The risk of business as usual in the Church

Though the Church tends to think in centuries and the wheels turn ever so slowly in the hierarchy, George Weigel suggests a strategic intiative to change what he calls “internal sclerosis”. Because frankly, there’s a growing bishop crisis….besides the other one.

Weigel does the math and calculates that the episcopacy – the institution of bishops – is heading for a severe shortage.

Taking all of these factors into account, a conservative estimate would suggest that the Church in America must be given at least 250 new bishops between now and December 2025: one new bishop about every three and a half weeks.

Growing the ranks of potential bishops is one thing. But placing them where they’re needed is at issue here.

The present system for vetting candidates for the episcopate, and then getting them appointed and installed in a timely fashion, needs a major overhaul. Not only does it work too slowly; it doesn’t work strategically. The actuarial tables have made clear for more than a decade that the senior episcopal leadership of the United States would have to be dramatically reconfigured in the last half of the first decade of the 21st century. Yet there seems to have been no strategic plan to guide this process. Appointments to both diocesan and metropolitan sees are handled independently, one at a time; on only the rarest of occasions does consideration seem to be given to how a move on one part of this complex chessboard affects other possible moves down the line.

Moreover, there is virtually no consultation on the appointment of bishops with knowledgeable members of the Church outside the ranks of the clergy (and such consultation is exceedingly rare with the lower clerical orders). Reformed, evangelically-focused criteria for judging a man’s fitness for the office of bishop, for which many rightly called in the wake of the Crisis of 2002, do not seem to have been devised, much less implemented. And all of this is happening — or, better, not happening — at a moment when episcopal credibility remains the most severe casualty of the Long Lent of five years ago.

The risk of business-as-usual? Congregationalist ultramontanism, if you’ll pardon the phrase: a Catholic Church in America in which people love their parish priests, love the Pope – and have little sense of connection to the local bishop. That’s not what Vatican II intended in its reform of the episcopate, nor is it what Christ intended for his Church.