Leroy Matthiesen

Leroy Matthiesen (June 11, 1921 - March 22, 2010) was a Catholic bishop in the United States. He served as the sixth bishop of the Diocese of Amarillo in the state of Texas from 1980 to 1997.

Biography

Leroy Theodore Matthiesen was born June 11, 1921, in Olfen, Texas, and died in Amarillo, Texas on March 22, 2010. He was ordained as a priest for the Diocese of Amarillo on March 10, 1946. After receiving a Master’s degree in journalism in 1948, he was appointed editor of the diocesan newspaper The West Texas Catholic, which featured his column “Wise and Otherwise” until 1998. In 1954 he became the founding pastor of St. Laurence Parish in Amarillo. In 1961 he received another Master’s degree, this time in secondary school administration,and in 1962 was appointed rector of St. Lucian’s Preparatory Seminary in Amarillo.

He was awarded a Doctorate of Letters in Journalism in 1961, and in 1968 he was named Principal of Alamo Catholic High School. In addition, for nine years he was pastor of St. Francis Parish near Amarillo. Consecrated Bishop of the Amarillo Diocese in 1980, he served until his retirement in 1997.

As bishop, he took several controversial stands for a consistent pro-life ethic, most notably a call to conscience to the workers of Pantex—the final assembly plant for all nuclear weapons in the U.S., as well as a call for a stay of execution for a man convicted of killing a nun in an Amarillo convent.

In his retirement he published three books: Wise and Otherwise: The Life and Times of a Cottonpicking Texas Bishop (in 2004); The Golden Years: The History of St. Laurence Cathedral in Amarillo (2005); and Lieber Bernard und Elise: The Lives and Times of a German Texas Family (2009).

Bishop Matthiesen received many honors in his lifetime. Among them was the Isaac Hecker Award for Social Justice in 1984 and the Ketteler Award for Social Justice in 2002. In 2009, he was presented with the Teacher of Peace Award from Pax Christi USA, which promotes nonviolence, disarmament and human rights.

In his speech to Pax Christi members, accepting the peace award, Bishop Matthiesen spoke of his conversion to deep peace. After a personal challenge by Sister Regina Foppe in 1981, “There came," he said, "a barrage of wake-up calls,the first as I was praying Psalm 33. When I read the stanza, ‘A vain hope for safety is the horse; despite its power it cannot save,’ something, someone—was it the Spirit? --tricked me into praying, ‘A vain hope for safety is the nuclear bomb; despite its power it cannot save.’ I shook that off, but then came an onslaught of voices and people. By year’s end they had me fully involved in the debate about the morality of the production, assembly, deployment of nuclear weapons and the ability and intent we had and still have of destroying the society of aggressor nations.”

He then urged the other U.S. Catholic Bishops “to do what we promised to do in our 1983 pastoral letter, 'The Challenge of Peace:God’s Promise and Our Response', namely, that once the Cold War was over and the circumstances no longer existed that led us to give strictly conditioned moral approval of the possession of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to aggression, we would withdraw our approval. In effect, we would not only…consign the just war theory to the dust bin of history, but along with it our conditioned blessing on the possession of nuclear weapons.”

Bishop Matthiesen asked everyone to pledge themselves “to abolish not only nuclear weapons, but war itself, and with it torture, the death penalty, homophobia, racism, sexism, retributive justice, the chasm between the greedy and homeless and hungry poor, and to reduce resort to abortion.”

Consistent with the ecumenical vision of the Second Vatican Council, Bishop Matthiesen worked collaboratively with other denominations and religions, as well as secular organizations devoted to peace and social justice. He was a strong supporter of the Peace Farm, an organization formed in witness to nuclear bomb assembly at neighboring Pantex.

At the time of his death, Bishop Leroy T. Matthiesen was an internationally known man of conscience.

Notes