SAN FRANCISCO — The announcement by Pope Benedict XVI has been dubbed the "Bombshell by the Bay." 
 
 Next week, a key player in the passage of Proposition 8 — a man who has decried the "contraceptive mentality" of modern life — will become the leader of the Catholic Church here in the city that thrust same-sex marriage onto the national stage, the birthplace of the Summer of Love. 
 
 Supporters view Archbishop-designate Salvatore Cordileone, the 56-year-old son of a commercial fisherman, as a charming and brilliant defender of the faith. He is fluent in Spanish and Italian, has been known to sing vintage TV theme songs in Latin and is a deep believer in a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. 
 
 But many gay and lesbian Catholics worry that they will be marginalized after Cordileone's arrival. Oasis California, the Episcopal Church's gay ministry, convened a meeting recently at a Castro District bar to discuss how spiritual people should respond to the "architect of Prop. 8" coming to town. 
 
 Cordileone's appointment "re-emphasizes the Vatican's concern, and the U.S. bishops' concern, about gay marriage," said Father Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center. "Even in a city like San Francisco, they're willing to appoint someone who … has a high state and national profile on this issue. 
 
 "They're serious," Reese said, "and they're not going to back down." 
 
 During a July news conference, Cordileone was circumspect when discussing the "cultural challenges" his new diocese would present — which he said revolved around "issues of family life and, essentially, come down to our understanding of the human person, the purpose of our human sexuality, what God calls us to do and how he calls us to live and how he calls us to love." 
 
 But in a recent interview at the headquarters of the Oakland diocese, where he has served as bishop for three years, Cordileone was more direct: Gays and lesbians who are in sexual relationships of any kind, he said, should not receive the sacrament of Holy Communion, the central ritual of Catholic life. 
 
 "If we misuse the gift of sexuality, we're going to suffer the consequences," he said, "and I firmly believe we are suffering the consequences." 
 
 The prelate's light-filled office overlooks Oakland's Lake Merritt. Just beyond the graceful urban estuary, he said, are "100 blocks of inner-city neighborhoods. Those are fatherless children." 
 
 Cordileone will lead a flock of more than 500,000 Catholics spread over 91 parishes in three counties — San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin. Although it is not as influential as the country's largest dioceses, New York and Los Angeles among them, it is a high-profile destination for a fast-rising archbishop. 
 
 And though he strives to deliver Catholicism's absolutes in as nuanced a fashion as possible, Cordileone said, people need to understand that "the church is not going to change its teaching. ... The solution isn't to say, 'Well, I'm just going to disagree and continue being a Catholic.' That's not how we arrive at holiness." 
 
 Unlike secular organizations, however, the church cannot just slam the door on dissenters, he said. Instead, the Catholic Church must reach out, support people, "move them along to understand." 
 
 Cordileone, who heads up the subcommittee for the promotion and defense of marriage of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, came early to the Proposition 8 battle. 
 
 In 2007, the California Supreme Court was considering the constitutionality of a voter initiative that changed the state family code to say that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." 
 
 That September, the San Diego City Council was poised to join a friend-of-the-court brief in support of legalizing same-sex marriage in California. Cordileone — who grew up in San Diego and was its auxiliary bishop at the time — wrote a heartfelt letter to the lawmakers: 
 
 "We believe that marriage, by its very definition, can exist only between a man and a woman," Cordileone wrote. "Moreover, study after study — not to mention common sense — show that children fare better in life when raised in a home with a loving father and mother in a stable, committed relationship." 
 
 Society and its governing bodies should do everything in their power to "encourage healthy and stable marriages," he added, while treating "persons with same-sex attraction" with "respect, compassion and sensitivity." 
 
 The council voted to act in support of gay marriage. But Mayor Jerry Sanders, who had been expected to veto the measure, called a last-minute news conference. Facing reporters, he choked up. One of his daughters is gay, he said. He could not tell her that she did not have the right to wed. 
 
 A few weeks later, a small group of traditional-marriage backers gathered in a San Diego living room to strategize about how to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot in case the state Supreme Court overturned Proposition 22, which ultimately it did. ||||| With early voting underway and Election Day approaching, the head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego Thursday reminded pastors and priests that while they are obligated to share how their faith’s teachings are relevant to public policy, they shouldn’t get entangled in partisan politics. 
 
 Bishop Robert McElroy sent the message to 100 parishes in the diocese and all the priests not affiliated with parishes after the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Old Town issued bulletins that included partisan messages, including one that that claimed Satan was working through Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. 
 
 “Let me stress again that while we have a moral role to play in explaining how Catholic teaching relates to certain public policy issues, we must not and will not endorse specific candidates, use parish media or bulletins to favor candidates or parties through veiled language about selectively chosen issues, or engage in partisan political activity of any kind,” McElroy wrote. 
 
 All political material distributed by parishes must be approved by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the California Catholic Conference or the diocese’s Office of Social Ministry, he said. 
 
 McElroy noted that his warning came after The San Diego Union-Tribune published a front-page article about the controversial content in the church newsletters. 
 
 Legal experts said the parish’s statements likely violated IRS regulations that prohibit tax-exempt organizations like churches from making political statements in support or against a candidate for public office. 
 
