"Make the Mass Latin Again" - the Pope Francis backlash comes home

Kaya Oakes
Religion Dispatches
January 4, 2017

On December 3, 2016, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone confirmed sixteen Catholics, both young and mature adults, at Mary Star of the Sea Church in San Francisco.

There would be nothing notable about an Archbishop performing a confirmation ceremony except for this: according to the Traditional Latin Mass Society of San Francisco, it was the first confirmation in San Francisco performed in Latin—the “Extraordinary Form” of the Catholic Mass—since the reforms of Vatican II in the 1960s.

The San Francisco diocesan newsletter ran only a small blurb about the event, stating that the people being confirmed had been undergoing instruction in Catholicism from Rev. Bill Young at Saint Monica church, which is one of two parishes in San Francisco that regularly offer a Latin Mass. The confirmation class made a special request of the Archbishop in 2014 that they would be confirmed in the Extraordinary rite.

Cordileone has long had an interest in reviving the Latin Mass. In 2014, just a year after Pope Francis was elected, Cordileone told Latin Mass Magazine that when he chose to celebrate Mass in Latin, he was promoting the vision of the recently resigned Pope Benedict: “to make this form of the Mass more easily available” and “to promote it” as a “useful tool of evangelization.” When asked if Latin Mass would continue to appeal to small groups of people “at odd hours in out of the way locations,” Cordileone said that younger Catholics who might be drawn to Latin Mass “did not go through liturgy wars” after Vatican II and “are not jaded by that.”

When Cordileone was installed as Archbishop of San Francisco in 2012, the principle co-consecrator was Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, who has mentored Cordileone for many years and is also an enthusiast for the pre Vatican II form of worship. And just a few weeks before Cordileone performed the Latin Mass confirmation, Burke was among four cardinals who announced to the media that they had filed a “dubia”—a request for formal clarification—with Pope Francis regarding Amoris Laetitia, the pope’s recent exhortation on families.

Particularly, the four cardinals were concerned about actions perceived to be “intrinsically evil,” including communion for the divorced and remarried. When they failed to get a response from the pope, they alerted the media. The Catholic Herald noted it is highly unusual for cardinals to “go public like this.”

But “going public” is long what Cardinal Burke has tended to do. Known for his love of silk, brocade, lace, and other forms of Catholic clerical fashion, Burke, who was created cardinal by Pope Benedict in 2010, rose to prominence as one of the American church’s “culture warriors,” stating that the “feminized” church has a “man crisis,” suggesting families should not allow their children to have contact with “evil” gay family members, stating that Catholic politicians John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi should be denied communion, and serving on the advisory board to the Human Dignity Institute, which invited Steve Bannon to a conference at the Vatican in 2014.

More recently, Burke has remained in the public eye for his repeated criticisms of Pope Francis’ attempts at church reform. Francis has responded in kind by demoting Burke from the highest Vatican court in 2014 and demoting him again from the Congregation for Divine Worship in 2016. Burke is currently the prefect of the Knights of Malta, which is under investigation for dismissing an official. Burke was at the meeting where the official was asked to resign and claimed the pope was behind the request for resignation, which turns out to be a lie.

Meanwhile, in October of last year, Pope Francis elevated three Americans to cardinals, including Chicago’s Archbishop Blaise Cupich and Indiana’s Joseph Tobin. In both cases, the new cardinals represent Francis’ vision for the church, not Burke’s or Cordileone’s. Both have made immigrant rights a top priority; Tobin battled Mike Pence on the issue, and Cupich asked the USCCB to make immigration a key priority (America magazine’s Mike O’Loughlin notes that “[Cupich’s] request was denied”). Cupich is also a vocal supporter of the activist priest Fr. Michael Pfleger, who has fought back against gun violence in Chicago. Tobin, who worked at the Vatican during the investigation of American women religious and criticized the investigation, is also an open supporter of women’s ordination to the diaconate.

Cordileone, meanwhile, who was considered to be a rising star in the church under Pope Benedict, has mostly gone quiet since the controversy he created in 2015. At that time, he tried to re-classify Catholic school teachers as ministers who would have to abide by church teaching on marriage and same sex relationships, even if those teachers were not Catholic. Cordileone also failed to reverse Fr Joseph Illo’s ban on altar girls at Star of the Sea parish in the same year. This followed his earlier role in getting Proposition 8 passed and his joking statement in 2015 that “more genders will be invented” as time goes on. Those actions resulted in a full page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle signed by 100 Catholics, asking Pope Francis to remove Archbishop Cordileone.

Instead of removing Cordileone, the pope elevated San Francisco’s auxiliary bishop Robert McElroy to bishop of San Diego, Cordileone’s former diocese. McElroy, like Cardinals Cupich and Tobin, is a “social justice” bishop who said in a talk last year that being judgmental is a “cardinal sin for religion,” and he has frequently put poverty, not abortion or same sex relationships, at the forefront of the issues he thinks Catholics should be most concerned about.

Turmoil in the San Francisco seminary, however, reveals how smaller-town power players like Cordileone can have an impact even when they’re unlikely to receive a red hat. St. Patrick’s seminary has been run by the religious order of the Sulpicians since 1898. Like most dioceses, San Francisco has seen a precipitous drop in the number of seminarians in formation, and there are currently only 93 students enrolled. The Sulpicians were informed in October of last year “that we are no longer invited to provide Sulpician administrative leadership to St Patrick’s,” and the rector, Fr. James McKearney, was forced to resign, in a decision that “just came out of the blue for reasons that are still not clear.”

Cordileone appointed new seminary staff from among the higher ups in the dioceses of San Francisco and San Jose, including Jesuit Fr. John Piderit as the seminary’s vice president for administration. Piderit is the former president of Loyola University in Chicago, and in 2000, he stepped down from that position after budget crises at Loyola brought the university nearly to the breaking point and calls for his removal were heard from faculty, staff and students. As professor Paul Jay put it at the time, “people will be very relieved to have the nightmare over.” Piderit’s biography at the San Francisco archdiocese’s website, however, mentions only that he “induced significant cost-cutting at Loyola.”

Cordileone also announced in 2014 that the seminary would be the home to the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music, where lay people could be formed for ministering in the church, with a special emphasis on the Extraordinary Rite and Gregorian chant. However, the institute’s website two years later still says “full site coming soon,” with a video featuring stock music rather than chant, and its Facebook page has not been updated since 2014.

Articles about the turmoil at the seminary repeatedly mention that Cordileone intends for a greater focus on Latin in priestly formation. But only two parishes in San Francisco continue to offer Latin Mass, leaving an open question: if the archbishop intends to train more priests in the Extraordinary Rite, where will they serve, and whom will they serve?

When it comes to continued calls for more availability of Latin Mass from Burke, Cordileone and other prelates, Pope Francis is paying attention. In July of last year, after Cardinal Robert Sarah called for priests to return to consecrations “ad orientum,” facing away from the people, Francis told Antonio Spadaro S.J. that Pope Benedict’s call for recognizing a return to old forms of worship was “right and magnanimous.” However, Francis, who called any attempt to return the church norm to Latin mass “an error,” was more pointed in his criticism:

I always try to understand what is behind persons who are too young to have experienced the preconciliar liturgy but who nevertheless want it. At times, I find myself in front of persons who are very rigid, an attitude of rigidity. And I ask myself: How come such rigidity? This rigidity always hides something: insecurity, or at times something else…. Rigidity is defensive. True love is not rigid.

Even former Catholic-turned-Orthodox conservative writer Rod Dreher admitted last year that Americans may have reached “peak Latin Mass”; attendance rose for a bit when it was offered in more parishes, then appeared to flatline. Dreher says the risk is similar to that of American Orthodox churches, and that Latin Mass has become a “boutique niche.”

For right now, however, Latin Mass has become one more chess piece in the war for Catholic cultural identity in America. On the one side, Pope Francis is making his moves, elevating bishops like Cupich and Tobin, keeping an eye on the “rigid” and “defensive” Catholics calling for a return to old ways of worshipping. On the other side, Cardinal Burke and the others are using tactics like the dubia to try and force the Pope to bend to their will, while many US bishops stubbornly refuse to recognize the fact that they increasingly lead a church of immigrants who could care less about brocade or lace when their very existence in this country is being threatened by the president-elect and his cabinet.

The white, elderly, conservative leaders of the American church are a vocal minority, as are those who insist that Latin mass will somehow make a miraculous comeback leading to the salvation of the rapidly shrinking American Catholic church. The seminarians who learn to perform it will stand in front of parishes that are increasingly made up of speakers of Spanish, Tagalog, and multiple Asian and African languages.

Yes, at one point Latin was a universal language in the church. But that point is long gone. If “Make America Great Again” was based on a return to a glorious but largely mythological past, “Make the Mass Latin Again” is likewise a callback to a mythological past of Catholicism. There’s beauty in mythology, to be sure. But there is also grave danger in believing mythologies can save broken institutions. They are merely bandages covering bleeding wounds, and Jesus, who knew Latin only as the language of the empire that killed him, would probably agree.

Coming to Newark archdiocese: a different kind of Cardinal

Sharon Otterman
New York Times
December 22, 2016


For about a year, the guys at the gym just called him Joe. He lifted weights in the early mornings wearing a skull-printed do-rag. He worked out on the elliptical, wiping it down when he was done.

Then one day Shaun Yeary, a salesman at a landscape supply company, asked him in the locker room what he did for a living. “I used to be a priest,” Joe recalled telling him. “And now,” he said, his voice growing quieter so as not to scare anyone in earshot, “I’m the archbishop of Indianapolis.”

v “I was like, for real?” Mr. Yeary recalled. “This guy is benching two and a quarter!” — gymspeak for 225 pounds.

