Msgr. Harry Schlitt retires
On June 30, Msgr. Harry Schlitt completes a 12-year term as Vicar for Administration and Moderator of the Curia for the Archdiocese of San Francisco as he turns over the assignment to his successor, Father James Tarantino, long-time pastor at St. Hilary in Tiburon.
Msgr. Schlitt, who was ordained in 1964 and incardinated in the archdiocese in 1974, was pastor of St. Gabriel parish in San Francisco before his appointment to the archdiocese’s top administrative job. He will continue in active ministry but will not take on another full-time role. He will fill in as a “weekend warrior” for pastors who need help with liturgies and other tasks. At the same time he will continue as celebrant of his long-running televised Mass program serving Bay Area Catholics who are unable to attend Mass. He is working to expand the broadcast to San Diego and Salt Lake City.
“I will keep the TV Mass, which I’ve been doing for eight years now,” Msgr. Schlitt said. “That’s been a very fulfilling ministry for me, and it’s the been the most fulfilling as a priest.”
Referring to the tough duty of administrative work at a time of financial stress for parishes and the archdiocese, he said: “I never intended to be dealing with this kind of stuff when I was ordained.”
Msgr. Schlitt also is working on a memoir of his career as a radio priest. He is reviewing the 5,000 to 6,000 scripts for radio spots he aired since 1968 on the syndicated Father Harry broadcast he hosted through his own God Squad Productions Inc.
Msgr. Schlitt was a young priest working in high schools when he got his start on a music station, KICK AM in Springfield, Mo. A disk jockey helped him blend the lyrics from popular songs into one-minute stories for young listeners. Msgr. Schlitt also had an award-winning program on Armed Forces Radio for 20 years, which he said was the most popular religious program on the military network.
Msgr. Schlitt also was a popular broadcaster in San Francisco. He is a member of the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame, which features a sample of one of his 1978 KFRC AM broadcasts on its website at sfradiomuseum.com/audio/kfrc/.
“At one time in this city,” Msgr. Schlitt said, “I got up at 5 o’clock and did 6 to 7 at KNBR, got in my car and went over to KYU and did 9 to 12, came home at 12 and from 12 to 12:30 listened to myself on KCBS-FM, got home at 1 o’clock for a television show that was on KRON on Sunday. So if you didn’t like me, it was too bad.”
As a broadcaster, Msgr. Schlitt honed his own style. He sought to reach a wide audience with a positive, non-judgmental religious message that countered the fire-and-damnation approach of Bible Belt evangelists. “I took a little heat from priests,” he said. “I know I was looked on as someone who was a soft salesman for religion.”
He recalled one priest’s challenge: ‘“You never say Jesus, you know you work for Jesus?’”
His answer: “Well, it’s just not my style.”
Msgr. Schlitt began his path to the priesthood when he was 14, and the discipline of prayer and the Mass continues to be central to his experience of being a priest.
“Some of us went in after the eighth grade, and our minds were bent by the constant presence,” he said. “We had a lot more talk about the figure of the Holy Spirit as part of your calling, and that was taught to us and instilled, and so you really believed that you were called.”
Msgr. Schlitt spoke with Catholic San Francisco about his media ministry, his career as an administrator and about evangelization, communication and the vocation of priest during a trying time for the Church. He talked about priests who were also characters, and how hard it is to combine the two roles today.
The conversation began with a discussion of parish school economics, as Msgr. Schlitt had just learned of a funding shortfall at an elementary school and was preparing to deal with the news.
CSF: What is the status of parochial schools, those that are in the most fragile state? What’s likely to unfold over the next year?
Msgr. Schlitt: It’s not news in San Francisco that the number of children is dwindling. There are just not enough children to fill the desks of all the parochial schools that we have in the inner city. We’ve had at least three studies done. We’ve had enough studies. All the studies tell us that we have too many seats, too many chairs, for the few students that we have. We have a lot of older buildings that need maintenance and upkeep and we can’t afford to have the buildings taken care of just for a small number of students, so we have to find a way, and I’m hoping next year at this time there will be a sound plan that gets all of these children into a Catholic school. We’re not doing away with Catholic education; in fact this would reemphasize how important it is. But we also do not have the people or the parents who have the wherewithal to keep buildings going. Most of our Mission schools, for example, there’s a lot of young immigrant families there and there are a lot of young people who have families who don’t have a strong heritage from grandfathers, great-grandfathers, who can pay the tuition for the grandchildren. So, we need a reorganization of a lot of inner-city schools to make sure there’s a seat for every Catholic kid who wants an education.
