Bishop Cupich: A View from Spokane

The Catholic Thing ^ | 9/24/14 | Douglas Kries

[marshmallow]

Now that he has been named archbishop of Chicago, many people have expressed interest in Bishop Blase Cupich’s time as bishop of the Diocese of Spokane. I should make clear that I barely know Bishop Cupich on a personal level. I am only a Catholic layman in the diocese of Spokane. I do, however, hold an endowed chair in “Christian Philosophy” at Gonzaga University, serve as academic advisor to Bishop White Seminary (an undergraduate college seminary at Gonzaga), and am a former director of Gonzaga’s small Catholic Studies Program. Gonzaga University is, primarily, a school of approximately 4800 undergraduates that calls itself Jesuit and Catholic and that operates within the Spokane diocese.

First, the good news: Not long after he was appointed to serve as bishop in Spokane, Cupich delivered a talk at Gonzaga as part of “Ignatian Heritage Week.” His lecture was devoted to the work of Christian Smith, an accomplished sociologist who is the director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame.

Professor Smith’s work is vast, but he is especially deft at using sociological tools to chronicle the inability of Christian parents and educational programs, including Catholic ones, to pass on the practice or even the mere knowledge of Christian faith to young people in the United States. In his presentation, Bishop Cupich seemed quite convinced by Smith’s analysis of our current and ongoing crisis.

This means that Cupich recognizes that there are very serious problems within the Catholic Church and within Catholic education in the United States. But Cupich may be unaware that after his appearance, Ignatian Heritage Week was taken over by Gonzaga administrators and that ideas such as Smith’s have hardly been featured during Ignatian Heritage Week ever since.

Not long after Cupich became bishop.....

[NKP_Vet]

http://the-american-catholic.com/2014/09/24/popewatch-why-cupich/#more-55452

[BlackElk]

The appointment of Cupich to Chicago is a possible relief for Spokane but a great tragedy for Chicago.