Joe, also known as Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, recently became one of the 120 men in the world who will choose the next pope. But he wants to be judged by his actions, not his lofty position in the Roman Catholic Church.

Though he has led the Archdiocese of Indianapolis since 2012, a status that usually comes with perks like a driver, he drives himself around in a Chevy Tahoe and helps with the dishes after lunch meetings. He introduces himself simply as Padre José to the children at a local Catholic school. He showers and shaves at the Community Healthplex gym like any other member, and calls his workout buddies his Band of Brothers.

In short, he is just the kind of leader Pope Francis is elevating to realign the church in the United States with his priorities.

As the pope has made clear over the past three years, fancy lifestyles, formality and regal titles like Prince of the Church are out of style for cardinals. So is an emphasis on the divisive issues of abortion and same-sex marriage, even though the church’s underlying position on those issues has not changed.

Instead, in the pope’s view, the church should emphasize humility and service to the poor. It should be multicultural, welcoming different styles of worship. It should reach out to other faiths and stand up for immigrants, refugees and nuns.

And that, church experts and members of his flock say, is a close description of the priorities of Cardinal Tobin, who will be heading east just after Christmas to lead the approximately 1.5 million Catholics in the Archdiocese of Newark. He is replacing Archbishop John J. Myers, 75, who preferred to be addressed by the formal title Your Grace, and who achieved notoriety when the church spent some $500,000 to outfit the house he will retire to with an indoor exercise pool and an elevator.

Cardinal Tobin’s appointment in October as one of the nation’s 18 cardinals came as a surprise to many, including the man himself. But perhaps it should not have. For what his unassuming bearing does not reveal is that he is no stranger to the corridors of power in the church. He is a friend of Pope Francis. And under Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, he had helped lead the Vatican office that oversees the roughly one million men and women in religious orders around the world.

That position did not end so well. It was an open secret that Cardinal Tobin was sent to Indiana as a kind of exile most likely because he questioned an inquiry by his office into supposed doctrinal lapses among the roughly 50,000 nuns in the United States. As he got to know the faithful in the chancery of Indianapolis, he would joke with them about it.

“I was kicked out and I’m grateful for it,” the chancellor of the archdiocese, Annette Lentz, recalled his saying about how he turned up on her doorstep. And she would tell him, “Their loss is our gain.”

How Cardinal Tobin, 64, an amiable 6-foot-3 Irish-American who likes Bob Seger, plays piano and speaks five languages, went from being the oldest of 13 children living in Detroit to the pinnacle of the global church is a story that bears telling.

He grew up in a working-class neighborhood where the big houses were perfect for the large families of Irish, Polish and other Eastern European backgrounds that filled them. The local parish, Holy Redeemer, was run by an order of priests called the Redemptorists, and was unusually large, with 14 Masses each Sunday for up to 20,000 worshipers, he recalled in a Dec. 5 interview.

His mother was a public-school teacher who quit her job to raise her brood; nine of her cousins and three of her aunts were nuns. Growing up in a deeply Catholic environment, Cardinal Tobin had two role models: the parish priests and his father, a cost analyst at General Motors who attended 6 a.m. Mass daily.

Joe Tobin was a rough-and-tumble child, who once crashed through the back-porch window when he was being chased. But he also learned the deeper lessons taught by the nuns at the parish school.

“Joe came home in second grade and said to me, ‘Mom, I need a pair of socks,’” his mother, Marie Tobin, 93, recalled before Cardinal Tobin’s emotional farewell Mass in Indianapolis on Dec. 3. “And I looked at his feet and saw his socks were fine. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘there’s a boy in my class who has rags around his feet and a safety pin.’”

In 1977, when the cardinal was in seminary in Esopus, N.Y., his father died of a heart attack. By that time, the family had moved across the border to Canada, and his father had been commuting to Michigan.

“I idolized my dad,” Cardinal Tobin said. “He was everything I think a man should be. He was strong, he played in the Orange Bowl as a freshman in Boston College. He lost his leg in World War II, so he never played football again. He had a quiet, unpretentious faith. He was chivalrous with women.

“And I remember when he died,” he added, “and I was waiting at the seminary for someone to drive me to La Guardia, and one of my teachers came and said, ‘If you can be a man like your father, when they call you Father you will be all right.’ And I suppose I am still trying to do that.”

He remains close with his siblings. And in the Redemptorists, an order that requires a vow of poverty and emphasizes missionary outreach, he found a second family.

He dreamed of being sent to far-flung locales once he was ordained in 1978. Instead, because he spoke Spanish, he was sent right back to Holy Redeemer, which had a growing Hispanic population.

There, he learned about serving the poor. An older priest modeled what was to become a signature of Cardinal Tobin’s ministry: an intense focus on each person.

“When he is there and you are talking to him, it’s as if you have known him all your life,” said Bernice Guynn, 89, a parishioner at St. Rita in Indianapolis.

From Detroit, he was moved during the AIDS epidemic to Chicago, where he ministered at the bedsides of the dying. The church’s stance against homosexuality was not a barrier to him. “It’s important to be there for people,” he said.

By 1991, the higher-ups of his order had taken notice and he was moved to Rome. For 12 years, he led the Redemptorist order, finally traveling the world to missions in more than 70 nations.

In that capacity, he made an impression on Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the Vatican official responsible for enforcing Catholic doctrine. In 2010, five years after Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict, he offered Father Tobin the title of archbishop and the position of secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life in the Vatican.

Cardinal Tobin recalled that he was painting his mother’s porch in Ontario when he got the call from the Vatican secretary of state. “I turned white and started stuttering,” he said. He did not want the job, he said, but how does one refuse the pope?

The office he had been tapped to administer was investigating American nuns for supposedly adopting a “secular mentality” and straying from Catholic orthodoxy. In other words, the nuns were accused of being too liberal, and Cardinal Tobin was to oversee the inquiry. But he had an “extremely positive” view of the nuns, he told The National Catholic Reporter at the time, and he wanted to explain their good works.

“My first job, I thought, was to ask, ‘What were people trying to accomplish with this?’” he said this month. But the problem, he came to believe, was structural: the investigation of 55,000 religious women by a tiny staff for the alleged errors of a few.

“It made as much sense as an ophthalmologist trying to do cataract surgery standing in center field in Yankee Stadium and pointing his laser gun up at the bleachers,” he said.

Two years into his five-year term, his priest secretary surprised him with the news. “We are so sorry you are going,” Cardinal Tobin recalled him saying. “And I said, ‘Really, where am I going?’ And he said, ‘Indianapolis.’” The official news did not come for four months. “It was like death by 1,000 cuts,” he said.

When he arrived in Indiana in December 2012, most American Catholics had never heard of him. But to the nuns he was something of a hero.

“We thought that he was a tremendous individual,” said Mother Anne Brackmann, the prioress of the Carmelite Monastery in Terre Haute, Ind. “And he was welcomed very, very warmly.”

Someone else took note of his dismissal: Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who would become Pope Francis.

The two men met in 2005 during a synod of bishops in Rome, and they bonded over a shared view of the church.

There were conservative bishops in their group who wanted, for example, to ban girls from being altar servers. “I have eight sisters, and at the time, I had nieces who were serving at the altar, and I didn’t see the justification for it,” Cardinal Tobin said. “Bergoglio was on the same page. There are more important things to talk about.”

They had also laughed together: Cardinal Tobin recalled telling Cardinal Bergoglio that he had been his mother’s choice for pope that year, because she had read how he picked up after himself and cooked his own food. Still, Cardinal Tobin was surprised to get a note from Cardinal Bergoglio in 2010 wishing him luck in his Vatican position.

“He said: ‘I remember our time together, I remember our conversations, and I remember your mother’s good taste. I’m praying for you.’”

By the time Cardinal Tobin came to the Vatican in 2013 to receive his pallium — the cowl that would mark his status as the archbishop of Indianapolis — Pope Francis had been elected. He was not sure the new pope would remember him. But Francis again surprised him.

“I’ve been praying intensely for you since I heard what happened,” Cardinal Tobin said the pope had told him.

What happened next was a kind of rehabilitation. Francis appointed him to the oversight committee of the same Vatican office he had been removed from. Then, in October, came the announcement: The pope was naming him a cardinal. He would be the youngest one in the United States.

Cardinal Tobin was shocked. “It’s kind of like you are sleeping in class and all of a sudden the spotlight is on you,” he said.

At a news conference last month in Newark, he put it this way: “Sometimes I think Pope Francis sees a lot more in me than I see in myself.”

Cardinal Tobin said he loved his time in Indianapolis, where he visited parishes in 39 counties, ministered to prisoners on death row and baptized about 1,000 new Catholics each Easter.

He was up by 4 many mornings to pray before arriving at the gym by 5:30. With the help of a trainer, Shane Moat, he learned how to deadlift 425 pounds. “Big breath, explode, keep it close,” Mr. Moat coached him earlier this month. Cardinal Tobin strained and hoisted the weight to his waist. “You the man!” someone shouted.

“No, I’m not,” Cardinal Tobin said after dropping the weight with a bang.

That morning, Mr. Yeary, the salesman, presented him with a goodbye gift: a framed photo of the cardinal with his seven workout buddies, whose ages range from 27 to over 70. “Oh, man, that’s wonderful, thank you,” the cardinal said. Then he reverted to his lighthearted tone: “None of those Sopranos are going to mess with me. This is my crew.”

Cardinal Tobin has had a hard time saying goodbye. He choked up at his farewell Mass and had only one request of the congregation that had packed the cathedral: Pray for him. But his admirers here and elsewhere are hoping that Cardinal Tobin will become a more public voice for Pope Francis and his priorities.

He has already done that once, in a showdown with Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, a Republican who is now the vice president-elect, over welcoming Syrian refugees.

In November 2015, Mr. Pence announced that he would suspend Syrian refugee resettlement programs, citing security fears. Cardinal Tobin felt that was not only illegal, but also immoral. He met with Mr. Pence, discussed his objections and told him he would continue the Catholic Charities resettlement program. A federal court has since overturned the governor’s directive.

In an email, Mr. Pence said, “Cardinal Tobin is a personal friend, and I deeply respect his commitment to his faith and his ministry.”

While Cardinal Tobin did not tell anyone whom to vote for in the presidential election, he said he was disturbed by appeals to fear during the campaign of Donald J. Trump, particularly his views of refugees and immigrants.

Mr. Trump, he said, “was appealing to the dark side of the divisive forces, to the unredeemed part of us.” And while the cardinal believes American democracy will ultimately resist such appeals, “you can’t be too Pollyannish about things.”

In Newark, he said, his first job after his installation on Jan. 6 will be to listen. Encompassing Bergen, Essex, Hudson and Union Counties in northern New Jersey, the archdiocese has pockets of great wealth and poverty, and an array of immigrants so diverse that Mass each Sunday is celebrated in 20 languages. About 30 percent of the parishioners are Hispanic.

It is also a community in need of healing. In July, citing the failure of the archdiocese to effectively remove priests accused of sexual abuse from contact with children, the editorial board of The Star-Ledger of Newark called the departure of Archbishop Myers a “true blessing.”

“During his 15-year tenure as New Jersey’s highest-ranking Catholic, he protected pedophile priests,” the board said. “He urged his flock to vote based on two issues — abortion and gay marriage — at the threat of being denied Holy Communion.”

Jim Goodness, the spokesman for the archdiocese, denied those allegations, saying that Archbishop Myers had permanently removed from ministry some 20 abusive priests and that he had “never threatened to deny Communion to anyone.”

Cardinal Tobin will bring a different message. One of his priorities, he said, would be to ensure that the archdiocese is fully compliant with church and criminal protocols on handling sexual abuse allegations.

At the Vatican in the late 1990s, the cardinal recalled, it was difficult to convince people that the abuse issue was serious. “I think they just believed it was an American problem,” he said, adding, “I don’t want to make it like I was a great crusader over there, but I did take it seriously.” He later led an effort to establish protocols for abuse claims in his order.

Yet the most outspoken American victims group, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said that Cardinal Tobin, like the church as a whole, must do more, such as posting the names of all credibly accused priests online. “Certainly there are worse bishops, but that fact should comfort no one,” David Clohessy, the organization’s national director, said.

Cardinal Tobin assumes his role in an uneasy time. He said that he hoped to lead with joy and transparency, and that he intended to encourage dialogue to bridge divisions. But he would go further if he believed that policies ran counter to the moral values that Jesus taught.

On the threats by President-elect Trump to carry out mass deportations of illegal immigrants, for example, Cardinal Tobin was clear. He recalled how Pope John XXIII, before he became pope, issued false baptismal certificates to help Jews escape the Nazis in World War II.

“We have to resist,” he said. “With public statements, and then, you do what you got to do.”

Bishop calls for 'widespread opposition' in event of massive deportations

Tom Roberts
National Catholic Reporter
November 30, 2016

In the wake of “a deeply destructive political campaign,” U.S. citizens face the dual task of rising above profound political divisions that tear at the national fabric as well as remaining diligent in addressing “the major wounds of American society,” especially the threat of massive deportations.

The assessment was made by San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy during a Nov. 28 address at the 2016 Catholic Immigrant Integration Initiative Conference at the University of San Diego’s Joan B Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.

McElroy prefaced his remarks on the need for Catholics to stand in the way of mass deportation of immigrants with a plea for political responsibility. He appealed to those upset at the election of Donald Trump to not follow the example of Barack Obama’s political opponents “who from his election onward worked toward the failure of his presidency.”

Political responsibility as Catholics and Christians, he said, also means dealing with “the profound sickness in the soul of American political life” that “tears at the fabric of our nation’s unity, undermining the core democratic consensus that is the foundation for our identity as Americans.”

Healing, he said, “will require altering the role of partisanship in our individual, social and national lives. Party choice has ceased to be merely a political category and instead has become a wider form of personal identity” that ultimately finds individuals confined “within partisan media and culture silos, and are encouraged in their anger against those who disagree.”

One of the major wounds in the culture, he said, is the threat to immigrants. In recent months, he said, “the specter of a massive deportation campaign aimed at ripping more than 10 million undocumented immigrants from the lives and families has realistically emerged as potential federal policy. We must label this policy proposal for what it is – an act of injustice which would stain our national honor in the same manner as the progressive dispossessions of the Native American peoples of the United States and the internment of the Japanese.”

For the Catholic community in the United States, “it is unthinkable that we will stand by while more than10 percent of our flock is ripped from our midst and deported. It is equally unthinkable that we as church will witness the destruction of our historic national outreach to refugees at a time when the need to offer safe haven to refugees is growing throughout the world.”

McElroy emphasized the need to maintain protections for those covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. “The DREAMers,” he said, “are everything that Americans seek in those who enter into our society: 85 percent have lived in the United States for more than 10 years; 93 percent have a high school degree, and 40 percent attended college. Eighty-nine percent have a job and pay taxes.” Should the new administration move toward massive deportations, he said, “the Catholic community must move to wide-spread opposition” and “with the same energy, commitment and immediacy that have characterized Catholic opposition on the issues of abortion and religious liberty in recent years.”

The four cardinals and their five doubts

Michael Sean Winters
National Catholic Reporter
November 23, 2016

The case of the four cardinals and their five dubia has been well reported and garnered plenty of commentary. Cardinals Brandmüller, Burke, Caffarra and Meisner decided to publish their letter containing the dubia, openly challenging the pope to clarify parts of Amoris Laetitia that they find to be a source of confusion. The whole episode is painful and put me in mind of an earlier and similarly painful episode in the history of the Catholic church in the United States.

In the post-war years, Jesuit Fr. Leonard Feeney ran the Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, Mass., adjacent to the campuses of Harvard University and Radcliffe College. A charismatic man, Feeney attracted young minds to his brand of extreme Catholicism and, specifically, his interpretation of the doctrine "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus" — "no salvation outside the Church." Feeney managed to get his center accredited to teach courses by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts even though he had no such authority from either his Jesuit superiors or from the Archdiocese of Boston. He began convincing his young devotees to drop out of Harvard and Radcliffe and enroll at his center.

Needless to say, this made for some angry parents, and Fr. Feeney was summoned to a meeting with the archdiocese. Historical footnote: The auxiliary bishop with whom he met was then-Bishop, later-Cardinal John Wright. When Wright became Bishop of Pittsburgh and then Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, his secretary was then-Father, now-Cardinal Donald Wuerl, one of Pope Francis' staunchest defenders and one of the most effective participants in the two synods that led to Amoris Laetitia. Feeney agreed to notify parents before their children withdrew from the more prestigious schools and also to submit his newsletter to Jesuit censors.

The great historian of the church in the U.S., Jesuit Fr. Gerald Fogarty, picks up the story. He writes:

But Feeney's attacks became broader. In dealing with Protestants he was virulent in asserting that only in the Catholic Church could one be saved. His followers at Boston College even charged the president of the institution with heresy. He also alienated many of the students who used to frequent St. Benedict's Center, which now became a closed group of "family," totally convinced that it alone represented the truth of Catholicism. The American Church had its own Port Royal.

Bingo! How many times in these pages have I observed that a key hermeneutic in understanding both Pope Francis and his critics is to grasp that he is an old Jesuit and that old Jesuits contend with Jansenists. That is precisely the dynamic at work with these four cardinals.

Feeney continued to cause scandal. A 1949 decree from the Holy Office about Feeney stated: "Therefore, let them who in grave peril are ranked against the Church seriously bear in mind that after 'Rome has spoken,' they cannot be excused even by reason of good faith. Certainly, their bond of duty of obedience toward the Church is much graver than that of those who as yet are related to the Church 'only by an unconscious desire.'" That is to say, the Protestants Feeney thought damned had a better shot at heaven than he did because of his disobedience! He was eventually suspended from the Society of Jesus and excommunicated in 1953. For insisting on an unduly narrow interpretation of the doctrine that there is no salvation outside the church, Feeney found himself outside the church. Thanks be to God, he finally was reconciled in 1972, although he never formally recanted his interpretation of the doctrine.

Doctrines are made to be wide enough to find application in a variety of complex and different human circumstances. This is the thing that the four cardinals, like Feeney, cannot accept. They believe that their way of reading the prior teachings of the church is the only way, even though the esteemed scholar of the theology of St. John Paul II, Rocco Buttiglione has again explained that Amoris Laetitia is in full continuity with the whole of the teachings of Familiaris Consortio, St. John Paul II's prior apostolic exhortation of the same subject. The four cardinals focus on parts of that latter text, and neglect others. The synod fathers, and Pope Francis, offer a different interpretation, one that I believe is more cognizant of the entire prior teachings, and one that is not the least bit confused about doctrine.

