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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Right, but there’s a lot of space between “is infallible” and “should not be publicly contradicted.”

Strickland is catapulting his own career by criticizing his superiors. That’s political suicide even before the theological questions come in.

Political suicide, yes, but this kind of thing had happened before and it was generally understood what popes would do. Dismissing a bishop for criticism of a pope was not thought to be an option on the table.

It’s not?

A bishop directly challenging the pope—or claiming his office—is the kind of thing that led to excommunications.

The usual playbook for a bad/rogue bishop who is too young to just wait until retirement is to assign a coadjutor(bishop with equal rights). Removing a bishop from office is the sort of thing that under the previous two popes simply would not have happened without, like, being arrested for sex abuse or something. It wasn’t used for insubordination.

Strickland is being removed because he’s a popular American from podunk AND because the current pope is very much a norm violator with the use of the powers of office. Other more prominent bishops(Chaput, notably) who made harsh accusations against the pope were left in place until their mandatory retirement age.

A career in the priesthood where you stay silent about corruption in the Church isn't a career worth having.

He’s not a corruption whistleblower, he accused the pope of heresy.

Now the current pope has a lot of corruption scandals he could be accused of, but Strickland has not been a whistleblower in that regard(and is probably not much better informed in that matter than an interested layman; the Vatican leaks like a sieve but ordinary bishops of minor dioceses aren’t directly exposed to the majority of the shady stuff).

"Corruption in the church" is not a narrow legal term, and should not be interpreted that way. The church has a mission, and people intentionally compromising that mission for their own personal aggrandizement or satisfaction is a serious problem. The higher they are in the hierarchy, the worse the problem becomes.

The Pope promulgating heresy, if that is indeed what he is doing, is more than sufficiently shady to be worth denouncing.

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