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.
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.
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!)
(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?)
No comments:
Post a Comment