THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ARCHBISHOP CORDILEONE’S APPOINTMENT TO THE SUPREME APOSTOLIC SIGNATURA!

One of the new subdeacons for the institute of Christ the King, Sovernign Priest, ordained by Archbishop Cordileone on July First in Florence, Italy, was at the High Mass I celebrated for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost with the commemoration of Saint Anne, Jesus’ Grandmother. The fresh subdeacon, visiting his parents in Savannah, is seated and wearing his beretta:

This is the ordination of six subdeacons and eight deacons by Archbishop Cordileone in Florence Italy on July 2:

The subdeacon at my Savannah’s TLM for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost is the third one from the right:

Press title from  THE CALIFORNIA CATHOLIC DAILY:

“What the Cordileone move to the Vatican highest court means”

The context turns the appointment into a gesture

MONEY-BYTE:

The renewal comes as the five-year term of the members appointed by Francis in June 2021 expires: Cardinals Müller, Tobin, Grech and Harvey thus conclude their mandate on the tribunal, in an ordinary transition that gives way to a new generation of canonists.

The appointment of the Archbishop of San Francisco is, by far, the one with the greatest ecclesial significance. Cordileone is no newcomer to the Palazzo della Cancelleria: a canonist by training, he worked as an official of the Apostolic Signatura itself in the 1990s, before his episcopate, so he knows from within the machinery of the tribunal to which he now returns as a judge.

But it is the context that turns the appointment into a gesture. Cordileone is one of the few diocesan ordinaries in the world who regularly celebrates the traditional Roman rite. On July 2, he conferred the subdiaconate and diaconate on fourteen seminarians of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest in Gricigliano (in Florence, Italy), in ceremonies that were completed the following day by Cardinal Burke —former prefect of the same Signatura — with the ordination of four new priests.

Just days later, the archbishop publicly reacted to the episcopal consecrations of the Society of Saint Pius X in Écône, stating that they reflect “a growing lack of trust that has been building for a long time,” calling for “sincere and honest” dialogue between Rome and the Fraternity and requesting that access to the traditional Mass be facilitated “so that our faithful do not feel obliged to seek spiritual nourishment outside the family in communion with Rome.”

That Leo XIV incorporates him into the Church’s supreme tribunal three weeks after those statements admits few ambiguous readings: far from placing him outside the perimeter of pontifical trust, that discourse has not been an obstacle to entrusting him with a function of legal guarantee at the heart of the Curia. At the most delicate moment in the relationship between Rome and the traditional world since 1988, the Pope seats on the Signatura an archbishop who celebrates the ancient rite, ordains for an ex Ecclesia Dei institute and calls for a review of the liturgical status quo.