The Communion of Just Some Guys
I have a lot in common with Salvatore Cordileone: we both have hilarious Italian names, and we're both completely unqualified to be bishops
"Look at Me, poor and despised of men; are the great people of the world likely to be great in My eyes?"
-Jesus, speaking to Saint Teresa of Avila in a vision
"You called me again, drunk in your Benz
Driving home under the influence…
I don't relate to you
I don't relate to you, no
'Cause I'd never treat me this shitty."
-Billie Eilish
My dear friend and longtime comedy partner Nadia Vazquez has a saying: every man, deep down, is just some guy. No matter how a man presents himself or what his title is or where he comes from, he's still going to do stupid stuff, because he is still Just Some Guy and he's going to do the things that Just Some Guys do. He's going to say dumb things and double down on them. He's going to read a fake thing online and think that it's real. He's going to make decisions regularly that are selfish and shortsighted.
What my friend meant by "men are just some guys" is that no man is immune from this. If you get a fancy degree from a fancy school, you're still Just Some Guy. If you are elected to the United States Senate or if you make a billion dollars, you're still Just Some Guy. If you get married and raise a family and do well in your career, you're still Just Some Guy. We're all moving through life with fake-ish credentials, trying to win arguments and feel good and justify ourselves to ourselves, and most of us only occasionally get it right when it comes to demonstrating values like "mercy" or "solidarity" or "charity". And if you're ordained as a priest, if you graduate from divinity school, if the Pope himself names you a bishop or a cardinal in the church that preaches mercy and solidarity and charity, you're still Just Some Guy getting it wrong most of the time.
I've never expressed it quite as succinctly as my friend, but exploring how Just Some Guys influence our church has always been central to G.O.T.H.S. I am Just Some Guy - I'm not an especially good Catholic and I'm not especially intelligent or insightful, and while I'm at it too many of you read this newsletter - but I hope that I have been able, on occasion, to show you that the people who steer our church are also Just Some Guys. They are about as qualified to run things, to administer the sacraments, to preach, to hire employees, to post a video telling you what's wrong with the church, as I am, and I am Just Some Guy you're reading on your phone who put a Billie Eilish quote at the top of this piece.
This idea that nobody is exempt from being Just Some Guy comes up all the time in G.O.T.H.S.; honestly, the number of times it has come up is kind of a bummer if you think about what that really means. I even wrote this idea out in the very first installment of the newsletter from November 2019:
"To the extent that this project has a thesis, it's this: the shit that is ruining the world is also ruining the Catholic church...People of God are not exempt from toxic masculinity or alt-right YouTube videos or rich people thinking they're infallible or the desire for fame at all costs."
We hit this theme a lot early on: Tom Monaghan wasn't an evil genius, he was a rich guy doing the stupid vanity projects that rich guys love doing. Rick Heilman wasn't a cruel authoritarian, he was an old man who spent too much time looking at the Internet. Randall Terry...well, I think he just really wanted to be famous.
As the project went on, this theme kept coming up. Taylor Marshall just wanted to pay his mortgage on time. Catholic "voter guides" were just by and for Republicans. The attorneys at Opus Bono Sacerdotti were just not that bright. JD Flynn is just a hack. Dwight Longenecker is just a dipshit. Rod Dreher is just a scared little bigot. And, in one recent piece on Catholic crowdfunding, I tried to be very direct:
"One thing I've learned from writing all of these pieces is that we shouldn't overthink the reasons why people do things...My point is that when it comes to far-right Catholicism, you're much less likely to find widespread coordinated evil plots than you are to find a bunch of stupid people doing stupid things, stupidly, for stupid reasons. Put another way: people like money, power, comfort, and attention. There are exceptions, but when people make decisions, a lot of them make those decisions based on what's going to help them gain or hold onto their money, power, comfort, and attention."
