Well, it would have been very difficult for the Holy Father to have been more wrong on an appointment that we was on this one (unless perhaps he had brought Rembert Weakland out of retirement)...
...Wuerl appointed to replace McCarrick as Archbishop of Washington...
Wuerl has a long and shameful history, which includes, among other things, public statements that suggests he'll be pimping and pandering to the pro-death crowd in Washington and attempting to silence those few Bishops in fly-over country who have the courage to insist that even those Catholics who wield secular power be subject to unambiguous moral teaching. Unlike our own Bishop Finn, Wuerl is rather highly thought of the folks at the National Catholic Reporter, which says a great deal, doesn't it?
The people of Pittsburgh have reason to rejoice; they get a new Bishop. The people of the Archdiocese of Washington....well...who really cares, outside the Beltway? Unfortunately, the Washington see has gained more prominence that it deserves, lately outshining that of Baltimore, so rest of us have to look forward to exactly the wrong kind of man in the Washington bully pulpit.
Yes, I was wrong last month in taking comfort that such rumors are rarely true. Now it's we Midwesterners have another reason to start praying extra hard that the Pope will at least return the Washington red hat back to St. Louis where it belongs, for more reasons than one.
Mistakes will be made in the best pontificates; let's not forget Pio Nono's false start, which can probably be compared to Benedict's pandering to the Red Chinese. But let's pray that this is the last major one for a while. So far, Benedict's early episcopal appointments look a lot like John Paul's early episcopal appointments, and that's nothing to cheer about.
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6 comments:
Respectfully, this posting is nuts. You do not know what you are talking about. Bishop Wuerl has been a faithful advocate of Church teaching for many, many years in Pittsburgh. He is well known in Rome from his days as assistant to the great Cardinal Wright. The Pope knows better than you, whoever you are.
Get serious...no wonder your posting is anonymous. Wuerl is the Pennsylvania pentultimate episcopal freak-dom personified. Do your research before you embarasses us with your less than informed opinion. Cardinal Wright was one liberaldom's heros. Good grief.
Now, now, first off, we don't taunt anonymous commenters (particularly OTHER anonymous commenters); after all this is an anonymous blog, and we can't keep track of all the pots and kettles.
I have been challenged to build a dossier of sorts on Bp. Wuerl by a non-anonymous fellow evil trad. I'm working on that (which means I'm waiting for someone else to put together a dossier so I can claim it as my own).
The threshhold objection I have to Wuerl (which may not be the most serious--it's just the freshest one that comes to mind) is that he's (as someone else put it) a complete "company man," in an age where Bishops, esp. Bishops in prominent sees, should not be.
His position that politicos can be scandalizers and accomplices in mortal sin and still present themselves at the communion rail (er...hold their hands out in the communion line) is bad. What's worse, he has proposed trying to take authority away from other individual Bishops who do have vertebrae and vest it in the USCCB. He actually proposed to the press, if I recall correctly, that individual Bishops couldn't exercise that aspect of governance within their own diocese without unanimous consent of the Conference or majority consent of the Conference and consent of the Holy See. Which is, of course, a guaranty that that authority will never be exercised.
At the end of the day (whatever orthodox things he may say to appease the neo's and gain credibility) Wuerl is gunning for the good Bishops, and as Archbishop of Washington, he'll have a bigger gun.
In the end, Wuerl is a fellow traveler with McCarrick, and although he may put up a better facade, he's just another apparatchik--one of Bernardin's Boyz. More later.
OK, Benedetto would not have had to call up Rembert Weakland back from pasture in order to mess this up worse; someone pointed out to me that he could have appointed Bps. Matthew Clark or Todd Brown.
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