Well, he let them down, didn’t he ? No anti-doctrinal sensations from the Popes . And don’t try to tell us that some weren’t hoping for one, impossible though this would have been. Is is possible that some of them were bishops ?
You can just imagine the Sunday afternoon scene in some building that’s still called a palace, with somebody who still likes to be called ‘milord’, by somebody who /still wears the pectoral cross even at home, even if it’s banging off his knees, somebody who’s stalking about the parlour, shouted at his secretary, hoping against hope that someone will come to the door with a reserved sin to get a penance that will turn his hair white and curdle his blood.
They’ll still have to go on listening to the Pope, if only because there is no other reason for their being taken seriously in 2016 , and that of course mostly all their own fault. They’ll feel better next day, and issue orders for the closure of a few more churches or maybe start a vocations campaign, .
But worse than having to listen to him, and having to show it, as congregations decline and the Flock becomes restive, worst of all in fact, is having to do some work, this time in discernment. The days of saying ‘This is what Canon Law says, so there’ are on their last legs. As the Pope says in ‘ The Joy of Love’ :
‘We also find it hard to make room for the consciences of the faithful, who very often respond as best they can to the Gospel amid their limitations, and are capable of carrying out their discernment in complex situations. We have been called to form consciences, not to replace them…A pastor cannot feel that is enough simply to apply moral laws to those living in ‘irregular situations’ as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives’
‘We have been called to form consciences , not to replace them’
Does the Pope, a man bold enough to say ‘Pastors, not Princes’, and we’ve heard a Scottish bishop, although he’d been a bishop for all of nine weeks at the time, tell us what he thought about that, really understand just how much actual WORK this involves ? How much it involves giving up the addictive taste of power?
‘Capable of carrying out their discernment in complex situations’?
Come on, we bishops do that. It’s our thing. After all, we’re celibate, and we can do what we like. And it’s all been such fun. How can THEY possibly do that?
We have a sudden flashback here to days of being stooped in front of a high chair , picking bits of violently discarded food out of our clothes, and saying to a trembling upper lip, ‘Eat it, it will do you good ‘. Can’t bishops see, given their perspective of more or less unlimited power, that supporting Pope Francis by adopting the extension of ordination actually gives them power beyond their wildest dreams, and hundreds of thousands of new Ordained Celebrants to control?
How, you may well ask, did bishops get this way? One of the answers is how they were appointed, and the Congregation of Bishops did this. Their numbers at one point included Cardinal Bernard Francis Law, still listed on 4th April 2013, at 11.27 a.m. Yes, him. This body obviously jumped through the hoops provided by St John Paul II, the Platonic Relationship Pope , during his lengthy reign. If you said what he liked, you were appointed. We have assessed the price of sending a 2016 calendar to each of the world’s bishops, in case they haven’t got one, but the price is prohibitive.
While anybody still cares, we suggest that the bishops smarten up.
This is now 2016. Accept it, or do the honourable thing.