The Vatican Friday announced that Bishop Salvatore Cordileone would become the Archbishop of San Francisco, a massive archdiocese that includes nearly a half-million Catholics.

Normally such announcements are relatively non-newsworthy outside the Catholic community. But Bishop Cordileone is different: During his tenure as Bishop of Oakland and in his time before that as an auxiliary bishop in San Diego, Cordileone has risen to become one of the key figures in the Church’s opposition to same-sex marriage not only California but beyond the state’s borders.

In an interview with the Catholic News Agency earlier this month, Cordileone said there could only be "one definition of marriage":

The bishop explained that this issue is of crucial importance because “we cannot have two different definitions of marriage simultaneously in the country.”



“Only one definition of marriage can stand,” he said. “This is not expanding the right of marriage. It’s changing the definition, or taking away something is essential to marriage – that it’s the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of the binding of the two and the procreation and education of the next generation of offspring.”

For a video of Cordileone talking at length about this issue, see this video at the Marriage Matters To Kids website. He also, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, is the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage.

Here's Cordileone speaking at the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Religious Freedom Confererence on May 24 of this year: