African American from New Orleans made a bishop

Pope Francis has appointed Fr Fernand Cheri OFM as an auxiliary in New Orleans. The 62-year-old friar, a native of New Orleans, is the first African American bishop appointed in the United States since 2006.

Cheri was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of New Orleans in 1978, where he served in a variety of parishes. In 1992, he entered the Franciscan order, professing full vows in 1996. His most recent assignment was as a campus minister in Quincy, Illinois.

Bishop-elect Cheri has compiled multi-volume collections of gospel-music discographies. He has served on a variety of liturgical committees for the US bishops and black Catholic Church organisations, and has contributed essays on the subject of gospel music to liturgical magazines. He brought groups of students to New Orleans to help in the reconstruction efforts after Hurricane Katrina of 2005.

“I look forward to just working with the people of New Orleans again,” Cheri said. “I never left New Orleans. Wherever I go, I bring New Orleans.”

n Conservative Catholic commentators published articles in advance of Pope Francis’ anticipated encyclical on the environment, which sought to identify limits to what Catholics will be required to agree with.

Maureen Mullarkey in First Things magazine wrote, “Francis  is an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist … Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical – and now meteorological – thickets, sacralising politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.” Professor Robert P. George wrote, “The Pope has no special know­ledge, insight or teaching authority pertaining to matters of empirical fact of the sort investigated by, [say], physicists and biologists, nor do popes claim [to have it].”