The problem, I think, is that the four cardinals believe Pope Francis is muddying the waters by reclaiming the church's long standing teachings on conscience, on the difference between objective and subjective guilt, on the application of the church's twin teachings on marital indissolubility and God's superabundant mercy to the human details of a situation, that is discernment, and perhaps most especially, that the Eucharist is not a prize for the perfect, the most Jansenistic of the positions put forward by the critics of Amoris Laetitia. They want to look upon the world through the lens of church teaching and see only black and white, but human lives are grey and when seen through the lens of church teaching, that human greyness should invite compassion not judgment from a Christian pastor. Their approach works for an accountant but not for a pastor.

In his Apologia pro vita sua, Blessed John Henry Newman writes of his conversion to Catholicism and, specifically, his ability to acquiesce to Catholic understandings of certain doctrines. And, as ever, Newman writes beautifully:

Nor had I any trouble about receiving those additional articles, which are not found in the Anglican Creed. Some of them I believed already, but not any one of them was a trial to me. I made a profession of them upon my reception with the greatest ease, and I have the same ease in believing them now. I am far of course from denying that every article of the Christian Creed, whether as held by Catholics or by Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties; and it is simple fact, that, for myself, I cannot answer those difficulties. Many persons are very sensitive of the difficulties of Religion; I am as sensitive of them as any one; but I have never been able to see a connexion between apprehending those difficulties, however keenly, and multiplying them to any extent, and on the other hand doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. There of course may be difficulties in the evidence; but I am speaking of difficulties intrinsic to the doctrines themselves, or to their relations with each other. A man may be annoyed that he cannot work out a mathematical problem, of which the answer is or is not given to him, without doubting that it admits of an answer, or that a certain particular answer is the true one. Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.

"Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt." It seems to me the four cardinals have five difficulties, but not five doubts. Perhaps they have more difficulties than that. I fear that in their zeal to defend the doctrine on marital incommensurability, they neglect other equally vital doctrines on conscience, mercy, and the sacraments. I certainly had difficulties with some of the interpretations placed upon the teachings of St. John Paul II. We all have difficulties. But to publicly voice doubts about the magisterial teaching of the church is not something a cardinal should be doing or, if he does, he should have the decency to include his red hat with the submission of his dubia. Cardinal Burke likes to fret about lax Catholics causing scandal, but in his case, as in that of Fr. Feeney, it is sometimes the most extreme Catholics who cause the worst scandal.

Francis refuses to fall into trap set by Cardinal Burke and allies over 'errors' in Amoris Laetitia

Christopher Lamb
The Tablet
November 16, 2016

Pope believes questions posed on divorced and remarrieds are designed to force him into debate on cardinal's terms

One of Pope Francis’ most prominent critics has upped the ante. In an interview with the National Catholic Register United State’s Cardinal Raymond Burke has said the pontiff is “teaching error” by suggesting divorced and remarried Catholics can receive communion and has threatened to make a “formal act of correction.”

He and three other retired cardinals have written to Francis calling on him clear up the confusion which are contained in the Pope’s family synod document, Amoris Laetitia which they claim is causing “grave disorientation and great confusion” among Catholics. And they have put five questions to him - known as Dubia - which demand a “yes or no” answer.

But the Pope has not responded so the group - including Joachim Meisner, retired leader of Cologne, Carlo Caffarra, retired leader of Bologna, and Walter Brandmüller, formerly in charge of the Vatican’s historical sciences committee - have gone public with their concerns.

So why is the Pope staying silent? Francis believes their questions are a trap and has opted not to engage in a debate which seems on the cardinals' terms and designed to make him restate old rules. He has also definitively endorsed the Argentinian bishops’ position which is that communion can be given to remarried Catholics in some cases - and he is leaving it up to individual bishops in general to make the call.

For the conservatives this is the crux of the problem. It is not so much “confusion” about the document but that the Pope has ruled in favour of personal conscience, discernment and power to the local churches. That is scary for them because it means throwing off the comfort blanket of clean, clear unequivocal papal teaching.

But the truth is that when it comes to marriage and divorce a “one size fits all” solution doesn’t work, and Francis knows it. He also knows that most Catholics agree and that Amoris Laetitia reflects the reality of countless numbers of parishes. And he may be sceptical of the claim that the faithful are “confused” from a group of cardinals not currently engaged in front-line pastoral work.

Anyone watching the new Netflix series “The Crown” might have been struck by the similarity between this debate and the Church of England’s refusal to allow Princess Margaret to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, on the grounds he was a divorced man.

The proposed marriage between Margaret and Townsend, the senior bishops tell the young Queen in one scene, cannot happen as it would threaten the sacrament of marriage. Those events took place more than half a century ago and the Church of England has since changed its position on the issue.

And in the Catholics’ similar debate over communion for divorced and remarried Francis is betting that his teaching will be the one that stands the test of time.

In Gomez, US Bishops make clear pro-immigrant statement

John L. Allen Jr
Crux
November 15, 2016

Coming just seven days after the victory of Donald Trump, the choice by the US bishops of a Mexican-born prelate who’s passionate about immigrant rights can’t help but be seen as a powerful statement of priorities by the leadership of the American Catholic church.

Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles might well have been elected to a senior position in the U.S. bishops conference under any circumstances, given that he’s seen as a well-liked and popular figure among his fellow prelates, as well as someone robustly committed to the traditional doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church.

Coming just seven days after the victory of Donald Trump, however, following a campaign in which Trump ran on a get-tough platform on immigration, the choice of a Mexican-born prelate who’s become passionate about immigrant rights can’t help but be seen as a powerful statement of priorities by the leadership of the American Catholic church.

To be fair, the first vote of the day was actually for the presidency of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, but the outcome was largely foreordained since the bishops generally pick the sitting vice president for the top job. In this case, that meant Cardinal Daniel Di Nardo of Galveston-Houston was almost certain to prevail.

The interesting race was therefore for vice president, and in the end, although there were nine nominees, it came down to a choice between Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans or Gomez. After the initial two ballots they faced one another in a run-off, with Gomez eventually garnering the most votes.

Under other circumstances, that might have made the final ballot an interesting test of where the American bishops stand vis-à-vis the Pope Francis experiment in Catholicism, since Aymond is generally seen as a moderate to progressive figure who emphasizes many of the same social justice issues as the pontiff, while over the years Gomez, who’s a member of the Catholic organization Opus Dei, has been seen as a bit more conservative and traditional in outlook.

However, two factors likely changed the calculus this time.

First, it was widely expected that Gomez, as the archbishop of the largest Catholic diocese in the United States and also the first Hispanic bishop in the country up for the distinction, would be named a cardinal the next time an American received a red hat from a pope.

Instead, Francis opted to elevate Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago, Archbishop Joseph Tobin of Indianapolis (who’s subsequently been named to Newark) and Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas, who’s been tapped to head a new Vatican department for family, laity and life.

While few really begrudge those choices, there was nevertheless wide disappointment for Gomez and a natural sense of sympathy for someone other bishops perceived to have been “passed over” or left off the list.

In that context, putting Gomez in line to become president of the conference was really the closest way American bishops had at their disposal to make up for their disappointment that he wasn’t named a cardinal.

Even more fundamental than that, however, was likely the effect of Trump’s upset victory in last Tuesday’s presidential election. Whatever else the American bishops may care about, the defense of immigrants has emerged in recent years as an increasingly critical priority - in part because they see it as a critical human rights priority that’s very much in sync with the agenda of Pope Francis, and in part because those immigrants also tend to be members of the bishops’ own flocks, since they’re disproportionately Catholic.

One key trajectory in American Catholicism today is a “back to the future” dynamic, in which the Church is once again becoming a blue-collar, immigrant community, and therefore the defense of immigrant rights isn’t simply an abstract humanitarian exercise for many bishops, but also a reflection of the people they’re seeing in the pews as they move around their local communities. To be clear, it would be wrong to read the choice of Gomez entirely as an anti-Trump, pro-immigrant statement.

He’s hardly a standard-bearer for the progressive agenda in the American church. On the contrary, he’s a protégé of Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia, having started his career as an auxiliary under Chaput in Denver, and is generally seen as part of the moderate-to-conservative camp among the bishops. He’s solidly pro-life, he believes strongly in the need for better catechesis and grounding in doctrine, and sees a serious threat in creeping secularism and assaults on religious freedom.

That said, there’s a more transcendent subtext at the moment, which is that at a time when American politics would seem to be trending towards walls and closure as the right response to the growing immigrant presence, Gomez incarnates a different option: Someone born in Mexico but who nevertheless has become fully assimilated in the United States, and without whom both the American Church and American society would be clearly impoverished.

For sure, as a leader of the U.S. bishops conference, Gomez will try hard to be a spokesperson for the full range of Catholic social teaching, including its positions on immigrants. However, even without trying, Gomez in his biography and personal story makes the point, and in his case, explicit speech almost seems anti-climactic.

That, in a nutshell, is the message the American bishops delivered on Tuesday, and it’s one sure to reverberate for some time to come.

Pope Francis surprise: Newark, NJ gets a cardinal, Philly doesn't

David O'Reilley
Philadelphia Inquirer
November 14, 2016


When Pope Francis announces 17 new cardinals Saturday in Rome, there will be some American surprises among them.

One will be the presence of Indianapolis Archbishop Joseph W. Tobin, a little-known moderate soon to be the Archdiocese of Newark's first cardinal.

Another will be the absence of Philadelphia's prominent archbishop, Charles J. Chaput.

Although Chaput is widely regarded as one of the American hierarchy's most capable leaders, Francis appears to have bypassed the 72-year-old conservative who hosted him at last year's World Meeting of Families.

Since 1921, popes have presented the five previous archbishops of Philadelphia with the scarlet hat of a cardinal, lending the archdiocese a reputation as a "red seat" or "cardinalatial see."

