Pope names US Redemptorist to Vatican office for religious

VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict XVI has named the U.S. Redemptorist Father Joseph W. Tobin to be secretary of the Congregation for the Institutes of Consecrated Life and the Societies of the Apostolic Life. The 58-year-old Detroit native will be ordained an archbishop, the Vatican said Aug. 2 announcing the Father Tobin's new assignment. While serving as superior general of the worldwide Redemptorist order from the 1997 to 2009, Father Tobin also served as a vice president of the Union of the Superiors General and, for the last eight years of his term, was a member of the special council for the relations between the union and the congregation for the religious. In late May, Pope Benedict named as Father Tobin to the nine-member team scheduled to conduct an apostolic visitation of the Catholic Church in Ireland in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis there.

Pope Benedict XVI

Papacy began	19 April 2005 (5 years, 106 days)
Date of birth	16 April 1927
Predecessor	John Paul II
Birth name	Joseph Alois Ratzinger
Nationality	German and Vaticanese