Big, wonderful news for San Francisco

 

Bishop Cordileone, a staunch friend of the traditional Latin Mass and the architect of California’s Proposition 8, has been appointed Archbishop of San Francisco. You might want to take another sip of coffee and read that sentence twice. I have to say, with the recent appointment of Bishop Vasa to lead the diocese of Santa Rosa, and now this, it seems that at long last Rome is determined to clean house in California. Deo gratias!

Poor Rocco, on the other hand, can hardly contain his dismay:

“After a half-century of occupants accused by conservatives of soft-pedaling church teaching in favor of a more conciliatory approach toward constituencies ranging from gays and lesbians to Nancy Pelosi – a group of prelates among which the recently-retired chief guardian of church doctrine, Cardinal William Levada, was not exempt from sometimes stinging criticism — the move delivers the long-desired ‘Holy Grail’ of the American Catholic Right firmly into the faction’s hands, in the form of a prelate already known widely both for his forcefulness and a stringent doctrinal cred almost unequaled among his confreres on the national bench.

For liberal Catholics, meanwhile, the appointment is likely to be received as something akin to the city’s Great Earthquake of 1906, or even more apocalyptic events.”

Bishop Cordileone is one of a small but growing number of American bishops who have personally celebrated the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite: