Leonard Klein: A Remembrance
[The following remembrance will appear in the February issue of Forum Letter.]
I did not know Leonard Klein well. I met him first at the ALPB-sponsored Conference on Christian Sexuality in Kansas City in 2002. I bumped into him a time or two at various events in the subsequent years, and exchanged emails with him sporadically. At the 2002 meeting, he and I, along with Robert Benne and Paull Spring, had been appointed to a group tasked with drafting “A Pastoral Statement of Conviction and Concern” which was then discussed by the attendees and revised in light of the discussion. I do not recall just who contributed what to this statement, but two sentences in particular could be cited to summarize Leonard’s thinking. “Because we love the whole church,” the statement said, “many of us are facing a potential crisis of conscience regarding the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. We earnestly desire to remain actively engaged in the life and mission of our church, but we observe that the ELCA is becoming schismatic and sectarian.” (It is perhaps worth noting that I am the only one of the group of four who remains in the ELCA today.)
The immediate context of this statement was, of course, the ELCA’s lengthy debate over homosexuality. That issue was probably not the most important, and certainly not the last, example of what Leonard viewed as the ELCA’s slide into schism and sectarianism. Over the next years he continued to speak out with passion and eloquence, a prophetic voice which, like most prophetic voices, was pretty much ignored by his colleagues. In 1995, when the ELCA Church Council decreed that the ELCA health plan would pay for abortions under any circumstances (the ELCA’s social statement notwithstanding), Leonard’s editorial in Lutheran Forum was scathing. The council’s action, he wrote, “merits as severe judgment as any of the prophets ever called down on Israel and Judah. . . . Real churches don’t kill babies. The action was schismatic.”
That conviction would finally lead Leonard in 2003 to leave the ELCA behind and enter the Roman Catholic Church, where he was ultimately ordained to the priesthood in 2006. It was the end of a long ecclesiological journey that led him from the Missouri Synod, in which he was first ordained, to the AELC, then the LCA and the ELCA. Through many of those Lutheran years, he played a very important role in the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau. It began in 1976, only four years after his ordination, when he, together with Pr. Larry Bailey, wrote a lengthy series of brief Forum Letter articles (more than 50 in all) entitled “Renewing Lutheran Worship.” Mostly a review of the work of the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship, the essays reflected Leonard’s strong commitment to liturgical renewal.
About the same time, Leonard was closely involved in an effort by several people to resurrect Una Sancta, a journal mostly focused on Lutheran liturgy with roots in the 1930s. Una Sancta had gone through several iterations over the years, but had ceased publication in 1969. This group developed a plan for an occasional “Una Sancta Supplement” to Lutheran Forum. The plan finally was brought to fruition in 1978, when the first supplement was published, with Leonard as its editor.
In addition to editing the Una Sancta supplement (and eventually the more-or-less annual Una Santa issue), Leonard became an editorial advisor for Lutheran Forum itself. In 1992, when Russ Saltzman had to relinquish the editorship of Forum Letter for several months, Leonard became the de facto editor (Paul Hinlicky technically served as “interim editor,” but since he was also editor of Lutheran Forum, much of the work on Forum Letter fell to Leonard). When Hinlicky resigned as Lutheran Forum editor in 1993, Leonard was appointed to succeed him. He served in that capacity for three rather tumultuous years. After leaving the position, he was elected to the ALPB’s board of directors, where he served for several years.
Leonard was often accused of being too “negative” about the church. He protested that he was not, by nature, a negative person. “I laugh a lot,” he confessed. “The parish office revolves around jokes at my expense; few innocent bystanders suffer because of my existence. . . . My daily ministry, administration, proclamation and celebration of the liturgy are a source of great joy, hope and satisfaction.” But he saw in contemporary Lutheranism’s leaders an “inability . . . to find, lift up and treasure the very things that are the source of my joy and have been the source of the joy of Christians from the beginning.” Sometimes in such a situation “the only way to be positive is to be negative.”
When an ELCA seminary professor claimed to be baffled by the “anger, petulance, and superciliousness” of most of the so-called “evangelical catholics,” Leonard replied that the professor simply failed to understand the “pastoral concerns of the movement.” “Whatever else it is,” he wrote, “evangelical catholicism is a liturgical movement, its theological emphases primarily pastoral. Most of us are parish pastors and mostly we are worried about good biblical preaching, the weekly eucharist, and a vital sacramental, liturgical life. The ‘anger, petulance, and superciliousness’ arise from the need to defend the fundamentally Lutheran proposition that the Church is an assembly around Word and Sacrament and from exasperation at pastors who can’t remember what they promised in their ordination vows. . . . The negativism of the ‘evangelical catholic’ gang is a response to a Church life that has lost the center. It is the anathema that is sister to the credo.”
The newly ordained Father Klein, the first married man to be ordained to the priesthood in the Diocese of Wilmington, was initially assigned to serve with the diocesan Family Life Bureau and as a hospital chaplain. In 2011, he was made pastor of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception and St. Patrick Churches in Wilmington, returning him to the pastoral ministry he cherished. He continued to be active in pro-life activities in the diocese.
Even after he left Lutheranism, he continued an interest in the work of the ALPB. I know that he read Forum Letter faithfully, for every so often he would email me with a comment—usually terse, but always appropriate and illuminating—on something he had read there. After we reported on the ELCA’s declaring itself a sanctuary church, for instance, he quipped that it “would do better to declare itself a sanctuary church for the unborn.”
Leonard’s departure from the Lutheran communion, like those of others who have journeyed to Rome or Constantinople, left those of us still here much the poorer. Yet we are much the richer for having had them journey with us for a time, and we rejoice that they found a peace in Christ which they were unable to find in Lutheranism (or at least in its current institutional manifestations). Rest in peace, Fr. Leonard Klein. May God give comfort to his widow, Christa Ressmeyer Klein, and to all who loved him and all whom he served.
Richard O. Johnson is the editor of Forum Letter.