It's not clear if Francis is "packing" liberal and moderate prelates onto the College of Cardinals that will one day name his successor, said William Madges, professor of theology and religious studies at St. Joseph's University.

"But it seems pretty clear," said Madges, "that Francis is intentionally breaking the tradition that certain dioceses automatically get a red hat."

Francis has also made clear he does not like clerics aspiring to honors, and has virtually discontinued the practice of naming diocesan priests "monsignors."

Archbishop Chaput and his spokesman, Ken Gavin, declined to comment for this story.

"If you love Chaput and want to see him a cardinal, then you'll resent" that Francis appears to have bypassed him, said David Gibson, a former reporter for Vatican Radio and biographer of Pope Benedict XVI.

"But it's nothing personal," said Gibson, who writes for Religion News Service. "Francis wants to elevate like-minded people to the College of Cardinals."

Cardinals serve as advisers to popes, head the Vatican's most important bureaus, and may elect a new pope until they turn 80. After Saturday's consistory — or gathering of cardinals — in St. Peter's Basilica, there will be 120 cardinal-electors. Of these, Francis will have named 36 percent of them.

"It's completely wrong to see the elevation of Tobin as diminishing Archbishop Chaput," said Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America.

"Chaput has done amazing things in Denver and Philadelphia and has a terrific reputation in the church," he said. The pope's choice for Newark "I think reflects something that Pope Francis wants to promote in the pastoral work of Tobin."

Tobin, 64, will be installed as archbishop in Newark's Cathedral of the Sacred Heart on Jan. 6. He succeeds unpopular Archbishop John Myers, who reached retirement age of 75 in February.

Myers controversially used $500,000 of archdiocesan moneys to expand his $750,000 retirement home in Hunterdon County and was sharply criticized for failing to report sexually abusive priests to civil authorities. Gibson, a former resident within the archdiocese, said there was "low morale" among the clergy and laity.

"I think that Pope Francis sees a lot more in me than I see in myself," Tobin, a priest of the missionary Redemptorist order, joked at a news conference Monday.

But some observers say they see much of Francis in Tobin, who this year publicly rebuked Indiana Gov. (now Vice President-elect) Mike Pence's refusal to allow Syrian refugees into the state, saying his archdiocese would continue to resettle them.

And while serving as second-in-command of the Vatican's office for clergy and religious, Tobin in 2012 questioned the need for a controversial Vatican investigation into perceived liberalism among some women's religious orders in the United States.

Pope Benedict sent Tobin to Indianapolis that same year.

Three years later, however, Francis called off the nun inquiry. The two prelates have been friends since 2005, and Tobin once visited him when the future pontiff was still Cardinal Bergoglio of Buenos Aires.

Tobin served 12 years in Rome as the Redemptorists' superior general, and speaks Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish in addition to English.

While popes rarely explain their reasons for assigning bishops or making them cardinals, Madges said it seems the pontiff is trying to broaden the representation of parts of the Catholic world in the College of Cardinals.

He noted that three years into Francis' pontificate, the archbishoprics of Venice and Turin, Italy, are still without their traditional red hats.

And yet Francis has named a cardinal to the remote Polynesian island nation of Tonga and another to Lampedusa, the Mediterranean island where tens of thousands of refugees from Africa and the Middle East have landed in hopes of entering Europe, many at great peril.

The conclave that elected Francis in March 2013 had cardinals from 48 countries. As of Saturday's consistory, it will contain cardinals from 79 countries, including Mauritius and Papua New Guinea, both Pacific island nations.

Five cardinals will be from Europe, three from Latin America, two from Asia, two from Africa, and three from the United States.

The last group will include Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas, who will head a new Vatican office on family and laity, and Archbishop Blase J. Cupich of Chicago. Both are viewed as doctrinally moderate.

Another striking absence in the consistory will be Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, an archdiocese headed by cardinals since 1948. Detroit, St. Louis, and Baltimore — other longtime "red seats" — also have been bypassed in recent years.

Chaput — who has said he was completely unprepared for the clergy sex-abuse issues and massive fiscal deficits he encountered on his arrival to Philadelphia — is sometimes described as a conservative "culture warrior" for his fierce opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

In July, he made headlines when he posted notice that Catholics living in "irregular" sexual relationships — heterosexual cohabitations, same-sex partnerships, and those divorced and remarried outside the Catholic Church — still could not receive Holy Communion or serve as lectors and eucharistic ministers, or on parish councils.

Coming just four months after Francis had issued a major church document, Amoris Laetitia, that appeared to give bishops more latitude in such matters, Chaput's traditionalist position struck some in the archdiocese as unduly rigid.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney even denounced it as "not Christian," but Madges said Chaput evidently views clear articulation of the church's traditional moral teachings to be a "gift to the faithful."

While Chaput "has made remarks that hint at a focus on a smaller and purer church," Schneck noted, he said he believes it has been "Tobin's outreach to the marginalized and outsiders" that has won him a red hat.

Diocese investigates pro life priest for aborted baby video

Associated Press
November 12, 2016

AMARILLO, Texas - The Roman Catholic Diocese of Amarillo says it’s investigating a priest who placed an aborted fetus on his altar and posted a video of it on two social media sites.

The Amarillo Globe-News reports that Amarillo Diocese Bishop Patrick J. Zurek says the Nov. 6 “action and presentation of Father (Frank) Pavone in this video is not consistent with the beliefs of the Catholic Church.”

In the video posted to Facebook, Pavone said Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform would allow abortion to continue and that Donald Trump and the Republican platform want to protect unborn children. A shorter version was posted on Instagram.

In his Tuesday statement, Zurek said the diocese “deeply regrets the offense and outrage caused by the video for the faithful and the community at large.”

“Father Frank Pavone has posted a video on his Facebook page of the body of an aborted fetus, which is against the dignity of human life and is a desecration of the altar. We believe that no one who is pro-life can exploit a human body for any reason, especially the body of a fetus,” Zurek’s statement said.

Pavone responded to the controversy his action created in a Nov. 8 post on his Facebook page, writing, “I want to offer you a sincere apology, brothers and sisters, for any unnecessary offense, any confusion, division that’s been created, because there are those out there who are deliberately stirring up that confusion.

“Some people say, ‘Oh, Father Frank, you’re out of your mind.’ You know what? Maybe that’s the place for normal people to be when we’re living in the middle of a holocaust and many people are ready to elect a woman who cares nothing about these babies, who wants us to pay for their destruction,” he wrote, referring to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Pavone was ordained a priest of the New York Archdiocese in 1988 but was incardinated into the Amarillo Diocese in 2005 by Bishop John W. Yanta, then head of the diocese, who served on the organization’s board of advisers. In 2012, the Vatican Congregation of the Clergy issued a decree allowing Pavone to minister outside the Diocese of Amarillo, but he still must obtain specific permission to do so from Zurek.

Pope Francis gives N.J. its first cardinal - and ups the ante on church reform

David Gibson
Religion News Service
November 7, 2016

Pope Francis had already delivered the Catholic Church’s version of an October surprise when he included Indianapolis Archbishop Joseph Tobin in the batch of new cardinals he announced last month – promising a red hat to the leader of a relatively small Midwestern diocese of 230,000 Catholics that had never before had a cardinal, nor would ever expect one.

Then on Monday (Nov. 7) the pontiff doubled down with a November stunner as the Vatican announced that Francis was moving Tobin to head the Archdiocese of Newark in New Jersey.

In a statement release early Monday after the Vatican announcement was official, Tobin compared these last few weeks to an earthquake, saying the news on Oct. 9 that he would become a cardinal was his “first jolt” and the phone call on Oct. 22 informing him that he would be going to Newark was a “second tremor.”

Never before has a cardinal been moved from one diocese to another, and church observers across the board also expressed shock at the unprecedented transfer, which seemed to signal a new stage in Francis’ effort to revamp a U.S. church that had become increasingly conservative under the pontiff’s two predecessors.

Not only is Newark a much bigger archdiocese than Indianapolis, with some 1.2 million Catholics, but it’s never had a cardinal and, like Indianapolis, never expected to get one.

That’s mainly because a cardinal perched across the Hudson River from Manhattan would have been seen as a rival to the Archbishop of New York, a post currently occupied by Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

And that’s exactly what’s likely to happen now, especially since Tobin is clearly a personal favorite of the pope’s and Dolan has been associated with Francis’ conservative critics.

“(T)he move portends an ecclesiastical scenario heretofore unseen on these shores nor anywhere else in the Catholic world: two cardinals leading their own local churches not just side-by-side, but within the same media market,” wrote Rocco Palmo, whose blog, Whispers in the Loggia, specializes in clerical gossip.

Moreover, Tobin’s promotion – which was first reported Friday by the Star-Ledger of Newark – was also viewed by church observers as something of a snub to Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s five previous archbishops, going back nearly a century, had all been made cardinals.

But Chaput is seen as a culture warrior out of step with Francis’ more pastoral and welcoming vision of the church. That Chaput seems destined to end his career without a red hat, and a possible vote in an eventual conclave to elect a pope that comes with being part of the College of Cardinals, is a bitter pill for many on the Catholic right.

All of this reinforces the obvious fact that Francis clearly cares little for protocol, or bruised egos; the cardinals he named last month come from 11 dioceses that had never had a cardinal – including Indianapolis – and six countries that have never before had a cardinal.

At the same time Francis overlooked dioceses that for centuries had been considered a lock to have a cardinal.

READ: Pope’s cardinal choices bring surprises, especially for US

But the transfer of Tobin, 64, to Newark also underscores the challenges that Francis faces in a country that has produced some of his sharpest critics.

