New San Francisco archbishop led fight against gay marriage

New San Francisco archbishop, who led fight against gay marriage, appointed by pope

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  Bishop Salvatore Cordileone at Cathedral of Christ church the Light in Oakland in 2009.

The Vatican on Friday named a prominent religious official who has been a leader in the fight against same-sex marriage as San Francisco's new archbishop, the latest in a string of conservatives to lead Catholics in one of the country's most liberal areas.

Salvatore Cordileone, 56, organized religious leaders and helped raise significant sums of money to get Proposition 8, the 2008 initiative that banned same-sex marriage in California, on the ballot and spoke forcefully in support of it. He is also chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage.

In his first statements after the Vatican's announcement, Cordileone, the current bishop of Oakland, touched on a range of topics, from cultural diversity to immigration reform. But reporters barraged him with questions about same-sex marriage. His response was resolute.

"Marriage is the union of a man and a woman, because children can only come about with the embrace of a man and a woman together," he said. "I don't see how that's discriminatory against anyone."

Cordileone follows two other conservative archbishops: George Niederauer, 76, who is retiring, and, before him, William Levada, who in 2005 was elevated from archbishop of San Francisco to become the Vatican's top enforcer of doctrine.

Adoration and outrage

The new archbishop's stance on marriage has earned him adoration as well as outrage within the church.

"If people like him don't defend it, it's going to be lost very soon," said Ed Silva, 59, a father of three and a member of Holy Spirit Church in Fremont, which is under the Diocese of Oakland. "In my daughter's lifetime, you may be able to marry your dog. That's how lost this society is getting."

But for others, the elevation was disappointing.

San Francisco is "one of the hearts of the gay liberation story," said Michael Harank, 59, a lifelong Catholic who founded an independent Catholic agency in Oakland for homeless people with HIV. "He may be pastoral, but his work as one of the financial fathers and creators of Prop. 8 is clearly a slap in the face to the gay community."

Cordileone said he wouldn't shy away from the struggle of being a conservative voice in a liberal area, but it left him perturbed that marriage would be so much of a focus of his appointment.

"To be honest, I'm kind of frustrated," he said. "I wish I didn't have to expend so much time and energy on something that should be self-evident.

"But this is the high-profile issue," he said. "It's a foundational issue. For whatever God's reason, it's the issue he's given us at this point in history, so I'm not going to run from it."

3 conservatives

Niederauer also played a pivotal role in the Prop. 8 campaign, not just with his public statements, but also by actively courting the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to participate in the campaign. Mormons contributed more than $20 million, and Mormon officials said they wouldn't have done so without the encouragement of Niederauer, the former bishop of Salt Lake City.

In Levada's role as the Vatican's prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he has tried to rein in U.S. nuns for challenging church teachings on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, among other things.

The Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, said the appointments of increasingly conservative bishops in the United States started with Pope John Paul II, who served from 1978 to 2005.

Though it would be impossible to find a Catholic bishop in favor of same-sex marriage, Reese said conservatism today includes a particular focus on marriage.

"Clearly, the pope and the Vatican are very concerned about the issue of same-sex marriage and are very opposed to it, and that's reflected by the kinds of bishops that are being appointed in the United States," he said.

Cordileone will preside over an archdiocese that encompasses more than a half-million Catholics in San Francisco and Marin County and on the Peninsula. He will also oversee the dioceses of Oakland, San Jose, Santa Rosa, Stockton, Sacramento, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Reno and Salt Lake City.

Hours after he was named, Cordileone delivered a speech in San Francisco in both English and Spanish. The diocese is about 40 percent Latino, and he will be San Francisco's first fluent Spanish-speaking archbishop since Joseph Sadoc Alemany, a Spaniard by birth who was named San Francisco's first archbishop in 1853.

Cordileone, whose father was baptized at SS Peter and Paul's Church in North Beach, said he spent summers in San Francisco as a child. He was born and raised in San Diego, where he later served as bishop and led the effort against Prop. 8. He was ordained as a priest by Leo Maher, a former San Francisco Archdiocese official who also later was bishop of San Diego.

Cordileone will be installed Oct. 4, the feast day for St. Francis of Assisi, for whom San Francisco is named.