When the U.S. bishops’ conference meets in Baltimore next month, the bishops will elect a new general secretary to lead the conference’s administrative offices.
While the election will come under decidedly less urgent stakes than it came last time, it does come as the USCCB faces several significant challenges that will require real leadership.
And at the same time, the election comes as perceptions about the role of general secretary might themselves be changing among the U.S. episcopate.
In July 2021, USCCB general secretary Msgr. Jeff Burrill resigned abruptly from his position, after the conference was sent questions on the priest’s use of location-based hookup apps, his apparent visits to an adult “bathhouse” in Las Vegas during the height of the Theodore McCarrick scandal, and other alleged conduct which raised concerns about both his integrity and his ability to lead.
The resignation, and subsequent reporting from The Pillar on the reason for that resignation, threw the conference into some degree of chaos, as officials scrambled to respond to the situation and as it became a national flash point of controversy about both the morality of priests and the ethics of the reporting itself.
Into that chaos, Msgr. Michael Fuller was appointed immediately as the conference’s interim general secretary, and elected to a five-year term of conference leadership thereafter.
While Fuller, a former professor at Mundelein Seminary, had four years of experience working in the conference at that point, he came into the general secretary role without the customary term as an apprentice in the associate general secretary role.
From the beginning, Fuller faced the task of crisis management, while also navigating challenges occasioned more broadly in the life of the Church amid the Francis papacy, taking up the conference’s unexpected role of coordinating synodality across the country, and with the conference involved in the first National Eucharistic Congress in the Church in the United States in decades.
Fuller’s tenure at the conference has received mixed reviews. On the one hand, the priest is generally regarded with some sympathy for the circumstances under which he inherited the job, and his willingness to take it while the conference labored under a microscope. On the other hand, there have been moments of tension between Fuller and the bishops — including a 2024 incident in which an archbishop accused Fuller of being “somewhat duplicitious” on a critical issue. And some staffers say that the priest has a style that can leave the conference staff lacking for clear leadership.
Finding the right balance for a general secretary is not easy. There is constant anxiety at the bishops’ conference about staffers who exceed their mandate — who give the impression that the USCCB is a “staff-driven” bureaucratic organ, instead of a tool of the bishops themselves. On the other hand, the conference is a natural nerve center of the Church in the U.S., and one in which an astute leader, with the ability to forge relationships of trust among the bishops, can help them to accomplish things, both inside and outside of the formal conference structure.
The general secretary can become, in short, as much a leader in the U.S. Church as he works to become — and while Fuller is seen to have kept mostly to internal conference affairs, some general secretaries, like Msgr. Ron Jenkins, became much more often seen as a critical confidante and consultor to a broad swath of bishops, lending his role a gravitas as a center of activity in the Church.
There was a time when the general secretary role, by virtue of the front row seat it gave to the work of bishops, had the reputation of being a bishop-maker — and it was widely perceived that priests who occupied it would soon after be elevated to the episcopacy.
But that is more myth than reality. In the 1970s and into the ‘80s, the conference’s general secretary was an auxiliary bishop. Since then, fewer than half of the men to occupy the role have become bishops. Even exempting Burrill, given the circumstances under which he resigned, there are more non-bishops than bishops to have held the role.
Still, the role has been important in the Church’s life, and for the next five years may be especially important to the bishops’ conference itself: The conference headquarters is increasingly occupied by empty real estate, layoffs have occurred with the collapse of federal refugee resettlement programs, and signs from the conference are that a more significant downsize may soon be coming.
The task of the next general secretary may be to guide the bishops’ conference through a shifted understanding of its own role, and the tools it has with which to undertake it.
So who will be the next general secretary of the USCCB?
All signs point to associate general secretary Fr. Paul Hartmann, a canon lawyer from Milwaukee (and noted Brewers fan), who has the same amount of service time in the executive offices of the conference as does Fuller, and is known to have a considerably more outgoing and decisive personality than the incumbent. For staff, that may be seen as a mixed blessing, reflecting on the one hand a clear line of internal authority, and the other hand, a possible loss of some autonomy among departments doing disparate kinds of work under the USCCB’s mantle.
Hartmann’s elevation to the position is not formally certain: General secretaries must be elected by the body of bishops. Generally, an “opponent” is selected from among the clerical conference staffers — in this case, doctrinal secretary Fr. Ron Kunkel seems the most likely candidate — but it is nearly unimaginable that the associate general secretary would not be seen at least to start on third base relative to his opponent.
Assuming Hartmann is elected, he will take the job without the aura of crisis surrounding him. But he will certainly not lack for things to do.
“The conference headquarters is increasingly occupied by empty real estate, layoffs have occurred with the collapse of federal refugee resettlement programs, and signs from the conference are that a more significant downsize may soon be coming.”
I was told, repeatedly, that the USCCB was not profiting in any way from this money, that it was merely a pass-through.
Huh.