Don’t let all those rigid vicious lawmakers get you down!
The Eponymous Flower laments:
There was once a time when Catholics would reject an unworthy ordinary by force.
Hundreds of demonstrators dressed in black barged into a cathedral in a city in southern Chile on Saturday and interrupted the installation ceremony for the city’s new Roman Catholic bishop, Juan Barros, whom they accuse of complicity in a notorious case of clerical sexual abuse, blocking his passage and shouting, “Barros, get out of the city!”
The scene inside the Cathedral San Mateo de Osorno was chaotic, with television images showing clashes between Barros opponents, carrying black balloons, and Barros supporters, carrying white ones. Radio reports said several protesters tried to climb onto the altar where Bishop Barros was standing. After the ceremony, he left the cathedral through a side door escorted by police special forces. Outside, about 3,000 people, including local politicians and members of Congress, held signs and chanted demands that he resign.
How does the Pope defend this bishop’s appointment in the face of such scandal and outrage? Is there no statement, no indication of any change? Isn’t this the People’s Pope, close to the poor, the outcast, the suffering, and the little guy?
Weeks of protests, candlelight vigils and letters to Pope Francis were not enough to persuade him to rescind his decision in January to appoint Bishop Barros to lead the Diocese of Osorno, 570 miles south of the capital, Santiago. Bishop Barros was a close associate of the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a prominent Santiago priest whom the Vatican found guilty of sexual abuse in 2011. Father Karadima, now 84, was ordered to retire to a “life of prayer and penitence.”
How many such bishops do we suffer with every day around the world and make no peep of protest? Does the FrancisChurch care what kind of depravity and oppression they foist on us in the name of ‘going forward, ever forward?’
Will this Bishop Barros be a force for good in his diocese or a destroyer of it? Who am I to judge?