CSF: You’re talking about closure of these schools and consolidating the students and faculty in nearby schools, so they continue the parochial school experience, just on a stronger economic footing?
Msgr. Schlitt: That’s right.
CSF: So, there would be a drop of several sites?
Msgr. Schlitt: I would think there has to be. If there isn’t, it doesn’t solve the problem. I told the Council of Priests at the May meeting, I said this is not business as usual in the archdiocese, where we can count on a bailout of elementary schools. We’ve put over $55 million into our high schools since I’ve been in this job as Moderator of the Curia, that’s a lot of money, but most of the high schools have families and wherewithal to support – the money we put in gets donated. So it goes back to that thing, well, the Catholic people don’t give as much in the offertory collection. But a lot of our Catholic people are supporting Catholic education and that’s more expensive than supporting your parish in the Sunday collection. And we have to realize that. The Archdiocese of San Francisco has four of the best Catholic high schools in the country and they have great facilities and they have the ability to teach Catholic education and develop a whole person. It’s quite a wonderful thing. In the elementary schools we just don’t have the numbers of students to support our elementary schools.
CSF: Do you see any parishes consolidating? Are some of the same economic factors parish-wide?
Msgr. Schlitt: We’ve talked about that. There are a couple where that could have been done this year. What will force that issue more than anything will be the number of pastors who will be available to be a one-pastor parish. It’s going to happen probably in five years that we’ll likely have a half-dozen parishes that are administered by a pastor who has more than one parish and a team to operate the second parish or the third parish. It’s happened in dioceses all around the country. It hasn’t happened here mainly due to the fact that we have a large number of religious, we have a number of retired priests who can fill in and help a pastor. One of the emerging factors that came out in our Council of Priests meeting was when you ask a new pastor whether he wants a parochial vicar, he’s apt to say, ‘I can’t really afford one.’ To house and feed and pay a priest is about $41,000 a year. For $41,000 a year a pastor can hire a retired priest or a religious to come in and help with the Masses on the weekend and occasionally take a funeral or a wedding. I’m not talking about the larger parishes, they have the wherewithal, but a smaller parish who might have had one parochial vicar or assistant a few years ago can’t really afford it now.
CSF: Is it that revenue is down, or costs are up, or both?
Msgr. Schlitt: Both. In the old days, 25 years ago, almost every parish had a housekeeper and cook, somebody who took care of the house, did the laundry and somebody who prepared the meals. I’ll bet you there are not a quarter of our parishes who now have a housekeeper and a cook. A lot of times the cook had a room in the back. If you go to these parishes you see on the first floor there’s always a guest room in the back where the cook would live next to the kitchen. They are few and far between now.
CSF: Is that because there are fewer parish members, or because those who are members and are active are less able to give?
Msgr. Schlitt: Both. That strong group who were working in the ‘50s and ‘60s and sending their children to Catholic schools, and it was affordable, and the parish helped out in the school, and you had free teachers because of religious men and women – all of that, when the schools went to lay teachers, lay principals, those people all had to have an equal salary with other teachers. So now we have that but it’s a terrific strain on some families. We have the high-class schools where the tuition is $10-$15,000 and they have a waiting list, because there are people with means who can afford it. You don’t hear much about that because they pay and the education is first-class. But the more and more Catholic immigrant family students that we have, the more and more difficult it gets to pay for their education.
CSF: While we’re on the economic basis of things, let’s talk about the Pastoral Center. There have been cuts in the last three years, ministries have been closed, things have been outsourced. This has been the case in dioceses across the country. What’s the outlook for the central organization?
