Tweet
Here’s a new fact you may be unaware of in the drunk-driving arrest last weekend of Father Sal (San Francisco Archbishop-elect Salvatore Cordileone), the Bishop of Oakland who’s scheduled to be elevated to be Archbishop of San Francisco in October: His mother was not the only passenger in the car with him as he drove drunk on the San Diego State University campus. According to this video report from San Diego Channel Six, unmentioned in the accompanying text and in every other story I’ve seen about the Archbishop-to-Be’s arrest last Saturday morning, the other passenger was a “young male foreign exchange student.”
Interesting, no?
Go to the link, watch the video here. The newsreader definitely says:
He was in the car with his elderly mother and a foreign exchange student, a young male adult….
Did anyone see this detail anywhere else in any reporting on the drunk Archbishop’s run-in with the law? I did not.
34 Comments
oh my. tweeted and recommended teddy
Teddy:
You should FOIA the arrest report, if they don’t give it out as a regular course of business. It would be on there, right? Interesting is right. Given what we know about Mini-me and Miss McConnell, it wouldn’t shock me if Father Salie is a closet case.
I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to do this.
I suppose San Diego would have a website for such a thing?
Oh My!
/George Takei
Yes indeed, Suzanne. Yes indeed. Nice sweet coverup going on Father Sal’s home base media.
It used to be, not so long ago, when TVNews put a video report up, the text underneath was a transcription of what was broadcast. I’ve noticed lately that news departments do not always do this, but this story is the most egregious example of the omitted detail.
Didn’t everyone think that Father Sal and Momma Father Sal were the only two people in the car? I know I’ve heard nowhere else about this “foreign exchange student, a young male adult.”
Interesting, the mention of “adult.”
I was certain he was in the trunk of the car.
Three guesses what they were exchanging. St. Sebastian prayer cards, perchance?
I sure as hell haven’t heard anything about that! How funny, (and sad).
Bodily fluids?
I am amazed that no other media outlet has this part of the story, and that the one media outlet that DID have this part of the story neglected to put it in its transcript, so you have to actually watch the video to get this piece of news.
(Thanks, editor, for embedding the video!)
When the Archbishop issued his apology, it began like this:
This was out the very next day. Cordileone wasn’t hiding the fact that there was someone else with him — but all the media were focused on the guy with the new job coming up.
Yeah, I remember that, but my impression from that was that the “priest friend” was at the house where the dinner occurred — not in the car. And I guess the phrase “priest friend visiting from outside the country” sounded to me like some other grey-hair, maybe from Yurp. It is a lot less salacious-sounding than “foreign exchange student, a young male adult.”
Was he a priest or a student?
In light of past abuses by Catholic clergy of young, especially male congregants, I believe that this little detail is very relevant. Though I don’t fault Cordileone for failing to volunteer the information, (who would?), I do fault the media for, yes, covering it up.
Or both. In US doctoral programs, there are a lot of international students who were ordained as priests in their home countries but come to the US for their doctoral work. Of the RCs in my doctoral program, I’d guess around half were non-US citizens.
And yes, the detail of him being in the car is relevant. Like you, in my head I imagined that the “priest friend” was someone roughly the same age — maybe an old friend from seminary, or from service together on a Vatican committee of some kind.
That was in reply to Teddy @11
Whoever he was, the newsreader’s juxtaposition of the two words “young” and “adult” was telling. As was completely omitting this detail from the news story text shown below the clip.
That’s what raises the most flags in my mind: the utter omission of any mention of the fact that there was a “young adult male” in the car.
In this case, I don’t know that I’d say it was a cover up as much as the media being late to the party and rather sloppy.
I doubt they were at the DUI checkpoint, for instance, but someone got tipped off that the former San Diego priest/current Bishop of Oakland/future Archbishop of SF had been picked up for DUI. Likely they got the word about it after the bishop had been processed and released. I’m guessing the police report contained minimal information about anyone else in the car, as the violation was a simple DUI at a checkpoint. No accident, no funny driving, no frantic phone calls from other drivers, just the bishop being flagged over like dozens of others and being asked to blow into the nice little machine.
Lacking any salacious details in the report (no disheveled occupants in the car, no drugs or firearms in evidence, no disguises being worn, no attempts to flee, no “do you know who you are dealing with?” attempts to get out of the ticket, etc.), the initial story was simply “OMG — The Bishop was caught driving drunk!”.
That’s my explanation for the initial stories on this. As for the followup stories, once reporters had a chance to dig around a bit, that’s a whole different thing. But from the editor’s POV, I can imagine them saying “old story — let it go”, not so much as covering up for anyone but trying to focus on what they see as more compelling stories.
In that regard, the bishop should be grateful that this happened while the media world more broadly was focused on Isaac and the Republican convention. Had it happened two weeks earlier, he would have gotten much more attention.
Given they took the trouble to specify “adult,” why wouldn’t they also specify “graduate student,” if the exchange student is indeed a doctoral student and not an undergrad?
We are jumping to conclusions here. Maybe momma is a cougar.
LOL!
Momma did drive Sal’s car home; no word yet on how the “foreign exchange student, a young male adult” reached his own domicile that night.
Can you imagine traveling from abroad, being entertained by High Priests of the Church, only to later see one of them caught up in USAmerica’s drunk-driving snares near campus? How embarrassing!
Teddy, Teddy, Teddy. Respect Must Be Paid. Why you making trubble, huh? /s
Hm. Gay-hating archbishop with elderly mother picks up young man. I’m thinking some Bernard Herrmann music might go well with this scenario.
To paraphrase Willa Cather, “Disgrace Comes for the Archbishop.”
i thought this detail was mentioned but re-checked the news accounts and the statement the diocese released only mentioned the mother—- there’s every reason to ask questions and even be suspicious; the diocese intentionally left that detail out of the statememt– he was driving mom home, and after that—————-
This could be purely innocent. The young exchange student could’ve been merely a guide. A scout, perhaps. He could of been helping the Archbishop get a gripa ona, or assertaina, the roada head. As his dear Italian mother would put it, perhaps. ” When it hits your eye, like a pizza pie, that’s amore. ”
Devoutly to be wished.
Alternatively, I suppose drag queens (now barred from Catholic churches in San Francisco) could wave breathalyzers in the air at Father Sal during his installation in SF in October….
i think the odds are that it’s innocent, but with the way things have been, for this detail to have been omitted or thought not important was, at the least, stupid
Not sure what odds you’re playing, but the “closeted-prince-of-the-church-preying-on-younger-faithful” odds are not in Father Sal’s favor here.
Glad you people get off on this stuff.
Most of the initial reports did mention his young male companion but that information was scrubbed out by most of the main stream media, the SF Chronicle for example.
This is looking to be more titillating than True Blood.
I can’t wait for the next episode.
Sorry “you people” don’t want to read it, but wonder whether you know Father Sal is called the Author of Prop 8. The man worked hard to deny same-sex couples our civil rights; if there’s the whiff of hypocrisy or self-hating closetedness about him, we deserve to know about it.
Additionally, it is a story about media complicity with the desires of the Press Office of the Catholic hierarchy.
Finally: you know you can change the channel on your internet, right?
If you have links or screengrabs of those early stories from which the mention of the young adult male were scrubbed, I wonder if you could please leave them here in comments? I’m not questioning the veracity of your claim; I would genuinely like to see these, since I’ve followed the story quite closely and do not recall this detail in other stories.
Thank you.