Next CT archbishop knows his work to bring Catholics back to church won’t be easy. He has big ideas.

Coadjutor Archbishop Christopher Coyne hasn’t been able to get around the Archdiocese of Hartford much since he arrived a month ago from the Diocese of Burlington, Vt.

He’s wearing a boot on his right foot following surgery about 10 weeks ago.

He did plan to get to a Catholic high school football game Friday night, however. “And then I start all over the place next week as well. So my schedule is getting very full,” Coyne said.

While Coyne, 65, is just starting to learn about the archdiocese, he does have strong ideas about his role as the next leader of Roman Catholics in Hartford, Litchfield and New Haven counties.

That will happen when Archbishop Leonard Blair retires at age 75 in April.

“I’d say my main focus is to evangelize and to try and encourage people who have left the church to return, trying to keep people in the building, people who are just halfway out the door, and also maybe some people who have never been a part of our church to come to the church,” Coyne said. “So my main thrust is going to be just to be a missionary.”

Coyne knows that’s harder than it sounds.

The number of Catholics attending Mass is down. Churches have been closed; he said he doesn’t know if more will be.

And the onetime spokesman for the late, disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law said that issue won’t be going away anytime soon, even in the archdiocese, because the hurt doesn’t fade. He expressed regret at how his role caused pain for those who were sexually abused and their families. 

“I don’t think any church or any diocese in the United States or anywhere where this has taken place will be past it until generations to come, because you’ll have the people who are victims who are getting older now and are dying off perhaps, but they have their family who remember their dad was a victim, and so they’re still bearing the wounds of that,” he said. “We can heal, but we’re not going to be past it for a while, for a long time.”

In addition to that shadow hanging over the church, Coyne will face an archdiocese that has shrunk from more than 200 parishes to 117 in the last decade. Meanwhile, evangelical mega-churches are drawing hundreds to their services.

“The Archdiocese of Hartford is about five times larger than Burlington, so it has five times the challenges in many ways,” Coyne said. “There’s a lot of good things that have happened here and continue to happen under the guidance of Archbishop Blair and the staff here and the priests and people, but there’s some real challenges, though, with the downsizing and the consolidations and the mergers.”

Coyne must decide what to do with “huge numbers of buildings and properties and things that are in need of TLC, but also that we probably need to divest ourselves of” while “we try to move from maintenance to mission.”

In Vermont, the diocese had plans “to help us organize our parishes and to really get moving, and then COVID hit,” he said.

“A lot of it would have been encouraging people to invite friends to come to different events, but also to try and set up some things that people would want to be part of,” Coyne said. “The main thing that we’re finding more and more in terms of getting people to become part of the organization is that people belong before they believe, usually.”

Belonging means becoming active in the work of the church, not just talking, he said.

“A lot of young people especially like to participate in acts of social justice, social ministry, care for the poor,” he said. “So you get people involved at that level, and then … as they begin to belong, feel that they are part of a group, and then you can start to talk about faith and belief and why you do what you do and what motivates us in the work that we do.”

Coyne said he has found that older people — baby boomers — are those who are most likely to have stopped coming to church. They go to non-religious groups or non-Christian groups such as Unitarian societies, or nothing at all.

“I’ve had friends and others who stopped and they say, I just don’t want to go to church, because all I hear is politics. All I hear is anti-abortion. I didn’t hear anything fulfilling in the Gospel. The preaching is awful; the music’s terrible. Why should I waste my time?” 

Coyne believes the answer is to be welcoming, to meet people where they are. That’s the secret to the mega-churches’ success, he believes.

“To try and encourage people to join and be part of a beautiful community like we have is difficult, especially because they feel like they have to pass a test before they can become part of the church too,” Coyne said. “I simply say, let’s just start with where a person is now when they walk through the door.”

That includes LGBTQ people, Coyne said.

“When I left the cathedral parish in Burlington to come here, there were a large number of gay and lesbian men and women, families that were there, folks who felt welcomed, encouraged, not welcomed and encouraged just in terms of your partner,” Coyne said. “You’re not perfect, like I’m not perfect, in different parts of your life. But we walk together, we encourage each other, we find our way.”

When it comes to women, Coyne does not believe there will be female priests in his lifetime. But he believes in women in leadership roles.

“I always have tried to encourage women’s leadership within the church and in Burlington, by the time I left, more than half of my senior cabinet was made up of women, very qualified, capable, faith-filled women, and they did a great job,” he said. “And I know there’s already qualified, capable, hardworking women here in the Archdiocese of Hartford.”

Perhaps, he said, his view of women stems from growing up with “three very strong sisters too who were willing to tell me their opinion.”

Coyne said he was a reluctant spokesman for Law, who died in 2017 in Rome after covering up a major sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston. He said he refused the job more than once but finally did it as a personal favor to Law.

“I truthfully tried not to ever hurt families or children,” he said. “I still angered a lot of people because I was bringing a message sometimes that was terrible, hard to hear, terrible to hear. The messenger often gets connected with the message.”

He said he believes the victims and others have valid reasons to criticize him.

“Yeah, they do, in the sense that I was not on the side of the angels in many ways,” Coyne said. “I was on the side of evil … not that the people who were with me and working were evil, but we were dealing with the fallout from evil deeds, awful deeds. And when you’re connected with something like that, you’re going to be painted in a particular way.”

He said he had promised not to lie or to spin or to hurt families.

“But I did hurt families, just because of the message, because they hear the stories,” Coyne said. “And they would just realize how many we were actually talking about, the numbers grew and all those other things. So you just couldn’t help but hurt people by being the bearer of the message.”

But when he left the role, members of the media wrote him appreciative notes, Coyne said.

He will face his share of skepticism in Connecticut. Beth McCabe, co-leader of the state chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said she has “very low expectations.”

“I have, unfortunately, little faith in any of the bishops that they’re going to do the right thing because they haven’t proven thus far that they are willing to do that,” she said. “They certainly can do it. But they choose not to.”

McCabe said Connecticut is behind other states in removing the statute of limitations for reporting sexual abuse, now set at age 52, “which sounds really good, but in fact the average survivor that comes forward is 55,” she said. 

“The biggest thing in terms of Connecticut is they’re unfortunately very influential in some of the politicians that are on the Judiciary Committee,” McCabe said. “Right now, many of the states, like Vermont, have eliminated the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse and there are other states that have done the same.

“We still have not been able to pass a change in the statute of limitations that would allow a window so that people whose abuse happened years ago could come forward and at least have an opportunity for justice with a civil suit. So that’s very discouraging,” she said.

The Rev. James Manship, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Church in Meriden, would say little about Coyne personally but said his hope for the archdiocese is what Pope Francis is inviting the church to:

“A return to our roots, of really being able to talk dialogue, and to find a way forward together that doesn’t stratify us in terms of hierarchy, but rather it unites us as truly the Body of Christ and just turn our way forward listening to each other.”

Manship continued, “So from either listening to folks from the LGBT community, the immigrant community, the people in the labor movement, and the struggles that moms and dads have just maintaining their marriage, fighting for their children. All of these things are just important for us to listen to so that we can understand each other as church.”

Ed Stannard can be reached at estannard@courant.com.