The Just Some Guy philosophy has served me well in telling the stories of the weirdest, dumbest, saddest members of the church. But does that include the bishops? Are the successors of the Apostles also Just Some Guys? Obviously yes. Thomas J. Tobin has the memory of a goldfish. Tim Dolan thinks Donald Trump is a big strong beautiful smart president. Robert Barron and Joseph Strickland would both be extremely susceptible to phishing scams. And, in a November 2020 piece in which I called the USCCB, among other things, "stupid idiots on their way to the Stupid Idiot Club", I wrote this:
"Bishops, as human beings, are not special. This is a theme we’ve explored before many times, but it’s worth repeating over and over. When you become a bishop, you aren’t magically endowed with better judgment than you had, and God does not sit you down for a special meeting to explain how the world works. You don’t get a pamphlet revealing the secrets of good moral discernment. You were a grumpy impotent old man before you became a bishop, and you are a grumpy impotent old man after you become a bishop, probably looking at TV and websites that are slowly driving you insane. When these bishops all meet, it is not a summit of brilliant theologians carefully examining the problems of the day, it's a group of old men all bitching about what they saw on Fox News and sniping at each other."
I think you're getting the idea here. A lot of men, including men in the church hierarchy, will present themselves as the Good and Right Catholics You Should Listen To, when their actions and decisions reveal them to be, as pretty much everyone turns out to be, Just Some Guys. And to illustrate this further, we should take a closer look at our most Just Some Guy bishop, San Francisco's Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone ayyyyyyy mammamiapizzapasta.
CHAPTER ONE - THE MOST JUST SOME GUY CRIME
In addition to the most comically Italian name since minor Grease character ChaCha DeGregorio, Cordileone brought one other unique attribute when he was named to the Archdiocese of San Francisco: his recent DUI arrest. DUI is, of course, the most "Just Some Guy" crime, and Cordileone fishtailed into it in a pretty Just Some Guy way: he had too much to drink and found himself at a DUI checkpoint, blowing over the legal limit, while trying to drive his mom home from a restaurant. When this happened in 2012, Cordileone had already been named as the next Archbishop of San Francisco, although he had not been formally installed in his new city yet. San Francisco wasn't exactly looking forward to Cordileone in the first place; in his previous job, he was best known for leading the Catholic support for Proposition 8, the then-successful but now-defunct 2008 ballot measure to ban gay marriage in California. Cordileone helped draft the language of Prop 8 and fundraise for its campaign. He prided himself on being a moral conservative culture warrior, but shortly before stepping up into his new job, everyone learned that his moral culture wars didn't extend to, you know, driving sober while his mom - his mom! - was in the car.
Like most first-time offenders, Cordileone pleaded down to a reckless driving charge and didn't serve jail time. And look, there's a silver lining here: nobody was hurt, and making a very public stupid mistake like this - again, his mom was in the car when he was arrested! He was in his fifties! - was an opportunity for Cordileone to approach his new position with a newfound humility. The only real way to screw that up any further, from a public perception standpoint, would be for Cordileone to kind of half-ass a joke about his recent arrest during the homily he gave at his literal installation Mass. And of course he wasn't going to make a joke about his DUI arrest during his installation Mass, are you kidding me, who would even do that?! We're talking about one of the direct successors of the Apostles here!
Except that we're also talking about Just Some Guy. Here's Cordileone during his homily:
"I know in my life God has always had a way of putting me in my place. I would say, though, that in the latest episode of my life God has outdone himself."
Which, in turn, led to headlines like this congratulating the archdiocese on the new Just Some Guy running things:
If you're Just Some Guy, you do stupid stuff and you laugh about it later. I’ll even use another example from driving: last year, I got caught on three different Chicago speed cameras in the same week. I didn't enjoy paying those tickets, but the string of bad timing was pretty funny in retrospect, I certainly don't speed anymore, and I even brought one of the tickets with me as proof of address when I went to renew my license; the DMV employee called me a "clever man". And now I joke about it. It's stupid but it's fine, because I’m not supposed to be the moral leader of a region that is home to 441,000 Catholics. I'm Just Some Guy.
