Bishop Kevin Farrell, auxiliary of Washington, DC, has been named as the new bishop of Dallas to succeed Bishop Charles Grahmann, who is retiring.
Born in Ireland, he entered the Legionaries of Christ in 1966 and his first assignment was as a chaplain for a university in Mexico. He then went to Washington, DC, where he held a variety of parish assignments and was appointed to head the Spanish Catholic Center, which he led for several years. He was ordained an auxiliary bishop in February 2002. His installation in Dallas will be on May 1, 2007. He is 59 years old.
He is fluent in Spanish and Italian. His brother is a bishop in the Roman Curia at the Vatican.
I wish him well. I got a very poor impression of the Dallas Diocese when I went, while on a business trip, in 1997 to mass at a church there and experience the strangest mass I’d ever seen. It was in the round with the priest never approaching the altar, the order of the mass was wrong, at the consecration three families came up to the round sacristy and each family held between them a platter with leaven bread and a jug of wine. The priest did not do the consecration, the families did! Obviously an invalid mass.
So I will pray for the new bishop and his success.
Cardinal O’Malley is another bishop who previously served as director of Washington’s Spanish Catholic Center. Looks like a trend!
Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
CPT Tom, I know exactly which church you went to – Prince of Peace in Plano, north of Dallas proper. It’s the crazy-out-there parish; there’s another parish (or two, at times) that is (are) more “traditional”, and then most of the Dallas parishes just muddle along in the middle. Same thing en espanol.