I requested time to talk with Diocese of Bridgeport Bishop Frank Caggiano without really knowing what I wanted to talk about.
The second Easter during a global pandemic is enough of a reason.
Without questions, I had no expectations. Sometimes, that’s the best place to find answers.
“Oh my gosh, what a year it has been. It has been, in a way, almost a parable of Christian faith,” he says, picking up a cue from my invitation to contextualize Easter and the pandemic.
“The suffering was all around us, the promise of new life was being offered, but you didn’t quite see it,” continues Caggiano, who lives in Stamford. “Now we’re beginning to see it. It’s almost like a Holy Saturday experience. The suffering is done. But the resurrection is not quite in front of us. And it’s a very difficult position to be in for many people. But Easter gives us a promise that life will come. And this Easter we are in a much different place than last Easter.”
Suffering, doubt, renewal. The meaning of each has intensified over the past 12 months.
Our conversation feels like the partner bookend to one we had a little more than a year ago, in the early chapters of this epic. At that time, Caggiano was contemplating how to address gatherings as well as rituals such as Holy Communion.
The ensuing pages have hardly been light reading, but Caggiano’s voice has relaxed considerably from its grim tones of March 2020. His trademark energy never seemed to waver, so while it comes as a revelation when he mentions we are chatting on his birthday, I’m hardly surprised that he seizes this new stage of life with passion.
“I’m officially a senior citizen today! Sixty-two years old!” declares Caggiano, who was born on Easter Sunday, 1959. “And I say to myself, one of the gifts God has given me is good health.”
I’ve never known anyone to be this enthusiastic upon achieving senior status. A pandemic and time are hardly slowing Caggiano, who continues to launch initiatives in the diocese.
His observations about navigating the church through this “menace” (his word) mirror those of many Fairfield County executives. When your business is people, it’s difficult to be isolated.
But this newly minted senior citizen has learned to recognize the potentials of tending to parishioners virtually.
“Think of the services online. Who would have thought (he frequently speaks in italic) of that as a regular means of worshiping?”
Priests often hear from older parishioners who struggle to sway younger family members to join them at church. But Caggiano says he is encouraged by data suggesting almost every new person who was offered web links to services opened them.
He is also candid about the experience of meeting donors at fundraisers. While a traditional one might draw some 70 people, he has come to appreciate the value of conversing virtually with 20 people at a time. Rather than create distance, it has been a more intimate experience, while inviting instant feedback he says has been “extremely relevant.”
While schools are anxious to return to the old normal, the church is poised to move forward with a hybrid model. Caggiano appears thunderstruck at the notion that the coronavirus has delivered him fresh ways to communicate with followers. He concedes that the Catholic Church’s struggles can cause a feeling of inevitability that “things can never change for the better.”
COVID, of all things, has shaken that mindset. He sees a potential turning point.
“So, all of this suffering will have some grace, some good for the larger community, and I’m excited to do that.”
It’s not just about technology and doing business differently. At one point, I attempt some Journalism 101 misdirection to lure Caggiano back to his high school years at Regis on East 84th Street. He counters with Jesuit pedagogy and suddenly I’m back in Catholic school as he says things such as “We’ve reduced truth to fact. Truth is much richer than fact.”
The pandemic, he reasons, inspired the kind of soulful reactions that can lead the flock back to church.
“Because everybody had to address the basic questions of life, right?”
“Who am I?”
“Why am I here?”
“Where am I going?”
Caggiano laughs. Then he offers what can only be a prayer that events in painful chapters of the last year will inspire a revival of dignified discourse.
“Can we dare to hope we can have dialogue again?” Caggiano posits, whispering “dialogue” as though the word and concept might otherwise become further splintered.
I try again to lure him to the past, asking what his beloved mother would have made him for dinner on a childhood birthday in Brooklyn, New York.
As he grew older, he favored (and still does) Italian Wedding Soup. As a boy, it would have been ravioli, manicotti or lasagna, because they all contain ricotta cheese. He pronounces “manicotti” and “ricotta” precisely as an Italian kid raised on Van Sicklen Street in the 1960s should.
Then we look to the future. I invite him to share an Easter message with readers.
“It’s just one of encouragement,” Caggiano replies. “For people to persevere. We see signs of hope, but we should not be foolish.”
Suffering, doubt, renewal. The third cannot be realized without enduring the first two.
John Breunig is editorial page editor of the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time. jbreunig@scni.com; twitter.com/johnbreunig
