Part II Why a Diocese Should Have No More than 100,000 Catholics

Cont.

Bottom Line

Yet, one man has to captain any ship. So, how to manage. 

One way to do it is to give the bishop an auxiliary, such as Los Angeles have five such. Giving him auxiliary bishops is like tag-teaming them. Who is the guy we really need to go to when we have problems? Who's the boss?

Another way is in the wretched Vatican II Church, we have these miserable "National Bishop Conferences", where a bishop's authority goes to die in a miasma of bureaucracy. Bishops, and their office, are (to coin a phrase) Biblical. Peter as chief of the Apostles, is Biblical. St Paul discussing with Timothy and Titus what to look for in men who are to be ordained bishops, that's Biblical. 

National Bishop conferences are not. Nor are synods, not in the sense of synodal government, such as Russia had from the days of "The First Peter" (Peter the Great) down to the Revolution in 1917, or the Republic of Greece has today. That's apparently what Bergoglio wants to turn the Catholic Church into. 

On the other hand, a synod or Church Council that meets to hammer out a particular solution to a particular problem, that's Biblical: The First Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15. But governing the Church, managing it and running it via a synod, that's not.

What the National Bishops conferences are is a long stride toward Synod rule, and what they offer is a chaos of confusion, for leadership is buried in a bureaucracy and no actual bishop seems to have any power or authority. Bishops Conferences fail the basic point of leadership: one man, a general of an army or a captain of a ship or a president of a nation, one man has to be responsible for what happens. Bureaucracy negates that.

Tradition Solution?
Meanwhile, Ohio has one archbishop, in Cincinnati, in an archdiocese has 472,000 Catholics. But what is an archbishop? Well, the title now is basically an honorific, but historically, the pope, in far off Rome, would send a pallium, a special long, thin cloth, to a bishop of a far-off nation and that made the recipient an archbishop. The archbishop thereafter governed things in that local Church as a stand-in for the pope. He was the pope's vicar, essentially. Medieval England had two archbishops, in Canterbury, the primary one, and in York, for northern England. Ireland had four archbishops, one for each ancient Irish kingdom (Armagh, for Ulster, Dublin, for Leinster, Cashel for Munster, and Tuam for Connacht). 

However, as noted, today the archbishop title is pretty much merely titular. Technically, has a suffragan bishops, bishops under his direction -- but as they all report directly to Rome, this is window dressing. Cincinnati's Ohio suffragan dioceses are Cleveland, Columbus, Steubenville, Toledo, and Youngstown. Steubenville is the most interesting of these, as it was created in 1944 because some rich family or other wanted a bishopric for their son. Had it not been for that, its territory would have stayed part of the Columbus diocese. Currently, Steubenville has about 38,600 Catholics, which is very manageable, though it is mostly Appalachian territory; hardly a "Catholic" region at all. 

The diocese of Cleveland, on the other hand, has 677,000 Catholics, out of a diocesan territorial population of 2,774,000 people! Toledo has 322,000 Catholics and 123 parishes. (That averages to over 2,600 people per parish -- how is a parish priest going to manage that?) And finally, Youngstown has 198,000 Catholics. and it has 94 parishes, or over 2,000 people per parish, again. 

Now, in Protestant terms, a church with over 2,000 members would be a "mega-church" with a huge staff running it. In Catholic terms, none of support Protestant mega-church support network exists for the parish priest.

Therefor it is fair to ask how is any of Ohio's dioceses are really manageable, on any sort of "personal" basis, by any of the bishops -- except in Ohio's case, Steubenville?

But if we reconfigured the Church in such a way that the bishops were directly responsible to the archbishops only, and the archbishops were directly responsible to the pope in Rome, we'd end up with a system wherein the Vatican still had about 5-6,000 "bishops" to deal with, but they'd be archbishops. The pope could hold each archbishop responsible for managing his bishops, and they in turn would be focused on their people, whom they'd be expected to know much better, letting the archbishop handle the big problems.

100,000
Some considerations: because there are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, having a rule that each bishop can only have about 100,000 or so people, would end us up with 13,000 bishops, instead of the 5,100 bishops (Latin rite and Eastern) currently existent in the Catholic Church.

Using Ohio as a guide, we'd have to break up all the dioceses except Steubenville (we could add a few counties to it, actually). Cleveland and Cincinnati would be broken up into three dioceses apiece, and Columbus, Toledo, and Youngstown, into two apiece. That's 13 dioceses altogether. 

The archbishop of Cincinnati would have to manage 13 bishops, unless it was deemed necessary to break the state up into two archbishops, one in Cincinnati (southwest corner of the state) and one in Cleveland (north coast of the state). The actual Catholic laity would be better served by their bishops, and the archbishops could deal with the pope -- directly, because we would eradicate the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops! No more big hotel ballrooms full of prelates voting at long banquet tables! No more bishop voting at all. Just responsibility "personified" in the local bishop and then his archbishop. 

Now, I would think the Vatican would want to appoint the archbishops, but the local bishops could (and should) be elected by their cathedral chapters -- something most Cathedrals probably don't have. And the laity could have some input in that, too. Laity could suggest men for ordination as bishop, and the Cathedral chapter choose from among them, with archbishop approving. 

Besides this, every nation would have a national Primate or Patriarch. In a huge country like the U.S., it is probably necessary to create a "Major Archishop" position, as well, someone who managed a team of 20 or 40 archbishops. 

Of course, Bergoglio rather wreck the Church than save it, and he would never implement such a plan; and the bishops themselves would be terrified. They actually be publicly accountable! They couldn't palm it off to the national bishop bureau shop! 

