(LifeSiteNews) – Monterey Bishop Daniel E. Garcia is going home to Austin.
Today, the Vatican announced that Pope Leo XIV had appointed Bishop Garcia, currently the Bishop of Monterey, California, the next Bishop of Austin, Texas. Garcia, 64, was ordained for that diocese in 1988 and was appointed its auxiliary bishop by the late Pope Francis in 2015.
According to the USCCB, the news was first “publicized” in the USA by the papal nuncio, Cardinal Christophe Pierre.
Garcia, who is fluent in Spanish, was appointed the Bishop of Monterey by Pope Francis in 2018 and began his tenure in 2019. He was the ordinary of the diocese during the worldwide COVID emergency. As bishop, Garcia refused to give Catholics religious exemptions from the experimental, abortion-tainted COVID vaccines.
According to Catholic News Agency (CNA), the bishop cited Pope Francis’ enthusiasm for the injections in an August 13, 2021, letter explaining that neither he nor his priests would help Catholics refuse them.
“Pope Francis has highly encouraged the vaccination as an act of safeguarding one’s own health as well as that of others – pointing us to the importance of the common good, such a key element of Catholic Social Teaching,” he wrote.
“For these reasons, I will not issue, and I have directed our clergy not to issue, any Letters of Religious exemption because it would contradict the clear objective teaching of the Catholic Church and the Holy See on this matter.”
Garcia was an enthusiastic supporter of the process leading to the so-called Synod on Synodality. According to an interview with America magazine, Garcia felt that Pope Francis had giving Catholics “permission” to “identify some aspects” of the Church that could be reassessed. Speaking of a meeting he and other bishops had had with Francis, Garcia said:
He really encouraged us to be spiritual fathers that would walk with our people. He uses the language, always, ‘accompaniment, accompaniment’. see that the synodal process is doing exactly that. We’re walking with our people, we’re listening to our people, and it will make us a stronger church. It will challenge us, because it’ll probably identify some aspects of our church that we need to look at. And that’s O.K. He’s giving us permission for us to do that.
As a relative newcomer to California, Garcia joined forces with local community organizers to launch the parish-level synodality meetings in the Diocese of Monterey. COPA, or the Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action, is a non-denominational social justice group with several partners from among the area’s schools, churches, and unions.
As the auxiliary bishop of Austin in 2015, Garcia defended the traditional definition of marriage. According to CBS Austin, he spoke up against the Supreme Court’s imposition of same-sex marriage in the United States, saying that marriage can’t change with the fashions.
“It’s not something that’s meant to be able to change because the culture says we should look at marriage in a different fashion,” he said. “In other words, no means no.”
According to his biography, Garcia grew up in Waco and in Cameron, Texas. He is an alumnus of Tyler Junior College (1982) and of Houston’s University of St. Thomas (1984), from which he also earned a Master of Divinity (1988). He attended Houston’s St. Mary Seminary.
In 2007, he was awarded a master’s degree in Liturgical Studies from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.
