The Holy Father named Bishop Salvatore Cordileone of Oakland to be the ninth
Archbishop of San Francisco. A terrific appointment. More to follow as this surprise (to some) appointment--he moves across the Bay from Oakland to San Francisco--begins to hit the email stream. Although obviously there are plenty of details that soon-to-be Archbishop Cordileone needs to master, it is not exactly as if he comes to the appointment without a clear sense of the situation in the City of St. Francis. A press conference at 10 AM at the cathedral will be streamed
here.
You can bet this will be seen and felt by some as the San Francisco Earthquake of 2012.
Here is the Vatican on the subject of the new Archbishop of San Francisco:
OTHER PONTIFICAL ACTS
Vatican City, 27 July 2012 (VIS) - The Holy Father:
- Appointed Bishop
Salvatore J. Cordileone of Oakland, U.S.A., as archbishop of San
Francisco (area 6,023, population 1,866,000, Catholics 448,000, priests
408, permanent deacons 78, religious 854), U.S.A. He succeeds Archbishop
George H. Niederauer, whose resignation from the pastoral care of the
same archdiocese the Holy Father accepted, upon having reached the age
limit.
By the way, already I've gotten emails asking if I knew about this before it happened. Some people suppose that because I worked with Bishop Cordileone in San Diego and because I work at Ignatius Press I must have had some insider info. Well, I can say I didn't know anything about it. Of course Bishop Cordileone has for some time been a possible candidate and I, among many others, speculated about the possibility becoming a reality. But I always wound up rejecting the idea on the grounds that Bishop Cordileone has been in Oakland for too short a time--3 years. Not that some of us at Ignatius Press didn't express to certain key folks the profile of the kind of bishop we thought San Francisco would be well-served to have. (I'm sure it doesn't surprise anyone that we would have strong opinions about such matters or that we would express them. In this we're hardly alone.) But that's different from knowing.
UPDATE:
Catholic San Francisco has the story here. (Ok. Rocco, folks out here are finally on it.)