But something has to be done. It is probably too late to save the Church from breaking up into National Language Churches in any event. In another 50 years, there will be a plethora of "National Language Catholic Churches" on the Orthodox model, a bunch of essentially "linguistic ghetto churches" supposedly in Communion but actually loathing one another. There will be, of course, a Latin Mass Latin-Rite Catholic Church existing throughout the world, and everyone, Christian or not, will naturally see that Church as the really only truly "Catholic Church". 

I don't think one needs to be a divinely inspired prophet to foresee that!

AnP

Why a Diocese Should Not Have More Than 100,000 Catholics...

Amici,

The Situation

The Church is in a mess, we all know that, and many reasons exist on the spiritual side of things (lack of Faith being primary) for why this is so. But more prosaic reason might also exist.

We have about 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, and 5,100 bishops. The bishops are obviously overwhelmed. They are supposed to govern their dioceses. How can they remotely do so with statistics like these? Surely, we can have little doubt that a titanic portion of the Church's troubles originate in this prosaic fact: Too many Catholics for too few bishops.

No Catholic bishop can be effective in being a bishop if he has a diocese of much over 100,000 people. And no pope can manage the world's five thousand bishops. No pope, no Vatican, can do so very closely, to any seriously good effect, to say the least. Remember, the Vatican appoints bishops; how good a job have they done the last 50+ years?

The Church itself has lasted -- on a secular, organizational level -- as a top-down ruling system, since its beginning. Obviously, it has a transcendent religious, supernatural dimension, but just purely in secular terms, the local bishop has been the cart-blanc ruler, with only a limited hierarchy above him, culminating in the pope in Rome. (I know Orthodox and Protestants reject this history, but as I reject their pseudo-history, we're even.)

From the early days of the Church, the bishop was the main guy -- priest, ruler, organizer and witness, guardian of the Faith. More formally, one could write that a bishop holds the fullness of the sacrament of holy orders and is responsible for teaching doctrine. The First Vatican Council in 1870 affirmed that each bishop is a direct heir of the Apostles (even as Pio Nono, Pius IX, sought to turn them into secretaries to the Vatican, which has proved to be a disaster).

And of course, each bishop created a hierarchy within each diocese, mirroring that of the Jerusalem Temple before it was destroyed. But above each bishop, due to the exigencies of human life, human rule, the nature of human organizations, there was a hierarchy culminating in one man. That was the pope, the bishop of Rome. (Again, regarding papal supremacy, the deniers of that, the Orthos and Prots, can go fish.)

When the early second century Corinthians had trouble with their bishop, they wrote to Rome and Pope Clement to resolve it. They didn't write to a neighboring Greek bishop or to Antioch, at that time "Queen of the East" and home of a flourishing Christian church wherein Christians were first called by that name, "Christians".

But within his diocese, it was the bishop who was priest in all Seven Sacraments, including ordination. As congregations grew, bishops appointed solid, elderly men to be "presbyters" (the word means "elder") to do baptisms, say Mass, hear confessions, preach, etc. But the bishops always kept the power to ordain.

Everyone in the town knew their bishop and he knew everyone. (Christianity was 'townie'; everyone outside was 'pagani', originally meaning rural folk.) He was their priest. Only after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity a state religion did they begin the create parishes with priests assigned to them. (That parish model of the Church is today under great stress for various reasons, and will probably be replaced.)

This history of small bishoprics one can see in Italy, where smallish towns have bishops, whereas in the U.S., only large cities are likely to have them. 

Today, a bishop is lucky if his diocese only has 50-60,000 or so Catholics. However, one bishop responsible for two or three hundred thousand Catholics in a diocese is NOT going to be effective. (Consider: the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has 4.4 million Catholics and five auxiliary bishops.) He'd be (and most of them actually are) a remote figurehead, useless to his flock and to himself as an actual leader of anything. In the U.S., each bishop is basically a CEO, and money management to keep the diocese afloat is his primary concern. 

And all that is one reason we had Mother Angelica become so powerful and influential: first, she was orthodox, not a heretic, and second, she did for Catholics through the medium of television what bishops should have been doing face-to-face. It is also why Catholic Answers and Catholic Apologetics in general have been mostly a freelance laity affair. "When the great have fallen," said Aragon, after Gandalf fell in Moria, "the less must lead." Since the hierarchy is not doing its job, the laity has to.

So, a Church with huge dioceses. Put it in perspective: Imagine a full (four-star) general -- with no colonels, let alone brigadiers or major generals, just captains and majors -- commanding an army of one hundred thousand men! How's that going to work? A typical US Army division today is about 17,000 to 21,000 and up to 40,000 with attached units, and they're under the command of a Major General. (Two stars)

Compare that to the Columbus, Ohio, diocese, from where I (more or less) came from before moving to Europe. It has one bishop, two retired bishops, 147 diocesan priests, total. Less than 100 are active and some 50 are assigned from religious orders or from outside in some way. It has 105 parishes. It covers 23 Ohio counties.

AND IT HAS A POPULATION OF 252,000 CATHOLICS!
(That's out of a total regional population of 2,456,000!)

How can one bishop even remotely hope to "govern" that, in the sense of being available to rank-and-file Catholics, confirming them, visiting with them, actually getting to know ANY (but wealthiest) of them? In other words, be a bishop? How can he remotely take into consideration the non-Catholics of his diocese, for that matter? (A bishop is supposed to be bishop of them all, one way or another. And a bishop has to be the primary apologist for the Faith to the non-Catholics, and is any bishop in the U.S. that?)

See Part II

AnP