Bishop Bruskewitz’s successor named in Lincoln

CWN - September 14, 2012

Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Auxiliary Bishop James Conley of Denver as the new bishop of Lincoln, Nebraska, succeeding Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, who is retiring at the age of 77 after two decades as bishop.

Under Bishop Bruskewitz’s leadership, Lincoln consistently led US dioceses in the ratio of seminarians to Catholics, and his diocese remains the only one in the United States that forbids female altar servers. In 1996, he gained national attention when he decreed that Lincoln Catholics who persist in membership in Call to Action, Masonic organizations, and anti-life organizations, and the Society of St. Pius X face automatic interdict and excommunication. More recently, he was responsible for the majority of the translation of theCompendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church into English.

Bishop Conley, 57, is a convert to Catholicism; he was received into the Church at the University of Kansas as a student in John Senior’s Integrated Humanities Program. Ordained a priest of the Diocese of Wichita in 1985, Father Conley worked for the Congregation for Bishops and served as a pastor before his 2008 appointment as auxiliary bishop.

“I have great love and appreciation for the Tridentine, or ‘extraordinary form’ of the Mass,” Bishop Conley said in 2011. “But I also see how the ordinary form, the Novus Ordo, has nourished and sanctified the spiritual lives of countless souls over the past 40 plus years.”

“And yet … something has been lost,” he added. “Something of the beauty and grandeur of the liturgy. Something of the reverence, the mystery, the sense of the transcendent … the problem is not the Novus Ordo — but the license that people sometimes take in celebrating it. I would add that another big part of the problem has been the translations we’ve been using. There is a banal, pedestrian quality to much of the language.”

Bishop Conley: Pope Smiled When He Heard U.S. Seminarian Numbers Are Up

Bishop James Conley of Denver said the news of rising seminarian numbers across the United States has delighted Pope Benedict XVI.

“He was very happy to receive that information,” Bishop Conley told EWTN News on May 4 after meeting the Pope at the Vatican.

“He said he had heard that vocations were going up in the United States, and he said this is very positive news; and, in fact, he had a big smile on his face when he heard the news.”

“I told him that in the Archdiocese of Denver both of our seminaries, St. John Vianney Theological Seminary and Redeptoris Mater Neocatechumenal Seminary, are full,” the bishop added.

“In fact, we have more applicants than we have space, so, for the first time in many years, we have to create a waiting list, which is a good problem to have.”

 
Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/bishop-conley-pope-smiled-when-he-heard-u.s.-seminarian-numbers-are-up#ixzz26RNK1nGo