A native of Pittsburgh, [Wuerl] received graduate degrees from The Catholic University of America, Gregorian University in Rome, Italy and the University of St. Thomas in Rome, where he received a doctorate in theology in 1974. Ordained to the priesthood in 1966, he was ordained a bishop by Pope John Paul II in 1986 and will celebrate his 25th anniversary as a bishop in January 2011.He was elevated to Cardinal by Benedict XVI in 2010.
In March 2012, soon after turning the OCSP over to Msgr Steenson, Wuerl was at the center of controversy:
In March 2012, Wuerl . . . punished a priest for his attempt to defend the Eucharist. Father Marcel Guarnizo, longtime visiting priest in D.C., learned just before a funeral Mass that a practicing lesbian Buddhist was in attendance. When she came up to receive, he quietly withheld Communion from her, after which she promptly switched lines and received from the extraordinary minister instead.Wuerl is generally recognized as a member of the liberal faction of US bishops on issues like communion for the divorced and remarried. More recently, he became the subject of media attention for his lavish lifestyle (the author of this piece, George Neumayr, appears to be a frequent Wuerl critic).Cardinal Wuerl's condemnation was swift. Within days Fr. Guarnizo was stripped of his priestly faculties and placed on administrative leave, accused by the archdiocese of allegedly "intimidating behavior" — while the archdiocese went out of its way to issue an apology to the lesbian.
The Catholic cardinal of the nation’s capital since 2006, Wuerl has long had a reputation for high living — despite his exalted status as the most powerful American prelate in what the media calls the “humble church” of Pope Francis. (In his previous posting as a bishop in Pittsburgh, he lived in a 31-room mansion filled with antiques, rugs, and art.) But few know the details of his furtive pursuits on Embassy Row — a posh lifestyle which stands in shocking contrast to the simplicity Pope Francis insists he wants his shepherds to embrace.
Further,
Earlier in the day, I had called Fr. Charles Cortinovis, the personal secretary to Cardinal Wuerl, multiple times and received no response. I had learned that Cortinovis lives, along with Wuerl, on the fourth floor of the archdiocesan building at 2200 California, a property priced at north of $43,000,000.Neumayr related two attempts to confront Wuerl in person at book signings. At the second,Cortinovis is the third personal secretary to Cardinal Wuerl during a tenure less than a decade. The other two had also lived on the same floor with the cardinal, which is “12,000 square feet,” according to a rough estimate by a lawyer familiar with the property records for the building.
[O]fficials with Opus Dei, the organization that runs the Catholic Information Center, encircled me and demanded that I leave. Evidently they had been briefed by archdiocesan officials on my journalistic investigation into the cardinal’s Embassy Row lifestyle. “I am a member of the press,” I replied as they pressed against me. “Call the police” if you want me to leave, I said to them as they temporized about what to do with me.As it happens, Msgr William Stetson was Director of the Catholic Information Center from 2004 to 2007 and continues to be a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei. In 2011-12, he was assigned, presumably by Cardinal Wuerl, to supervise the transition of St Mary of the Angels into the OCSP -- the original intent, stated by Stetson, was that the parish would be the first to enter the OCSP, on the first Sunday following the new year 2012.
This intent quickly went wrong -- in the first days of January, members of the parish were supposedly to make a first confession before being received, but it was never scheduled, and that strongly suggested to me that plans had changed, well before any announcement was made. It's hard to avoid concluding that Stetson, Wuerl, Hurd, and the newly-designated Steenson were all closely involved in this, with Fr Kelley and the parish kept in the dark.
Stetson has also been closely associated with Cardinal Bernard Law, dating back to their days together at Harvard in the late 1940s. He appears to have been a conduit between Law, Wuerl, and the Anglican Use, and then to Jeffrey Steenson. According to Wikipedia,
Since 1983 Monsignor Stetson has also served as consultant and later secretary to the Ecclesiastical Delegate of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for the Pastoral Provision for former Episcopal priests, by means of which over a hundred men have been ordained for priestly service in the Roman Catholic Church. He maintained the Pastoral Provision Office at Our Lady of Walsingham parish, an Anglican Use congregation in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston from 2007-2010.By Msgr Steenson's account, Stetson, a canon lawyer, was his adviser in the 2007 negotiations with TEC Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori that led to Steenson's amicable resignation as TEC Bishop of the Rio Grande and departure for Rome.
We actually have only a few data points in the developments that led to Anglicanorum coetibus. It was difficult enough to track down the meeting among TEC Bp Pope, then-Fr Steenson, and then-Cardinal Ratzinger in 1993, in which the structure of Anglicanorum coetibus was first mooted. But Stetson's biography strongly suggests that more happened between 1993 and 2010 than we now know, and that Law and Wuerl were closely involved, presumably with Benedict in the final phases.
Neither Law nor Wuerl is a theological conservative. Indeed, actual scandal surrounds Law, and there's at least a suggestion surrounding Wuerl. There must have been an agenda in the works. What don't we know?
