San Francisco prelate airs drunken driving

“Sexual differences cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the definition of marriage,” he said.

The appointment letter the pope wrote appointing Archbishop Cordileone was read aloud at the installation Mass. In it, Benedict said he appealed to the archbishop’s parishioners “to give you a warm welcome and to remain in communion with you.”

For his part, Archbishop Cordileone mentioned marriage only obliquely during his homily.

Thursday was the feast day of San Francisco’s patron saint, St. Francis of Assisi, and the archbishop said that St. Francis, too, lived during a time of spiritual unrest “even to the point of denigrating marriage on the basis that it was purely a material reality.”

Archbishop Cordileone’s arrest came after he was stopped at a police checkpoint near San Diego State University. His mother and a visiting priest from Germany were with him in the car he was driving. He said at the time that he had consumed some alcohol while having dinner with friends then decided to drive his mother home.

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