OAKLAND (CA)
Whispers in the Loggia
In an exceedingly rare appointment of its kind, Pope Francis has named Michael Barber SJ, 58 – a California Jesuit currently serving as a spiritual director at Boston’s St John’s Seminary – as bishop of Oakland.
Rare… Francis… Jesuit… Boston… “Super-Cardinal”…
Hmm.
At the helm of the roughly 600,000-member NorCal church, the bishop-elect succeeds Salvatore Cordileone, who was sent across the Bay to lead the more prestigious – yet less populous – archdiocese of San Francisco last July.
For purposes of context, the last time a simple priest was named to a Stateside post of this size came at a similarly early point in the last pontificate, when Msgr Kevin Vann – then a pastor in Springfield, Illinois – was tapped in May 2005 as coadjutor of Fort Worth, then a 400,000-member fold, which nearly doubled in size over the subsequent decade due to migration, birthrates and, well, just being Texas church. Yet while Vann was intended to have a period of apprenticeship under Bishop Joseph Delaney, the long-reigning prelate died the day before his successor’s ordination, suddenly placing the provided ordinary-in-waiting on the cathedra with no prep. (In his last top-tier appointment on the Stateside bench, B16 named Vann to the 1.3 million-member diocese of Orange last September, and Fort Worth remains vacant.)
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