Bishop Holley Goes To Graceland – Pope Taps DC Aux. for Memphis

As Cardinal Theodore McCarrick gradually returns to kicking after knee-replacement surgery earlier this month, the spoils just keep coming for his onetime top aides.Six days after the great Uncle's lead deputy in Washington was called to Rome as head of a Vatican dicastery, at Noon today – in an unusual August nod – the Pope named the cardinal's last "son," the veteran DC auxiliary Martin Holley, 61, as fifth bishop of Memphis in succession to the venerable Terry Steib SVD, a prelate of some 32 years and the longtime convener of the African-American bishops, who reached the retirement age in May 2015.An exceedingly warm, kind, ever-smiling figure, Holley had spent his life and priesthood as a pastor in the Florida Panhandle until his 2004 appointment as Washington's customary auxiliary with primary responsibility for its sizable Black church. Notably, along the way the Pope's pick was assigned to the vocations office in his home diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee – a particularly key area for the 80,000-member Memphis church, which has boasted a disproportionately high number of  seminarians over recent years, ordaining five priests in 2014.Among the unique attributes of the western Tennessee fold, Steib's stewardship of the diocesan schools is a particular standout. In a move practically unheard of elsewhere, the retiring bishop reopened six shuttered inner-city schools in 1998, entrusting their future to a first-of-its-kind partnership model whose success has led to attempts to imitate it far afield. (Here's lookin' at you, Mary McDonald.) On another front, as the bench's last active heir of one John Lawrence May – the St Louis archbishop whose liturgical preferences were famously described as "wine, women and song" – Steib has been increasingly intent on the church's outreach to gays and lesbians, chartering one of the few diocesan offices dedicated to ministry to the same-sex attracted and, in January, devoting his last pastoral letter to what he termed "a new season" in the church marked by a "compassionate response" to those in irregular situations vis a vis church teaching, a stance heavily echoed three months later by the Pope himself in Amoris Laetitia.Developing – more to come.-30-