One is that “the pool of ‘Francis bishops’ is still rather small in the U.S, where the footprint left by the appointments of Saint John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI is more significant than in many other countries,” said Massimo Faggioli, a theologian and church historian at Villanova University in Philadelphia.

Indeed, more than three decades of promoting conservatives left a limited supply of more pastoral leaders for Francis – who was elected in 2013 after Benedict retired – to choose from, and reorienting the machinery of episcopal vetting and selection and restocking the supply chain of talent can take a long time.

That’s why, Faggioli said, Francis “likes to move bishops that he knows well to important and strategic posts in the U.S. church.”

Francis showed that when he personally picked Archbishop Blase Cupich – who will also be made a cardinal in Rome this month – to go from the small Diocese of Spokane to the influential Archdiocese of Chicago two years ago, another surprising move.

Similarly, Francis also knows Tobin and knows that under then-Pope Benedict XVI, Tobin was effectively exiled to Indianapolis in 2012 from a senior job in Rome because Tobin disagreed with the Vatican investigation of American nuns.

For Francis, who has made overhauling the papal bureaucracy a priority, poor treatment at the hands of the Roman Curia is a resume builder. Tobin also clashed with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence — now Donald Trump’s running mate — over Pence’s effort to stop the settlement of Syrian refugees.

Another challenge for Francis is that many of those John Paul and Benedict appointments have not always turned out so well.

Newark is a case in point. Archbishop John Myers was sent there in 2001 by John Paul to replace Cardinal Theodore McCarrick – who was moved to Washington, DC where he was made a cardinal – and Myers’ quickly alienated many inside and outside the church with his hardline approach and a seemingly high-handed persona.

That was not only a contrast to McCarrick’s approachable style, but Myers, who is 75, was also widely criticized for mishandling clergy sex abuse cases. In addition, Myers outraged many in the flock when local media detailed pricey renovations he made to a retirement home.

Morale was so low in the archdiocese that in September 2013 Francis named Archbishop Bernard Hebda, also regarded as a pastor in the pope’s mold, as a coadjutor, or assistant, to Myers with the intention of replacing Myers with Hebda.

But after more than two years preparing to take over, Hebda was moved last March to take charge of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis following the departure of Archbishop John Nienstedt, who left under a cloud of various scandals.

The upshot is that not only does Francis want to overhaul the church’s U.S. leadership, but he has a lot of fires to put out in the American hierarchy and, for now at least, only so many fire fighters he can call on.

Church observers say that recent moves by the pope indicate that he has decided to take a more forceful hand in moving to promote bishops who share his approach in an effort to reorient the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops more quickly.

Yet that doesn’t mean all these decisions are necessarily good ideas.

“This move doesn’t really make sense to me,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and analyst for National Catholic Reporter who has written extensively on the political dynamics of the hierarchy.

“Newark is a big archdiocese and Tobin will have to take time to get to know the people and the priests,” Reese said, “and that will take time away from from the work he could be doing in the USCCB and as a cardinal advising the pope.”

On the other hand, getting to Rome from Newark is a lot easier than it is from Indianapolis, and Tobin is likely to be logging a lot more frequent flyer miles if Francis looks to consult him on how to move the American church in a new direction.

Pope Francis names new cardinal Joseph Tobin to Newark

Ines San Martin
Crux
November 7, 2016


The past month has been a whirlwind for Joseph Tobin: on Oct. 9 Pope Francis surprised the world by including him on the list of the 17 new cardinals he’ll create later in the month. And on Monday, the Vatican announced his new destination: Newark, New Jersey.

“One of my favorite descriptions of the experience of faith is ‘a willingness to be surprised by God’,” Tobin said in a statement on Monday.

“By that standard, the last weeks have been exceptionally ‘faith filled’.”

As of Nov. 19, when the pontiff formally elevates Tobin, 64, to the Church’s most exclusive club in a ceremony held in Rome known as a consistory, the US prelate will become Newark’s first cardinal, in the diocese’s 163-year history.

His fluent Spanish will come useful for leading the city’s 1.2 million Catholics, an estimated half of whom are Hispanic.

Tobin, currently in Indianapolis, will replace Archbishop John J. Myers, who presented his resignation this July, after turning 75. By canon law, it’s mandatory for every bishop to submit their resignation when reaching this age, and then it’s up to the pope to accept it and to appoint a replacement, which can take months or years, depending each case.

Self-defined as a “culture warrior,” Myers led the diocese for 15 years.

The contrast may be striking, as Myers was generally seen as something of a throw-back in terms of his concepts of clerical authority and lifestyle, while Tobin is regarded as more in the mode of Pope Francis in terms of his emphasis on simplicity and informality.

In 2013, Francis had appointed Archbishop Bernard Hebda as coadjutor in Newark, which is the reason why he was originally seen as Myers’ probable successor, but earlier in the year he was transferred to St. Paul and Minneapolis amid a sexual abuse scandal in the Twin Cities.

Hebda had arrived in New Jersey while the archdiocese was shaken by a scandal of its own, when it was revealed that a priest who had a lifetime ban on ministering with youth due to sexual abuse allegations, was in fact, attending youth retreats and hearing confessions from minors.

A former superior of the world Redemptorist religious order, Tobin had been named archbishop of Indianapolis in October 2012. This appointment followed a two-year job as the second in command of the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic life, also known as the “Congregation for Religious.”

He was transferred to the Vatican while Rome was conducting two separate investigations of American nuns, probes Tobin publicly questioned.

During this period, he was also responsible for the visit and reform of the male communities in Ireland during the sex abuse crisis in the country, and is currently overseeing the ongoing reforms of the Soladitium Christianae Vitae after scandals involving their founder, Luis Fernando Figari, were made public last year.

The prelate has known Francis since the 2005 Synod of Bishop on the Eucharist, where the two worked closely for almost a month. During the meeting, as is customary, much of the work was done in small working groups divided by language.

Tobin and then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio were assigned to one in Spanish.

The cardinal-elect made news last December when he defied Indiana’s Governor Mike Pence - currently Donald Trump’s vice-president nominee - by allowing a family of Syrian refugees to settle in Indiana, despite a ban from the governor.

Pence had called for the ban citing fears of terrorism and insufficient vetting, but a federal appeals court found it to be discriminatory, upholding a preliminary injunction against enforcement.

Myers had a similar clash with Governor James Christie over Syrian refugees, saying that the archdiocesan policy was to welcome those who arrive from Syria, arguing that people are “being murdered for their faith,” and that it was the Church’s prerogative not to exclude anyone.

Though Francis was expected to include at least one American in the new batch of cardinals, his decision to include Tobin came out of left field, surprising most observers, including the prelate himself, who found out through Twitter at 5:30 AM, little past noon Rome time, when the pope made the announcement.

Bishop Kevin Farrell, recently transferred to the Vatican to head a new mega-office dedicated to the family, laity and life, was a strong bet among long-time Church watchers. Chicago’s Archbishop Blase Cupich, the third new American cardinal, had also been expected.

In a press conference held soon after Francis’ made the surprise announcement during his weekly Sunday Angelus prayer, reading the 17 names from a piece of paper he took out of his pocket, Tobin defined his initial reaction to the news as “shock, mixed with a little embarrassment.”

A native of Detroit, Tobin is the oldest of 13 children. He will be installed in Newark on January 6, 2017.

In historic first, a cardinal expected to be named head of Newark Archdiocese

Mark Mueller
NJ Advance Media
November 4, 2016


In a historic moment for the Archdiocese of Newark, Archbishop John J. Myers on Monday is expected to announce his successor, Cardinal-designate Joseph W. Tobin, currently the archbishop of Indianapolis, NJ Advance Media has learned.

Tobin, a moderate leader who has supported a greater role for women in the church, has also expressed the need for more dialogue over gay parishioners and has sparred with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence over the resettlement of Syrian refugees.

Tobin has served as archbishop of Indianapolis since October 2012. Pope Francis named him a cardinal last month. The designation takes effect. Nov. 18.

The appointment would make him the first cardinal in the 163-year history of the archdiocese, which serves about 1.2 million Roman Catholics in Essex, Union, Hudson and Bergen counties.

He also would be the first member of a religious order to preside in Newark. Tobin was ordained a priest in the Redemporist order in 1978.

On Tuesday, Myers turns 75, the mandatory retirement age for Catholic bishops.

Jim Goodness, a spokesman for the archdiocese, declined to comment on the nature of Myers' press conference Monday.

But three people with knowledge of the diocese's plans said they expect Myers to announce that Tobin will replace him. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the announcement publicly.

Myers, Newark's archbishop since 2001, reached the mandatory retirement age of 75 in July. It was not immediately clear if Tobin would be present for the press conference, scheduled for 10:30 a.m. at the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark.

U.S. cardinals typically serve in the largest and most politically important cities, among them New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Newark, was not elevated to cardinal until his transfer to Washington D.C.

Tobin, a 64-year-old Detroit native, is the oldest of 13 children, according to his biography on the Archdiocese of Indianapolis' website. He served at parishes in Detroit and Chicago before taking on a series of assignments in Rome.

He is believed to be close with Pope Francis, with whom he has a personal relationship and who appointed Tobin to several prestigious assignments at the Vatican.

Tobin appears to also share Francis' belief in simple living, a turn away from the notion that bishops and cardinals are "princes of the church."

In an interview with The Criterion, a publication of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, after he was named a cardinal, Tobin recounted a conversation with his mother.

"It's funny," he said. "My mom can get a little emotional at times. She said, 'I can't believe that a child of mine is a prince of the Church.' I said, 'Mother, you don't believe I'm a prince of the Church. I don't believe I'm a prince of the Church. And Pope Francis doesn't believe I'm a prince of the Church. So let's never use that word again.'"