I suppose, though, that even if I am Just Some Guy, I would feel less comfortable joking about a driving infraction that got me booked into jail and required me to post $2,500 in bail. And I would feel less comfortable joking about it during my installation as the Archbishop of San Francisco, when I was coming into town looking to drop the moral hammer on any gay people I could find. That said, the embarrassing headlines did seem to humble Cordileone a little bit, and he didn’t go into overdrive on moral authoritarianism right away. At least not for a few years.
CHAPTER TWO - JUST SOME BOSS
In 2015, Cordileone decided it was time to update the code of conduct for the Catholic school teachers employed by the archdiocese. In a statement he released early that year titled “Statement of the High Schools of the Archdiocese of San Francisco Regarding Teachings and Practice of the Catholic Church,” Cordileone proclaimed that the schools he oversaw “exist to affirm and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ as held and taught by his Catholic Church,” and outlined new policies that he wanted to put in place across the school system, including strict morality clauses to ensure that archdiocesan teachers, people who served as the representatives of the church to impressionable schoolchildren, would never do a DUI while their moms were also in the car.
Just kidding, of course the morality clauses weren’t about DUIs at all, they were about being gay! Cordileone wanted it written into the employee handbook that “all extra-marital sexual relationships are gravely evil, including adultery, masturbation, fornication, the viewing of pornography and homosexual relations,” and make all of those grounds for termination with cause, even with no clear outline on how to enforce the masturbation thing.
This caused controversy right away; state legislators wrote to Cordileone telling him to back off, and Cordileone responded with “Would you hire a campaign manager who advocates policies contrary to those you stand for, and who shows disrespect for you and the Democratic Party in general?” The message was clear: gay people, and, I guess, people who masturbate, “show disrespect for the Catholic church”, and Cordileone had the right to hire and fire as he saw fit. And that sucks, but if you’re an at-will employee, that’s something your boss has the power to do. He can fire you for whatever reason he sees fit, and there’s not much you can do about it.
But, being Just Some Guy, Cordileone was never very smart, and he made a severe miscalculation in this case. Because the high school teachers in the Arch of San Francisco aren’t at-will employees, they’re represented by AFT Local 2240. It’s not often that you run into unionized Catholic schools - under current labor law, it’s very hard to unionize workers at religious institutions - but when you do, you find that they don’t have a lot of patience for bullshit from the archbishop. The union made this appropriately passive-aggressive statement early in the 2015 contract negotiations:
“After extensive consultation with our legal team, we stand by our initial position that the current language in our handbook and contract has served our schools and our community well for generations, providing guidance in line with institutional beliefs, and there is no need for change. This past week, we made a formal request to keep the current language in the collective bargaining agreement. We are disappointed that this request was rejected this morning.”
Cordileone figured that the easiest way to solve this problem was to write new language into the upcoming contract designating all of the teachers as “ministers” - allowing him to gut their collective bargaining rights under current labor laws - which also turned out to be a losing strategy for dealing with a union that had been active for four decades, in the middle of a slow-rolling wave of teacher strikes that had started in Chicago in 2012 and would fully explode in West Virginia in 2018. As the union’s president put it:
“We have worked for more than a year on establishing and following through on good-faith measures between the administrations of the four schools and ourselves. It seems disingenuous and is unacceptable for the Archdiocese school presidents and principals to come in at the eleventh hour of a long and exceedingly challenging year of negotiations and drop another issue that just adds to our teachers’ fear and uncertainty regarding their job security.”
“Disingenuous” and “unacceptable” served as descriptors of Cordileone’s approach to the new contract, and Cordileone in general, that really resonated with the broader archdiocesan community. Teachers and students started protesting outside the cathedral. The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in all fifty states by deciding Obergefell v. Hodges that summer and Local 2250 put out a statement, during contract negotiations, celebrating the Court's decision; the statement had to have been at least partially motivated by spite towards the archbishop, and I respect it. Tense negotiations continued through the summer until the contract was finally ratified in August.
