Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese (Part III)

Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
September 19, 1974

PART III

Saginaw, Mich., is a place where pastors, parents, children, even teachers (and maybe even the bishop) have to be “managed” to make them accept an utterly unnatural idea, namely, that the diocesan school system does not exist to teach the Catholic Faith but to inculcate “human values.” This amounts to saying that the diocese’s largest bloc of personnel (429 full-time, salaried teachers — almost four times the number of diocesan priests) is paid every year a giant share of the laity’s total contributions in order to do something at best — at best — tangentially related to the Catholic religion. So outlandish, in fact, is this idea that various disguises have had to be invented for it. Such as:

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Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese (Part II)

Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
September 12, 1974

PART II

On Aug. 21st, 1968, the Saginaw News, a secular paper, carried a lengthy attack on the encyclical Humanae Vitae. That fact in itself was not remarkable, since newspapers all over America that Summer were pouring out a torrent of contempt for the Roman Catholic Church. What made the Saginaw publication special, rather, was the fact that the attack was endorsed and signed by eighteen priests active in the diocese. Perhaps on account of this treachery, their bishop, Stephen S. Woznicki, suffered a heart attack.

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Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Dioscese

Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
September 5, 1974

PART I

In the rich farm country of central and eastern Michigan, graced with a vacationer’s paradise on the shores of Lake Huron, the Holy See erected the Diocese of Saginaw in 1938. Under two bishops — William F. Murphy (1938-50) and Stephen S. Woznicki (1950-68) — the young diocese grew and prospered. Then came a third bishop, Francis F. Reh, followed by ruin.

Catholic laypeople bombarded this reporter with invitations to come to Saginaw, to their living rooms and club basements, to hear the tales of

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