Francis George, the archbishop of Portland, Ore., is expected to be named Tuesday as the new leader of Chicago’s 2.3 million Catholics, Vatican sources said.
A native of Chicago, the 60-year-old George is known as an affable man who has strengthened church ties to Hispanic communities and staunchly defended the church’s positions against abortion and assisted suicide.
George’s appointment came as a surprise. Not widely seen as a national leader, George had only served 10 months as archbishop of Portland, his only experience in a major urban see.
Before that he served as bishop of Yakima, Wash., from 1990 to 1996.
In Yakima, George made a name for himself by embracing that city’s Hispanic Catholics and trying to bring them together with white Catholics.
He also helped Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, an influential voice at the Vatican, work out an accord with evangelical Christians, emphasizing their common social and theological goals.
And if there was any doubt about George’s fidelity to church teachings, he erased it at his May 1996 installation as archbishop of Portland’s 275,000 Catholics, using the celebration to take a strong stand against abortion, infanticide and suicide.
Struck by polio at the age of 13, George wears a brace on his right leg. He has long been known as an advocate for the disabled.
At the Northwest Side parish where George grew up, Rev. Gary Miller said he was thrilled by the speculation that George would become Chicago’s archbishop.
“We’re very proud of him. He’s served the church well,” said Miller, the pastor of St. Paschal Church, 3935 N. Melvina Ave., in the city’s Portage Park neighborhood.
George attended school at St. Paschal from kindergarten through 8th grade, Miller said.
George’s parents died in the mid-1980s and his only sibling, a sister, Margaret Cain, lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., he said.
Though George no longer has relatives in the neighborhood, Miller said he has met him on several occasions and found him to be “a good people person, a very intelligent and very faithful man.”
“I think he’ll do a good job here in Chicago,” if he were to be appointed, Miller said. “But I said that three months ago when I didn’t think he had a chance.”
The naming of a new archbishop ends more than four months of uncertainty among Cook and Lake Counties’ 2.3 million Roman Catholics, fueled by plentiful rumors and the Vatican’s age-old tradition of secrecy regarding appointments.
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As the vacancy stretched beyond the 12-week average between Chicago archbishops this century, and then beyond the symbolic new beginning of Easter, both clergy and lay people began to talk about a malaise that was setting in–a fatigue caused by too many false alarms and a growing desire to move on.
But Tuesday’s announcement also poses a host of new questions for the archdiocese, about its direction and the man who will likely lead it into the new millennium.
Given the ideological struggles in the church, locally, nationally and worldwide, the new archbishop will be closely scrutinized for his positions on controversial issues and his stance toward those who disagree.
He will also, inevitably and at great length, be compared to the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.
When Bernardin died on the morning of Nov. 14, he loomed as large as any religious figure in Chicago history. His death was international news.
The February release of an autobiographical book the cardinal wrote on his deathbed soared to the top of national bestseller lists and stayed there, selling more than 350,000 copies by the end of March.
During his 14 years as archbishop of Chicago, Bernardin had taken a clergy that had become discouraged, and in some cases, outright rebellious, and earned its near-unanimous loyalty.
He had made priest welfare one of his top priorities, and stood by the clergy through the difficulties of a manpower shortage, and the claims of abuse that dogged the church through the late 1980s and early 1990s.
As an administrator, Bernardin had seen both good times and bad. The deep deficits of the late 1980s, followed by the wholesale closing of parishes and schools in 1990, proved to be one of his greatest challenges.
Yet by the time he had died, the archdiocese had finished its second straight fiscal year in the black, even as it launched the most aggressive renovation and building campaign in decades.
The new archbishop will both benefit from those accomplishments and be measured against them.
At the same time, he will have to grapple with several important projects Bernardin did not finish.
Parishes throughout the archdiocese are in various stages of creating, for the first time, their own formal, long-range plans. At the same time, Bernardin had hoped to spur his churches to make their Sunday masses more lively and heartfelt, more welcoming to parishioners.
