Overview: New bishop appointment possibilities

[The nifty photo to the right is actually a working graphic of the Roman Catholic dioceses in the United States.]

The past seven days have been overactive when it comes to appointing new bishops for the United States.

Last Thursday three new bishops were appointed - a new ordinary of Duluth, MN, a new ordinary in Pueblo, CO, and an auxiliary to Providence, RI.

Yesterday a Monday appointment was announced to the diocese of Cheyenne, Wyoming (new bishops are typically announced for the United States on Tuesdays, after all).

(I'm kind of kicking myself over that last one because I actually had a very strong tip that it would happen this week. But, because I figured it would wait until Tuesday, and because I don't like blogging over the weekends (and especially Sunday, of course!) - I decided to wait to talk about it until Monday morning. Well, I didn't get to it on Monday until the appointment had already come across on the wire.)

Well, to get back in front of the prevailing winds of new bishop appointments, let me mention a couple things on deep background. Two dioceses in particular are on my radar:

• In the diocese of Fort Wayne/South Bend, Indiana - currently held by Bishop John D'Arcy, and in which the University of Notre Dame resides - I've been convinced that the new appointment has been picked since early this month. My most current update is that, while the Vatican wants to make the announcement, they are deferring to the request of Bishop D'Arcy that the announcement not be made until the current Bishop's appeal concludes. I'm aware of other instances where Rome has chosen to delay announcing the appointment of a new bishop until the current one has had an opportunity to see to pressing local issues, such as the raising of funds or the settling of diocesan business.


• Across the country in the Archdiocese of Seattle, I'm being reminded that Archbishop Alexander Brunett reached retirement age and submitted his resignation in January. It was accepted and he was asked to remain until a replacement could be chosen and installed. Some recent past practice has been for the Bishop of Helena Montana to be sent as the replacement of Seattle's Archbishop with the Helena Bishop being replaced by Seattle's auxilliary Bishop. Seattle currently has two young auxiliary bishops, and the bishop of Helena (George Thomas) is still under 60.

In the wider picture, there are currently six dioceses with no bishop currently serving, and six more dioceses with bishops serving past the mandatory age of retirement.

So we'll see - today is Tuesday - maybe Rome will go for a solid six appointments in six days!

(Please note that at no time in this post have I created three pairs of six numbers. Catholics are against that sort of thing.)