Msgr. Muench has served in tribunal for 31 years
For Msgr. R. Francis Muench, his 40 years of priesthood have been, among other things, a time of discovering what works and doesn’t work in his life.
A native of Newark, New Jersey, his call to priesthood was to the Benedictines. They served his home parish, his uncle was a Benedictine and they taught at the high school he attended.
“I liked the common prayer and work of the community,” he said.
For six years prior to and following ordination on May 2, 1981, he taught in the Benedictines’ Delbarton School — a boys’ residential middle and high school in Morristown, New Jersey.
“I taught religion to juniors, English to freshmen,” he said, adding with a laugh, “and for my sins, advanced placement music theory to seniors. Perhaps I discovered I was not the best teacher.”
‘Come and see’
Following what Msgr. Muench termed “a falling out” with the headmaster at Delbarton, the Benedictines sent him to Rome in 1982 where he earned a licentiate in Canon Law at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. Returning to Delbarton in 1986, he chaired the religion department for two years, followed by two years as director of the school library.
Even though he wanted to stay with the Benedictines, he began wondering if he was being called to something else. None of the ideas he wanted to try and which he presented to the abbot worked out.
“I began to wonder if community life was where I was meant to be,” Msgr. Muench said. “The community had been nothing but gracious and generous, so the problem was me — in the sense you think that if you take 15 years to figure something out, I’m a slow learner.”
During a retreat at St. Anselm in Washington, the abbot asked him, “Have you ever thought about Richmond?” He hadn’t, but when the priest wrote to the diocese in 1990, “Bishop (Walter F.) Sullivan himself wrote back, ‘Come and see.’ So I did.”
What attracted Msgr. Muench to the Diocese of Richmond was that there was a need for priests, something, he said, that was not so obvious with dioceses in the Northeast at that time.
“It was not a matter of ‘I’ll save you, Nell,’ like something out of Dudley Do-Right, but more, ‘Let’s see what happens. Let’s see if it works,’” he said.
In Richmond, Msgr. Muench was assigned to a parish (St. Augustine) and the Marriage Tribunal.
“I was weekend help, but I had never been assigned to a parish. I taught but had never just been there with people. With Canon Law, I never dealt with parishes,” he said. “I had been ordained nine years, but it (being in the Diocese of Richmond) was all new.”
Healing for the broken
Msgr. Muench has served in the tribunal for 31 years, first as defender of the bond, then as a judge, adjutant judicial vicar and, since 2007, judicial vicar. He was also episcopal vicar for the Eastern Vicariate (2005-2011) and, since 2011, episcopal vicar for the Central Vicariate.
He sees his work in the tribunal as an opportunity to bring healing to people who are broken.
“Outside of confession, it is a place where people can, in the context of a confidential hearing, attempt to look at something that was meant to be a very beautiful point in their lives, but whether they perceived it or not at the beginning, it was something very problematic,” Msgr. Muench said, adding that it might have taken months or years for that problem to have played out.
He likened the rewarding part of tribunal work to Simon of Cyrene in helping people carry the cross, noting that the tribunal provides people with “a chance to find God again after they’ve been disappointed.”
“That may sound arrogant, but it’s just the chance to look at their lives and, despite the fact that a judgment is issued at the end of the process, it’s not judgmental,” Msgr. Muench said. “Hopefully, we send them away with at least a little more peace of mind, not necessarily happy, but maybe a little more peace. That’s our prayer anyway.”
Parish ministry provides balance
During his time in the Diocese of Richmond, Msgr. Muench has served as pastor at St. Rose of Lima, Hampton (1994-1998); St. Pius X, Norfolk (1998-2005); Prince of Peace, Chesapeake (2005-2007); and St. Mary of the Annunciation, Ladysmith (2011-2012). He said parish ministry “provides a real balance.”
“You might imagine if you’re doing (tribunal work) that when people come in, it’s in brokenness and upset all the time,” he said. “In pastoral work you see the full gamut of families — the happy, the sad, every moment of life.”
He drew a similarity between the two aspects of his ministry.
“For me the confessional is much more like the work in tribunal,” Msgr. Muench said. “It’s a place where you hope people will come seeking healing. You hope carrying out the Lord’s ministry of forgiving makes a difference for them.”
Moving toward the ideal
That the sacrament has fallen into disuse is “a real sorrow” for Msgr. Muench.
“The real challenge of being a Catholic is that we always posit ideals and working toward the ideal. From the pulpit, you’re going to talk about the ideals, often tempered with some experience, as to why we need to move or how we might move,” he said. “In the confessional, you can deal with the essential holiness of people moving toward that even though that at a certain point they seem pretty much stuck.”
Msgr. Muench isn’t sure how to bring people back to the sacrament, but he would like them to “come and seek.”
“You hope that the people are not jaded or jaundiced, that they will continue to see the efforts that continue to be made — in spite of our failings and our foolishness,” he said.
Msgr. Muench said Romans 8:35-39, in which St. Paul writes about what can separate people from the love of God, needs to be emphasized.
“That is the message we can bring to people and to keep repeating because there’s always going to be somebody who’s going to do the dichotomous thing: ‘We’re safe, you’re not’ or ‘What does any of it matter because after all, it won’t make any difference,’” he said. “Well, you can look around the Church, and in the Church, and see plenty who speak to those kinds of things. But if you believe in the grace of God and you recognize your own shortcomings then you can say, with St. Paul, ‘But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective’” (1 Cor 15:10).
‘God makes something out of the damage’
Asked about the path of the last 40 years that has included community life as a religious, diocesan priesthood, teaching, advanced studies and service to the diocese and parishes, Msgr. Muench replied with a laugh, “I don’t recommend the via negativa (the negative way) as the way of going through your life — the Old Testament experience of seeing the presence of God but you don’t recognize it until after the fact. It feels like that’s been the story of my life, like the road to Emmaus in the sense that after he stopped talking to you, ‘Oh yeah, that must have been him.’”
He said that those experiences can be helpful to and relatable for people who hear about them.
“It’s nice to have one of the plaster saint priests who has the obvious sanctity and who seems to have it all together, glistening and brightly shining. And then you get somebody who comes along and looks like a dented fire hydrant with all the things hydrants have happen to them and you say, ‘Oh, why did they send us that?’” he said. “Well, maybe Lazarus meant more when he came out of the tomb than when he went in.”
Msgr. Muench said that the older people get, they like to know that somebody has been through the same thing in their life.
“I have not experienced the loss of a child or the failure of a marriage, but I can say I have experienced the failure of one’s perception of a vocation,” he said. “You hope God is able to make something out of the damage one has created.”
‘Blessed’
The Eucharist, prayer and reading of Scripture — “and not just the parts that are in the missal and the Liturgy of the Hours,” he said — fortify Msgr. Muench.
“There’s a lot there that’s instructive, and you go back to them time and time again, knowing that every time you hit them, the same passages hit you differently,” he said.
As for those who have helped him throughout his life, especially during his priesthood, Msgr. Muench, citing family, friends, mentors, colleagues, the people in parishes and the tribunal, said, “I’ve been blessed. I couldn’t have done better if I were chasing around for some kind of misplaced perfection. A lot of people showed me what that could be.”