A Plea to Good Bishops

The wickedness of a previous generation of bishops, not wholly leached away, has robbed good bishops of the honor they deserve.

PUBLISHED ON

February 5, 2025

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The last thing I’d want to be in our time is an American bishop.

The recent letter from the USCCB to President Trump, on illegal immigration, was measured in tone, nor did it fail, implicitly, to recognize the duty of those in public office to provide for the common good, taking all circumstances into account. It was greatly superior to the moral posing and preening wherein the Episcopal prelate in Washington indulged herself at the service following the inauguration, to the predictable applause of her true audience and to the hardening of the president’s opposition to anything she had to say.

And yet, who will listen? I have heard some people say that the first thing the Trump administration did for Catholics who voted for him was to betray them, giving their bishops the stiff arm. That assumes that American Catholics, as a whole, like and admire their bishops. They do not. Whether they should is another question. It also assumes that when they see a missive coming from the USCCB, they think of their own bishop. Unless their bishop is one of the most vocal of the players, they do not.

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I have heard some people say that the first thing the Trump administration did for Catholics who voted for him was to betray them. That assumes that American Catholics, as a whole, like and admire their bishops. They do not. Tweet This

It is a thankless task to manage decline. When I was a boy, in the heady days following Vatican II, our bishop, Joseph Carroll McCormick, set about a diocesan campaign called Project: Expansion—and yes, the colon was in the phrase, as I saw on a billboard outside our town. Call it market-driven punctuation. The diocese was going to build. I don’t fault him for that. He wanted especially to build diocesan high schools, one of which I myself later attended. He did not see the disaster in store for the Church. That disaster came in several forms.  

There was the sudden and calamitous collapse of the teaching orders among religious sisters. They donned a fancy feminism, which ended up ensuring that the children of the poor and the working class would never be taught within the haven of the Church. There was the revolution in sexual mores, or their near universal abandonment, which would, again, devastate the poor. It also gave the Church fewer children for the schools and fewer young men for the seminaries. Besides, sins of the flesh turn the eyes away from heavenly things, as people accept the lie that all real comforts to be had are in this world. 

There was, in parish after parish, the self-inflicted wound of “renovation,” usually against the people’s wishes. I will not get into the new rite for the Mass, except to note here that it was the American bishops, or the translators they put in charge, who diluted or betrayed the prayers at Mass by excision, reduction, and distortion. Then the homosexual priests threw their party and invited many an altar boy to join in—for the sex abuse scandal was overwhelmingly homosexual. They turned many a seminary into a bathhouse, bidding, as Michael Rose puts it, goodbye to good men. We will be paying for those misdeeds for a very long time.

What’s a bishop, for an American Catholic? He’s the man who shuts down your school or the church you have attended all your life. He’s the man who imposes a year’s wait before you can get married, looking the other way if you are living already in the same house. He makes you leap bureaucratic hurdles before your children can receive First Communion. If you’ve got a parish full of people who actually believe that Christ is present in the Eucharist, and who kneel to receive the sacrament or line up for Confession before Mass, the bishop is, too often, a shadowy figure to keep at bay. He provides a cover for bad priests, while taking out his frustration against the good.

As I say, much of this criticism is too harsh, and for many good but usually unrecognized bishops, it is flatly unfair, even calumnious. Now comes the Trump administration, determined to enforce immigration laws that target the eleven million people—though no one really knows the number—who are here illegally. A wide variety of considerations come into play. 

First come the laws in question, passed by the people’s representatives in Congress. The bishops do not imply that these laws are unjust. If, given current circumstances, it would be a miscarriage of justice and a harm to the common good to enforce these laws after so many years of erratic enforcement or of conniving at their violation, the bishops should explain why. To set aside a law is itself a grave matter, as it gives people the sense that they are governed by caprice in the executive or in the vast and impenetrable administrative state.

Even so, the bishops may be right, that the repatriation of so many people would be a humanitarian disaster. But then they should consider other relevant circumstances: the wages of working class men, depressed by cheap labor in farming, construction, and factory work; overburdened social services in areas that can ill afford it; inequity committed against people who wish to immigrate to the United States legally; the enrichment of cartels trading in drugs and human beings; assimilation to American ways, hardly possible when you have admitted a huge class of people holding together as they must because their continued presence is uncertain and because their manner of entry has placed them in a moral and cultural contradiction.

I have no settled opinion on what to do with those millions residing in America illegally. I do not know what leeway is built into the relevant laws. I do not know, with any real precision, who they are, where they are, where they have come from, how old they are, how many are male and how many are female, and what they are doing. I can only guess about their effects upon the economic welfare of the poor and the working class. 

But then, this is what legislatures are for. They are supposed to be made up of people with a wide range of skills, experiences, knowledge, and points of view characteristic of where they come from. Of course they can get things badly wrong. They can be motivated by abstractions misapplied. They can follow along with cultural decline—in my lifetime, almost everything they have determined about the sexes has been destructive. 

