[Catholic Caucus] Who Will Succeed Cardinal Wuerl?

The Spectator ^ | October 28, 2018 | George Neumayr

[ebb tide]

In late September, I started getting calls from concerned Catholics in Newark, New Jersey that Cardinal Joseph Tobin “had an Italian actor living at his cathedral basilica rectory.” The callers identified the actor as Francesco Castiglione. They said that Castiglione has been taking English and voice classes at Seton Hall University, and suggested that he is the real recipient of Tobin’s infamous accidental tweet from earlier this year. (“Nighty, Night baby, I love you,” Tobin wrote to someone whom he claimed later was one of his sisters; the sister has never published proof of receiving the tweet.)

I then called up the inaptly named Jim Goodness, Tobin’s spokesman. I asked him point-blank: Is Castiglione living with Tobin at the rectory? “I am not going to entertain the question,” replied Goodness. Shortly after my tweet on October 5 — Castiglione’s Facebook page tellingly contained no posts from October 5-12 as far as I can tell — I got a call from a well-placed source in Newark. “Francesco is gone. He left the rectory,” my source informed me. I then called up Goodness again to verify this report. Goodness said he wouldn’t address the matter and hung up on me.

A second reliable source called to reiterate that “Castiglione took off” and that Tobin was conducting a leaks investigation designed to ferret out any priests who might have talked to me.

What did it all mean? Was Tobin discarding baggage in anticipation of his possible appointment to replace Cardinal Donald Wuerl in Washington, D.C.? Possibly. He is, after all, on the short list to succeed Wuerl. (He made the Wall Street Journal’s list of three.)

“Tobin is under serious, serious consideration,” a source close to Wuerl’s chancery informed me on October 25. The D.C. chancery is “preparing for him,” according to this source.

[ebb tide]

Catholic Caucus

Under any other pontificate, Tobin would be the last cardinal tapped for Washington, given his scandalous ties to the pedo-rapist Theodore McCarrick. Tobin has acknowledged that he knew about McCarrick’s settlements in New Jersey with churchmen whom he tried to force into his bed. But Pope Francis is nothing if not reckless and indifferent to the flaws of flaky and depraved cardinals inside his inner circle.

Francis loves Tobin above all for his left-wing politics and itches to place a Trump nemesis in D.C. That’s why Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester, an open critic of Trump, has also been under consideration to replace Wuerl, though he appears to have dropped off the list. I have been told by sources in Rome that the Vatican took Hillary’s defeat hard and continues to fulminate over the Trump presidency. Francis’s repeated jabs at “nationalism” are thinly veiled attacks on Trump’s MAGA agenda.

[ebb tide]

Ping

Nighty-Night, D.C.

[Buckeye McFrog]

short answer: Somebody worse.