Vatican veteran poised to lead converts

Steven Lopes was a "cradle Catholic," reared in a family that never acted as if religion stopped at the church door.

Superlatives topped superlatives in a career that brought him three degrees from Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University, stints as a university teacher, secretary posts with key church officials and a leadership role in the Vatican's outreach to Anglicans, Episcopalians and Methodists.

When the Vatican needed someone to oversee melding of Catholic and Anglican liturgical traditions, it turned to the boyish California priest, who, associates said, possessed the rare ability to seem at ease in any situation.

On Tuesday, Lopes will take his next step in church leadership, as he is installed as the first bishop of the Houston-based Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. The diocese-like jurisdiction oversees more than 40 congregations of converts from the Anglican tradition in 27 states and four Canadian provinces.

"Lesson No. 1: The Holy Spirit is going to lead," said Lopes, 40. "I never had an assignment coming that was expected, including this one."

In welcoming the bishop-elect, Msgr. Jeffrey Steenson, a former Episcopalian who has guided the ordinariate since 2012, praised Lopes' work in creating the ordinariate, "the most remarkable endeavor the Catholic Church has ever launched for the cause of Christian unity."

"There is probably no one who has worked as hard and who has a deeper knowledge of the ordinariate," said Steenson.

Mentored by parish priest

The son of California Bay Area educators, Lopes recalled that religion was palpable in his childhood home.

"We always had a strong religious practice at home," he said, "but that isn't so much what pointed to my own vocation."

What followed was a touching tale of how his local parish priest, the Rev. Marvin Steffes, aware that Lopes' father was seriously ill, reached out to mentor the teenage future priest.

"When I was 14, the parish priest pulled me aside one day after school and invited me to help him on weekends as one of the parish sacristans," Lopes said. "Father Marvin had found out my father was terminally ill - he died two years later - and he was keeping me close. He knew I needed someone close."

Through high school and the first years of college, Lopes worked side by side with the priest, nurtured by Steffes' "natural and loving fatherly way in his vocation."

"I wanted to be a priest just like him," Lopes said of Steffes, who died at age 80 in 2011.

From the University of San Francisco, where he majored in theology, Lopes moved to St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, Calif., and then, after one year, to Rome's Pontifical North American College.

Lopes graduated with a baccalaureate in theology from Pontifical Gregorian University in 2000, and was ordained as a priest the following year. Over the next few years he moved back and forth from the Vatican university, where he obtained two more degrees, to California where he served in various pastoral capacities.

In 2005, he was named secretary to San Francisco Archbishop William Levada, who had been appointed prefect of the Vatican office charged with promoting Catholic teaching.

'Pretty daunting work'

By 2007, Lopes was involved in one of the faith's greatest ecumenical endeavors of the late 20th century - providing a religious home for thousands of Anglicans, Episcopalians and Methodists drawn to Catholicism.

The movement began in 1980 when the Vatican established mechanism for onetime clergy in the Protestant denominations to lead congregations of newly converted Catholic laity.

When groups of erstwhile Anglicans in 2007 asked the church if there were ways their parishes could join in full Catholic Holy Communion, the Vatican responded by appointing a commission to study the matter. Lopes was among the panel's first members.

The effort culminated in Pope Benedict XVI's 2009 authorization of creation of personal ordinariates that provide converts full Catholic Communion while retaining aspects of Anglican liturgy. An English ordinariate was established in 2012; Houston and Australia came a year later.

The new churches shared aspects of both of the parent faiths. Unlike Catholic priests, ordinariate priests could marry. Lopes served as executive director of the committee charged with developing texts for celebration of Mass that combined Catholic and Anglican traditions.

Among Lopes' committee colleagues was former Episcopal rector Clint Brand, now an English professor at Houston's University of St. Thomas.

"I was working closely with him for four or five years," Brand said. "It was pretty heavy going. It was pretty daunting work. Sometimes, I felt I was in over my head. Steven had the capacity to pull us back to earth, to get us to take a deep breath and get through it."

In the United States, the move of Episcopalians to Catholicism was prompted by their church's liberalization on issues such as homosexuality. But Lopes suggested other factors were at work, not the least being the common beliefs the religions shared in medieval England.

"The way they prayed and structured church life arose out of medieval Catholic England," Lopes said. "In many ways, it wasn't a great leap of faith."

Upon his departure from the Episcopal Church, Steenson called Catholicism "the true home of Anglicanism."

Blessed with charm

As Lopes prepared to take on his new duties in Houston, Catholic leaders expressed confidence that he skillfully would guide the ordinariate's geographically scattered parishes.

"He is a very down-to-earth person, very intelligent," said Sister Mary Walsh, a Lake Charles, La., nun who attended Lopes' classes in Rome. "… With the Anglicans … he tried to keep what was in line with Catholic teaching. He wanted them to have their own culture and way of worship."

Nebraska priest the Rev. Jeffrey Loseke said he met Lopes in seminary and always has been "amazed at his ability to charm people."

"He feels comfortable in every setting," said Loseke, who called Lopes "my closest friend." "He can go toe to toe with academics, the powerful, yet be comfortable in a downstairs family room with parishioners. He's a real person."