I have no way of knowing how shrewd a negotiator Cordileone actually was; the only things I know are that he didn’t get any language in the contract at all about at-will employment, he didn’t get his morality clauses in the contract at all, and the teachers who had endured years of wage freezes had come away with a new 7.5% salary increase. I mean, it certainly seems like one party did a very good job negotiating, but it wasn’t Cordileone, it was the union who stuck together, got the city on their side, and wielded the threat of withholding their labor. Maybe Cordileone could have threatened to fire them all and replace them, but he had just spent months publicly arguing that he should be able to police his employees' sexual activity at all times, so it's possible that his applicant flow had recently slowed down.
As the archbishop, Cordileone is the boss of hundreds of employees, with a tremendous amount of direct power to tell them what to do and how to act. And if he doesn’t like what someone does or how they act - or who they’re married to or, I suppose, how much they jack off - he can fire most of them and leave them without a paycheck or health care or pension or means to provide for their families. It’s a staggering amount of power to have over people, and you would think that an archbishop wouldn’t rush to use that power coercively to enforce his views on sexual morality, including for off-the-clock conduct. But Cordileone doesn’t act like an archbishop, he acts like Just Some Guy, and Just Some Guy can be like any other shitty boss you would have at any other shitty workplace. But like Just Some Guy who’s your boss, he can crumble in the face of labor solidarity, in his workers organizing and standing with each other for mutual aid and protection.
Despite Cordileone’s best efforts, he was not able to get the contract he wanted, and did not gain the power to directly coerce or harm the members of Local 2240. But this past year, he has been trying very hard to directly harm others and himself.
CHAPTER THREE - WHAT I’M SAYING IS HE'S NOT VACCINATED
As Cordileone revealed in a December 1st 2021 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, he still hasn't gotten vaccinated against COVID-19. I don't know the man's medical history, and it's possible that he chose not to get vaccinated because of a possible autoimmune complication or other serious medical issue. The only way to know the real reason why Cordileone is not vaccinated, of course, is to keep reading the Chronicle interview and see if he went on to say some of the dumbest shit I've ever read about vaccines:
"[The COVID vaccines] are not really vaccines. We think of a vaccine as a shot that gives you immunity to a disease for life or at least for a very long time. And these actually don't give any immunity at all. They give protection."
As Cordileone puts it, his opposition to getting vaccinated isn’t rooted in any sort of moral or medical question, but rather his personal misunderstanding of what a vaccine is or how we get to the end of the pandemic; when National Catholic Reporter covered this interview, they included reactions from multiple local public health experts, who unanimously responded, in so many words, "yeah what he's saying doesn't make any sense." But Cordileone is pretty sure he doesn't even need the vaccine, claiming that "my immune system is strong...it's probably not necessary for me to be vaccinated." Even though everyone is telling him to take precautions in a dangerous situation, he just figures he's built different and will be just fine; it's the kind of airtight logic that could also lead you to, I don't know, have four drinks and figure you're still good to get behind the wheel of a car.
It's not like Cordileone's bosses have told everyone "eh, get the vaccine if it's right for you, but ultimately it's no big deal". The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has urged people to get vaccinated, you literally can't enter the Vatican without a vaccine passport, and when an unvaccinated rival of Pope Francis got put on a ventilator, the Pope almost burst out laughing in front of his press pool. Cordileone sees all this and, like the Just Some Guy he is, shrugs and tells the local paper "I'm stepping into another controversy, I guess."
Yeah, I guess! And hey, while we're guessing, guess who this is in a November 7th Catholic News Service photo, weeks before he made public that he was unvaccinated:
That was Cordileone out and about in his diocese, as he was visiting different parishes and charities and schools every week, as there was still a deadly pandemic raging, as there was a way to help with the pandemic readily available for him in every chain pharmacy in the country. He didn't get it, and he didn't bother telling anyone until December. And now that his archdiocese knows that he's not vaccinated, some of them don't want him around. As one pastor put it in his parish bulletin as he was canceling Cordileone's December visit:
"I called him and spoke with him and asked him to re-schedule his visit for a later time because many people in the parish had expressed concern about this. I feel it is important that everyone feel safe, and we all do our part to prevent the spread of COVID-19, especially now with the new Omicron Variant. These are stressful times enough and I felt his pastoral visit to us would be overshadowed by concerns about the pandemic."
