{Cardinal] Tobin on Amoris: Bishops Should ‘Suck It Up’ and Work Together

Crux ^ | 11/21/16 | John Allen Jr

[marshmallow]

New Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark told Crux on Monday that when it comes to the pope’s document Amoris Laetita and its provisions on Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics, U.S. bishops should get together and work out a strategy rather than individually asking the pope for clarifications.

ROME - I’ve often said that one of the best ways to know you’re getting old in the Catholic Church is when guys you used to pal around with in Roman bars and restaurants start getting named bishops. By that standard, I suppose, the test of getting really old is when those same guys become cardinals.

Such was my experience on Saturday, watching Joseph Tobin become a member of the Church’s most exclusive club.

I first met then-Father Tobin back in the 1990s, when he was the superior general of the worldwide Redemptorist order, and we were still friends over a decade later when he went to work for the Vatican as the number two official in the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, better known around town as the “Congregation for Religious.”

I was always impressed with the balance, intelligence, and cultural adaptability Tobin displayed, and presumably those are some of the same reasons Pope Francis surprised pretty much everyone - Tobin very much included - by naming him a cardinal.

In conventional political terms Tobin is generally seen as a center-left figure, in many ways cut from the same cloth as the pope. During his tenure in the Vatican, he became known for his open questioning of two separate investigations of American nuns - comments that some observers believe helped cost him his job, and help explain why friends see the red hat he picked up on Saturday as a karmic balancing of the scales.