The Pope Fiddles While Rome Burns

Nero Fiddles While Rome Burns

Excuse me for laughing, but I just read several newspaper headlines suggesting that the Vatican,  in the persons of Bishop Sartain (Seattle), Bishop Blair (Toledo), Bishop Paprocki (Springfield, IL),  are going to "reform" the Catholic Women Religious of the United States! Give me a break! Of all the problems the Vatican has, they are concerned about the religious women who are out in the world actually practicing their Christianity!


If anything needs "reforming" it is the Vatican and its autocratic bishops. Benedict XVI might want to reform the Vatican Bank and allow the light of transparency to penetrate the secrets that lie buried in its vaults. The Vatican might want to reform itself in terms of its lack of leadership on the misconduct of priests and bishops who were involved in pedophilia or who covered it up. (Many of us still question why Cardinal Law was promoted to Rome after his disastrous lack of leadership in Boston.) The Vatican may want to consider its ambivalent position on clerical involvement in local politics. In South America, the Vatican told priests associated with  "Liberation Theology" to disengage from political activity, but on the other hand, when US Catholic Bishops launched a political attack on President Obama, the Vatican was noticeably silent.


The current leadership of the institutional Church is driving baptized Catholics and their money out of the front door all across the USA and other parts of the world. The Church has an increasingly, woeful lack of male, celibate priests. Catholic dioceses in the the US and Europe are closing churches at an alarming rate. With all these problems, one would think that the Vatican would "examine its conscience" and aggressively attack these problems. Not going to happen; they are worried about nuns in the US who are discussing the ordination of women.

I guess the Pope buys into the leadership philosophy that if you have a problem, the best thing to do is to ignore it and  create another problem of your own choosing and then pretend to be solving it.