Cordileone responded to the cancellation by saying "Health care decisions are a very personal matter," which is true a lot of the time, but stops being true when you're a public figure that's unable to do your job ministering to your archdiocese during a pandemic because your flock is understandably worried that you're literally going to infect them. Kind of like how people were worried a few years ago that Cordileone was going to write a contract that would let him take away their health care and benefits and income. Kind of like how they were worried a few years before that Cordileone was going to hit someone with his car.
There's a reason I chose to focus on these three Cordileone stories and not others. I didn't focus on Cordileone's contributions to the debate over whether to deny Communion to Joe Biden, or his response to the 2020 protests for racial justice (which were covered in an earlier piece), or his embrace of Archbishop Vigano's conspiracy theories about Pope Francis, or any other statements he's made on political issues. All of those are exactly what you would expect and you can find them very easily. But stupid public statements are just rhetoric, and while rhetoric can hurt people, another thing that can hurt people is actually physically hurting people, like when you hit them with a car or take away their paychecks or give them a virus. Cordileone's power, in many areas, is material: when he makes decisions, he can cause people to literally bleed, starve, and die. Cordileone - and all of his fellow bishops - is Just Some Guy, but if he’s not held to a higher standard than “Just Some Guy”, his power can cause widespread suffering. That's the kind of power that you should really only trust to someone with demonstrated good judgment, in a system with good oversight in case that judgment starts to slip or he starts to make the wrong decisions.
But the Catholic church isn't built that way, so we're left to hope that each bishop is an especially good and holy man who always makes the right decisions. But it's clear that the decisions Cordileone makes are not the decisions of someone who rose to the episcopate so he could be a model of prudence, humility, and moral discernment. They are not the decisions of a man who has expertise in Catholic moral teachings and their applications in a messy world. They are not the decisions of a member of the hierarchical church that listens to the bishop of Rome. They are the decisions of a dumbass waking up every morning, refusing to think five minutes into the future, and constantly scrambling. They are the decisions of someone trying to move through life with fake-ish credentials, to win arguments and feel good, to justify himself to himself, and not caring who gets hurt - literally physically hurt - along the way. They are the decisions of Just Some Guy that happened to become the archbishop.
And look, I'm Just Some Guy, too; my point is not that I'm a better person than Cordileone, although I don't drive drunk so I feel like I'm at least a little ahead. I'm not saying I should have his job or anything, but I'm also saying that he shouldn't have his job, either. As it turns out, Cordileone is in a job powerful enough that Just Some Guy shouldn't be able to have it. If a bishop occasionally said stupid things and did nothing else, we could ignore him pretty easily. But Cordileone doesn’t just say stupid things, he’s an employer who decides who gets a job, how they get compensated, and whether they can get fired with no notice. He’s a political actor who talks directly to legislators, writes the language of ballot initiatives, and leads campaigns to take away the rights of thousands of Californians, because he doesn't want gay people to think "my partner can be on my healthcare plan" or "my partner can visit me in the hospital". He’s an educator who can decide to suddenly gut the resources of schools serving hundreds of children. He has near-absolute power over sexual abuse allegations in his archdiocese: how they get investigated, how they get resolved, and how the Arch works to prevent future abuse from happening. He hears confessions and decides on the requirements for couples to get married in the church, and he can break into a nasty coughing fit at your confirmation or ordination, to which he showed up late after skidding into the parking lot with a weird stain on his bumper. None of that is power you can give to Just Some Guy. But what other option is there?