Tobin made headlines late last year when he defied a ban by Pence, Indiana's governor and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's running mate, on the entry of Syrian refugees in that state.

More than 150 Syrian refugees have since been taken up residence in Indiana with the help of the archdiocese, according to the Indianapolis Star.

Pence ultimately declined to enforce the ban.

Sulpicians withdraw from San Francisco Seminary

Dan Morris-Young
National Catholic Reporter
October 25, 2016


In an Oct. 21 announcement that apparently caught the San Francisco archdiocese and St. Patrick's Seminary and University off-guard, the U.S. province of the Society of the Priests of St. Sulpice informed the school's board of trustees that the order would be withdrawing its members from the school.

"We have recently been informed that we are no longer invited to provide Sulpician administrative leadership to St. Patrick's. As a consequence, we will not be able to serve the seminary according to the Sulpician tradition. After consultation, discussion and prayerful discernment, the Provincial Council has decided to withdraw totally from St. Patrick's as of June 30, 2017," said a statement issued by the Sulpicians' U.S. provincial office in Baltimore.

Known as Sulpicians, the community of priests helped found the seminary 118 years ago and has administered and helped staff it since then.

An Oct. 22 archdiocesan press release thanked the Sulpicians "for their very long service to the archdiocese and to those other dioceses served by the seminary," but also added:

"Before being informed of this decision, the Board of Trustees had intended to begin discussions that might lead to new Seminary administrative models with the Society. We regret that we did not have the opportunity to explore the possibility of forming a new collaborative model with the Sulpicians."

The seminary trustees "also announced the formation of a search committee to assist Archbishop [Salvatore] Cordileone in filling the position of rector of the seminary and university," concluded the archdiocesan release. Sulpician Fr. Gladstone H. "Bud" Stevens has served as the school's president and rector since June 1, 2014.

Mike Brown, director of archdiocesan communications, told NCR that the replacement search for Stevens was to be timed for the end of the school year when the Sulpicians withdraw, not for the near future.

Stevens referred all media inquiries to the provincial's office. Sulpician Provincial Fr. John Kemper was said to be traveling and had not returned requests for comment before this report's posting.

Brown also provided NCR with a copy of an Oct. 23 memo from Cordileone to priests of the archdiocese.

In it, the archbishop said a conference call had taken place prior to the trustees' gathering "with members of the Executive Committee of the Board and Fr. Kemper, and a member of the Provincial Council, Fr. Dan Moore, in order to apprise them of some concerns that had come to the attention of some of the Board members and to inform them that at the upcoming Board meeting some ideas would be proposed and discussed as to how best to address these challenges, one of which was the possibility of seeking a new collaborative relationship with the Sulpicians."

"The day before the Board meeting, however," continued the memo, "the Provincial Council for the United States met to deliberate on these issues, and reached their decision to withdraw entirely from the seminary."

Asked what sort of administrative collaboration might have been considered or suggested, Brown emailed, "That was all to have been further discussed at the Board meeting."

Tension between the Sulpicians and the archdiocese over administration of St. Patrick's is not new. In September 2013, Cordileone, then-San Jose Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Daly and then archdiocesan vicar for administration Fr. James Tarantino met with then president-rector Sulpician Fr. James McKearney, leaving McKearney no option but to resign, according to the Sulpician.

[ To understand this development in context, read the earlier story on the forced resignation of Fr. James McKearney several years ago]

US bishops’ vote likely to be seen as referendum on Pope Francis

John L. Allen, Jr.
Crux
October 21, 2016

As it turns out, the Trump v. Clinton showdown isn’t the only election of interest to American Catholics this fall.

The U.S. bishops are also going to be voting for their own new leaders in mid-November, and in some ways their choices are almost certain to be read as a referendum on how the American hierarchy wants to position itself vis-à-vis the new winds blowing in the Church under Pope Francis.

By tradition, a slate of ten candidates is nominated for the presidency and the vice-presidency of the conference, and they select both positions from among those nominees. The new president will replace Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, who’s served the usual three-year term.

Also by tradition, though not an inviolable one, the current vice-president is considered the front-runner for the presidency. Right now that’s Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston.

On Friday, the USCCB released the slate of nominees for the top two jobs, with voting set for the bishops’ fall meeting in Baltimore Nov. 14-16.

The nominees are:

Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond of New Orleans
Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap., of Philadelphia
Archbishop Paul S. Coakley of Oklahoma City
Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston
Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville
Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles
Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore
Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron of Detroit
Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski of Miami
Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe
If one were to open a betting line right now, I suspect a DiNardo/Gomez ticket would attract a lot of money, but of course that’s why we hold elections rather than letting bookmakers and pundits settle things - because anything can happen.

Gomez not only is seen as doctrinally solid but basically non-ideological (he’s a CPA by training, and an imminently practical figure), he also puts a face and voice on American Catholicism’s burgeoning Hispanic wing and has been among the leaders of the American bishops on immigration reform.

One immediately striking point is that none of Pope Francis’s recent picks for new American cardinals are on the list.

In the case of Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas, that’s explicable by the fact that he’s moving to Rome to take up a new Vatican position as head of the pope’s department for Family, Laity and Life, meaning he’ll no longer be a residential American bishop.

With Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Indianapolis, however, they’re remaining in the States and theoretically would have been eligible to hold office in the conference.

These nominations were largely compiled before Pope Francis announced his new cardinals Oct. 9, but to the extent that was a factor, it might have hurt Cupich and Tobin rather than helped them. Though it’s not automatic - Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, for instance, was once elected president of the conference, and DiNardo may well be this time - in general some American bishops believe cardinals already have enough prominence, and prefer to elect someone else.

Scanning the list, Aymond, Wenski and Wester all generally would be perceived as fairly “Francis-friendly” prelates, while names such as Chaput, Lori and Vigneron would typically be seen as more conservative counter-points. (How fair or complete those perceptions are is, naturally, an entirely different conversation.) Should one of those latter figures prevail, some media outlets and church-watchers may be tempted to style the result as a protest vote by the American bishops against the broad direction of Catholicism under Francis. It’s worth pointing out, however, that’s not the only way to read things. Historically speaking, there’s also a grand tradition in Catholicism of local bishops trying to embrace what they see as the strengths of a given pope, while also doing what they can to remedy perceived weaknesses and to plug holes in his agenda.

For instance, bishops in earlier centuries who saw a particular pope as a terrific governor but a weak evangelist might try to step up their own missionary efforts, in order to pull some of the weight themselves - not because they didn’t like the pope’s governance, but because they were trying to help him out where they thought he needed it.

When Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York defeated Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson for president of the U.S. conference in 2010, it was seen as victory for conservatives, and certainly that was part of the picture. On the other hand, I spoke to several bishops at the time who had a different outlook. Because Benedict XVI was seen as a great theologian but not necessarily a terrific evangelist or pitchman, they thought it might help to have an extrovert at the top of the U.S. conference.

Even if perceived “conservatives” win, therefore, it doesn’t necessarily have to be seen as a Brexit-style pullout from the Francis experiment, but perhaps as a vote for balance and, to use a churchy term, “complementarity.” The thinking might be that since Francis is an excellent pastor and a determined reformer, we could use some other folks in leadership disposed to ensure that the doctrinal baby isn’t tossed out with the bathwater.

Rules stipulate that the president is chosen by a simple majority vote. Following that, the vice-president is elected from the remaining nine candidates. In either case, if a candidate does not receive more than half of the votes cast on the first ballot, a second vote is taken. If a third round of voting is necessary, that ballot is a run-off between the two bishops who received the most votes on the second ballot.

During the meeting, the bishops will also elect new chairs of the following committees:

Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance
Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs
Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis
Committee on International Justice and Peace
Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People
For all kinds of reasons, the results will be closely scrutinized for an indication of what America’s Catholic leadership is thinking now, and what their priorities are likely to be going forward.

Comfort level with dialogue a US gift to universal church

John L. Allen, Jr.
Crux
October 19, 2016

All three new American cardinals set to be elevated by Pope Francis on Nov. 19 bring strong backgrounds in ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue, but in reality there's little remarkable about that, since the pope could have thrown darts at a dartboard in the US and come up with much the same thing.

This week, Crux’s Vatican correspondent Inés San Martín, who’s an Argentinian, was in the United States, among other things for a sort of crash course in the realities of American Catholicism.

One quick impression she picked up along the way is the fact that all three new American cardinals come with a fairly strong background in ecumenical and interreligious dialogue.

Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago, for instance, is the first Catholic co-chair of the new National Catholic-Muslim Dialogue, sponsored by the Committee on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Archbishop Joseph Tobin of Indianapolis, meanwhile, is the Catholic co-chair of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Consultation and an adviser to the bishops’ dialogue committee, while Bishop Kevin Farrell, simply by dint of serving in Dallas, has strong relations with the Protestant community, and has also taken a personal interest in Catholic/Jewish ties.

For Farrell, actually, ecumenical dialogue is more or less a family affair, since his brother Bishop Brian Farrell has served since 2002 as the number two official in the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Isn’t it striking, San Martín asked me at one point, that all three have that aspect of their biographies in common?

My answer? “Not really.”

In truth, Pope Francis could have chosen his new American cardinals by throwing darts at a dartboard with the names of every U.S. bishop on it, and the odds are that he would have come up with three men who also have a fairly deep experience of both ecumenical and inter-faith relations.