Msgr. Schlitt: Part of my administrative goal was to have people keep their jobs as long as they could. We probably would have been better off if three years ago if we had bitten the bullet and done more cuts and then become more level in our budgeting process. Every year I have had to begin the budget, in the last five years, with at least a million-dollar deficit. And you just can’t go on that way, and you can’t cut programs because our programs in the chancery are not that expensive. The expense comes in the salaries and the benefits. So you have to find a way.
CSF: Will your successor have to deal with this rolling wave, confronting a million-dollar hole every spring?
Msgr. Schlitt: No. Because he came in here in January and went through the budget process with me, he’s convinced he’s not going to do this next year. He’s going to have a small committee from the Finance Council help plan the budget, and he’s going to try desperately to restore our corpus in the archdiocese. (Msgr. Schlitt explained that the corpus is the portfolio of investments and deposits that produce income for the archdiocese. It is one of four sources of income for the archbishop to fund the archdiocese’s $10 million administrative budget. The other sources are the archbishop’s annual appeal, property rentals and bequests to the archbishop.)
CSF: You say your Armed Forces Radio program was very popular. What were the people responding to?
Msgr. Schlitt: I always talked to the brass and the chaplains and said, ‘What do you really want me to talk about?’ The overwhelming response was the quality of life and the basic tenets of morality. There were many men and women in the service who did not know that it was wrong to steal, or to cheat or to lie. I talked a lot about how that would improve your life. I didn’t have, ‘Jesus or God’s going to punish you if you steal.’ I got away with a very soft-sell kind of religion without mentioning Jesus...When I started on the radio, I came from Springfield, Mo., where there were five Bible colleges and the Assemblies of God were headquartered there. That was Tammy Faye and (Jim) Bakker and Jim Robinson, Red Foley’s daughter married Pat Boone – it was a whole country-and-western and a very religious way of life centered on the Scripture but the way they interpreted it. I came out of that experience and I used to call them God killers. I had Saturday and Sunday nights and worked for three hours from 9 to midnight. I had all these Bible kids calling me – they were on fire with the Scriptures, but it was just one thing they learned. They had no idea there were translations from the Scriptures and they came from several languages. All those things were new to them. So I took that and I said I’m not going to be a God killer if I get chance to go further on the radio. You don’t need to cram God down people’s throats – they’ll see it, they’ll hear you if you talk about the quality of life and the goodness that can come from being kind and not cheating and stealing and lying. There’s godliness in that.
CSF: You’re talking about judgmentalism. How do you see the state of dialogue within the Church? Where would you like to see it go? How can we do better?
Msgr. Schlitt: I don’t know if it was Thomas Aquinas, whoever said In medio stat vertus – Virtue stands in the middle. Virtue stands in the middle, which is one thing, and the Scriptures say don’t be lukewarm, be hot or cold, so there’s mixed messages in all of this. But I always thought that if you had a strong opinion, you could be right or left but that doesn’t mean you have to make that your crusade to make others right or left. There are very good people who are on the right side who it seems to me often complain the loudest about the way the diocese is being run. It really infuriates me when Rome or the apostolic delegate in Washington gets a letter about Archbishop Niederauer and the way he conducts this archdiocese. I know him as well as anybody, and I’ve lived with him now for five years. He is just a really good man. He’s very intelligent, and he understands what he’s doing, and so when he makes a decision he takes everything into consideration. And yet it’s like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of situation. He makes very few mistakes.... On the other hand, the other side thinks that if you’re not out in the trenches every day and if you’re having an office like this or a big cathedral you’re not doing enough for the poor people. So, to stand in the middle, to have virtue in the middle, is the most important thing.
CSF: What happened to the public priest, who not only had his vocation but also was a persona in society? Father Peter Yorke was the prototypical public priest, whose ministry was on the picket line and who tried to beat back the anti-Catholic forces at the time. What happened to the persona of the priest in the society at large?
