As you know, the VP of the USCCB is usually expected to succeed the President after their three-year terms are up. So, three years ago, Cardinal George was elected VP and now he’s President. Right after the vote for president, the vote for VP was conducted, with several candidates in the running. A run-off was required between Arcbishop Dolan of Milwaukee and Bishop Kicanas of Tucson. Bishop Kicanas won, is now the VP of the USCCB, and, if “tradition” holds, will be elected president in 2010.
(But remember…it’s not required. The bishops don’t have to elect him president when the time comes. They are perfectly free to elect someone else whom they believe would be a better representative of their body in the public eye. They are free to do that.)
Yesterday, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story detailing Bishop Kicanas’ involvement in one of the area’s more notorious recent clerical abuse scandals – not a blast from the past, but those involving a priest ordained in 1994, who attended Mundelein seminary while Kicanas was rector. Daniel McCormack is his name, and he was convicted in July of molesting five boys.
The Sun-Times article:

While rector of Mundelein Seminary in the 1990s, Bishop Gerald Kicanas says he knew about three reports of “sexual improprieties” against then-seminarian Daniel McCormack.
Still, Kicanas supported McCormack’s ordination, he told the Sun-Times.
“It would have been grossly unfair not to have ordained him,” said Kicanas, now bishop of Tucson, Ariz., who was interviewed Tuesday after his election to vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
McCormack went to prison in July for molesting five boys while assigned to a West Side parish.
U.S. bishops are trying mightily at their assembly in Baltimore this week to portray the scandals as largely a problem of the past. The McCormack case exposed the Archdiocese of Chicago’s recent failures when allegations surfaced before the priest’s 2006 arrest.
Mundelein officials learned in 1992 about sexual accusations against McCormack involving two adult males and a minor. The incidents began in 1988 when McCormack was at a seminary school known as Niles College, according to archdiocesan reports.
“There was a sense that his activity was part of the developmental process and that he had learned from the experience,” Kicanas said. “I was more concerned about his drinking. We sent him to counseling for that.”
McCormack was ordained in 1994. The following year, Kicanas became a Chicago auxiliary bishop.
The archdiocese’s vicar general, the Rev. John Canary, also worked at Mundelein at the time. He recently told the Sun-Times that McCormack should have never been ordained.
Kicanas disagrees, saying there was no “credible” allegation against McCormack.
“I don’t think there was anything I could have done differently,” Kicanas said.

Raise your hand if at the end of that last sentence, you actually said aloud, “You could have rejected him for ordination.”
It is disturbing, to say the least, to know that a seminary rector would see it as “grossly unfair” not to ordain a man with drinking problems and sexual issues of this kind – the kind that get you written up.
From all I’ve read about McCormack, he was a popular priest. Parishioners responded to his preaching and their interaction with him. Perhaps  these “gifts” of McCormack – whatever they were – were considered too valuable to be rejected. Perhaps in the mind of his formators, they outweighed any potential problems. Another possibility is, of course, that in the culture into which McCormack was being ordained, these “problems” were not actually seen as serious “problems” at all. That’s just another possibility.
Bishop Kicanas is by all accounts a very kind, affable man. His choice, though as the new USCCB by over half of his brother bishops to possibly be the face of the conference starting in 2011, in contrast to other more generally well-known figures like Dolan, Rigali and Vigneron is interesting, although perhaps that has its own advantages. The Sun-Times article, though, certainly has people wondering and raises new questions.
Not that the presidency is inevitable. Back in 2004, the two nominees for chair of the Bishops’ Committee on Liturgy were Rigali and Vigneron – and then Kinney of St. Cloud rose and nominated Trautmann from the floor, reading off a list of five other bishops who seconded the nomination. And the rest is history. Of a sort.
 Anything can happen….
Back to the issue of abuse…please read this First Things piece up today, by writer and mom Patricia Snow about how child-protection efforts are playing themselves out on the parish level.