Veep Flores — a bishop without subtext?
Description
The bishops of the United States elected a new conference president and vice president from among their number Tuesday morning.
The selection as president of Oklahoma City’s Archbishop Paul Coakley, erstwhile secretary of the conference, was widely predicted. Following a recent run of vice presidents ineligible to go on to serve as president because of age, the secretary position had become the de facto new poll position from which to run for the top office.
A more unexpected result was Brownsville’s Bishop Daniel Flores placing in a solid second place behind Coakley in all three ballots, before running away with the vice presidential position in a separate ballot.
Flores has occupied a number of visible roles within the conference in recent years, serving as past chairman of the committee on doctrine and serving as the conference’s pointman on the synod on synodality — and the most visible American during its Roman sessions, often injecting notes of humor into contentious press events and public statements.
Nevertheless, his prospect of senior conference leadership was widely written off by many (though not all) observers. In large part, this was not because of doubts over the bishop’s competence or intellectual capacity — he’s known to discuss casually Dostoyevsky and Tolkien, and compare and contrast traditional Marian popular devotions in Latin America and Poland — but because he is seen as one of the least clubbable of the conference’s members.
Not easily identified with any of the conference’s more visible social groups or voting blocs, Flores has long been seen by many as, variously, “the thinking conservative’s liberal” and “the liberals’ favorite conservative.” The reality of the man, at least judged by his public speeches and writings, appears to be someone who resists categorization.
The bishop’s habit of saying things like “perspective is not the enemy of truth” have made him a favorite with activist groups for changes in doctrine and a figure of concern among soi dissant conservatives.
But he tends to confound expectations mostly by not meaning more than he says: it was Flores, as a committee chair in 2023, who moved to include the conference’s doctrinal note on the immorality of gender reassignment surgeries into Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services.
During the synod on synodality, Flores presented himself as an unapologetic participant in and defender of the synodal project, but unafraid to address its more contentious aspects and presentations.
Speaking to The Pillar in 2022, the bishop batted away the popular argument that a consultation process involving less than 1% of lay people could be considered an expression of the sensus fidelium, or present a kind of mandate for progressive reform, while underlining the essential nature of episcopal discernment.
It’s also likely that the bishops, in backing Flores in Baltimore on Tuesday, had an eye on the increasingly contentious political atmosphere in the country, especially on the subject of immigration.
Many members of the conference’s slate of presidential candidates have tried to carve their own approach to engaging publicly with the Trump administration’s policy of mass arrests and detention, and questions of due process and religious freedom for detainees. Some have opted for increasingly direct statements, while others have been at pains to couch their interventions as concerns not criticisms.
Flores, on the other hand, in addition to being the bishop of a border diocese, has a record of engaging with painful and painfully contentious public events and issues in simple, even blunt language, while resisting superficial or snap reactions.
After a 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, killed 21 people, most of them children, the bishop sparked headlines by saying that Americans “sacralize death’s instruments, and then are surprised that death uses them.”
The willingness to address topical controversies, and being comfortable doing so in paragraphs rather than soundbites, may well have weighed with his brother bishops as they voted for him.
In a conference which can often appear shot through with coded signals and loaded phrases — it wasn’t so long ago that people attempted to discuss, seriously, whether episcopal beards were “anti-Francis” — Flores has long stood out as a man without subtext.
His strong showing in the three presidential ballots and runaway win on the vice presidential election suggests that his confreres may have decided he is who he appears to be and, more importantly, that he just means what he says.
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