{"id":256,"date":"2009-02-05T10:22:03","date_gmt":"2009-02-05T10:22:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/egan-leaving-the-piano-is-stil.html"},"modified":"2009-02-05T10:22:03","modified_gmt":"2009-02-05T10:22:03","slug":"egan-leaving-the-piano-is-stil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/02\/egan-leaving-the-piano-is-stil.html","title":{"rendered":"Egan leaving? “The piano is still here…”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bush<\/span>The buzz is a roar. The race to succeed Cardinal Edward Egan is nearing the finish line. And the winner is…!
\n“Who knows?”, by a mile!
\nWell, one sure bet is that the long-awaited announcement is nigh–Egan (he’s the one on the right) turned 75, the mandatory retirement age, nearly two years ago. But the pope can keep a bishop on as long as he likes, and Pope Benedict XVI apparently likes to do that. As Laurie Goodstein notes in her fine summation in today New York Times<\/a><\/strong>, the rumor that Egan’s beloved baby grand piano has been moved out of the Madison Avenue rectory is unfounded.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Joseph Zwilling, the cardinal’s spokesman, said there was no truth to the rumor. “The piano is in the cardinal’s residence, where it has always been,” he said.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then again, this wouldn’t a bad week for some good news for Rome. (Maciel, Williamson, et al.) Goodstein cites the persistent buzz about Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan, long a top candidate. He’s Irish, he’s affable, he’s media-friendly–and his people are denying everything. Still…”I think in many ways if the part of archbishop of New York could ever be scripted, Archbishop Dolan would really be cast in that role,” Father David M. O’Connell, president of the Catholic University of America in Washington, told The Times.
\n\"Archbishop<\/span>What Goodstein did not report, however, is the shocking news that Dolan’s candidacy will be scotched (sorry, Hibernians) by a brewing scandal over his failure to pay “back tithes.” Catholic Minority Report has the story…<\/strong><\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

The supposed nominee, on condition of anonymity, said he “just plain forgot.” He said he was deeply embarrassed by the unfortunate disclosure recently made public and asked that this “oversight” was put in context of years of service to the Church.
\nHe wrote a letter to L’Osservatore Romano saying, “In December, the archdiocese’s accountant advised me that I was a little behind in my donations. In an effort to ensure full compliance and the most complete disclosure possible of my personal finances, we remedied these issues by filing amended tithing returns with full payments, without interest. I assure everyone my mistakes were unintentional and I disclosed this information to the Pope voluntarily, and paid the tithing (without interest) promptly.”
\nPope Benedict XVI seems to be standing behind his nominee, saying today that his nominee is truly the only man for the job and that any attempt to derail this nomination would be seen as an attempt to play “the theologies of personal eschatology.” He said the nominee was uniquely qualified for the position of Archbishop. The Pope then added that it actually didn’t matter what anyone else thought because “I won.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/strong>
\n\"Stephen<\/span>Well, now it turns out that Vatican’s legendary “facciata bronzata” is crumbling, and they are weighing alternates. The leading candidate is a brilliant choice: Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert<\/a>. He’s Catholic, he’s a Sunday School teacher, he’s funny as heck, and he has just one wife (allegedly), which was of course St. Paul’s main requirement for bishops. The Desperate Blogger has the tale<\/a><\/strong>:
\n<\/p>\n

Confronted with questions regarding the fact that Colbert has never been ordained, and is, in fact, married with three children, the source told reporters, “These are not necessarily disqualifying factors. His Holiness recognizes that positions such as this often require a fine balance between the political and the ecumenical. As a former presidential candidate, and perhaps even more so as a Sunday school teacher, Mr. Colbert will be prepared to deal with whatever Church politics he may have to face. And as a popular television personality, His Holiness must also consider his ability to ‘put the butts in the seats’ every Sunday. With the financial crisis already forcing the closure of fourteen of our schools in New York City, the diocese could benefit greatly from ‘The Colbert Bump’. As far as him having children, that could work out in his favor as well. If the Archbishop has children, conventional wisdom says it’s much less likely to be revealed later that he’s ‘had children’, if you get my drift.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/strong>
\nAt dotCommonweal, Cathleen Kaveny<\/a><\/strong> even has the scoop on Cardinal Colbert’s first pastoral letter: The Splendor of Truthiness (Veritissitatis Splendor<\/em>).
\nAs always, I’m not confirming anything until it comes straight from the bocca del cavallo–that’d be Rocco Palmo, not the Pope. And Rocco says this morning he’s not talking<\/a>. <\/strong>He’s taking the high road.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, I could just throw everything at the wall and see what stuck… but that hasn’t been the case for a good while now. With a readership of this size, see, comes a responsibility I’ve tried and hoped to rise to — in a word, to be accurate — and, gratefully, that’s improved. (Not without fits and starts, of course, but it’s gotten better.)
\nBehind the page, though, what that’s meant is a lot more time and energy spent nailing things down beyond any shadow of a doubt, a lot less time to answer e.mails and send acknowledgments, and more than just sometimes, 10, 12, even 15 hours or more of working the lines, all to come up with nothing but a false alarm — for the record, this has already happened on multiple occasions… in recent weeks. But even so, just as you’ve come to expect “the goods,” making sure what seems true actually is before a single word runs here is simply doing my job.
\nIf that looks easy, good — just know it’s anything but.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that’s today’s “Word”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The buzz is a roar. The race to succeed Cardinal Edward Egan is nearing the finish line. And the winner is…! “Who knows?”, by a mile! Well, one sure bet is that the long-awaited announcement is nigh–Egan (he’s the one on the right) turned 75, the mandatory retirement age, nearly two years ago. But the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,3,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nEgan leaving? 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}