Oakland Tribune
Posted: 08/28/2012 06:48:17 AM PDT
Updated: 08/28/2012 06:48:48 AM PDT
By Angela Woodall
The Roman Catholic archbishop-elect of San Francisco, controversial for his vigorous support of California’s same-sex marriage ban, was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence and ordered to appear in court, San Diego authorities said Monday.
The Rev. Salvatore Cordileone was taken into custody after being stopped early Saturday at a checkpoint near the San Diego State campus, said Detective Gary Hassen, a police spokesman.
Cordileone was booked into San Diego County jail two hours after being stopped and was released Saturday on a $2,500 bond, sheriff’s records show. He was ordered to appear in court Oct. 9.
Cordileone, 56, is the current bishop of the Oakland Diocese, which issued an apologetic statement Monday afternoon.
“While visiting in San Diego this past weekend, I had dinner at the home of some friends along with a priest friend visiting from outside the country and my mother, who lives near San Diego State University,” the statement read. “While driving my mother home, I passed through a DUI checkpoint the police had set up near the SDSU campus before I reached her home, and was found to be over the California legal blood alcohol level.
“I apologize for my error in judgment and feel shame for the disgrace I have brought upon the Church and myself. I will repay my debt to society and I ask forgiveness from my family and my friends and co-workers at the Diocese of Oakland and the Archdiocese of San Francisco. I pray that God, in His inscrutable wisdom, will bring some good out of this.”
The San Diego City Attorney’s Office, which prosecutes misdemeanor DUI offenses, said it had not received a report on the arrest.
Cordileone is a San Diego native and was ordained at the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego. Police did not provide information about whether he had previously been arrested.
In late July, Pope Benedict XVI selected Cordileone to become archbishop of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties.
Cordileone is not scheduled to be installed as archbishop of San Francisco until Oct. 4. Catholic bishops are answerable only to the pope and a criminal charge would not automatically prompt a delay in Cordileone’s installation, according to canon law experts.
Cordileone’s appointment to San Francisco archbishop provoked outcry from gay rights advocates because he is a noted proponent of Proposition 8, the 2008 law passed by California voters to outlaw same-sex marriage.
Cordileone was already known as a theologically conservative bishop faithful to the Catholic orthodoxy when he was installed as Oakland’s bishop in May 2009, becoming the first Spanish-speaking bishop in the Oakland Diocese’s history. He was a staunch advocate for immigrant rights and opposes the death penalty.
He was also part of the San Diego Diocese when it filed for bankruptcy protection in 2007 after being slammed with claims by 150 alleged victims of sexual abuse and multiple civil trials. Cordileone denied allegations by creditors at the time that the diocese tried to protect its finances by hiding and downplaying the value of assets before bankruptcy proceedings began.
And he has refused to provide a list of priests involved in sexual abuse requested by Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, according to David Clohessy, director of the organization known as SNAP. Cordileone also called on Catholics to vote for an initiative on the November ballot that requires parental consent for minors seeking an abortion.
Because it’s a high-profile case, Cordileone’s paperwork may take longer to process if authorities are going out of their way to avoid mistakes, Bay Area DUI defense attorney Bruce Kapsack said.
Breath tests return immediate results. Urine and blood samples can take much longer to process, Kapsack said.
Kapsack said his clients have included priests, rabbis, imams and Buddhist monks. “They don’t get more of a break,” Kapsack said. “Actually, the higher profile the individual the stricter the situation becomes.”
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Newly-appointed SF archbishop arrested for DUI
ABS TV KGO-TV San Francisco
28 August 2012
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The incoming archbishop of San Francisco is in trouble with the law. Bishop Salvatore Cordileone, scheduled to be installed st. Mary’s Cathedral in October, was arrested over the weekend on drunk driving charges. It is quite a bombshell of the archdiocese.