EPILOGUE
As you’d expect, I don’t have any problems understanding why someone would choose to leave the Catholic church. The bishops are Just Some Guys, and they have the power to materially hurt people, and a lot of them try to use that power quite often, and all of us suffer as a result. Being a Catholic in America is infuriating if you pay any attention to anything that the leadership of our church does, and it doesn’t feel like it’s going to get less infuriating any time soon. Even if you get a better-than-average guy as bishop, he’s still Just Some Guy; I know that because we’ve had a few of them here in Chicago. Cardinal Bernardin may have followed an incredibly Just Some Guy bishop, but Bernardin still covered for abusive priests and fought to fire gay employees, and today Cardinal Cupich is still dragging his feet on getting all of the Arch’s abuse records to the state AG. And those two aren’t culture warriors like Cordileone - they are the celebrated "liberal" bishops still acting like Just Some Guys, or worse, and people still suffer.
As easy as it is for me to understand why people leave, I personally find it very difficult to leave myself, precisely because these bishops have caused so much suffering. If I believe that it’s important for our church to recognize and respond to suffering - and I think, based on everything I’ve read, that that’s at least somewhat important to being Catholic - leaving or doing nothing in response to the suffering that the bishops have caused does not appear to be a good option for me, and, more importantly, it doesn't stop any of the bishops from causing more suffering. It appears that I need to stay in the church, to stay with everyone else who is also suffering, to suffer with them, and to respond to that suffering in a way that lessens that suffering and hopefully helps lay the groundwork for a church whose bishops don’t cause that suffering.
Of course, I don’t have an easy way there, and the long-term solution for the church can't be to just find better men to have this level of power. We try that every so often, and it's clearly not enough, because every man, deep down, is Just Some Guy. So the actual solution needs to spread that power out enough that Just Some Guy isn't able to wield it by himself anymore. Just Some Guy should not run the collective bargaining process of a school system by fiat. Just Some Guy should not get to decide he can be welcomed anywhere while he’s unvaccinated during a pandemic that is getting worse. Material power needs checks on it, and the bishops need meaningful oversight by the laity to make sure that the material powers of the archdiocese as employer, educator, protector, and political actor are not left to the whims of Just Some Guy. But the laity would have to actually fight for a church like that, because the hierarchy of the church is very obviously opposed to it. And the reason I wanted to tell the story of Salvatore Cordileone, ultimately, was to make this point: we're not exactly up against a team of masterminds here.
These three stories about Cordileone are stories illustrating the material stakes of what Just Some Guy can do when he's a bishop, but they’re also stories about a bishop getting smacked down because he’s Just Some Guy, and the thing about Just Some Guys is that they, like all of us, care at least a little bit about money and power and comfort and attention. Cordileone became a laughingstock before day one in San Francisco the same way every other public figure becomes a laughingstock: the media and the community paid attention to his unforced error. Cordileone got beat in a contract negotiation the same way every boss gets beat: by workers standing together and showing him who does the actual work around here. Cordileone wanted to avoid getting vaccinated, but now he's an outcast like your aunt who can't eat in restaurants anymore: getting un-invited from one of his own parishes was an extremely public embarrassment that ran in national Catholic media, and he's since signed on to pro-vaccine statements from the California bishops presumably to try and repair his image a little bit. Cordileone literally can’t enter the Vatican anymore, so he’s got no shot at becoming a Cardinal or working on anything of importance to the global church, and it’s only a matter of time before he either caves to vaccine mandates or resigns himself to being a fourth-tier bishop. You can pressure a bishop because the bishop is still Just Some Guy.
So here’s an interesting question: what other pressure can the laity put on a bishop? How can the laity talk to each other, parish by parish, to demand better from the Just Some Guys who run the church? What if other parishes refused to have their bishop come visit? What if laity withheld their labor doing the day-to-day work of the parishes, the liturgical services, the schools? What other tools do we have to separate the bishops from their material power?
This is, obviously, very aspirational thinking, rooted in my own leftist views of power and who should get to use it. But I see that my church is making people suffer, and I can’t run away from it. I’m scared that a fight for something better is a fight that we could lose. But when we stop assuming the successors of the Apostles are powerful, learned, and moral men, and start realizing that they’re Just Some Guys, the fight starts to look a little more appealing.
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of new installments.