Msgr. Schlitt: I think that, number one, there are fewer of us. Let’s call them characters, because I believe I was one. You could enjoy an extraneous character 30 years ago more than you can today. I’ll give you an example. Twenty-five, 30 years ago there were pastors in this town where the government of City Hall would not do anything unless they checked with them. Now we don’t have any presence there....It’s one of the reasons we have such a hard time in city govenrment in getting any sympathy for Roman Catholicism or for the Archdiocese. I think right now it’s very difficult to be heard. I’m getting away from character priests. Number one, I think we had more (priests) so there were more characters and their time was outside the parish so they weren’t strapped with administering a parish. A pastor 25 years ago had two or three assistants in a big parish, so the youngest guy would take care of CYO and the baseball teams and the kids dances, the next guy would take the Women’s Sodality and the men’s club, and the third guy would watch the books. And the pastor would hold forth at dinner and know that he was on his way out but he was teaching, he was mentoring all three of these men...We have a mentoring program where we try to get younger priests in with a pastor, but it doesn’t mean they live with them. So, the pastor doesn’t have time to be a character anymore. And I don’t know that, right and left since Vatican II some 45-50 years ago made a split. A lot of pastors want to keep both sides happy. If they go one way with one they cut off a number of people, and when they do that their collection goes down. I help out at one parish. I said. ‘Father, you have three Masses on Sunday, you only need two.’ He said there are people who come to that early Mass, a handful, who are older people, and they are responsible for most of the collection on Sunday. He has to make that judgment.
CSF: As a Church, why are we so defensive? Why are we so risk-averse when we have the best story in the world? Why are we letting others fill that space? Why aren’t we competing? When did we stop competing? Are we waiting for the storm to pass?
Msgr. Schlitt: I think there are several reasons. One is the institution itself – we’re so top-down managed. Every priest is careful not be called in by the bishop for taking a risk....I think it’s part of the institution where we have a risk aversion because we don’t want to be in trouble. And it goes back also to 2002 when the abuse thing started and guys were not wearing their collars as much because a few remarks would be made on the street. I used to walk down to play handball at the Olympic Club, and I’d get people looking at me like I just fell off the abuse wagon. That didn’t help to drive guys further back into their holes. And I think the other thing would have been – I was pastor at St. Gabriel in the early ‘90s and when the kids would come up and hug your leg after Mass or want to be picked up, you always had a second thought about that. But 10 years before that, I used to tickle them and pick them up and hug them. You just have second thoughts about that.
CSF: That’s a tragedy.
Msgr. Schlitt: Isn’t it?
CSF: The last year of your job coincided with the Year for Priests. What was the most challenging experience in your vocation in the past year?
Msgr. Schlitt: For me in this job it’s always been the budget situation because it irritates me to know I have to make some changes that will not please everyone and that will cause some bad feelings around the building and some lowering of morale and all of that. That’s always been the challenge in this particular job. The challenge for my priesthood is always trying to get to be in a hurry about things. I’m going to make a concentrated effort. I hurry my prayers in the morning. The archbishop and I say our office together and we pray the Mass together when we don’t have something outside, and when that happens you slow down because you’re with somebody else. But when you’re by yourself it’s hard to give that time to God and not be in a hurry to get to the next meeting or the next person you’re supposed to see. I’m looking forward to not being in a hurry. I read somewhere that when you hurry your prayer life, you actually do violence to God. And I suppose if I were to be listing my faults that would be major to me.
CSF: What advice would you give a young man considering the priesthood?
Msgr. Schlitt: If there are any indications at all that you are looking to a life where you’d be able to help other people you should find out what’s it all about....If you have any inner feelings or thoughts of being a spiritual person or having a relationship with God or beyond yourself, if you have these feelings you should go try them out. And a way to do it is to go someplace where there’s a priest and you can make a retreat and spend some quiet time and really talking in depth and not just talking around. Try to see the thing through by yourself. A lot of people have a deep spiritual sense that they keep to themselves, and they don’t explore any further. You need a deep spiritual sense to deal with the challenges of the day. It has been a hard two to three weeks for me since we announced people are leaving here. If I didn’t have Mass and prayer in the morning and meditation to see that I’m doing my job, and having that leveling situation, it’d be harder. It’s unbearable. If religion is a crutch, it certainly is. It’s a good one for me.
By Rick DelVecchio
From June 25, 2010 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
