Retired Bishop Brom of San Diego dies at 83

SAN DIEGO — A funeral Mass can be celebrated Could 17 for retired Bishop Robert H. Brom of San Diego, who died Could 10 in San Diego. He was 83.

The Mass for Brom, who headed the diocese from 1990 till 2013, can be celebrated at St. Therese of Carmel Church in Del Mar Heights, California, adopted by burial at Holy Cross Cemetery.

“He was a pure instructor who consistently labored to convey the ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council into the guts of the Diocese of San Diego,” Bishop Robert W. McElroy, present head of the diocese, mentioned in a Could 10 assertion.

“This dedication to the council additionally framed his lifelong service in forming males for the priesthood,” he added.

Robert Henry Brom was born Sept. 18, 1938, in Arcadia, Wisconsin. He earned a bachelor’s diploma at St. Mary’s College in Winona, Minnesota, and a licentiate in sacred theology from Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian College.

He was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Rochester-Winona in 1963.

In 1983, St. John Paul II appointed him bishop of Duluth, Minnesota, and in 1989 named him coadjutor bishop of San Diego to help Bishop Leo T. Maher.

When Maher retired in 1990, Brom instantly succeeded him, heading the diocese from July 10, 1990, till Sept. 18, 2013, when he retired.

“Bishop Brom’s deep love for our parishes and pastoral imaginative and prescient have been complemented by a eager administrative functionality in guiding San Diego by means of years of pleasure and hardship,” mentioned McElroy. “In his retirement years, Bishop Brom intensified the jail ministry that he started as bishop and his service to the Missionaries of Charity.”

St. Teresa of Kolkata, founding father of the Missionaries of Charity, was certainly one of two individuals Brom typically mentioned have been essentially the most inspirational in his life. The opposite particular person was St. John Paul.

Because it was for a lot of bishops, Brom’s most notable problem was the clergy sexual abuse scandal confronting the Catholic Church within the early 2000s.

He led a subcommittee of U.S. bishops whose cost, he mentioned, was to develop a course of to “maintain ourselves and one another accountable” to the phrases of the “Constitution for the Safety of Kids and Younger Folks.”

The constitution was initially established by the U.S. Convention of Catholic Bishops in June 2002. It’s a complete set of procedures for addressing allegations of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy and different church staff.

In 2007, the San Diego Diocese was sued by survivors of intercourse abuse; a majority of those instances occurred earlier than Brom’s time as head of the diocese. The bishop mentioned the scope of the go well with may trigger the diocese to declare chapter, which it did in February of that yr.

Brom additionally was stung by resurfaced claims accusing him of abuse — allegations he mentioned had been proven to be false a decade earlier.

“I contemplate it a grave injustice that my repute and the nice of the church have been harmed by those that presently, and for years, have made me the goal of their slanderous assaults,” Brom mentioned in the course of the chrism Mass he celebrated that March.

“Personally, I’m able to forgive them, however the hurt they’ve executed and are doing can not go unmentioned,” he mentioned.

In September 2007, the dioceses of San Diego and San Bernardino, California — the latter had damaged off from the previous in 1978 — agreed to pay $198.1 million to settle lawsuits with 144 victims of sexual abuse by monks between 1938 and 1993.

The dioceses had initially supplied $95 million to settle the claims. The plaintiffs sought $200 million. On the time, it was one of many largest such settlements in america.

Brom met with many abuse survivors and their households to advertise therapeutic and reconciliation. He additionally helped resolve a number of false allegations.

On different points, Brom issued an announcement in 1990, not lengthy after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, calling for a peaceable decision to the disaster.

He mentioned he supported “worldwide solidarity” to withstand aggression as a result of it supplied hope “for the peaceable liberation of Kuwait.” The assertion was learn throughout an anti-war rally on the campus of the diocesan-run College of San Diego.

In a pastoral letter issued throughout Easter 1992, Brom known as on Catholics to welcome immigrants even when out there assets “appear stretched to the restrict.”

He instructed parishes to actively search out immigrants to convey them into their religion communities, and known as on pastors to emphasise the church’s teachings on the appropriate to immigrate and tasks to the poor.

The pastoral famous that within the diocese there have been an estimated 30,000 immigrant staff, nearly all of whom have been Mexican or Central American and lots of of whom lived among the many rural homeless.

“Many have been homeless for years. They stay the place they will — holes within the floor, makeshift shacks, open fields — in appalling situations of utmost poverty,” he mentioned.

From the start of his ministry in San Diego, Brom believed the diocese’s many ethnic and cultural teams enriched the native church.

He spent his first three months as coadjutor finding out Spanish in order that he would have the ability to minister successfully to the diocese’s substantial Hispanic inhabitants. As bishop, he licensed institution of the diocesan Workplace for Cultural Range.

Brom upgraded the diocesan Ecumenical Fee to the standing of a full diocesan workplace and have become the primary bishop within the nation to nominate a vicar for ecumenical and interreligious affairs.

One other of his priorities as San Diego’s shepherd was making pastoral visits to parishes. He made visits 5 instances to the entire roughly 100 parishes within the two-county, 8,852-square-mile diocese.