Today is a day of great joy! We have a new Archbishop!

What happened 
Today is a day of great joy! We the people of Atlanta once again know we will have an archbishop! Thursday morning, at 10:00 Rome Time (4:00 Atlanta time), Pope Francis announced the name of our next Archbishop after an 11-month period without one, during which there was a long and complex process to choose the next Archbishop. The search is over, and the results of the search for the next Archbishop became public on Thursday! Welcome back to Atlanta, Archbishop-Designate Hartmayer! 

We don’t quite technically have an Archbishop yet (and I’ll explain why later in this post), but news has come from the Holy Father, through his representative in the United States, our Nuncio, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, that Archbishop-designate Hartmayer, until now bishop of Savannah, will be installed here in Atlanta as Atlanta’s eighth bishop (and seventh archbishop) on Wednesday, May 6th, 2020! As Archbishop-designate Hartmayer prepares to return to Atlanta and as the day of his installation here comes ever closer, let us pray for our Archbishop-elect, that he may be as good and loving a shepherd to us as he has been to the people in his previous diocese, Savannah, for 8 years, and that he may be warmly welcomed back to Atlanta. Archbishop-designate Hartmayer previously served as pastor in two parishes here for 16 years prior to his appointment to Savannah.

The announcement was the answer to the prayer of almost a million and a half of the faithful of North and Central Georgia. I checked daily if the Holy Father had appointed us a new archbishop, and, when I would see that, no, we didn’t have one, I would pray for the future archbishop and for those in charge of selecting him. When I checked on Thursday, I assumed that, as was the case for the last 11 months, I would be wrong once again and we would not have a new archbishop announced that day. But alas, I was wrong, and this was a great example of one of the cases when it's so good to have been wrong!

In fact, right now, if I Google “does Atlanta,” Google immediately suggests “does Atlanta have a new archbishop.” I guess if you Google something every day for 11 months like I did, Google will have a pretty good idea of what searches to suggest. This actually isn’t a new blog post. I wrote this blog post months ago, when I assumed that this vacancy would take about as long as “normal” to fill: that is, about 8 months from vacancy to installation. As it turns out, from initial vacancy to installation, Atlanta will have been vacant for 13 months (April 2019 to May 2020)—much longer than any vacancy in any see in recent times that I know of.

What makes someone an Archbishop?
Like any bishop, in order to have “ordinary authority” to teach, govern, and sanctify the people of an archdiocese, an archbishop must have a letter from the Pope himself naming him the bishop of some see; in the case of an archdiocese, that sees’ ordinary is of the special rank called the “archbishop.” If anyone were to claim to be the (arch)bishop of an (arch)diocese but could not produce the letter that is signed and sealed by the Pope naming them as such, lacks the ordinary authority and is therefore not the legitimate (arch)bishop of the area. Further, any (arch)bishop appointed to a different see, or any priest appointed to a see who is not yet a bishop does not yet posses that authority until installation, but they will as soon as the installation is complete—more on how that works later.

Archbishops, in most cases are “metropolitan archbishops.” There are technical reasons in Canon Law explaining when that doesn't happen, but I won't go into them here. We in Atlanta have been in a metropolitan see since Atlanta became an Archdiocese back in the early 1960s, so, once installed, Archbishop Hartmayer will become a metropolitan archbishop. Before we became an archdiocese, we were a diocese for a few years, and for more than a century prior to that, from the 1850s to the 1950s, we were not our own diocese but rather a part of the Diocese of Savannah, which, for that century, covered the whole State of Georgia. Being made an Archdiocese in 1962 means we have since then been the metropolitan see of a province, thus the metropolitan archbishop is the head of the whole province. The province of Atlanta includes 3 states, within which there are five dioceses. In Georgia, we have the Archdiocese of Atlanta and the Diocese of Savannah. In North Carolina, we have the Diocese of Raleigh and the Diocese of Charlotte. In South Carolina, we have the Diocese of Charleston, which covers the whole state. In total, about 26 million people live in the province, of which just over 2 million are Catholic. 

The archbishop has full discretion to teach govern, and sanctify as the ordinary only in his archdiocese (each of the other dioceses has its own ordinary bishop), but he is a valued advisor to and close collaborator with all of the bishops in his province, even though he has no authority over the goings-on in those other dioceses under normal circumstances (that is, without the intervention and explicit direction of the Pope). To facilitate that collaboration within the province, all the bishops and the archbishop of a province meet usually at least once a year to give each other a report on how things have been. If there’s a particularly solemn liturgical event (a groundbreaking of a new church, an ordination, the dedication of a cathedral or other church, the consecration of a new bishop, or some other event of the sort), the archbishop of the province almost certainly will be involved, and may even be tasked with leading it. 

   

Installing a new Archbishop seems really complicated. What’s going to happen?

