BishopAccountability.org
	Dallas Gets a New Bishop By Jeffrey Weiss KHOU [Dallas TX] March 6, 2007 http://www.khou.com/news/state/stories/khou070306_ac_dallasbishop.24449c34.html The Vatican named Bishop Kevin Joseph Farrell as the new bishop of Dallas on Tuesday. The new man replaces Bishop Charles Grahmann, who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75 last July. Bishop Farrell currently serves as auxiliary bishop for the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. He's scheduled to answer questions at a 10 a.m. news conference in Dallas. According to the archdiocese Web site, Bishop Farrell was born in Dublin, Ireland, in September 1947. He brings experience as a parish priest and a high-ranking diocesan administrator. He also has a history of working with Hispanics, a skill sure to be important in the increasingly Hispanic Dallas diocese. Shortly after his ordination as a priest in 1978, he was assigned to be the chaplain for the University of Monterrey in Mexico. While there, he conducted seminars in bioethics and social ethics. In 1986, he was chosen by Cardinal James A. Hickey to be the director of the Spanish Catholic Center, an agency of the Archdiocese of Washington that primarily serves the Hispanic community and new immigrants through legal assistance, education, employment assistance and health care. From October 2000 to March 2002, he was pastor of Annunciation parish in Northwest Washington, D.C. Since March 2001, he has served as vicar general and moderator of the curia for the Archdiocese of Washington. He was ordained an auxiliary bishop in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 11, 2002. He takes over a Dallas diocese with more than a million members, more than five times larger than it was when Bishop Grahmann took over in 1990. But the recent history of the diocese has been marked by scandal as much as growth. Even before disclosures of child abuse by Catholic priests rocked the U.S. church elsewhere, the Dallas Diocese became infamous in 1997, with the civil trial of Rudolph "Rudy" Kos, who molested altar boys in three Dallas parishes. In 1999, the Vatican named Joseph Galante, a Philadelphia native then serving as bishop of Beaumont, Texas, as coadjutor bishop in Dallas. He was to govern alongside Bishop Grahmann and, presumably, succeed him. Such transitions usually take less than a year, and some local Catholics hoped that would be the case here. But Bishop Grahmann refused to step aside early. Relations between the two bishops became frosty and in 2004, the Vatican sent Bishop Galante to lead the diocese of Camden, N.J.
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