Bp Martino had to make some hard decisions on closing schools and parishes, and people didn’t like this. He also invested his personal prestige in bringing a group called the “Community of St John” from Argentina, where they ran traditional mass communities (of clergy and lay people), and then there was a gay scandal involving some of the priests or brothers in this group. It turned out that the group (former SSPXers who were kicked out) is well known for this in Argentina, but he obviously didn’t know it and was too trusting.
I think the thing that really did him in was the opposition of the USCCB. He was one of the first bishops to oppose the Church’s automatic canonization of any Democrat and their giving breaks to pro-abortion politicians, and I think that was what finally brought him down.
There was an interview with one of the head honchos at the USCCB just a couple of days ago in which he said he was disgusted by the “minority of bishops” who had opposed Obama and he wanted Obama to know, in the post Kennedy funeral times, that it wasn’t that way anymore. The “minority” was about 1/3 of the American bishops, which seems pretty signficant to me. But obviously something has happened at the USCCB in the last few months that has made the old guard liberal wing (Mahony et al.) much more powerful, and I think this is why Martino couldn’t take it anymore.
That said, Martino added that he "clearly" wasn't "prostrate with illness" and, freed from the burdens of office, was "feel[ing] fine" at the hourlong session.
To handle the bulk of the diocese's affairs, the freshly-named apostolic administrator, Cardinal Justin Rigali, tapped Msgr Joseph Bambera, a well-regarded local pastor, as his delegate. A former chair of the diocese's Presbyteral Council and member of the Board of Trustees of the Jesuit-run University of Scranton, Bambera notably comes to the post from outside the current diocesan curia.
While the temporary caretaker of the Scranton church reappointed the bulk of Martino's eight vicars to continue in their current capacities on an interim basis, one of two figures to not make the cut was Msgr Kevin McMahon -- the highly-regarded moral theologian Martino recently recruited as his episcopal vicar for "Catholic Doctrine, Identity and Mission."
Before the Scranton post was created for him last month, the priest of Wilmington served in St Louis as resident counsel on bioethics and health care issues to another prominent "lightning rod" prelate: Archbishop Raymond Burke, who was transferred to Rome last year as the global church's "chief justice."
Grist for the mill.
I saw Bishop Martino and listened to his comments on a televised portion of one of the USCCB meetings and had underlined my own opinion which was that he was going to be a great Bishop and help bring the Church in America back to orthodoxy.
I believe the comment I remarked on concerned his observation that the Bishops needed to recatechize the dissident catholics and teach them what the "common good" really meant.
We don't have too long before that slickster bishop Kikanis takes the helm,I pray that he either has an epiphany,converts and turns Catholic or resigns.