I hadn't seen this in the news originally and found out about it at church yesterday morning, when our two lectors were talking about it.

I couldn't tell what way they were leaning, because they wouldn't even go into specifics, but they did mention that a former deacon of ours is going to take over for Fr. Hall.

I also found out something interesting about Seton Hall from this: The Archbishop of Newark heads the Board of Trustees and the Board of Regents.

Archbishop Myers is VERY disliked around here. Mainly because a little over a year ago, he decided that the $850,000 house (that belonged to the archdiocese) that he was going to retire too was too small

So he had about $500,000 in additions made to it for when he uses it. It basically was an entire additional 3-4 story house built next to it.

Here's an aerial view of the house originally:

And this is the added construction:

It's a 4500 sq ft home on 8.2 acres with 5 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and a 3-car garage. The new wing is 3000 sq ft, has an indoor exercise pool, hot tub, library, and elevator.

This became public a couple weeks before the Archbishop's Annual Appeal, when the archdiocese asks for contributions to help support many of the services the archdiocese runs (schools, shelters, etc)

As you can imagine, last year's Appeal was... very weak. Especially after Jim Goodness (who's basically the Archbishop's mouthpiece) said "Archdiocesan funds were not used on the Archbishop's house...

"... we simply sold some properties and used the profits from that." Yeah, you can see the logical fallacy there.

... wow

Also, Myers' predecessor is still alive. He lives in a priest's retirement home within the archdiocese.

So THAT is the kind of person Myers is: One who does things like that to his "weekend retreat" because he feels he deserves it.

Oh, I'm sorry... the priest in the retirement home isn't his direct predecessor. It's the archbishop 2 before him. His immediate predecessor was Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of D.C.

(McCarrick was quite nice every time I met him. Myers was very standoffish and self-important the one time I had the chance)

Anyway, that's the kind of guy Myers is, and he's the one who has the say on who gets to be Director of Campus Ministry at SHU. And he can fire that person on a whim

Now what gets me is that the men's basketball team, who are a pretty decent team, although not to the levels they once were when they made the NCAA finals, are recruiting the country's first openly gay player.

BTW, Seton Hall is also the location of the Immaculate Conception seminary, the archdiocese's main seminary.

Myers also already has had his successor picked out for him, Archbishop Bernard Hebda, who is the "coadjutor archbishop". Which is basically like "archbishop in training"

It's also "archbishop who can do the PR things that Myers probably shouldn't because people don't like him while Hebda is amazingly outgoing and personable."

ugh