Sources used for this piece include:
“Catholic High School Teachers Face New Assault by Administration.” CFT, 3 June 2015, https://www.cft.org/news-release/catholic-high-school-teachers-face-new-assault-administration.
Fraga, Brian. “Archbishop Cordileone Reveals He's Not Vaccinated for COVID-19, Drawing Sharp Criticism.” National Catholic Reporter, National Catholic Reporter, 3 Dec. 2021, https://www.ncronline.org/news/coronavirus/archbishop-cordileone-reveals-hes-not-vaccinated-covid-19-drawing-sharp-criticism.
“Gay Sex, Adultery, Masturbation, Porn Are 'Gravely Evil': Sf Archbishop Clarifies Sexual Morality for School Staffs.” CBS San Francisco, CBS San Francisco, 4 Feb. 2015, https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/04/san-francisco-archbishop-salvatore-cordileone-to-add-statements-on-sexual-morality-in-faculty-handbook-proposes-adding-clauses-to-teachers-contract-gay-sex-adultery-masturbation-porn/.
“Lawmakers Want Investigation of San Francisco Catholic High Schools over Teacher Morality Clauses.” CBS San Francisco, CBS San Francisco, 23 Feb. 2015, https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/23/archdiocese-san-francisco-lawmakers-investigation-catholic-high-schools-teacher-morality-clauses-archbishop-salvatore-cordileone-assemblymembers-phil-ting-kevin-mullin/.
Melendez, Lyanne. “SF Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone Reveals He's Not Vaccinated against COVID-19.” ABC7 San Francisco, KGO-TV, 2 Dec. 2021, https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-archibishop-covid-19-vaccine-archbishop-salvatore-cordileone-not-vaccinated-against-archdiocese/11290843/.
Pena, Luz. “SF Church Asks Archbishop Cordileone to Re-Schedule Visit Because He's Unvaccinated.” ABC7 San Francisco, KGO-TV, 11 Dec. 2021, https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-archbishop-salvatore-cordileone-vaccine-st-agnes-church-sf/11323584/.
“San Francisco Archbishop Jokes about His DUI Arrest in Speech.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 5 Oct. 2012, https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/10/san-francisco-archbishop-dui-arrest-jokes.html.
“San Francisco Archdiocesan Teachers Ratify New Contract Agreement with the Archdiocese of San Francisco.” CFT, 20 Aug. 2015, https://www.cft.org/news-release/san-francisco-archdiocesan-teachers-ratify-new-contract-agreement-archdiocese-san.
“SF Archbishop Answers Disapproving Letter from Lawmakers after Clarifying Sexual Morality for School Staff.” CBS San Francisco, CBS San Francisco, 20 Feb. 2015, https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/20/sf-san-francisco-archbishop-catholic-church/.
“SF Prelate Jokes about DUI Charge at Installation.” AP, USA TODAY, 5 Oct. 2012, https://amp-usatoday-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/1614669?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#aoh=16399244442403&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fstory%2Fnews%2Fnation%2F2012%2F10%2F05%2Fcatholic-archbishop-dui-jokes%2F1614669%2F.
“Statement from the San Francisco Archdiocesan Federation of Teachers, AFT Local 2240.” CFT, 6 Mar. 2015, https://www.cft.org/news-release/statement-san-francisco-archdiocesan-federation-teachers-aft-local-2240.
Woodall, Angela. “San Francisco Archbishop Dui Charge: The Rev. Salvatore Cordileone Arrested in San Diego.” The Mercury News, The Mercury News, 27 Aug. 2012, https://www-mercurynews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.mercurynews.com/2012/08/27/san-francisco-archbishop-dui-charge-the-rev-salvatore-cordileone-arrested-in-san-diego/amp/?amp_js_v=a6&_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQKKAFQArABIIACAw%3D%3D#aoh=16399242922811&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mercurynews.com%2F2012%2F08%2F27%2Fsan-francisco-archbishop-dui-charge-the-rev-salvatore-cordileone-arrested-in-san-diego%2F.