From the Vatican, via Catholic News Service, comes word of the retirement of Cardinal James Francis Stafford, a Baltimore native and former auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese.

As head of the Apostolic Penitentiary since 2003, Stafford has overseen the office that grants indulgences and the court that may absolve sins reserved to the Holy See. He has worked at the Vatican since 1996, when Pope John Paul II asked him preside over the Pontifical Council for the Laity.

A former bishop of Memphis and archbishop of Denver, Stafford told CNS he has had the "enormous grace" of coming to a deep understanding of how central forgiveness is to the message of the Gospel and the mission and life of the church.

Everything the church celebrates and everything it offers the world in terms of education and social service "is dependent on our being freed from the burden of guilty," the cardinal said Tuesday. "I have re-learned and found a more profound understanding of the mystery of Christ's redemption and of the anxiety that is part of the human legacy.”

Consecrated auxiliary bishop of Baltimore in 1976 by Archbishop William Donald Borders, Stafford served in the archdiocese until 1982. But he may be best known around here for comments he made at the Catholic University of America in Washington last fall, days after the election of President Barack Obama.

As reported first by the CUA student newspaper The Tower, Stafford called Obama “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic“ and said he had run on an “extremist anti-life platform.” He likened the Catholic experience during the Obama term to “Jesus’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane,” where the Gospels say Jesus and his followers prayed the night before his crucifixion.