James Stafford

Based on Wikipedia: James Stafford

James Stafford was born in a city that knew him only as its son.\n\nOn July 26, 1932, in Baltimore, Maryland, the only child of Francis Emmett and Mary Dorothy Stafford came into the world. His father ran a furniture store—opened by his grandfather back in 1902—with the kind of quiet permanence that defined so much of Catholic life in middle America. The boy grew up in Irvington, a Baltimore neighborhood where the streets still knew how to hold one another, and he graduated from Loyola High School in Towson in 1950.\n\nThen came the car crash.\n\nIn 1962, a close friend died in an accident that shattered James Stafford's carefully laid plans for medicine. The future cardinal was attending Loyola College Maryland, his career path seemingly set toward healing bodies. But grief has a way of opening doors that ambition alone never could. He entered St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore—the same year, the same moment, with the particular weight of one life ending altering the trajectory of another.\n\nThe seminary years taught him patience. Archbishop Francis Keough sent him to Rome, to the Pontifical North American College, where he attended thePontifical Gregorian University. In that city of ancient stone and modern purpose, Stafford was ordained to the priesthood for the Archdiocese of Baltimore by Bishop Martin O'Connor on December 15, 1957.\n\nHe earned his Licentiate of Sacred Theology from theGregorian University in 1958. The church had its new priest.\n\n## A Man of Two Worlds\n\nStafford returned to Baltimore and took up his first pastoral assignment as assistant pastor at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish, where he remained until 1962. But something about his formation called for more than just parish work. He entered the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he earned a Master of Social Work degree in 1964—his thesis examined the foster care of children.\n\nThis dual formation in theology and social work would define him. From 1964 to 1966, Stafford served as assistant director of the archdiocesan Catholic Charities and assistant pastor of St. Ann Parish in Baltimore. He was then named director of the archdiocesan branch of Catholic Charities by Cardinal Lawrence Shehan—serving in that position for ten years.\n\nIn 1970, Pope Paul VI named Stafford a chaplain of his holiness. The following year, he was elected president of the presbyteral senate for the archdiocese. He helped reorganize the central services and create its collegial structures—the kind of work that builds an institution from the inside out.\n\nOn January 11, 1976, Paul VI appointed Stafford as auxiliary bishop of Baltimore and titular bishop of Respecta. His consecration on February 29, 1976, at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore, with Archbishop William Borders presiding and Shehan and Bishop Thomas Murphy as co-consecrators, marked his entry into the hierarchy.\n\nStafford chose as his episcopal motto: In principium erat Verbum—Latin for "In the beginning was the Word," drawn from John 1:15. The word mattered to him. Language, precision, the sacred text itself—all of it would guide his years.\n\nAs auxiliary bishop, he served as vicar general of the archdiocese from 1976 to 1981. From 1978 to 1984, he led the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Commission on Marriage and Family Life—guiding the church's response to family structures under pressure in a changing America.\n\nHe also served as administrator of Sts. Philip and James Parish in Baltimore from 1980 to 1981.\n\nStafford attended the Fifth Ordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in Vatican City from September to October 1980—sitting among bishops from around the world, listening to the voice of the institution speaking in one chorus.\n\n## Memphis: The Southern Diocese\n\nOn November 17, 1981, Pope John Paul II appointed Stafford as the second bishop of Memphis. He was installed on January 17, 1982.\n\nHis tenure in Memphis saw him revise the structure of the pastoral office, improve the fiscal conditions of the diocese, and concentrate on evangelizing African Americans—a particular burden he carried with the seriousness of someone who understood that the church had not always spoken to black Catholics as clearly as it spoke to others. In addition to his duties in Memphis, Stafford was chairman of the USCCB Commission for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs from 1984 to 1991 and co-president of the Dialogue between Roman Catholics and Lutherans from 1984 to 1997.\n\nHe led through a time when Catholic identity in the American South meant something different than it did on the coasts. But his work was noticed.