Fr. Robert Barron among new Los Angeles auxiliary bishops

In a stunning move, at Roman Noon this Tuesday, the Pope named the 55 year-old rector/president of the Windy City's Mundelein Seminary as one of three auxiliary bishops for the nation’s largest local church — the 5 million-member archdiocese of Los Angeles — alongside two of its most well-regarded lifers: Msgr Joseph Brennan, 61, the career pastor turned lead vicar-general to Archbishop José Gomez, and the Irish-born Msgr David O’Connell, 61, whose decades of ministry in LA’s violence-torn South Central corridor arguably comprise the Stateside bench’s most potent example yet of the “peripheries” Francis insistently wants present at the church’s center.

While each bishop-elect brings a compelling story, to use one op’s term, the appointment of Barron is likely to “suck the air out of the room” far beyond the three-county SoCal juggernaut, now the largest diocese in American Catholicism’s five centuries of existence. A protege of the late Cardinal Francis George (whose own successor in Chicago some leading prelates hoped Barron would be), the nominee's Word on Fire ministry of films, widely circulated, conservative-leaning columns and YouTube commentaries have made him a household name in church circles as well as one of the US fold's most popular speakers, and now, the highest-profile Stateside priest to enter the episcopacy since one Timothy Michael Dolan became an auxiliary of his native St Louis in 2001 after seven years of taking Rome by storm as rector of the Pontifical North American College.

Along these lines, Barron is one of the few incoming US bishops who's already appeared before his new confreres as a speaker, having served as spiritual director for the bench's 2013 summer retreat. Yet even as the calculus behind his Western move remains a mystery, its seismic impact on two of the nation's three largest dioceses is immediate: in LA, the bishop-elect heads to the most influential seat of pop culture on earth, his "rock star" talents for communication (and, indeed, fund-raising) on-hand to shore up a sometimes restive Anglo minority in the trenches, while in the 2.3 million-member Chicago church, the leadership of Mundelein – long regarded as the "crown jewel" of American seminaries, currently the US' third-largest formation house – now falls vacant for Archbishop Blase Cupich to fill just nine months into his tenure, a pick with implications across the Midwest.

http://whispersintheloggia.blogspot.com/2015/07/bishop-barron-goes-to-hollywood-pope_21.html

Barron is certainly regarded as a conservative (in Catholic terms, at least), which makes it all the more interesting that (a) Pope Francis appointed him and (b) he's heading to Los Angeles, of all places.