In effect, that’s one of the gifts Catholics in the United States can, and do, offer to the universal Church - a comfort level with religious diversity and with dialogue that one can’t always take for granted in other parts of the world, especially in places with one historically dominant religious tradition where other traditions are essentially invisible.

Historically speaking, there has never been an established church in America. Granted, at the beginning Protestants were the overwhelming majority and set the cultural tone, but that too equipped Catholics for dialogue, since avoiding contact with Protestants basically would have meant never leaving the house. Quite quickly, America began attracting new arrivals from various parts of the world who brought their religious traditions with them, and found in the United States a generally safe haven in which to practice and foster them.

Also because we’ve never had a state church, American religions have had to learn to hustle from the beginning. Public funding and state sponsorship was never going to ensure the survival of a church, or mosque, or synagogue, or temple, which meant they had to be self-reliant and, at least to some extent, missionary-oriented.

As a result, religion in America has always been something of a noisy and competitive affair, so even if one were inclined to ignore the “other,” it’s awfully difficult to do so in reality.

Perhaps at the level of formal, officially sanctioned dialogues, there wasn’t a lot happening in the United States, or, for that matter, anywhere else, prior to the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s. On the ground, however, in terms of the stuff of daily life, the demographic and political character of the United States compelled Catholics to be people of dialogue from the start.

As of 2016, there are 198 different Catholic jurisdictions in America - 177 Latin rite archdioceses and dioceses, 19 eparchies, archeparchies and exarchates of the Eastern churches, 1 military archdiocese and 1 personal Ordinariate for former Anglican communities. Frankly, it’s difficult to imagine the leader of any one of those outfits who lacks some personal experience of engaging both Protestants and other faiths, either in structured formal dialogues or in the informal “dialogue of life.”

Not all bishops are equally adept at such exchanges or invest the same level of personal energy in them, but it would be a rare American prelate who didn’t recognize taking part in such dialogue, at least in some form, as a basic part of the job description.

That’s not necessarily the case with churchmen from other parts of the world.

Pope Francis, for instance, was actually something of an exception among his fellow Latin American prelates in terms of his own résumé on ecumenical and interfaith dialogue, in part because Argentina is an outlier among Latin American states with large pockets of both Jews and Muslims, and also because he built strong ties with Protestant and Orthodox believers.

Many other Latin American prelates have been ambivalent about such dialogue in the past, in part because their primary experience of the Christian “other” has been of aggressively proselytizing Evangelical and Pentecostal groups, who often target Catholics for their missionary campaigns.

At one point during the 1990s, the Latin American bishops estimated they were losing more than 8,000 people a day to the Evangelicals and Pentecostals, and overall more people converted from Catholicism to Protestantism in Latin American during the late 20th century than did so in Europe in the century following the Protestant Reformation.

That’s not exactly a prescription, in other words, for good neighborly relations.

In the United States, however, a commitment to dialogue with other Christians and other faiths really isn’t a marker of being progressive or avant-garde, and it’s really not that exceptional in terms of the experience our bishops, clergy and laity bring to whatever else it is they end up doing.

So, yes, by elevating Cupich, Tobin and Farrell to the College of Cardinals, Pope Francis in effect will be injecting three more personalities into that mix personally committed to the idea of dialogue and outreach with other Christian churches and other faiths.

Presumably, however, he had other reasons that were more decisive in terms of why these three - because if that’s all he was looking for, virtually any churchman in the United States would have done the trick.

3 for 3: the new cardinals

Michael Sean Winters
National Catholic Reporter
October 9, 2016

It is several miles past remarkable that if Pope Francis had asked a roomful of social justice Catholics whom he should make a cardinal, +Blase Cupich, +Kevin Farrell, and +Joe Tobin would have been the names likely to emerge. Actually, I would not have recommended all three for fear of being tagged as piggy.

Let’s not beat around the bush. The pope has sent his clearest signal yet about the direction he intends to take the Church in the United States, and within that signal is an unmistakable rebuke to those whom I have long called the “culture warriors.” The pope did not send a red hat to Philadelphia. He did not send one to Baltimore. He did not even send one to Los Angeles, and I do not think of Archbishop Jose Gomez as a culture warrior so much as he is someone who is a tad sympathetic to the culture warrior crowd. In a normal consistory, people would say, “Well, there wasn’t room for another American.” There was room when a hat is sent to Indianapolis. The pope not only chose these three, he did not choose others. This is not the list that would have been assembled by, say, George Weigel.

Another myth has been exploded. When a bishop is named a cardinal, they usually have a press conference and they say that this conferral of the red hat has nothing to do with them personally, that it is an honor to the local church. Of course, the fact that certain local churches traditionally discover that their archbishops end up as cardinals largely destroys any such distinction between the person and the place. They said that about this being an honor for the city because it allowed them to look humble. But it was always a lie. The cardinalate is a personal honor. He will be bestowing it on these men, not on their cities. Indianapolis is not on the periphery the way, say, Phoenix is or Gallup is. (There is a case to be made that the southside of Chicago is the periphery.) No, the pope wanted the selection of his successor, and the guidance of the universal Church, to be entrusted to these three men.

And such men. These three bishops have long been recognized as among the most intellectually formidable bishops in the country. They are all three of them “smell of the sheep” kinds of pastors as well. Archbishop Cupich got his start as a bishop in Rapid City, South Dakota, a land of intense rural poverty, especially on the Indian reservations. Archbishop Tobin is one of the few Latin rite bishops I have seen go to the Catholic Worker dinner held during the annual USCCB meetings in November. And Bishop Farrell took over the Centro Hispanico here in Washington, a social service center run by the Church, when friar Sean O’Malley was named a bishop. They are all in the mid-60s, which means they all received their seminary formation after Vatican II. All three are churchmen, which is the opposite of a culture warrior.

The naming of Archbishop Tobin also shows the degree to which Pope Francis is plugged into the concerns of women religious. During the twin investigations of women religious, Archbishop Tobin strongly opposed those who really wanted to take it to the Leadership Conference of Women Religious with a doctrinal investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He lost that battle and the CDF investigation went forward but, I am told, he retained the respect of Pope Benedict XVI. Once Francis came to town, that investigation was wound down with little attention and a red hat is on its way to Indianapolis not to Hartford or Baltimore.

Archbishop Tobin and Archbishop Cupich also bring international perspective to the U.S. bench. +Tobin served as a superior of the Redemptorists for years and they have houses all over the globe. Just last month, I met a Ukrainian bishop who is a Redemptorist and he spoke movingly of how much the order misses his leadership. Archbishop Cupich has headed the Committee on the Church in Central & Eastern Europe for years, and has developed extensive contacts not only there, but with German and English bishops through various collaborations with their similar committees. Sometimes we Americans think we are the center of the universe, so it is vital that we have Church leaders with a more global perspective.

It is a new day for our old Church. At a time when the political life of the nation could scarcely be more depressing, these three churchmen step forward and a sense of hopeful direction emerges. Pope Francis demonstrates that he is very well informed about the personnel and the challenges facing the Church in the U.S. This news is as happy as it is stunning.

Another debate we can't ignore

David Wesson
Pray Tell
October 4, 2016

We all are aware of the ad orientem debate raging now. Like the recent U.S. presidential “debate,” we may want to just simply tune out and ignore it; after all, it often is reduced to the two sides screaming over one another. Unfortunately, like the presidential debate, we cannot afford the luxury of apathy.

In many dioceses, including my home diocese of Birmingham, Alabama, there has been a small but vocal number of priests who are zealously promoting and implementing this posture after Card. Sarah endorsed it in a private talk in July. Bishops have largely remained silent. This silence has continued to cause confusion as proponents of this posture continue to (wrongly) state that the GIRM recommends or even assumes ad orientem during the liturgy.

Only three bishops in this country, as far as I am aware, have issued clarifications for this murky topic.

In a terse email to his presbyterate and diaconate, Bishop Anthony Taylor in Little Rock, AK gave clear guidance. Taylor stated that since the GIRM states that whenever possible, priests should celebrate the Mass facing the people, they should. Bishop Taylor stated that since in his own diocese it is always possible to celebrate facing the people, “outside of Mass celebrated in Latin in the Extraordinary Form, [he] expect[s] Mass will always be celebrated facing the people in [that] diocese.”

Bishop Martin Amos of Davenport, IA, in a strong letter to his presbyterate, later published in his diocesan newspaper, stated: The pervasive nature of electronic communication has facilitated the distribution of [Cardinal Sarah’s] opinions. Therefore, in order to prevent confusion and foster unity within the diocese, I am sending you this letter to clarify matters as they stand.

The Cardinal Prefect offered his own, private opinions on this and other matters. His words do not, and indeed cannot, constitute a change in ecclesiastical law or practice. Therefore, the law of the Church stands, as exemplified in paragraph 299 of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM). … There are cases where it is not possible to assume this posture, so the Order of Mass makes some accommodation for it (GIRM 127, 132, 133, 141). However, it is clear that the normative position of the priest when presiding at Mass in the Ordinary Form is facing the people, or, better, of the priest and the assembly facing the Altar together… To be clear, this is the posture that priests are to take when celebrating the liturgy (in the Ordinary Form) in the Diocese of Davenport. I am confident of your obedience in this matter.

The Most. Rev. Joseph Naumann, the archbishop of Kansas City, KS, just sent a letter to his presbyterate on 21 September addressing this subject. Naumann wrote that “it is incorrect to assert either [orientation] is superior over the other… because of my concern for the liturgical unity of our people within the Archdiocese, and the welfare of all our priests, I am not inclined to affirmatively promote changing to “ad orientem” worship by priests at this time.”

Thank you, bishops, for your sound liturgical guidance.