Robert Alan Sirico (born June 23, 1951) is an American Catholic priest and the founder of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is a political, religious, and cultural commentator. He is also the retired pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Grand Rapids.Acton Institute | Our Team: Rev. Robert A. Sirico
Early life and education Sirico was raised in an Italian Catholic family in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, (in both Bensonhurst and East Flatbush) but by his early teenage years, he had left the Church. He received an associate's degree from Los Angeles City College, studied at St. Mary's University College, London, and received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern California. Sirico holds dual Italian and American citizenship. His older brother was actor Tony Sirico.
Writing in the Acton Institute's 2018 Winter edition of its Religion & Liberty quarterly publication, Sirico said growing up in Brooklyn caused him to develop a late appreciation of nature, which only took hold after he moved to the West Coast. His move West happened during what he called "The Great Environmental Awakening of the 1960s and 70s". Sirico's environmental concerns became one of the missions of the Acton Institute: "Our mission at the Acton Institute often attempts to bridge the divide between the extremists of pantheism and those who would seek profit at any cost to the environment. It is our goal to celebrate human flourishing while recognizing that it's not mutually exclusive with God's call for us to be conscientious environmental stewards."
A deeper study of the Christian anthropology led to his return to the Catholic Church in 1977, and later to the writings of St. Augustine. The biography of St. John Henry Newman moved him to consider the priesthood. He received an MDiv from The Catholic University of America in 1987 and was ordained a Paulist priest in 1989. He was assigned to the Catholic Information Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and soon thereafter founded the Acton Institute.
Career
1970s
Sirico was ordained a Pentecostal minister and established a healing ministry in Seattle around 1970. He became very popular and gained the support of several charismatic churches in the area. A foundation was established for the financial support of his ministry. During this time, according to Sirico, he believed that homosexuality was condemned by the Bible as a perversion. However, he soon found it "impossible" to heal a person from being gay. He eventually made a public announcement that he was gay himself and intended to form a church for gays. This led to him losing the support of his healing ministry's backers.
In 1972, Sirico founded Seattle's Metropolitan Community Church, which primarily ministered to gays. The church became a member of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). MCC had been founded in 1968 as "the world's first church group with a primary, positive ministry to gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender persons."
In April 1973, Sirico and the MCC picketed the Seattle Police Department, claiming there was a "vendetta" by the Seattle Police Department against homosexuals. In October 1973, Sirico was arrested in Seattle for "walking in the roadway" after crossing the street to come to the aid of a gay man he saw was being arrested. In jail, Sirico was reportedly singing "We Shall Overcome" until he was bailed out by a parishioner. The citation was later struck down at trial and Sirico was let off with a warning by the judge.
In July 1973, Sirico went to lead the newly founded Metropolitan Church of Cincinnati.
Sirico was a proponent of gay marriage and performed same-sex marriages as a Protestant minister. In 1975, Sirico performed the first gay marriage in the history of Colorado at the First Unitarian Church in Denver.
Sirico left Seattle for Los Angeles, where he became the director of the Los Angeles Gay Community Center. In 1976, police conducted a raid at one of the center's events, a "male slave auction." Sirico stated the event was merely a fundraiser for the center and that the police raided it in order to "discredit the image of gay people in this community for legislative gains." Charges against the arrested were later dropped.
In 2010, Sirico addressed his activities in a written response to questions posed to him by a National Catholic Reporter writer. "I believe that my activities in the 1970s, though representing a very different political and theological stance to the ones I hold today, nonetheless help me to understand the complex issues that go into the debate 'gay marriage,'" he wrote. "These insights have also been helpful in my pastoral work with persons who have same-sex attractions and have given me a greater sensitivity into the struggle to live a chaste life."
In the early part of the decade, Sirico held left-leaning political and economic views, even becoming involved with Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden and their Campaign for Economic Democracy. However, after reading Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, he became a libertarian. In his book, Defending the Free Market, Sirico wrote about his journey from leftist politics to free-market economics: "I suppose the fact that I spent time on the left of the political spectrum isn't the surprising thing. I mean, I'm a New Yorker; I'm a child of the '60s; I went to seminary in the early 1980s, when a baptized form of Marxism was next to godliness. When you take all of that into account, my sojourn on the left has about it almost the inevitability of Marxist dialectic. What most people find surprising isn't that I was once a card-carrying lefty but that, despite my background, I somehow ended up as a passionate defender of the free economy, of liberty and limited government, of a traditional understanding of culture and morality, of all of those things that America's Founders held dear and that our country is now in danger of losing."Sirico, Rev. Robert, Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc. 2012.
