Father Gerald Murray is an ice hockey-playing New York priest, canon lawyer and conservative Catholic public commentator. He is probably the closest modern America has to Ronald Knox. Only, of course, Murray is not a Monsignor. That’s because he is not afraid to disagree publicly with the Church’s liberal hierarchy. Like Knox, who helped convert Evelyn Waugh, Father Gerry (as he is known) is now both a bestselling author and broadcaster.
We met at his Rectory cottage at the Church of the Holy Family in New York – a Midtown church popular with diplomats due to its proximity to the UN – after the publication of his book Calming the Storm: Navigating the Crises Facing the Catholic Church and Society. The rectory houses a number of priests and has a long mahogany dining table on the first floor.
Fr Gerry has been unflinching on whether President Biden should receive Communion. His position is unambiguously clear. He would not give him the Eucharist.
Murray’s book is a personal account of his priesthood journey (co-written by Diane Montagna) as well as a spiritual handbook for our times. The book has been endorsed by such heavyweights as Cardinal Burke and Cardinal Sarah.
Few priests have Fr Gerry’s charisma as well as moral clarity on the leading issues facing the Church and society today. Alas, there are many. Murray deals head-on with subjects such as the “indissolubility of marriage” – he resigned from his first canon lawyer’s job after refusing to rubber-stamp the pile of annulments in the New York Diocesan marriage tribunal – homosexuality and gender ideology; the importance of being allowed to celebrate Traditional Latin Mass; the sexual abuse scandals involving Catholic clergy; the responsibility of bishops to uphold – “and not contradict” – the doctrine of the Catholic Faith and the “duty of all Catholics to remain faithful to the teachings handed down from the apostles”.
While others, such as Douglas Murray in War on the West, have diagnosed how Western values and Christianity are under siege in the secular world, Father Gerry’s book is as much spiritual cure as prevention. He sees the only solution to the moral decay of the modern world (including lack of Vatican leadership) being our “confidence in God’s never-failing providence”. Only by “renewing our minds and hearts in the truths that Christ and His Church teaches us brings true peace of soul”.
Amid the turbulence of “doctrinal confusion and worldliness in the Church”, we must trust in “Christ alone to calm the storm and turn to him in confidence and faith,” Fr Gerry argues. I ask him whether he thinks standing up for Catholic truth as a “public Catholic intellectual” is part of his vocation.
“I do think it’s part of my vocation because the good Lord prepared me for this role through my parents and my [Jesuit] schooling, and through my interests,” he says. “When I was in college, for instance, I worked in the radio station in the news department for a year, put together news programmes. So I do enjoy current events.”
He grew up in Brooklyn with a Jesuit-educated lawyer father and a Catholic mother who attended Fordham Law School. Fr Gerry is 98 per cent Irish-American – his family left Ireland around the 1840s – with a military bearing, piercing eyes, square jaw and an athletic figure (he is now 63). Both parents were devout and his father went to Mass before arriving at his Wall Street office each day.
“That opened my eyes to see that religion is not simply a matter of obligation and goes beyond a sense of fulfilling a duty. It involves putting love into doing more – more prayer and receiving Communion more frequently,” he says.
His father introduced him to such intellectually formative writers as GK Chesterton and John Henry Newman. He attended a private Jesuit boys’ academy in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and then Dartmouth College, before entering St Joseph’s Seminary (Dunwoodie) in 1980. He was ordained at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City on 1 December, 1984.
Fr Gerry was a history major in college, and his father was “an intelligent, thinking Catholic” (he carried a battered missal into work) at a time when the Jesuits were “much more conservative” and crusaded against communism in the 20th century. “So my background was a great preparation for talking about this new woke culture, which is a new kind of Cultural Marxism. It is trying to cower people through shaming them. I object to all that and am well prepared for it.”
Murray makes it clear where he stands on such subjects as gender ideology and education in schools, which is a particular concern at the moment. He seems untroubled that his opinions are often not in line with progressive Church encyclicals. Has he ever confessed that he may have disrespected the Holy Father by expressing differing views?
