"Liberal archbishop installed in San Francisco"

Thus reads the caption of a news item in the February 18 issue of The Tablet [London].  Read on:

American Catholicism’s most progressive archdiocese this week warmly welcomed its new head and his message of inclusion. At Wednesday’s installation Mass in San Francisco, Archbishop George Niederauer was handed the crosier by his predecessor, Archbishop William Levada, who the Pope named last May to succeed him as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Quoting T.S. Eliot in his first homily to the city’s 425,000 Catholics, Archbishop Niederauer, 69, made his own the poet’s assessment of the Church: “She is tender where you would be hard, and hard where you would like to be soft.” The new Pope’s first major appointee in the United States indicated that Benedict’s recent encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, would “guide” his stewardship of a diocese known for its significant contingent of gay Catholics and its efforts in caring for the sufferers of HIV/Aids.

In an interview with The Tablet on Monday, Archbishop Niederauer spoke of his distaste for the labelling which he said had brought the American Church further from God and nearer to the dust.

Before being named bishop of Salt Lake City – home to 150,000 Catholics and the headquarters of the Mormon Church – in 1994, George Niederauer spent most of his priesthood in seminary work in his native Los Angeles. His nuanced interpretation of the Vatican’s November document banning gays from priestly formation has attracted the fury of church conservatives, one of whom recently castigated the archbishop’s appointment to San Francisco as “troubling” and called his position on the document as being analogous to the views of “dissenters”.

Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle, Archbishop Niederauer said that, in his oversight of the archdiocesan seminary there, the document would come up “in the context of an entire programme of priestly training and formation, not as a headline item”. He reaffirmed his opinion on its contents, emphasising the importance of a seminary candidate being “able to maintain the appropriate boundaries … able to retain his commitment to that celibate relationship with Christ in priesthood”. He added that this “would be true, also, for the heterosexual candidate”. He also dismissed the hypothesis, prevalent in some US church circles, that the sexual orientation of priests was the prime cause for the abuse scandals. He said this was a “mistaken” construct that “doesn’t make sense”.

The first American bishop to acknowledge publicly that he had seen the controversial film Brokeback Mountain, which centres on the romance between two cowboys, the archbishop said he found it “very powerful”, seeing as one of its lessons “the destructiveness of not being honest with yourself, and not being honest with other people – and not being faithful, trying to live a double life, and what that does to each of the lives you try to live.”
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