The death last Tuesday of Bishop John Cummins, emeritus bishop of the Diocese of Oakland, did not draw the sort of media attention that other prelates of his generation have received in obituaries. That is a shame, because Bishop Cummins had a significant and lasting impact on the Catholic Church in his own diocese and elsewhere through his quiet leadership and ministry, including 26 years at the helm of the Oakland diocese from 1977 until 2003. Bishop Cummins was a reminder to many of what Pope Francis meant when he called for bishops who are “pastors, not princes.”
“For more than a quarter-century as bishop, Cummins championed the cause of the poor,” wrote East Bay Times columnist Martin Snapp in a September article commemorating the 50th anniversary of Bishop Cummins’s ordination to the priesthood. (Note the paper of origin: If you’ve ever lived in the Bay Area, you know how remarkable it is to see a Catholic prelate praised in the secular press.) Bishop Cummins, he wrote, also “reached out to Catholics of all races, ages, nationalities and sexual orientations; advanced the role of women in the church (including appointing a nun, Sister Barbara Flannery, as chancellor of the diocese); and laid down a zero-tolerance sexual abuse policy long before scandals in other parts of the country became public.”
Bishop Cummins, Snapp wrote, “is basically a conservative guy who likes to work within the system but had the humility to recognize that his way might not be the way for everyone.”
Born in Berkeley, Calif., in 1928, John Cummins was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of San Francisco in 1953. In his first decade as a priest, he served as an associate pastor, a campus minister at San Francisco State University and Mills College and a teacher at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland. When the Diocese of Oakland was created in 1962 out of eastern parts of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, he became its first chancellor. In 1971, he was appointed executive director of the California Catholic Conference of Bishops, a post he would hold until 1977; he also served as the conference’s president from 1988-1997.
In 1974, he was named an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Sacramento, and in 1977 was installed as the bishop of the Diocese of Oakland. He served in that post until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 75 in 2003. The next year, he joined the newly-created John S. Cummins Catholic Institute for Thought, Culture and Action at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, Calif.
Bishop Cummins was also a national figure—although one known better to his fellow bishops than to the press—throughout his tenure in Oakland. He was the chair of several committees of what is now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, including committees on liturgy, lay involvement in the church and migration and more. He also chaired the Catholic side of the Roman Catholic-Reformed Presbyterian Dialogue Commission.
From 1981 to 1984, he chaired the board of the National Catholic Educational Association. On the international stage, he was a delegate (don’t fool yourself, those synods didn’t require much of delegates) for the Synod of the Americas in 1997, the Asian Synod in 1998 and the Fourth Congress on Pastoral Care of Migrants in 1998.
He had a deep interest in the church in China, serving as liaison of the U.S. church to the Catholic Church in East and Southeast Asia for 22 years, and visited China many times. In a 1997 article for America (one of many times he wrote for the magazine over the years), he offered a prescient take on the future of Vatican-China relations. “Earlier we tended to take sides in assessing the faithfulness of church groups as they made difficult and sometimes ambiguous choices in the complex religious and political situation of the 1950s and 1960s,” he wrote of the church in China. “One bit of sound advice for us comes from the Hippocratic Oath. ‘First, do no harm.’ We should favor neither the open church group nor the underground group. Indeed, we need to speak out for human rights, but we should avoid strident language and confrontational politics.”
In that same article, he noted the important role of Americans of Asian or Pacific Islander descent in the U.S. church; in the case of China, that included many whose ancestors had arrived on American soil six generations before. New generations of arrivals, he wrote, deserved to find welcome in the United States: “Asian immigrants now number in the millions. They are not just to be welcomed but must be seen for who they are, contributors from their own graces to the vitality and the future of the church in the United States.”
I had the chance to meet Bishop Cummins a number of times while studying at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in Berkeley from 2009 to 2012: He was close with a number of faculty members at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, where he had been the diocesan liaison to the three Catholic theological schools that were then members of the G.T.U. during and after the Second Vatican Council, and he regularly attended important events. Bishop Cummins also served for many years on the board of the Jesuit School of Theology there.
In 2015, Bishop Cummins published a memoir, Vatican II, Berkeley and Beyond: The First Half-Century of the Oakland Diocese, which detailed the diocese’s efforts to implement Vatican II—including important efforts at ecumenism at the Graduate Theological Union that continue today.
“Our diocese has lost a father, grandfather, shepherd and true priest of Jesus Christ,” said Bishop Michael C. Barber, S.J., of Oakland in a statement from the diocese after Bishop Cummins’s death. “May Christ the Good Shepherd welcome Bishop John into the eternal reward prepared for him who served the flock of Oakland so well.” The statement continued:
His commitment to the implementation of the Second Vatican Council, his compassion for the poor and marginalized and his dedication to building bridges with people of other faiths and cultures has enriched not just the local Catholic community, but all who came in contact with him.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Carol,” by Sally Thomas. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
