If only the Bopping Bishop had taken Eric Idle's advice from The Meaning of Life:
But don't take it out in public/
Or they will stick you in the dock/
And you won't come back
The Kakistocracy That Is Rome keeps slouching towards Bethlehem.
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New digs for ponderings about Levantine Christianity.
The interior of Saint Paul Melkite Greek Catholic Church, Harissa, Lebanon. I have decided to set up a Substack exploring Eastern Christi...
And a JP2/B16 bishop to boot. Surely a CDF under Cdl Ratzinger so noted for weeding out any whiff of sympathy for women's ordination could have uncovered something of this. What's the motto? #kakistrocracy1978-2013?
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DeleteIf only someone had told the pontiff about Mr. Mastubator availing himself of male hookers and hitting up underage boys... Oh, that's right--people did. But he played the "conservatives are bad so please ignore" card like you do. And so Francis ignored it, as it fit his manichean world view. It took him jerking off on camera for the pontiff to finally act.
DeleteAt least you didn't yell "gossip!" this time...?
Alas, the "everything was great until JPII derailed Vatican II's Glorious Revolution" is, in addition to being ahistorical partisan propaganda, not an improvement.
But yes, I agree wholeheartedly that JPII and Benedict either appointed or promoted men who should have toiled away as parish priests or been sent out of the priesthood by trebuchet--where appropriate, into hard time.
The one-note, corruption-coddling, parochial demagogue currently on the chair of Peter is but one of many such cases fitting the former.
But yes, I agree wholeheartedly that JPII and Benedict either appointed or promoted men who should have toiled away as parish priests or been sent out of the priesthood by trebuchet--where appropriate, into hard time.
DeleteI think there are about 3,000 bishops, so the pope's attention to any one appointment is going to be pro forma unless it's a cardinal or a primate. There should be people in the Congregation for Bishops who can critically evaluate the candidates who end up on the short list courtesy the metropolitans and the nuncios. Clergymen have feet of clay known to very few, so it's not hard to imagine bent characters landing in sees in spite of the best intentions of the parties concerned. The ultimate problem is who makes it through the formation process to ordination.
100% agreement with Art. The real villains (the sin of neglect mostly) are in the Congregation of Bishops. I suspect we would do better (at least in the First World) if the selection of first-time bishops was shifted out of Rome to a combination of clergy and lay people submitting a terna to the bishops of the province, an independent lay group vetting each. Maybe Rome gets veto option on an archbishop.
DeleteMy sense is that Pope Francis has inherited a lot of crap in the bench of bishops and more, the culture that promotes them. Sometimes it's like watching your adult child. You know they're going to screw up something, but they're already in the system, so you can only hope that a come-to-Jesus moment is on the way.
My sense with JP2 and B16 is that they were easily groomed and manipulated by people who knew what those popes wanted to hear. A fatal flaw of any administrator, but there we have it.
100% agreement with Art. The real villains (the sin of neglect mostly) are in the Congregation of Bishops.
DeleteI actually never said that. The Congregation, btw, gets their recommendations from metropolitans and from nuncios.
non-Cardinal Viganò, no wonder, then. New paragraph then with the initiation of my comment then. I just thought you were on to something, namely that the pope doesn't micromanage 4k bishop appointments as they arise.
DeleteIIRC, it was the standing policy of the Congregation for Bishops ca 2002 to remove bishops who had committed offenses, though the process could be drawn out (as it was with Reginald Cawcutt of Cape Town, whose removal took two years). What they did not do was remove bishops who had been lax with accused priests.
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