CALIFORNIA
Huffington Post
By Carol Kuruvilla & Antonia Blumberg
A group of Catholics in San Francisco is asking the pope to replace their archdiocese’s spiritual leader, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, with someone “true to our values.”
More than 100 Catholics signed a full-page ad in Thursday’s San Francisco Chronicle asking Pope Francis to name a new church leader more closely aligned with San Francisco’s progressive ideals. In their open letter, the petitioners argue that Cordileone has “fostered an atmosphere of division and intolerance” and “isolated himself from our community.”
The letter follows months of protests against the archdiocese’s leadership. Frustrated local Catholics have spoken out, in particular, against Cordileone’s efforts to add language to the moral guidelines laid out for teachers at Catholic high schools that reaffirms the church’s stances on same-sex marriage, artificial insemination and other controversial matters. …
James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of the Catholic magazine America, told HuffPost that although these types of grassroots campaigns have arisen before, they rarely have any influence on the Vatican.
“The decision to remove a bishop is made by the Vatican, specifically the Congregation of Bishops advising the Pope,” Martin told HuffPost in an email. “The only time that a petition might influence the Vatican is if it seems that the bishop is unable to lead the diocese because of widespread opposition. But normally these campaigns do not serve to sway the Vatican. Sometimes they may have the opposite effect, and raise sympathy for a bishop — that is, if he’s seen to being ‘attacked.'”
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