 On Oct. 16 a flier was inserted into the historic church’s bulletin that listed five public policy issues that are “intrinsically evil” and conflict with Catholic teachings. Democrats support all five, while Republicans back none, it said. 
 
 “Based on the above, it is a mortal sin to vote Democrat,” the flier stated. “If your bishop, priest, deacon or other parishioners tell you to do so, you must walk away from them. Your immortal soul and your salvation are at stake-and so are theirs.” 
 
 The diocese said the flier was inserted into the bulletin without the pastor’s knowledge, and that its contents do not reflect Catholic teachings. It is not a mortal sin to support Democrats, and voters should use their faith-informed conscience when picking a candidate, the diocese said. 
 
 On Oct. 30, another message appeared in an article that ran in Immaculate Conception’s actual bulletin. Using an out-of-context line from a 2015 Clinton speech, the newsletter said that the Democratic nominee was influenced by Satan via Saul Alinsky, the trailblazing community organizer. 
 
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 “The devil does this through the tactics outlined by Saul Alinsky with the outcome as Hillary Clinton has stated, ‘And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed’, to draw us away from God’s teachings regarding the sanctity of life to those of the world and its prince.” 
 
 Clinton, speaking at the Women in the World Summit in 2015, was actually talking about eliminating roadblocks that make it difficult for girls to go to school, women to attend college, prevent the enforcement of domestic violence laws, and access to reproductive and maternal healthcare. 
 
 The article also included ten “sins” that have “enslaved” American society through the support of politicians, judges and voters. Some of the threats were longstanding issues the Catholic church has opposed, like abortion, gay marriage, and embryonic stem cell research. 
 
 But the article also spoke against admitting immigrants whose religions aim to “eradicate every believe except of their own prophet and god, and to impose this on America,” adding to the public debt by assisting immigrants while “paying Americans to sit home and not work,” and for “regulating the right to bear arms for free citizens in a nation where criminals and terrorists will always have weapons and where government is now in opposition to its citizens.” 
 
 The diocese said it welcomes immigrants, and that matters of the national debt or Second Amendment aren’t issues the church gets involved in. 
 
 Joshua Stewart/Union-Tribune Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church in Old Town Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church in Old Town (Joshua Stewart/Union-Tribune) 
 
 A review of several of the diocese parish’s bulletins posted online shows that most have mentioned the upcoming election, but they emphasize the importance of taking the election seriously, thinking like a Catholic in the voting booth, and requests to pray for politicians and civility. They less frequently mention candidates and political parties by name. 
 
 On Tuesday, a week before the election and a day before news about the bulletins, McElroy delivered an address at the University of San Diego where he emphasized the importance for bishops to be passionate about their faith and the implications of public policy, but that they must not be partisan. 
 
 “I speak to you tonight as a bishop who is part of a long tradition in Catholic episcopal leadership in the United States which holds that both the Church and society are best served when bishops refrain from publicly endorsing or favoring, either directly or indirectly, specific candidates in partisan elections,” he said. 
 
 And he said that voting as a Catholic isn’t so much an evaluation of one or several policy issues, but a spiritual and moral process. 
 
 He spoke about the need for political solutions that end abortions, eliminate hunger, prevent violent conflict, stop right-to-die laws, halt global climate change and environmental destruction, eliminate the drug trade, and end partisan impasses that prevent immigration reform. 
 
 “It requires, in a very real sense, the development of ‘a Catholic political imagination’ which sees the connections between poverty and the disintegration of families; war and the global refugee crisis; the economic burdens of the aging and legalized physician-assisted suicide,” he said. 
 
 But McElroy said there is an urgent need to address the dismal state of American politics. 
 
 “The sickness in the political soul of our nation will only be healed if society undertakes a massive regeneration of the political ties which unite us as a people and begin to see these ties as more important for us as a society than the partisan divisions which rend us apart,” he said. 
 
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– Critics are calling it "bombshell by the Bay." The pope has sent a strong message to his Left Coast faithful by naming a key backer of Proposition 8 against gay marriage as the new archbishop of San Francisco. Salvatore Cordileone, who officially takes charge next week, is considered an "architect" of Proposition 8, notes the Los Angeles Times. He helped develop the proposition to shoot down the state's gay marriage measure when he was an auxiliary bishop in San Diego. Cordileone's appointment by Pope Benedict "re-emphasizes the Vatican's concern about gay marriage" even in a city like San Francisco, Father Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University, tells the Times. "They're serious, and they're not going to back down." Cordileone, who heads the "defense of marriage" subcommittee for the US Conference of Bishops, has warned that Catholics have to understand the "church is not going to change its teaching," and has said that the sacrament of Communion should be denied to gays and lesbians in a relationship. "Paranoia is very high," says San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener, whose district includes Most Holy Redeemer Church in the Castro, which could be the largest gay Catholic congregation in the nation. "There are a lot of gay people for whom this religion is very important. It's just very, very sad," he tells the San Francisco Chronicle. The archdiocese recently banned drag queens from serving as emcees at charity events at the church. In Cordileone's most recent controversy, he was busted for drunk driving last month in San Diego—and apologized. The 56-year-old archbishop will lead more than 500,000 Catholics in 91 parishes in three counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin.