Only 2 1/2 years after being named a cardinal, San Diego’s spiritual leader is headed to Washington, D.C., as archbishop, according to multiple news outlets.
Robert McElroy, 70, is expected to be named to the high-profile Roman Catholic post in the nation’s capital, according to the National Catholic Reporter, followed by other sources.
McElroy would succeed retiring Cardinal Wilton Gregory, 77, at the Washington Archdiocese.
“The news was expected to come as soon as noon in Rome, 3 a.m. Eastern time,” said the National Catholic Reporter, led former San Diego Tribune reporter James Grimaldi
The Reporter said McElroy declined to comment. Times of San Diego has reached out to spokespeople for the San Diego-Imperial diocese.
McElroy is “one of the American church’s most forceful defenders of migrants and a sharp critic of Donald Trump’s first administration just days before Trump takes office a second time,” said the Reporter story, credited to “NCR staff.”
The Pillar — a conservative Catholic outlet that began as a Substack newsletter — and The Washington Post also reported that McElroy was chosen by Pope Francis.
The Post said McElroy’s appointment was confirmed by several people informed by Catholic officials in Washington and Rome with direct knowledge of the decision.
“They spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the Vatican’s pending announcement,” the Post said.
McElroy would replace Gregory, the first African American cardinal. At age 77, Gregory is considered two years past the standard retirement age for bishops.
The archdiocese of Washington includes the Catholic University of America and Georgetown University and is home to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
The Post described McElroy as considered by some Catholics to be a leading intellectual aligned with Pope Francis.
“Just after Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration in 2017, McElroy said ‘we must all become disrupters,’ citing the use of the military to deport undocumented people, the portrayal of refugees as enemies and Muslims ‘as forces of fear rather than as children of God,’” the Post said.
Massimo Faggioli of Villanova University was quoted as calling McElroy “the most progressive Catholic bishop and cardinal at this time in the United States.”
His appointment would be “a statement and a response to the political direction the country has taken,” Faggioli told the Post.
San Diego, a diocese serving 1.4 million Catholics currently has three auxiliary bishops: Ramón Bejarano, Michael Pham and Felipe Pulido.
A former San Diego auxiliary bishop, John Dolan, was named bishop of Phoenix in June 2022.
Two months later, McElroy became the first cardinal of San Diego, receiving his scarlet skullcap, ring and silk hat as he knelt before Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
McElroy was inducted along with 19 cardinals from around the world in a ceremony, known as a consistory.
As cardinal, McElroy becomes an elector of the pope after the passing of Francis.
In late May 2022, at a Bay Park news conference discussing his surprise elevation to the Sacred College of Cardinals, McElroy was asked about the prospect of his becoming pope.
He immediately replied: “I don’t think an American should be pope.” The United States has so much power “in so many levels,” he said, that having an American pope would be a “counterpoint to the witness that the church has to continue to be giving.”
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