Cordileone admits he was stopped at a DUI checkpoint as he and his mother were leaving dinner with friends in San Diego. He grew up in San Diego and according to police, that’s where the 56-year-old was arrested early Saturday morning in the city’s college district on suspicion of drunk driving. San Diego police say the man selected just last month by Pope Benedict to become archbishop of San Francisco was released after posting $2,500 in bail.
“Leaders are human. There is, deep in the Christian and certainly the Roman Catholic tradition, a sense of forgiveness, that no one comes to any leadership position with a perfect slate,” says James Donahue, president and professor of ethics at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
Cordileone was already a controversial pick for San Francisco. He’s known as a conservative on social issues and was a prominent backer of Proposition 8, the voter-approved measure banning same sex marriage in California. Last month, he reiterated his position. “We need to do everything we can to strengthen marriage,” he said.
Police say Cordileone is due in court to face his drunk driving charges on October 9, just five days after he is scheduled to be installed as archbishop at a ceremony at St. Mary’s Cathedral. Donahue says the vatican could make what he calls “adjustments” to that decision. “So the question is, how will both the vatican and also how will the people of the Archdiocese of San francisco will view his ability to lead and the kind of credibility that he will have. It’s really about credibility,” he says.
Cordileonoe released a statement Monday saying, “While visiting in San Diego this past weekend, I had dinner at the home of some friends along with a priest friend visiting from outside the country and my mother, who lives near San Diego State University. While driving my mother home, I passed through a DUI checkpoint the police had set up near the SDSU campus before I reached her home, and was found to be over the California legal blood alcohol level.”
He continued, “I apologize for my error in judgment and feel shame for the disgrace I have brought upon the Church and myself. I will repay my debt to society and I ask forgiveness from my family and my friends and co-workers at the Diocese of Oakland and the Archdiocese of San Francisco. I pray that God, in His inscrutable wisdom, will bring some good out of this.”
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Catholic archbishop-elect apologizes for ‘disgrace’ of drunk driving arrest
The Toronto Star
Published on Tuesday August 28, 2012
Elliot Spagat and Lisa Leff
The Associated Press
HANDOUT/REUTERS Salvatore Cordileone, bishop of Oakland since 2009, has been arrested in San Diego for drunk driving.
SAN DIEGO—The Roman Catholic archbishop-elect of San Francisco has apologized for his arrest on suspicion of drunken driving, behaviour that he said brought “shame” and “disgrace” on himself and the church, though legal experts said was unlikely to derail his promotion.
The Rev. Salvatore Cordileone said in a statement issued Monday by his office that he was driving home from a dinner with friends in San Diego with his mother and a visiting priest friend early Saturday when he was pulled over at a checkpoint near San Diego State University.
The statement said a sobriety test showed his blood-alcohol level to be above the legal limit, although Cordileone did not reveal by how much.
“I apologize for my error in judgment and feel shame for the disgrace I have brought upon the Church and myself,” he said. “I pray that God, in His inscrutable wisdom, will bring some good out of this.”
Cordileone, 56, currently serves as bishop of Oakland and is scheduled to be installed as San Francisco archbishop on Oct. 4, five days before his first court date.
Pope Benedict XVI selected him last month to replace Archbishop George Niederauer, who is retiring in October.
Cordileone took a breath test that confirmed his blood alcohol content exceeded California’s legal limit of 0.08 per cent, said Officer Mark McCullough, who declined to say by how much.
Cordileone, one of 11 people arrested at the checkpoint that night, identified himself as a priest, said McCullough. An officer did an Internet search and learned he was archbishop-elect.
Canon law experts said a criminal charge would not automatically prompt a delay in Cordileone’s installation as archbishop, which is scheduled to take place at St. Mary’s Cathedral on Oct. 4, the feast day of San Francisco’s patron saint, St. Francis of Assisi.
Because Catholic bishops are answerable only to the pope, any potential discipline would have to come from the Vatican, said Michael Ritty, a canon lawyer in private practice in upstate New York.
The Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, predicted that Cordileone’s arrest, while embarrassing, would only draw a response from Rome if it appeared he had a serious substance abuse problem that prevented him from carrying out the archbishop duties.