Sometimes they are imprudent and shortsighted, though acting upon right principles; a human failing ineradicable from our condition. Sometimes they are too hasty; sometimes too slow; sometimes they pay too much attention to one side of a question and not enough to the whole. But then, committees of bishops do that too.

Our good bishops are in a bind; the bad ones do not care. The wickedness of a previous generation of bishops, not wholly leached away, has robbed good bishops of the honor they deserve. When it comes to ensuring the fidelity of Catholic schools and colleges, about which bishops do have knowledge and can properly exercise authority, the USCCB has long dragged its heavy institutional feet. Why should we trust it?

It is not my place to instruct any bishop about the religious life. But I can recommend things nearby. Get to know the faithful outside of both the chancery and various parish committees. Especially get to know the men, an untapped source of dynamism and of opinions based in practical experience; they have been too long neglected. Visit the schools. Forge bonds with homeschooling families. Go to churches in danger of closing, and bring no officials with you. Attend the Latin Mass. That should go without saying.

You may be surprised how grateful people can be, just to sense that you are with them, that you do not envy or despise or dismiss their piety, that you want their parishes to endure, that you believe without reservation all that the Church teaches, and that you are willing to learn from other people—as we all must—what is not in your competence. Nor be too chary of what you do know. We need to hear it.

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5 thoughts on “A Plea to Good Bishops”

  1. The weakness displayed by the good Bishops are very much similar to the Castrated manhood that generations of male abuse and hate – Routine in the Powerful Institutions in the West from the Top, all supported by too many mind-broken, fear-driven, feelie-thinkie, amoral, baby-murdering, male-hating, vicious, fugally-strangling, delusional-psycho, hyper-empowered, Sick, Fatherless, Brotherless, Witch-directed mother raised womanhood that leap as a mob at any masculine effort to change the slide into deeper insanity, unTruth, inJustice, disOrder, Sin, Joy-Love-Family murdering Horror that has been generations spreading since 1958ish after century of Modernist-Satanic Advancements in Church and societies throughout Western and world.
    .. As a man that argues that racism, for example, is not the reason so many young minority men are so often arrested by police but it is because some in that group are responsible for 2/3 all violent crime even though their groups young men – a fraction of a minority of population – that man can expect to be harmed by howling mobs of women and other delusional fatherlesss Leftie mind-abused males, attacking him in employment (calling employers to make him & family homeless, starving, dead-on-streets), lies, false-witnessing, reputational damage, …,
    That Bishops that do not react unJustly to such a force reporting a priest that did not require Masks or held Confessions or Mass when some fear-inducing (virus) abusive policies were dictated by the Bishops in fear of the Vatican punishments.
    A very sad situation – I now consider the position held by Sedeprivationists is reasonable, so much so I may state that it is my position to our present situations from before Vatican II, that this Pope, many Bishops & top Leaders, and previous Popes from the Office holder that suppressed the 3rd Secrete and allowed that heretical containing Vatican II result, that they are ‘legally’ Popes but since their intent was and is to betray their Office and duties and oaths to the destruction or access of the Catholic Church ad replace with a false ‘Ape’ worldly Sin focused soul-murdering version, they never received the other aspect of the Papal Office (Bishops or other Offices) that is normally supplied by God, the Charismas, Graces, and increased focus and support of the Holy Ghost that is normal for the Office.
    It’s hard to not Believe that Satan rules the Modernists in Vatican and throughout the Church.
    God Bless., Steve

  2. Holy men deserve our respect and obedience, evil men deserve our contempt and disregard. A lie is a lie no matter who tells it whether you are Pope, bishop, priest or laity. For the most part the Episcopate of the Catholic Church has proven beyond any shadow of doubt that many of them and perhaps most of them are not holy men. The USCCB actions pertaining to abortion, immigration, pedophilia scandals, financial corruption have demonstrated that they have little or no regard for the Catholic faith, the laity or God in general. Their recent criticism of President Trump’s actions in dealing with the immigration problem they helped create demonstrates a level of hypocrisy that is rare even in this day and age. Their silence during Biden’s tenure capped off by his becoming a Freemason is quite telling as well. We should be able to look to them for direction, we should be able to believe and support what they say but that is simply not the case. Their silence while fellow Bishops who do speak out are “Stricklanded” demonstrates a weakness and cowardice we can’t ignore. There are a lot of things I feel towards the bishops, but sympathy or empathy are not on that list. The state of the decline in the Church is a direct result of their actions or more accurately their inaction. Weak people are worse than evil people. We have always had evil and evil is somewhat predictable. Weak people will never prevail because they lack the character and strength to do so. They are unpredictable and can only be relied on to fold when you need them the most. We can only pray the bishops will see the error of their ways and repent for what they have done and are doing to the Church.
    My most sincere apologies to the good bishops out there, the current you swim against is very, very strong. May God watch over you and guide you and bless you in all that you do.

  3. What if any “good” bishops there may yet be, they all seem to desire “to play along to get along” or risk being dismissed in the same manner of Bishop Strickland.

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