"Bishops and Their Camels" A Sunday Reflection

 An old Arab idea: Camels know the 100th name of Allah...

...and that's why they wear so superior a look!

Father Hunwicke notes that Dom Gregory Dix reveals that while we, today, may think Catholic bishops are bad, they've been pretty bad before.

An excerpt:

"[I]t cannot be said that the episcopate as a whole had come well out of the universal crisis of the Diocletian persecution. 

"Few bishops when it broke out were men of much distinction. Eusebius, who as a bishop and a contemporary has some claim to be heard, says frankly that they were on the whole a poor lot, and ascribes the persecution largely to divine anger at their conduct. He is rather given to pious thoughts of this kind, which have not quite the value of historical judgments. But the precise and definite evidence of episcopal failure everywhere at this time can hardly be discounted ... The better bishops, of course, proved faithful and were martyred. But a shockingly large number at the first question turned traditor - i.e., handed over the Scriptures and sacred vessels to the authorities for destruction, the formal act required of them, which Church and State agreed to consider as constituting apostasy. Others denied that they had them in their keeping, but gave the names of the lectors who had them. Others again salved their consciences by handing over other books instead ...

An P again:

Read the whole article. Fascinating, depressing, and yet strangely comforting. If the Church could survive those idiots, she can survive anything, even Bergoglio & Co. As Belloc famously wrote:

"THE Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine — but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight."

Of course, I hasten to say those long-ago bishops were threatened with death, and in those days death was nasty, brutish, and long-drawn out. Most of today's bishops in the developed world won't face THAT sort of persecution, even though they wear purple because it is the color of blood and it is supposed to remind them that they're expected to be martyrs.

An Préachán