\n\n## Denver: The Mountain Archbishop\n\nFollowing the death of Archbishop James Casey, John Paul II appointed Stafford as the third archbishop of Denver on June 3, 1986. He was installed at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Denver, Colorado, on July 30, 1986.\n\nDenver presented different challenges. In 1990, the Vincentian Fathers announced the closing in 1994 of St. Thomas Seminary due to falling enrollment. Stafford decided to buy the seminary property and plan a brand new institution—St. John Vianney Theological Seminary. The new facility opened in 1999 under his successor, Archbishop Charles Chaput.\n\nStafford hosted the 1993 World Youth Day—the first such event in the United States. In his final year as archbishop, he launched the first capital campaign in forty years and a "Strategic Plan" for Catholic schools.\n\nBut Denver also brought something darker.\n\nIn a July 28, 2005 article in the Denver Post, five men described being fondled as boys during the 1960s by Reverend Harold Robert White. In August 1983—one of the complainants wrote to Stafford complaining about White's behavior. A response letter from the archdiocese said that White was to receive an evaluation from competent personnel to determine whether there were recurring difficulties.\n\nWhite continued to work in parish ministry until 1993; he was laicized in 2004.\n\nStafford's handling of this matter—and what it revealed about institutional silence and clerical protection—would linger.\n\n## Rome: The Curia Calls\n\nOn August 20, 1996, John Paul II appointed Stafford as president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity. He was created cardinal-deacon of Gesù Buon Pastore alla Montagnola Parish in Rome in the consistory of 1998.\n\nIn 2003, Stafford was appointed major penitentiary—overseeing matters pertaining to indulgences and the internal forum of the Catholic Church. He was one of the highest ranking American members of the Roman Curia and the second one in that role.\n\nHe participated in the 2005 papal conclave that selected Pope Benedict XVI.\n\nStafford submitted his letter of resignation to Benedict XVI on his 75th birthday in 2007—choosing the path of retirement that so many bishops before him had walked. On June 2, 2009, Benedict XVI appointed as his successor Archbishop Fortunato Baldelli, then apostolic nuncio to France.\n\nOn March 1, 2008, after ten years as a cardinal deacon, Stafford took the option for promotion to the rank of cardinal-priest and was assigned the titular church of San Pietro in Montorio.\n\nIn 2009, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology and inducted into their College of Fellows.\n\n## The Voice Against Obama\n\nThe National Catholic Reporter reported on November 19, 2008, that Stafford had criticized US President-elect Barack Obama, saying he has \"an agenda and vision that are aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic\".\n\nThe story was first reported by The Tower, the student newspaper of the Catholic University of America, where Stafford made those remarks. Saying that the United States experienced a \"cultural earthquake\" when Obama was elected president, Stafford said the president-elect \"appears to be a relaxed, smiling man\" with rhetorical skills that are \"very highly developed\".\n\n> \"But under all that grace and charm, there is a tautness of will, a state of constant alertness, to attack and resist any external influence that might affect his will\", he added.\n\nStafford then predicted that the Obama administration would compare to \"Jesus' agony in the Garden of Gethsemane\". The Catholic News Agency revealed more details about Stafford's remarks that same week: > \"If 1968 was the year of America's 'suicide attempt,' 2008 is the year of America's exhaustion,\" he said, contrasting the year of publication of Humanae vitae with this election year. > \"For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden,\" Stafford told his audience.\n\nCatholics who weep the \"hot, angry tears of betrayal\" should try to identify with Jesus, who during his agony in the garden was \"sick because of love\".\n\nStafford also attributed America's so-called decline to US Supreme Court decisions such as the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which Stafford claims imposed \"permissive abortion laws nationwide\".\n\nHe had spoken many times from the ambo. But this speech—this language of apocalypse and crisis—would define how some American Catholics understood their new president.\n\nThe cardinal who was born when Baltimore knew him only as its son died as something else entirely: a voice in the cultural wars, a man whose church still held the Eucharist close to its chest, whose warnings were not gentle.