Archbishop Wilton Gregory has been named by Pope Francis to become the sixth archbishop of Washington.
Gregory, 71, is best-known for having led the bishops’ conference during its 2002 Dallas meeting at which they adopted a zero tolerance policy for clergy sex abuse. He has been serving as archbishop of Atlanta since 2004 and has been a bishop since 1983, when he was consecrated by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago. He will be the first African-American archbishop of the city.
Archbishop Gregory’s new assignment will be challenging. He succeeds Cardinal Donald Wuerl whose resignation was accepted last autumn, almost three years past the mandatory retirement age, and in the midst of controversy over his handling of clergy sex abuse while serving as the bishop of Pittsburgh. The previous archbishop, former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was removed from the clerical state in February for sexually abusing both minors and seminarians.
In addition to his leadership confronting the first iteration of the clergy sex abuse scandal, Archbishop Gregory is known as moderate voice within the bishops’ conference. Like his mentor, Bernardin, he has advocated that the Church profess a “consistent ethic of life,” focusing not only on abortion but on a range of life issues such as the death penalty and war. His archdiocese issued the most comprehensive action plan for implementing Francis’ environmental encyclical, Laudato si’.
Gregory presided over enormous growth in Atlanta as the archdiocese grew from 292,300 Catholics in 1998 to an estimated 1.2 million today. Although his new archdiocese has only 700,000 Catholics, it is an enormously complex diocese, home to many national religious institutions, the national Catholic University, the headquarters for the bishops’ conference, as well as the federal government. Every previous archbishop of Washington has been named a cardinal.
Loading ...
