett started a summer harvest festival and other programs to feed the hungry. He taught adult Bible study classes, led trips to the Holy Land, and oversaw construction of a new parish building.

“When he left here, we hated to see him go,” said Jerry Bixman, a St. Aidan parishioner. “We heard about it on Friday. By Sunday, we had 1,500 signatures (asking Brunett to stay). It didn’t work.”

In 1991, Detroit Archbishop Adam Maida appointed Brunett pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Mich. The appointment was viewed as a gesture of reconciliation. In the 1930s, the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the Shrine pastor, fueled anti-Semitism with fiery attacks on Jews on a national radio program.

Brunett worked to repair lingering ill feelings toward the shrine. He also became increasingly involved in ecumenical issues, serving on several national panels, founding two institutes, writing several books and receiving awards for improving Catholic-Jewish relations.

“Christianity calls for unity,” Brunett said, citing Jesus’ prayer on the night before he was crucified that all believers would become one with another.

“That’s not to say there will not be diversity. But out of diversity comes our unity.”

In Helena, Brunett reached out to American Indians.

The Blackfeet tribe adopted him and gave him an Indian name: Holy Eagle Feather.

“He was very instrumental in getting our Catholic middle school on our reservation,” said Gertie Heavy Runner, whose tribe made Brunett a beaded miter. “He made us aware of how important we are to the Diocese of Helena.”

The Rev. John Darragh of the Cathedral of St. Helena said Brunett broadened the horizons of isolated Montanans.

“We’re not on the cutting edge of society. We don’t deal with a lot of world religions,” Darragh said.

“He brought a kind of conscious-raising awareness to us, a sense of what it means to deal with the Jewish community, the Hindu community.”

Acquaintances say Brunett is hard to label.

“The liberals think he’s conservative, and the conservatives think he’s liberal. Those are good characteristics. That’s the best thing you could say of him,” said Detroit Auxiliary Bishop Bernard Harrington, who has known Brunett since the ninth grade.