"So long, farewell, aufwiedersehen, goodbye....goodbye.....gooooodbyyyyyyee.”
Posted on 01/26/2006 11:57:42 AM PST by marshmallow
Well, it happened 37 years late, but the Holy See finally appears to have pulled the plug on Bishop Thomas Gumbleton. This from an open letter released yesterday:
On Thursday of this past week, Pope Benedict XVI accepted my resignation from the office of auxiliary bishop to Cardinal Maida. In the revised Code of Canon Law, promulgated in 1983, there is a canon directing every bishop to request permission of the Pope to resign from the Episcopal office at the age of 75. For a variety of reasons when I turned 75 last year, I wrote a letter requesting that I not resign at that time.
During the past year I have carried on correspondence with Cardinal Giovanni Re, the head of the Congregation for Bishops, regarding this request. However, some time ago he indicated that my request to defer my resignation was not acceptable. Finally, I decided to end the discussion. On January 21, 2006, I wrote to Pope Benedict asking him to accept my resignation from my office as auxiliary bishop to Cardinal Maida.
To pinch a line from Tom Stoppard's Travesties, Gumbleton was a man "who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognised." His humility was spectacularly well-photographed, and journalists managed to make his private austerities as famous as his heterodox opinions. A minor league Archbishop Tutu, Gumbleton somewhat too obviously relished celebrity and celebrities, and was frequently pictured at Leftist rallies squeezed shoulder to shoulder with Martin Sheen and Eleanor Smeal and the other stars that get to hold the banner at the front of the march. The graf below from a decade-old radical newsblatt, concerning a Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal demonstration, is typical:
A broad range of organizations and prominent individuals endorsed the demonstration, including former New Mexico governor Toney Anaya, actor Ed Asner, writer Alice Walker, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, Jesse Jackson, and movie producer Oliver Stone.
Celebrated as a peace activist, Gumbleton has always been a strangely un-peaceful man himself. The homilies he posts at the NCR -- as a comparison with Mother Teresa's writings will show -- convey less love of the poor than bitterness at their oppressors: militarists, capitalists, ecclesiastics, etc. It's all about class warfare, in his view, and we shouldn't be surprised that his campaign for "peace" takes on that baleful truculence familiar from Marxist rhetoric. In latter years, Gumbleton added gay liberation to his roster of causes, and his recent announcement that, as a lad, he'd been sexually groped by a priest assured that he'd go out in a blaze of publicity.
Certainly the Vatican apparat Gumbleton so disparaged was lavish in its forbearance toward him. Were it half as intolerant as he claimed, he'd have been out selling vinyl siding by 1980. That makes me wonder whether this heartless institution realized that they had damaged goods on their hands, that his need for self-display was merely the surface symptom of a much deeper problem, and that, in charity, the best thing to do was to isolate his tantrums and leave him kicking theological nerf balls in the basement of the NCR. The pastoral approach.
Translation: they fired him.
Finally.
"So long, farewell, aufwiedersehen, goodbye....goodbye.....gooooodbyyyyyyee.”
As Haydn would say: "Te...Te Deum Laudamus!"
Hip Hip Hooray!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton: I did write a letter, but I indicated that I felt it was better if I did not resign so I did not request to resign. I just said I prefer to continue working. And so I sent that in and when I got it back they asked for another letter, but I haven't sent it yet. So, it's all in limbo.
Please excuse my ignorance here, but who is this guy and why is it good that he's been semi-fired?
-Conservative Catholic Dude in San Antonio
"I don't resign"
"We accept your resignation"
One could write screeds about him, but he's essentially Ted Kennedy in a Roman collar.
SirKit and I were wondering the other day how soon he'd be retiring. This is great news!
Gumbleton had vanished. A morning came, and he was missing from
the chancery: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence. On the
next day nobody mentioned him. On the third day Winston went
into the vestibule of the Records Department to look at the notice-board. One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Peace and Social Justice Committee, of whom Gumbleton had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before -- nothing had
been crossed out -- but it was one name shorter. It was enough.
Gumbleton had ceased to exist: he had never existed.
(with apologies to George Orwell)
Thank God they are all getting older, but can the pope outlive them? May he live to be ninety and in good health until his death.
My mother used to mutter in disgust about Gumbleton. Then she would rush off to confession.
Good news bumpus ad summum
That would be good news also!
Adios, Gumby. Another bad one bites the dust.
I always liked Ronald Reagan's response to the reporter who asked:
"So how did your meeting go with Tutu?"
Reagan: "Tutu? So-so."
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