It seems that bureaucracy is bureaucracy, no matter if it is sacred or secular. For almost a month, I have been trying to find out how many bishops are in the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops. Googling the Catholic sites achieved nothing; Catholic On-line did not post my comment concerning the number. So, no matter how much it galls me to admit, I used Wikipedia. I sat down with the list on Wikipedia and my calculator and determined that there are 262 Bishops with their names listed. There are 265 if you list the militaryBishops, but I don’t know their standing, so I left them out of the count. I also have no idea of the accuracy of the list, but at least I now have some kind of answer. If the United States Council of Catholic Bishops is concerned about the accuracy, please leave me a comment, I will be more than happy to massage my numbers.
This concern with numbers has nothing to do with trivial pursuit or mathematical anality. I am, and have been, making a point about the lack of noise from the the Catholic Bishops in the US concerning Obama and Notre Dame. If one reads Catholic Online and several of the other Catholic blogs, one would assume that there is a major uprising among the Bishops concerning Obama appearing at Notre Dame. One of the headlines from Catholic Online today reads, “Now it is 46: More Bishops Against ND Scandal.” One would assume that there was a groundswell of Bishophic outrage against President Obama speaking at and receiving a degree from Notre Dame. It just ain’t so. There is no groundswell. Most of the media accounts report that the “scandal” is being driven by a small number of conservative Catholics who are out-of-step with the majority of Catholic thought.
“Catholics are a diverse group of people,” said John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Center for Religion and the Press, explaining the poll. “There’s been a decline in Obama’s numbers that’s not too far out of step with his decline overall. The rest of this, a lot of this, is internal politics between conservative Catholics and liberal Catholics.”
All this may be media bias, but my small effort at statistics reflects otherwise. There are 262 Bishops, 46 have spoken out. That means that 18% of American Bishops consider this a “scandal” wothy of them setting down their miter and picking up a pen. 85%, over 4 in 5, see no problem or see nothing worth commenting about. Since the majority of the Bishops serve the majority of the Catholics, what does this say about the Church in general?
I left the Episcopal Church because the battle for the Episcopal soul had been won by those who questioned the existence of anything Biblical and were more interested in numbers, popularity, being diverse (there is that word again), being popular, and appealing to all the popular secularist and liberal causes of the day. As I have heard priests say over and over in that church, “we don’t want anyone turned away from the table of Jesus.” So, in their effort to compromise and be open-minded, they have ended with a church with gay bishops, women priests, priests who think it is okay to be both Muslim and Christian simultaneously, a female head of their leading theological seminary who calls “abortion a blessing,” and local congregations who think that none of this applies to them.
So, I came to the Catholic Church looking for unity and find that the cancer of secularism has crept into the American Church. Maybe crept is not the right word. Secularism is full-fledged and gobbling more and more American Catholicism every day. The most notable Catholics are proud of their “liberal Views” and think that they can travel to Rome and teach the Pope. The Bishops are quiet unless it is to support another liberal political view or be against another war. They plead for money for the poor and pour millions into settlement funds for priests who couldn’t keep their hands off children. All of this could be forgiven, if there was some sort of unity or reformation or a return to traditional Catholicism. As I look around I don’t see it. As a new convert, maybe I am expecting too much. Maybe, I haven’t come to terms with being realistic in my faith. I am too new, and you know what they say about converts. But just maybe I don’t want to become a once a year, proud to be lapsed catholic – maybe I yearn for the one true faith — the one unwavering, traditional, centuries old church who traces its succession to Peter who knew Christ. I don’t need modernism, I have seen it at work. It ain’t purty.
