If into his office from all over the world came government officials and generals and people of many religions, what would he tell them?

Bishop Raymond A. Lucker is slowed but not stopped by the question.

“The most important thing,” he said,”is to worship and praise and acknowledge God.

“If we are God’s children, then we need to recognize Him.

“It follows that, since He made us and we are His children, we are brothers and sisters and we have responsibility for each other.”

BISHOP LUCKER, who will be installed Thursday as the second bishop of the New Ulm Diocese, is not worried about his new job. “I haven’t moved in yet,” he said.

But he does worry about spending billions on the B-1 bomber, for instance, and people overconcerned with professional sports and about the style of life in this country that emphasizes wealth and gain and excess.

“Las Vegas is the symbol of all that is bad in this country,” he said.

This atmosphere is the one in which Vietnam and Watergate were born, he said, and it makes living a Christian life difficult.

Bishop Lucker, who comes to the New Ulm Diocese from his position as pastor of the Assumption parish in St. Paul, is not a stranger to the church people in this area.

His past duties have included organizing programs of religious education for the New Ulm area, and he taught at St. Paul Seminary from 1957 to 1968, acquainting him with several area pastors, he said.

WHAT GREETS him here?

“I have not really reviewed the situation,” he said, “except from a distance.”

Not yet aware of problems the diocese may face, he prefers a positive approach.

“What is my role?” he asks.”My role is to be a spiritual leader in this 15-county area. My role is to help build up the faith, build up the church, to teach, to be a leader in worship.”

Bishop Lucker said that figures that show Catholic Church attendance on the decline nationally are probably accurate, but do not apply to the New Ulm area.

Why the decline?

“It’s very complicated,” Bishop Lucker said.Among young persons,”‘it’s linked to their own concepts of what the church is and what they feel might be lacking.”

Membership in this area has in-creased but has not changed markedly, Bishop Lucker said.

WHAT MUST a spiritual leader be?

“That’s the part that really scares me,” he said,”because I recognize that I am just a human being, I am just another person.”

“How can I be called a spiritual leader? I say, ‘Lord, do You know what You’re doing?”

The country, he said, is in need of spiritual leaders at this time.”For so long we have expected heads of churches to be administrators,”Bishop Lucker said.

That has been due to the growth of the church in this country’s history, he added-pioneer spiritual leaders had to build and be on the committees.

Is that his responsibility as bishop of this diocese? “Exactly not,” he said.

HIS ROLE is rather to promote the “spiritual renewal” which has begun in the Catholic Church and in other church groups, he said.

“I think there is an interest in prayer, an interest in meditation, in fasting, in other spiritual practices,” he said.

If all religious groups approached this spiritual renewal together, he said, the world would feel it. “I think we’d have a greater impact,”Bishop Lucker said.

“If we could be one and we portrayed to the world a unity in approach and there was no rivalry, we would come out much more clearly as the church of Jesus Christ.”

BISHOP LUCKER said Mother Theresa of India was an important spiritual leader of the day, one who is making a difference.

Mother Theresa, he said, has devoted her life to helping poor people. She now has 1,000 women helpers and a group of men paralleling the women’s efforts in poverty areas all over the world.

How does she affect that world?”She has changed herself,”‘ said Bishop Lucker, adding that that was the most important thing.

Beyond that,”the impact of a large group like that is enormous,” he said.

Spiritual leaders are not so hard to find, Bishop Lucker said.”There are a lot of them,” he said.”a lot of them are little people”

IS THE LIFE of a priest a hard one?

Sometimes it is difficult, and lonely ,Bishop Lucker said., but he is satisfied with it overall. It is good always to be dealing with people, he said.His wish of being a parish priest came true finally in 1971, when he became pastor of St. Austin’s Parish in Minneapolis.

“All day long you’re visiting the sick, you’re teaching people, you’re helping people get ready for marriage, you’re working with people who are in trouble, you’re in crisis situations,” he said.

He mentioned a suicide case in his parish.”To be with the family the whole night while that child dies takes a lot out of you,” he said. “But there’s a bond, there’s a relationship.”

New Ulm Daily Journal

Feb. 17, 1976