Reports: Vatican Official to Head Indianapolis Archdiocese

By Peter Smith
The Courier-Journal
October 17, 2012

http://blogs.courier-journal.com/faith/2012/10/17/reports-vatican-official-to-head-indianapolis-archdiocese/


A high-ranking Vatican official, seen as sympathetic to American nuns in their ongoing tensions with the church hierarchy, is reportedly to be announced as the next archbishop of Indianapolis.

The American-born Archbishop Joseph W. Tobin, a Redemptorist priest, has been secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. The Italian paper La Stampa, the British-based Catholic publication, The Tablet, and the blog Whispers in the Loggia are reporting the announcement by Pope Benedict XVI will take place later this week.

There are 151 parishes and about 225,000 Catholics in the archdiocese, which extends from Indy down to the Kentucky line, including such Louisville-neighboring counties as Clark, Floyd and Harrison. Archbishop Daniel Buechlein retired early due to health problems.

Tobin, 60, the oldest of 13 children, worked as a parish priest in Detroit and Chicago and later led his religious order before taking the Vatican post in 2010.

La Stampa says Tobin was reportedly unhappy with the critical report issued earlier this year by another Vatican congregation — for the Doctrine of the Faith — accusing the Leadership Conference of Women Religious of effectively straying in areas of doctrine. Whispers' insider Rocco Palmo depicts the move as the Vatican tacking left after sending a staunchly conservative bishop to the liberal lions den of San Francisco (Salvatore Cordileone, who's already in a spat with the city's Episcopal bishop).

Palmo writes of Tobin:"By all accounts, the choice of the Detroit native was intended as an olive branch to the US' communities of women in the wake of the tensions sparked by the 2009 apostolic visitation of the nation's non-contemplative orders of nuns. While his selection was greeted as a "ray of hope" by the sisters and their supporters (and, indeed, with private sighs of relief by many American bishops), the reaction within the Roman Curia was rather different, an enduring divide highlighted by Tobin's open admission of 'ranting' about its ways, and his pointed barb that the church's central government needed 'to be humble and make sure it is service and not simply bureaucracy.'

"In a 2011 interview with Catholic News Service, Tobin said that the congregation's handling of the visitation's early stages had 'caused real harm,' adding that 'some rather unscrupulous canonical advisers' to the orders were also to blame for fanning 'rumors' that Rome sought a full-scale clampdown.

"Comparing the latter to 'Fox News' – 'they keep people coming back because they keep them afraid' – the archbishop conceded that 'certainly, on our side of the river or our side of the pond,' the Vatican 'had created an atmosphere where that was possible.'"

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