We had a pretty intense thread going on down there up until Sunday, under the post about the Lexington Diocese’s reinstatement of a priest who’d been arrested for sexual offenses twice and had a charge against him found credible by another diocese.

When threads get really long and intense, as this one did, I sometimes lose track of exactly what people are getting so angry about, and that’s the case here. But I think, in the end, it’s about bishops.

But I still don’t know exactly what the disagreement is. I suppose it concerns our general stance towards “bishops” as a category. When does clear-eyed presentation of facts spill over into disrespect? What exactly does it mean to “respect” a bishop? And does anyone really care?

My perspective, of course, is as someone who has worked in the Church and, incidentally, has spent the last week reading the short stories of J.F. Powers rather closely. You think those two points aren’t related? Well, think again. They are.

Powers’ short stories are masterpieces. Most of them concern clerical life, treated, simply, as life. The priests and bishops are as human as you or I, a great many of them operating mostly out of ego than any heady dedication to a great spiritual purpose. One of my favorites is a story that describes, very simply, without a great deal of exposition, a group of sisters counting a Sunday collection for their parish. There is no preaching, no caricaturing, but simply dialogue and action that gives us a Sunday afternoon in which the sisters count the collection while the pastor listens to the radio on the front porch, a few pages in which the status of each is made painfully clear.

So the point is, unfortunately, I have no great expectations of bishops. Nor, do I think, has hardly anyone else in Christian history since, perhaps, St. Ignatius of Antioch. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but the point is – there have been a lot of bishops in the life of the Church. After a certain point – the Patristic era, let’s say – there are not a lot of bishop-saints.

But I’m guessing the humanity of bishops is not the point. What about the fairness of speaking of “the bishops” as a group in critical terms?

Well, why not? What have they done for you lately?

Just kidding, sort of. I guess the point that some have tried to make is this: the American bishops have not held each other accountable. They have used the traditional and canonical concept of their identity as individual “princes,” if you will, to (apparently) refrain from making any kind of judgment or taking any kind of action against brother bishops who have been involved in all kinds of shenanigans, from settling sexual harassment cases against them to paying off former male lovers to sheltering pedophile priests.

I want to remind you that this isn’t necessarily the way it has to be. When you read the history of the early Church, you read a history of bishops regularly calling each other to task, sometimes privately, quite often very publicly, not only in their own communications, but in synodal and conciliar action, and so on. There was a sense that something great was at stake, that there was something that had to be protected, not matter what the price –

And that something was not episcopal fraternity. It was the Gospel.