The buzz is a roar. The race to succeed Cardinal Edward Egan is nearing the finish line. And the winner is…!
“Who knows?”, by a mile!
Well, one sure bet is that the long-awaited announcement is nigh–Egan (he’s the one on the right) turned 75, the mandatory retirement age, nearly two years ago. But the pope can keep a bishop on as long as he likes, and Pope Benedict XVI apparently likes to do that. As Laurie Goodstein notes in her fine summation in today New York Times, the rumor that Egan’s beloved baby grand piano has been moved out of the Madison Avenue rectory is unfounded.

On Wednesday, Joseph Zwilling, the cardinal’s spokesman, said there was no truth to the rumor. “The piano is in the cardinal’s residence, where it has always been,” he said.

Then again, this wouldn’t a bad week for some good news for Rome. (Maciel, Williamson, et al.) Goodstein cites the persistent buzz about Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan, long a top candidate. He’s Irish, he’s affable, he’s media-friendly–and his people are denying everything. Still…”I think in many ways if the part of archbishop of New York could ever be scripted, Archbishop Dolan would really be cast in that role,” Father David M. O’Connell, president of the Catholic University of America in Washington, told The Times.
What Goodstein did not report, however, is the shocking news that Dolan’s candidacy will be scotched (sorry, Hibernians) by a brewing scandal over his failure to pay “back tithes.” Catholic Minority Report has the story…

The supposed nominee, on condition of anonymity, said he “just plain forgot.” He said he was deeply embarrassed by the unfortunate disclosure recently made public and asked that this “oversight” was put in context of years of service to the Church.
He wrote a letter to L’Osservatore Romano saying, “In December, the archdiocese’s accountant advised me that I was a little behind in my donations. In an effort to ensure full compliance and the most complete disclosure possible of my personal finances, we remedied these issues by filing amended tithing returns with full payments, without interest. I assure everyone my mistakes were unintentional and I disclosed this information to the Pope voluntarily, and paid the tithing (without interest) promptly.”
Pope Benedict XVI seems to be standing behind his nominee, saying today that his nominee is truly the only man for the job and that any attempt to derail this nomination would be seen as an attempt to play “the theologies of personal eschatology.” He said the nominee was uniquely qualified for the position of Archbishop. The Pope then added that it actually didn’t matter what anyone else thought because “I won.”

Well, now it turns out that Vatican’s legendary “facciata bronzata” is crumbling, and they are weighing alternates. The leading candidate is a brilliant choice: Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert. He’s Catholic, he’s a Sunday School teacher, he’s funny as heck, and he has just one wife (allegedly), which was of course St. Paul’s main requirement for bishops. The Desperate Blogger has the tale:

Confronted with questions regarding the fact that Colbert has never been ordained, and is, in fact, married with three children, the source told reporters, “These are not necessarily disqualifying factors. His Holiness recognizes that positions such as this often require a fine balance between the political and the ecumenical. As a former presidential candidate, and perhaps even more so as a Sunday school teacher, Mr. Colbert will be prepared to deal with whatever Church politics he may have to face. And as a popular television personality, His Holiness must also consider his ability to ‘put the butts in the seats’ every Sunday. With the financial crisis already forcing the closure of fourteen of our schools in New York City, the diocese could benefit greatly from ‘The Colbert Bump’. As far as him having children, that could work out in his favor as well. If the Archbishop has children, conventional wisdom says it’s much less likely to be revealed later that he’s ‘had children’, if you get my drift.”

At dotCommonweal, Cathleen Kaveny even has the scoop on Cardinal Colbert’s first pastoral letter: The Splendor of Truthiness (Veritissitatis Splendor).
As always, I’m not confirming anything until it comes straight from the bocca del cavallo–that’d be Rocco Palmo, not the Pope. And Rocco says this morning he’s not talking. He’s taking the high road.

Once upon a time, I could just throw everything at the wall and see what stuck… but that hasn’t been the case for a good while now. With a readership of this size, see, comes a responsibility I’ve tried and hoped to rise to — in a word, to be accurate — and, gratefully, that’s improved. (Not without fits and starts, of course, but it’s gotten better.)
Behind the page, though, what that’s meant is a lot more time and energy spent nailing things down beyond any shadow of a doubt, a lot less time to answer e.mails and send acknowledgments, and more than just sometimes, 10, 12, even 15 hours or more of working the lines, all to come up with nothing but a false alarm — for the record, this has already happened on multiple occasions… in recent weeks. But even so, just as you’ve come to expect “the goods,” making sure what seems true actually is before a single word runs here is simply doing my job.
If that looks easy, good — just know it’s anything but.

And that’s today’s “Word”…