While serving in San Diego four years ago, Cordileone was instrumental in devising an initiative to strip same-sex couples of the right to wed in California.
The archdiocese serves more than 400,000 Catholics in the city of San Francisco and Marin and San Mateo counties. In the post, Cordileone would oversee the bishops in Honolulu, Las Vegas, Oakland, Reno, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Jose, Santa Rosa and Stockton.
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UPDATE 1-San Francisco archbishop-elect apologizes for drunken driving
The Chicago Tribune
August 27, 2012|Reuters
By Ronnie Cohen
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 27 (Reuters) – The Roman Catholic bishop newly chosen by the Vatican to lead the archdiocese of San Francisco and two other Bay Area counties publicly apologized on Monday after his weekend arrest on suspicion of drunken driving.
Salvatore Cordileone, 56, appointed in July by Pope Benedict XVI to preside over more than 500,000 Catholics as metropolitan archbishop of San Francisco, was taken into custody on Saturday near San Diego State University, according to the San Diego Police Department.
He was jailed on suspicion of driving under the influence after he was stopped at a police checkpoint and failed a field sobriety test, police spokesman Detective Gary Hassen said. The bishop was later released on $2,500 bail, he said.
Cordileone, a San Diego native who currently is bishop of Oakland, had dined earlier that evening with friends and another priest and was driving his mother home from the gathering when he was arrested, he said in a statement released by his diocese.
He acknowledged that his blood-alcohol level was found to be over the legal limit, apologized for his “error in judgment” and said he felt “shame for the disgrace I have brought upon the church and myself.”
“I will repay my debt to society, and I ask forgiveness from my family and my friends and co-workers at the Diocese of Oakland and the Archdiocese of San Francisco,” the statement said. “I pray that God, in His inscrutable wisdom, will bring some good out of this.”
An arraignment in the case has been scheduled for Oct. 9.
Cordileone is due to be installed at a special mass on Oct. 4 as head of an archdiocese encompassing 91 parishes in San Francisco and the neighboring counties of San Mateo and Marin.
He is replacing Archbishop George Niederauer, who is retiring.
Cordileone has been particularly outspoken in church opposition to same-sex matrimony as chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, a role that has put him at odds with many Catholics in the largely gay-friendly Bay area.
He also led church support for the 2008 voter-approved California state constitutional amendment, Proposition 8, that banned gay marriage.
(Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; editing by Steve Gorman and Philip BArbara)
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After drunk-driving arrest, U.S. Catholic archbishop-elect apologizes for ‘error in judgment’
The Toronto Globe and Mail
Published Monday, Aug. 27 2012, 7:50 PM EDT
Last updated Tuesday, Aug. 28 2012, 6:29 AM EDT
ELLIOT SPAGAT and LISA LEFF
SAN DIEGO — The Associated Press
Rev. Salvatore Cordileone said in a statement issued by his office Monday that he was driving home from a dinner with friends in San Diego with his mother early Saturday when he was pulled over at a drunk-driving checkpoint. He said a sobriety test showed his blood alcohol level to be above the legal limit.
Bishop Cordileone serves as bishop of Oakland and is scheduled to be installed as San Francisco archbishop on Oct. 4, five days before his first court date.
He says he is ashamed of what he termed an “error in judgment” and plans to pay his debt to society.
Every bishop should be ‘theologically conservative” and faithful to Catholic orthodoxy.” Many are not.
That said, “conservative” or not, Bishop Salvatore Cordileone showed a lack of prudence in getting behind the wheel while under the influence. He said it himself: ” “I . . . feel shame for the disgrace I have brought upon the Church and myself.”
Indeed he has brought disgrace upon both himself and the Chruch. The story is being carried around the world.
Will the 04 October 2012 bishop’s installation as Archbishop of San Francisco proceed five days before he is scheduled to appear in court? I don’t believe it should. I think prudence dictates that at the least the installation should be postponed until further details emerge in court 09 October 2012.