At the Service of the Law
by James R. Koelsch
MOSAIC, Fall 2008

  
Placing yourself at the service of the law is only natural when you come from a family that has three generations on the Detroit police force. Like both of his brothers, a niece and a nephew, Msgr. Ricardo Bass of the Sacred Heart Class of '69 has followed in the footsteps of his father—in a way. Instead of upholding the civil law, he is serving canon law, the law of the Church.

Besides performing ministerial work in several parishes, Monsignor Bass has been a judge on the Detroit archdiocesan tribunal and even served as the judicial vicar, or chief judge, for a while. He also taught canon law at St. John Provincial Seminary in Plymouth for a few years before it closed in 1988, as well as serving as an adjunct professor at other local colleges, including Sacred Heart.

Right now, Monsignor is pastor of Prince of Peace Parish in West Bloomfield, Michigan, and has been Cardinal Adam Maida's delegate since 2005 for cases of misconduct involving the clergy. He also advises the cardinal on finances and other matters as one of the archdiocese's seven consultors. His brother priests, moreover, elected him in 2003 to represent them on the Presbyteral Council, another advisory group mandated by canon law.

Although Monsignor Bass might be continuing in the family tradition, serving the law never really occurred to him
until he was already seven years into his ministry.

"When I was an associate pastor at St. Frances Cabrini [in Allen Park], I received a call from Cardinal Dearden asking me to come and see him," recalls Bass. "It was in January [of 1981], which isn't a time that you think about going to school." To his surprise, the cardinal asked him to study canon law at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where he would complete his licentiate in 1983.

Bass considers himself an unlikely servant. The youngest of four children, he wasn't baptized until he was sixteen. "I was a 'pagan baby,'" he explains tongue-in-cheek, referring to the envelopes into which children in the Catholic schools used to put their nickels and dimes to "adopt" non-Christian babies from foreign lands. "My Catholic mother and Baptist father married before a judge and decided that, if any of their children wanted to follow a religious practice, they could do so when they became adults."

Once the young man had made his choice, the Holy Spirit began nudging him toward the priesthood. Bass was ordained
nine years later in 1974, after earning a bachelor's degree at Sacred Heart and completing his graduate work at St. John and the University of Detroit. The most important lesson during this time was one that he learned at Sacred Heart.

"Many of the professors urged us to get our daily hour of prayer in," he explains. So, he still strives to sit before the Lord quietly every morning. "It has seen me through many difficulties in my ministry."

Since coming to Prince of Peace in 2004, Monsignor has found himself chairman of the West Bloomfield Ministerial Association and Community Forum. About half of this group's thirty or so members are religious leaders, and the other half are civic leaders, such as the township's supervisor and principals of the schools. "We come together once a month to discuss concerns that are important to our community," says Bass.

Because anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry are among those concerns, three of the religious leaders—an imam,
a rabbi and Monsignor—take what he calls a little road show to the local high schools and even to Wayne State University. "The purpose is to show that an imam, a rabbi and a priest can be friends," he says. "The three groups of the Abrahamic tradition should be able to live and work together."

Monsignor Bass has found another way of continuing his family's tradition of serving the law. Only in this case, it's the law of Love Himself.