Back to Atlanta, what will happen in order to actually install Archbishop-designate Hartmayer in a few weeks during the Mass of Installation will be fairly complicated, so here's a crash course of what to expect at St. Peter Chanel in Roswell on Wednesday May 6.  If you can't make it to St. Peter Chanel that day because of work, school, or another obligation, don't worry, since momentous occasions like this one will surely be streamed live on the Internet (and then archived on the live-stream site, or perhaps on YouTube or Vimeo). We know the date and place of the installation as of this post, but we do not yet know the time. 

Here’s how things will happen on May 6 when the installation occurs:

1.       A lot (and by “a lot” I mean “ several hundreds”—maybe enough to fill almost half of the pews in St. Peter Chanel) of priests, deacons, and other bishops will file into the cathedral in procession, with the new Archbishop-elect at the back. The priests and deacons will mainly come from Atlanta and Savannah; bishops will been invited from all over the country, for sure, and maybe even from all over the world. 

2.       Mass will begin as it always does, once the procession ends, with the Sign of the Cross, and then with a greeting to summarize what will happen during the Installation Mass will follow. 

3.       No bishop can be ordained or installed anywhere without the permission of the Pope, in writing, always in the form of this letter. The original letter is in Latin, on parchment, signed and sealed by the Pope. The nuncio, who has the letter, will be called upon to read it.

4.       The Vatican’s Ambassador (called an Apostolic Nuncio), Archbishop Christophe Pierre, will read an English translation (and possibly also in Spanish and other languages) of said letter that contains the mandate to install the new archbishop.

5.       The letter will then be presented to the Archbishop-designate, who checks that the letter is legitimate by examining the wax seal, the personal seal of the Pope, found on the letter.

6.       He then takes it to the College of Consultors, a group of priests from Atlanta who helped early on in the selection process, and which he will now be the head of, for their inspection of that same seal for the same purpose of verifying the letter's authenticity.

7.       After that, he walks around the cathedral holding the letter high so that all can see it, and in once they do so, give the assent to the installation of their new Archbishop.

8.       Since he is already a bishop, he won’t need another ordination—in fact, that can’t happen; once someone is ordained a priest, they are ordained forever, and likewise when they are ordained a bishop (and thus when the man possesses the fullness of the priesthood, since only bishops can ordain). If we were dealing with a vacant diocese (or if we were receiving a new auxiliary bishop) to be headed by a bishop not yet ordained, the priest in question would be ordained a bishop at this point.

9.       The new Archbishop, his appointment having been assented to by his clergy and laity, is given a crozier. The crozier is the thing that he carries that looks like a shepherd’s staff--  in fact, that’s exactly what it is, and reminds both him and his people that he is a shepherd who guides a flock, who would be willing to lay down his life for his sheep (us) if it were necessary to protect them.

10.   Having been given the crozier, he is then escorted to a special chair in St. Peter Chanel. In this case, it won’t be the cathedra (since Christ the King’s cathedra's  back is literally built into the wall, there will be a special chair for Archbishop Hartmayer to sit on, but it won’t be the cathedra, technically). The archbishop’s special chair in his cathedral upon which only he may sit is called a “cathedra” –from the same root as the the source of the word “cathedral,” the Latin word for "chair" —and it is a symbol of the teaching authority of the bishop or archbishop. Every diocese or archdiocese has at least one church with one of these chairs, the cathedral, and only the bishop or archbishop with ordinary authority can sit on that chair. No one who is not the ordinary bishop or ordinary Archbishop (Archbishop Hartmayer, once installed) can sit on the cathedra. So, since May, when our see became officially vacant, no one has sat on the cathedra. 

11.   At the moment he sits down on the chair in St. Peter Chanel, he officially becomes the eighth bishop and seventh archbishop of Atlanta, even though he will not technically have taken possession of his cathedra, and therefore, of his cathedra, but in doing so at St Peter Chanel, he will immediately assume ordinary authority to teach, sanctify, and govern in Atlanta. As they did when he processed with his mandate, the people once again will typically warmly welcome the new archbishop, now officially having taken possession of his see, with a round of applause.

From here, Mass will continue as normal, from the Gloria onward. Taking possession of the Cathedral and the cathedra therein will occur in a separate liturgical celebration a few days later.

12.   Sometime after June 29 this year, Archbishop Pierre will come back to Atlanta to present Archbishop Hartmayer with the pallium. The pallium is a woolen scarf-like garment worn only by metropolitan archbishops like Archbishop Hartmayer that symbolizes the yoke (the thing boxen wear out in the fields to pull carts and stuff). This garment, made from the wool of lambs blessed on the feast of St. Agnes in January is a reminder to the Archbishop and his people that the position of Archbishop is one foremost of service to his people, and that as a shepherd. However, not wearing the pallium between his installation and whenever he receives the pallium does not diminish either his rights or his obligations as an archbishop.  

Once again, welcome back to Atlanta, Archbishop-designate Hartmayer! We are praying for you!