how about this instead: Military Archbishop O’Brien for NY, early retirement for LA’s Cardinal, and Levada sent there.
We have an Archbishop in Boston you can have. Heck, we’ll throw in a retired Auxilary and buy him another $300 set of sandals for the trip.
Sounds good to me! Levada probably wouldn’t be very much better than Mahony, judging by his performance in SF, but he’s less of a media hound and probably, in the long run, a shade more orthodox and obedient than Roger. I think one of the problems with these guys is, alas, you can’t “unmake” them. So you have to keep shuffling them around until the one who happens to be a problem ends up some place where (a) he can’t do any damage; and (b) it doesn’t put some other cardinal’s nose out of joint that he was placed there.