Listecki was first made a Bishop by John Paul II. Pope Benedict made him Archbishop of Milwaukee. Many problems within the Church can be laid at the door of Pope Francis, but not this complete indifference that many clerics show to predator priests and bishops.
PopeWatch: His Hero
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
How does the old maxim go…better to kerp your mouth shut when.suspected of being a fool, rather than opening it and removing all doubt….
Weakland was a Western Pennsylvania native, who was inexplicably elevated to Archbishop by Paul VI. Weakland is another, like Bergoglio, who should have never been ordained to anything.
This malignant tumor of a pontificate is due, in large part, to the episcopal appointments of his last three predecessors. I’m not including JPI, since he wasn’t pope long enough to make any significant episcopal appointments. In fact, he probably didn’t make any.
This is why the American church is shrinking into a mission field.
At the end of the day, the most important thing to a Catholic bishop is his standing among other bishops.
I once read that the major flaw in Russian WW2 tank designs was that that treated effectively treated the crew like a necessary evil. That’s how far, far too many Roman bishops feel about their flocks and priests. Listecki here exemplifies it.
And Greg is right that personnel is policy. I will reiterate that the Roman pontiff arrogating to himself the right to appoint every bishop on the planet is not warranted in revelation, tradition or even canon law before 1917, so I will again condemn it as totalitarian idiocy.
But since it is policy, let’s be blunt and lay the lion’s share of the blame for bad appointments at the feet of JPII. He had the longest reign and spent the first two-thirds of it heedless of the reality that bad bishops kneecap any attempt at reform. In fact, he frequently appointed scoundrels despite vociferous and well-supported internal objections, e.g., Groer, McCarrick and, worst of all, Bergoglio. The head of the Jesuits thought the last was a bad idea, and compiled a report to that effect. Rest in peace, Hans Peter Kolvenbach–you tried.
And here we are.