VERMONT/NEW YORK
Whispers in the Loggia
Capping weeks of speculation surrounding Bishop Salvatore Matano, at Roman Noon this Wednesday the Pope named the 67 year-old prelate – head of Vermont’s statewide diocese of Burlington since 2005 – as bishop of Rochester.
In the upstate New York post, the Providence-born, Rome-trained canonist succeeds Bishop Matthew Clark, who led the 320,000-member diocese for 33 years – a length of tenure practically unheard of in recent times – until his retirement was accepted last September, two months after his 75th birthday.
While Rochester under Clark had been an outlier among Northeastern dioceses in its normative embrace of a progressive post-Conciliar ecclesiology, as was universally expected, the incoming bishop comes from a rather different cloth. And much like last week’s appointment of the now Bishop Leonard Blair to the archbishopric of Hartford, the choice of a fairly conservative figure with an extensive background in law and administration will be seen in some quarters as a clash with the prevailing “Francis narrative” on the wider scene.
A longtime veteran of 1 Cathedral Square – the Rhode Island Chancery, where he capped his service as vicar-general – Matano spent two tours of duty as a local aide at the Washington Nunciature before his appointment to Vermont as coadjutor in early 2005. Ordained in Burlington on the very afternoon of B16’s election, much of the bishop’s tenure has been taken up with the legal and financial fallout of scores of clergy sex-abuse lawsuits, the settlements of which have spurred the diocese to sell off extensive swaths of its real estate holdings – including its Chancery – to pay for the claims while avoiding bankruptcy. While a 2010 settlement for 26 suits totaled $17.6 million, the amount of another agreement to close 11 cases earlier this year was not disclosed.
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