1980s After his move to Los Angeles, Sirico attended Los Angeles City College, earning an A.A. in Humanities and Speech Communications in 1978. He then went on to study English and Speech Communications at the University of Southern California and completed his B.A. in 1981. He spent a year studying literature at St. Mary's University in Twickenham, London before returning to California in 1980.
Sirico earned his Masters of Divinity from The Catholic University of America in 1987. During this period, Sirico initiated a friendship with Michael Novak after reading Novak's 1982 book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Through Novak's frequent dinner parties, Sirico met and engaged in conversations with a variety of the era's thought leaders. He "witnessed Clare Boothe Luce contending with Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett on the meaning of virtue; heard Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatism, and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian and Victorian scholar, recount their own intellectual journeys from socialism; and became acquainted with Charles Krauthammer, Bob and Mary Ellen Bork and Charles Murray." One year after Novak's death, Sirico wrote of the theologian's impact on the priest's life. Sirico recalled that both he and Novak moved from a form of democratic socialism to staunch free-market advocacy. The younger Sirico also related how he introduced the idea of writing a book on Liberation Theology to Novak, which became his second major publication: Will It Liberate? Questions About Liberation Theology. Sirico concludes by asserting Novak was a valuable mentor.
Sirico said the evenings at the Novak household contributed significantly to his eventual worldview. "These gatherings were a great augmentation to my classes," he wrote in a remembrance of Novak in 2017. "Those wide-ranging debates on economics and politics, art and literature and just about everything in between, modeled an open and informed discussion prompted by intellectual curiosity and civility, sadly lacking in the present public discourse. The participants did not always agree with one another, but they certainly enjoyed each other's company. Those evenings were like a graduate seminar featuring some of the finest minds in the country at the time and in many ways formed a kind of proto-Acton Institute and served as a good model for its eventual founding."
After completing his novitiate with the Paulist Fathers' house of formation, St. Paul's College in Washington, D.C., Sirico was ordained a priest of the Paulist Order in 1989.
1990s In 1990, in response to what he saw as an insufficient understanding of economics by religious leaders and the religious isolation of business leaders, Sirico founded the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids. With the motto "connecting good intentions with sound economics," the institute provides a vision of free market economics within a Judeo-Christian moral framework. In Sirico's words:
Shortly after the institute's founding Pope John Paul II published his encyclical Centesimus annus. Some, such as Greg Burke, have claimed that John Paul II gave support to Sirico's economic and moral vision by taking what Sirico calls a "preferential option for liberty," and asserting that economic freedom is essential for a moral society, and makes aid for the poor more effective.
As noted in a 2017 essay in The Wall Street Journal: "When the Acton Institute was founded in 1990, America was in a heyday of harmonious thinking about capitalism and Christian values. Catholic intellectuals such as Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, and George Weigel gained renown for defending economic freedom. Novak described the ideal Christian economic creed as "ordered liberty": a system that acknowledges the risks of consumerism and competition and mitigates them with a moral culture rather than state regulation."
2000s In 2012, Sirico published Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy. Reviewing the book in The Washington Times, Claire Cousino wrote: "Despite its title, Defending the Free Market is anything but a Randian manifesto. Father Sirico argues that a stable, limited government plays an essential role in allowing human enterprise to flourish by aiding in the enforcement of just laws and the protection of its citizens' basic rights, including the right to private property." She continued: "One of the book's highlights is its discussion of the role of free enterprise in alleviating global poverty. Drawing on a series of interviews with leaders and entrepreneurs in developing nations on the economic challenges they face — from unpredictable or unjust legal systems to the way in which Western aid often undermines local businesses and sustains corrupt governments — he argues that Western nations need to reject neocolonial assumptions in favor of solutions that "call on the capacities of the poor.'"
In a review of Defending the Free Market written for The Libertarian Christian Institute, Laurence Vance noted: "Sirico courageously defends 'sweatshops' for "boosting the incomes of many poor people and putting their families on the first rung of the ladder of economic progress.' He does point out, though, that 'the force that has created many of the most brutal sweatshops isn't economic freedom but a mongrel cross of capitalism and government meddling.'"