PopeWatch: Ditto

Yes! An enthusiastic agreement by PopeWatch with this post from Dr. Jeff Mirus at Catholic Culture:

A family member texted me on Wednesday to suggest that Bishop Robert Barron’s response to an important question had been inadequate. As Catholics decried the toppling of the statues of St. Junipero Serra in several California locations, Bishop Barron noticed that many wanted to know what the bishops were going to do about it. He responded that this is the wrong question because (citing Vatican II) it is the province of the laity to engage directly with the larger secular world.

Therefore, Bishop Barron argued, lay people should be asking what they themselves are going to do about it. This is certainly true, but my texter interpreted it as a typical episcopal evasion of yet another culturally-sensitive question. It is fine to tell the laity they need to take greater responsibility for engagement with the world; that position is unarguable. The problem is the pervasive sense among the laity that the bishops will seldom support and encourage them when they do this—unless, of course, they take a position that the Conference of Catholic Bishops has already specifically endorsed.

The laity frequently sense that they are far more likely to be rebuked by their bishops if they defend Catholic faith, morals, ideas and action in ways that generate controversy. In other words, the laity run the perpetual risk of being considered “uncharitable” if they do not strike the typically extremely cautious episcopal tone of voice, which so often seeks above all (a) to adopt positions that will be seen as reasonable by the dominant culture; (b) to express them with numerous caveats to lessen the impact; and (c) to leave out anything foreseen to be controversial with Those Who Matter.

Illustrations

There are two ways to illustrate this problem. I could talk about all the fixed moral issues that most bishops fail to address vigorously or frequently at all, especially the sexual issues on which the world is directly and irrevocably at odds with the Church, to the point of condemning and shutting out anyone who disagrees with the dominant culture. In most places, you will not even hear the moral and spiritual aspects of these issues addressed from the pulpit.

Alternatively, I could talk about prudential issues on which the bishops often stake out arguable but one-sided positions that align nicely with the attitudes of the dominant culture, leaving only “the deplorables” behind—an issue like the best way to deal with immigration, for example, or the best way to combat racism. Here, for example, the bishops typically endorse as good policy anything that purports to help the disadvantaged (after all, the default Catholic position ought to be to help somehow—the question is “how?). Since we are talking about bishops here, the result is that Catholics who regard any such proposal as harmful to the common good are often perceived as morally suspect.

Go here to read the rest.  When it comes to our clergy, the three political laws formulated by the late Robert Conquest are a useful tool for analysis:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.