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Cardinal Stafford named to head Vatican office dealing with penance
John Thavis
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) — U.S. Cardinal J. Francis Stafford has been named by Pope John Paul II
to head the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican office that deals with matters of conscience involving
the sacrament of penance and procedural issues concerning indulgences.
Cardinal Stafford, 71, will leave the Pontifical Council for the Laity, where he has served
as president since 1996. The new head of the laity council is Polish Archbishop Stanislaw Rylko,
58, who had been council secretary.
The Vatican announced the appointments Oct. 3. They were among the first of a series
of expected changes in the Roman Curia.
Cardinal Stafford will oversee a Vatican department that is not very well understood
by outsiders. The "penitentiary" in its name refers to the penitential issues it handles.
The Apostolic Penitentiary is one of three tribunals of the Holy See. The penitentiary
is divided into two offices: One governs indulgences, and the other is a court that handles cases
of conscience and absolves individuals from sins reserved to the Holy See.
Cardinal Stafford will be called the "major penitentiary." The agency also
commissions priests to serve as confessors in Rome's major basilicas.
Cardinal Stafford was named to head the laity council three years after the Denver
Archdiocese, which he headed at the time, hosted World Youth Day in 1993. The five-day gathering of
a quarter-million young people featured a visit by the pope. Cardinal Stafford was named a cardinal
in 1998.
One of the main tasks of the laity council is to coordinate World Youth Day celebrations
with local organizers, and Cardinal Stafford presided over preparations for youth-day events in Paris
in 1997, in Rome in 2000 and in Toronto in 2002.
Over the years, Cardinal Stafford also has taken a leading role in several
interdepartmental questions at the Vatican. In 1997 he was one of the Vatican officials in a small working group
with three U.S. archbishops that modified a proposed U.S. Lectionary for Mass, which had been held
up for several years by the Vatican.
In 1998, he was one of eight Vatican department heads signing a joint instruction on
lay ministry that warned against blurring the lines between ordained and lay ministry. The
instruction warned against assigning priestly roles to lay ministers in the name of advancing the role of the laity.
In 2002, he participated in a Vatican "summit" on clerical sex abuse cases with U.S.
cardinals and other Church leaders.
Born July 26, 1932, Cardinal Stafford studied theology at North American College
and Gregorian University in Rome and was ordained a priest of the Baltimore Archdiocese in 1957.
After ordination he served four years in a Baltimore parish and did graduate studies at The Catholic
University of America in Washington, St. Mary Seminary in Baltimore and Rutgers University in
New Brunswick, N.J. He has a licentiate in theology and a master's degree in social work.
He was appointed auxiliary bishop of Baltimore in 1976 and in 1982 was named bishop
of Memphis, Tenn. In 1986, he became archbishop of Denver.
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