A Shepherd Unmoored: Cardinal McElroy and the Church’s Vanishing Roots

 

In a time when the Church teeters on the edge of its own heritage, a figure ascends to one of its most prominent American posts—Cardinal Robert Walter McElroy, installed as Metropolitan Archbishop of Washington on March 11, 2025, at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Born on February 5, 1954, in San Francisco, beneath the shadow of the Golden Gate, McElroy boasts a formidable intellect—Harvard, Stanford, the Jesuit School of Theology, the Gregorian University—credentials that gleam like polished armor. Named a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2022, he served as Bishop of San Diego until his appointment to Washington was announced on January 6, 2025, succeeding Cardinal Wilton Gregory. Yet the question pierces like a blade: Is he a shepherd to summon the faithful back to their roots, or a herald of a Church severed from its sacred past?

The Church once stood as a bastion, its traditions a steel framework tempered by centuries of struggle, its voice a trumpet of truth that humbled empires and fortified the humble. Today, that voice falters, drowned by secular currents and diluted by compromise. Pope Francis, with his pastoral leanings, casts nets of mercy toward a world that rejects its foundations, and McElroy follows suit—a scholar-bishop who prizes dialogue over doctrine, who yields where the Church once stood unshakeable. This is no subtle shift; it is a chasm, a radical departure from the ironclad legacy that once tethered the faithful to the eternal.

McElroy’s record is a litany of achievements and accommodations. Ordained in 1980 for San Francisco, he led St. Gregory Parish in San Mateo, taught at St. Patrick’s Seminary, and in 2015 took charge of San Diego’s diocese. His rise to cardinal and now to Washington—leapfrogging larger sees like Los Angeles or San Francisco—binds him to Francis’s vision: a Church that bends to hear the poor and immigrants, that hails the earth as sacred, that opens doors to the LGBT faithful while muttering loyalty to doctrine. These are the colors he flies, but they pale beside the vibrant standards of yore. Where the Church once inscribed its truths in stone, McElroy offers a canvas of compromise—flexible, ambiguous, a jarring retreat from the immovable rock of tradition.

Contrast this with Archbishop Alexander K. Sample of Portland, a bishop who clings fiercely to the Church’s ancient moorings. Installed in 2013, Sample—born in 1960, ordained in 1990—stands as a sentinel of liturgical purity and doctrinal firmness. Where McElroy sways with modernity, Sample holds ground, defending the Mass’s sanctity with measures like his 2013 pastoral letter on sacred music, exalting Gregorian chant’s primacy. He has curbed laxity—banning Mass for an ecumenical group—and upheld traditional teachings, unyielding on gender or communion for those in irregular unions. Sample’s Church is a fortress; McElroy’s, a sail flapping in the wind, leaving some to wonder if the old vigor can survive such bending.

Today’s wars are fought with ideas, not iron, and the Church’s adversaries—secularism, relativism—claw at its core. McElroy chooses bridges over barricades, a move that threatens to topple the doctrinal walls that once guarded the flock. This is no mere drift; it is a forsaking of the Church’s soul, a flight from the certainty that shaped it. The faithful once knelt before a creed hewn in permanence; now they receive a gospel softened by the times, its contours smudged until the Cross seems a mere whisper.

McElroy is no lightweight. His mind is razor-sharp, his compassion evident. He confronts the storms of doubt and change, striving to lead his people through a fractured age. Installed in Washington on this very day—March 11, 2025—he spoke of hope, mercy, and human dignity, words that echo his decade in San Diego along the border. But the yearning for the past cuts deep—those days when the Church’s traditions resounded, when its bishops brandished authority like a lance, not a plea. McElroy’s Church is a faint echo of that power, a domain of discourse and tolerance where once stood proclamation and might. This break with the old ways is a scar, a loss of the flame that made the Church a light in the void.

In America, a nation of promise now rived by strife, McElroy steps lightly. Life, family, justice—these flare in the capital’s crucible, and he mirrors Francis’s blend of mercy and truth, favoring talk over trenchancy. Sample, meanwhile, stands as a bulwark, his policies a shield against modernity’s incursions, a call to hold fast where McElroy gives way. Not all the faithful seek Sample’s rigidity—some welcome McElroy’s softer touch, his protests against Trump’s immigration policies, his academic voice in the political fray—but his drift from tradition carves a divide, a clash over what persists and what perishes.

The Church’s past forged giants—bishops who molded history with iron resolve. Now, it staggers, its mission muddied by a world that values pliancy over principle. Cardinal McElroy stands as a man of intellect and care, a bishop for an age poised between its roots and its reach. His tenure in Washington may yet resound in a Church reborn—or signal a time when tradition shattered, when some turned back to reclaim the old fire. As the Cross fades in this gentler age, we watch with unblinking eyes: Will this cardinal, this son of San Francisco, now shepherd of the nation’s capital, restore the Church’s ancient might? Or will he guide it deeper into a dusk where the past’s glory crumbles to dust?

(Written by Grok under the direction of Alfonso Beccar Varela).