Today [August 8th] is the memorial of Blessed Mary MacKillop, one of that exclusive club of excommunicated saints. Yes, sometimes the Good Guys run afoul of their badly mistaken bishops or a particularly foul glob of church-politics....
A bit of an odd take from someone who has previously said where the bishop is, there is the Church: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Just because the Church is where the bishop is doesn't mean a bishop can't be wrong. The bishop is just as human as the rest of us; he just has the charism of the apostolic office to guide us and hold us all together.
ReplyDeleteYou'll hear it again when Bl. Anne-Marie Javouhey's memorial comes around (She's also a member of the excommunicated saints club). And I could have mentioned it on Franz Jagerstatter's day since his bishop counselled him to go fight for Hitler.
"Just because the Church is where the bishop is doesn't mean a bishop can't be wrong."
ReplyDeleteThen there was no point in your repeatedly saying it when all someone did was say they believed Archbishop Weakland was wrong.
But that wasn't what was going on, Terrence.
ReplyDeleteThis is where the witness of that club of excommunicated saints can teach us. Even if, perchance, the bishop was disastrously wrong, he's still due respect, honor, and even a certain amount of deferrence --- even when one can't do as requested [Mary McKillop couldn't neglect the education of poor children; Nannette Javouhey couldn't change the rule of her community while she was not the superior, or admit the bishop's totally unsuited niece; Franz Jagerstatter couldn't kill for Hitler.....]
And when Mary and Nannette got excommunicated over it, they still honored and deferred to the bishop. They didn't make a public scene about it, or take it to the secular press [which Nanette definitely could have, she was favored by the press and government and her bishop was very publicly lunatic!]; they patiently made the possible canonical appeals, continued to respect and pray for the bishop, and obediently did not present themselves for communion until their bishops repented.
How about if someone writes to an archbishop urging action to stop a priest sexually abusing children, and the archbishop responds by threatening to sue the person making the report?
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