He also had charged a committee with the daunting task of providing affordable education to all Catholics who want it, and many non-Catholics in the city who depend on it.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for the newcomer, however, will be to step out of the shadow of Bernardin’s personal stature.
Through his public battles with a false allegation of sexual abuse in 1994, and the onset of pancreatic cancer in 1995, Bernardin had won a personal popularity that somewhat surprised the low-key churchman.
After he announced on Aug. 30, 1996, that he was dying, he soon became something of a living icon–counseling cancer patients, visiting Death Row, talking about his own death with disarming frankness.
His death threw the city into a week of mourning. For two bitterly cold days, the devoted and the curious lined up around the block and around the clock at Holy Name Cathedral, waiting hours for a momentary glimpse at the cardinal’s body.
Bernardin’s funeral brought 160 bishops, archbishops and cardinals to the cathedral, along with a message from Pope John Paul II. Thousands watched on live television, while thousands more lined the streets that the funeral procession followed to Mt. Carmel Cemetery.
As one priest observed, “The easiest job in America would be to follow Joe Bernardin. But in another way, it would the hardest job in the world.”
Some observers believed that part of the reason the position was not filled immediately, despite advance notice, was to allow the newcomer a buffer between his arrival and the emotion of Bernardin’s death–a gap that might make comparisons a little less vivid.
Some pointed to dioceses that Rome has left without a bishop for up to a year.
But others argued that Chicago–the second largest diocese in the nation–was viewed as too important to let it coast for more than a couple of months.
If history is a guide, it will be at least another month, possibly two, before the new archbishop is installed.
Judging from that history, the ceremonies that attend the installation will give Chicagoans their first good look at who the new archbishop is, and what he wants to be.
Early in this century, Archbishop George Mundelein took over with a regal, almost imperial style that heralded an unprecedented period of power for the church in Chicago.
Archbishop John Cody, in 1965, recalled that grandeur, arriving in a train filled with hundreds of friends and dignitaries. That was followed by motorcades, parties and a procession through the streets, all leading to the televised mass of installation, at which he was formally announced before making a grand entrance.
His style was not as well suited to his times, however; in hindsight, given the controversies that followed, the pomp of his installation seemed to be almost a warning of the battles that were to come.
Bernardin, by contrast, scripted a folksier introduction. His official installation–the reading of the Vatican’s letter of appointment–took place not on television, but at a private, candlelight prayer service with his priests.
That was followed by a televised mass at the cathedral, then by masses Bernardin said at churches throughout the city, representing many of the different racial and ethnic backgrounds of his new archdiocese. He finished the weeklong celebration with an outdoor mass at Grant Park.
Because the official act of installation is more mechanical than ritualistic, the new archbishop has considerable freedom to decide how it will be done.
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Once installed, he has still more power to decide how the archdiocese will be run.
Several hundred clergy, monks, nuns and lay people working at the pastoral center serve at the archbishop’s pleasure. Now they’ll be eagerly waiting to see what their new boss has in mind.
And although the 988 diocesan priests remain employed by the archdiocese until they either leave or die, one of the archbishop’s most important and influential roles is deciding where to assign those priests.
The archbishop has direct or indirect control over the worship, education and health care of Chicago Catholics, some 40 percent of the city’s people.
By virtue of the archdiocese’s size, and its role in social services, the archbishop will also have considerable sway in local and state politics.
He will have at his disposal one of the most powerful bully pulpits in the country. And if tradition holds, the new archbishop will soon be made a cardinal, one of a handful in the U.S. with the privilege and power to elect a new pope.
But church observers say that for all that power vested in one person, the Archdiocese of Chicago is likely to look a lot like it does now for months, perhaps years to come, no matter who the new archbishop is.
It is important to remember, they say, that if it takes time for Chicago to get to know its new archbishop, it will also take a while for the new archbishop to figure out Chicago.