“Well,” he says with a steely glint in his eyes. “To criticise statements or actions of the pope is different from criticising the pope himself in the sense of imputing to him reasons why he did it.” He takes a sip of water before turning my question upside down. “But to criticise the papal decision that the Traditional Latin Mass needs to be suppressed, that doesn’t lack respect. In fact, I think that shows respect to the man that you would engage his arguments and try and help him [understand] why you think he has made a mistake.”
Murray adds that when you are looking at “leadership in the Church”, you need to make a distinction between the priest himself and his office. “We are not the incarnation of the office. The office is separate. The man is charged to enter the office and fulfil its responsibilities properly. So I think you respect someone when you tell the truth to them in a way that’s truthful to them and not accusatory or deprecatory.”
This seems to be the opposite approach of Pope Francis, who recently referred elliptically to the EWTN Catholic TV network on which Murray appears – broadcasting to the world’s largest religious audience – as doing “the devil’s work”. What did he think when he heard that comment?
“I smiled,” said Murray. “You know, it’s because the pope has spoken about ‘rigidity’ and used vivid language to describe people he’s not sympathetic to within the Church. I think that’s regrettable on his part. I think it’s not his role to do that. If the Holy Father was interested in discussing it with me, I’d be very happy to sit down with him in Spanish.”
Do you think the Holy Father watches you on EWTN’s The Papal Posse? “I doubt that he’s watched us because his English isn’t great, but I think his advisers watch it and they tell him why America is so opposed to him in many ways.”
He has only met Pope Francis once, in 2014 at the canonisation of John Paul II when Murray was based in Rome. He has met Pope Emeritus Benedict a number of times.
His 11 years as a Navy chaplain has influenced the tone of his commentary. Did he learn to be fearless about what he says from being a military chaplain, or was it in-built?
“In the military, the commanding officer needs to evaluate the performance of the men and women under him. So that kind of accountability needs to exist in the Church. And when it doesn’t exist, that’s when you get the Cardinal McCarrick [the disgraced former Archbishop of Washington]situations.”
I have met Murray four or five times. A highlight was the jubilee party – along with a slideshow of family photos and a pilgrimage he led to the Holy Land – at Holy Family to celebrate a landmark anniversary of his Ordination. He dresses with the same immaculate care Father Martin D’Arcy was known for and his silver-grey hair is cut like an army colonel. He moves in any social group – from the South Bronx (where he first served as a parish priest) to the Waspy River Club in Midtown where he is a member. His Catholic family is tight: his sister Mary Jane (another sister, Margot, tragically died in 1993) is married to the senior partner of a Rhode Island private equity firm who is a member of the Papal Foundation.
Murray loathes “sloppiness”, whether it is in doctrine or church dress. “I am always worried when a priest doesn’t know how to celebrate Mass according to the rubrics because then I see the entrance into the Mass of his personality. The Mass is supposed to represent the personality of Christ. That’s one reason we wear vestments. Casualness in liturgy is anathema but it has become the norm in most parishes.”
We move onto the subject of the Traditional Mass. “Archbishop Roche’s responses were surprising because canonically it was very ‘irregular’ as it did not identify the sort of document it was. Is it a general decree? An instruction? I concluded as a canon lawyer that it was an instruction. Traditionis Custodes is a disappointing document. Hopefully there will be some drawback from that.”
Does he think Roche – a liberal reformer, formerly Bishop of Leeds – is driving the old rite “cancellation”, or is it another example of the pope flexing his authoritarian instincts? “I think the pope is not sympathetic to the old Mass itself. He blames it on nostalgia or rigidity, an inability to change. I think this is unfair because I have a familiarity with a lot of people who go to the old Mass. And the vast majority are normal people without psychological hang-ups.”
I change the subject to his seminarian class at St Joseph’s. It saddens Murray that of the 20 in his class, four have died and another five have been laicised. “This is not good.”
Did he regard himself as a “spiritual warrior”? “Yes. In the sense that I ‘fight the good fight, the good fight of faith’ [1 Tim 6:12], as St Paul said. We know that there’s opposition out there, and then there are people making statements, which, if they don’t go unrefuted, the average Catholic thinks, ‘Well, I guess the Church has changed its teaching.’ That’s something which needs to be refuted.”
Murray may not be a bishop, but the Catholic Church‘s traditional flank is lucky to have him as one of its commanding officers.
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