Bishop Gordon D. Bennett, a U.S.-born Jesuit, has resigned as bishop of Mandeville, Jamaica, for health reasons.
Bishop Bennett, who will turn 60 in October, has headed the Mandeville Diocese since September 2004. The Vatican announced his resignation Aug. 8.
Father John P. McGarry, provincial of the Jesuit California province, to which Bishop Bennett is attached, said in an e-mail to province members that Bishop Bennett "will be returning to California for medical assessment and treatment for fatigue and depression."
Msgr. Michael Palud, Mandeville diocesan vicar general under Bishop Bennett, told Catholic News Service that Bishop Charles H. Dufour of Montego Bay has been named apostolic administrator of the Mandeville Diocese.
In May of this year, in a commencement address at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, Calif., where he was receiving an honorary doctorate, Bishop Bennett described in stark terms the challenges he faced as bishop of a tiny, poverty-stricken diocese in the Caribbean.
"I never believed persons could live in conditions so abysmal, in poverty so systematic," he said. "I never believed a culture could be so aggressive, so violent, so resourceful and so pitiful all at the same time. I never thought I would be called to be a leader in a culture seemingly forgotten by time and global awareness, and that I would be asked to make a difference precisely there."
He said of the half-million people in the diocese only 7,000 are Catholic.
"Our diocese is smaller than many parishes in the U.S. The unemployment in our area is 70 percent. Forty-five percent of the adults can neither read nor write," he said. "The average weekly salary in Jamaica is less than it costs to fill up one's gas tank in the U.S."
Gordon Dunlap Bennett was born in Denver Oct. 21, 1946. He made his first vows as a Jesuit in 1966 and was ordained a priest in 1975.
He studied at Jesuit College of Queen of Peace in Montecito, Calif.; Mount St. Michael's Scholasticate at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash.; the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley; and Fordham University in New York. He served as rector and novice master at Queen of Peace Novitiate in Montecito and as principal and later president of Loyola High School in Los Angeles.
He was made an auxiliary bishop of Baltimore in December 1997 and ordained a bishop the following March. He was one of just 10 active African-American Catholic bishops in the United States when he was named bishop of Mandeville in July 2004.
He was about to travel there for his installation that September when Hurricane Ivan, a Category 5 storm with sustained winds of 160 mph, pummeled the island. It severely damaged the cathedral and most of the diocese's churches, schools, rectories and convents. When he took over the diocese less than two weeks after the hurricane, his first job was to assess the damage and begin to raise funds for repairs.
---CNS |