Posted on 03/15/2008 5:50:26 AM PDT by NYer
BELLEVILLE, Ill. (AP) - Nearly four dozen priests in Belleville's diocese want Bishop Edward Braxton to step down.
A letter signed by 45 priests and sent to Braxton says his resignation would be for the good of Braxton and the diocese.
In January, Braxton publicly apologized for spending about $18,000 from restricted diocesan and Vatican funds.
The letter by the priests says they've become "increasingly frustrated by the lack of collaborative and consultative leadership" from Braxton, who took over the diocese in mid-2005.
The diocese covers Illinois' 28 southernmost counties and has more than 100,000 Roman Catholics.
The letter will be forwarded to the archbishop of Chicago and the Vatican's representative in Washington.
Braxton isn't commenting.
Ping!
The ,ost important part of the story doesn't say HOW he spent the funds.....feeding the poor or gambling? Big difference.
Braxton also may have bought a wooden chancery table and chairs with $10,000 from a "Future Full of Hope" fund for children and adults, the Belleville News-Democrat reported this week, citing a motion criticizing Braxton passed by the fund's board.
In the pretty small diocese of Belleville, if nearly four dozen priests put their signitures to something like this, the wheels have fallen off the train.
According to Catholic-hierarchy.org, there are 110 diocesan priests and 42 religious priests in 124 parishes in the diocese. (Does the petition include religious priests, since they do not “work for him”?)
I do know that there was nary a complaint, and indeed national prominence (top post in the USCCB) and even an Archdiocese given for Braxton’s heretical and politically correct predecessor, Wilton Gregory. And while it sounds very bad for Braxton (IOW, I do NOT mean this as a defense of him), his appointment was one of Rigali’s in the territory of Cardinal Bernadin and his lavendar mafia.
The wheels probably fell off the train when Gregory was bishop. These rebellious priests have no right to expect to be “consulted” or to expect the bishop to “collaborate” with them. They have the obligation to sit down, shut up and submit in humble obedience to their bishop. If they have a legitimate complaint, i.e., that his governance of the diocese is not consistent with Catholicism, then they should bring that to the attention of the Congregation for Bishops at the Vatican not to the attention of the local radio station. No one in actual Church authority asked for the impudent opinions of these priests and no one ought to ask. They evidently operate under the assumption that the Catholic Church is some sort of democracy which, thenk God, it is not and never will be.
Amen. You read my mind.
Good comments on this thread from knowledgeable folks. As the sins of bishops go in recent years (pedophilia, heresy, apostasy, liturgical abuse, breaking immigration laws, opposing our military, funding pro-abortion and pro-GLBT groups, mandating sex-ed classes for 6-year olds, ETC) buying expensive vestments ranks pretty low on the list of offenses, it seems to me. For this many priests to get together in an act of disobedience, I suspect what they really don’t like is that he doesn’t do things their way. The real story may not even be here.
The protest technique worked against Cardinal Law. It remains to be seen if it will work against this bishop. Although the padres are apparently not following correct procedures, the bishop also has no right under Canon Law to divert donations made for a specific purpose to other purposes. If he did this, he is just another example of a bishop placing himself above church law.
Wasn’t he from the Diocese of Lake Charles, Louisiana before going to Belleville?
As to Boston and Law, don't you think that the main role of the priests there was behaving scandalously as did the late Fr. Geoghan and that they had little to say that was relevant and that they could not discipline their diocesan ordinary if they wanted to???
The issue was theft. Some bishops, especially ones who view themselves as a corporation sole, don’t really believe that they’re stealing when they dip into Peter’s Pence, or hijack the Priest’s Pension Fund to pay off people who have dirt on bishops.
What is probably happening in Belleville is that people are starting to rethink giving to the Church. The crunch is on, but the bishop, with neary an apology, is still sending his bills to the parishes (Diocesan Stewardship) to pay up or else, and threatening to get rid of the guy who exposed the theft, and the priests have to get up there in the pulpit and tell people this is all on the up and up. They can’t do it anymore.
I’m glad the priests are fighting this, liberal or conservative. The alternative is that they can lay down and somebody else can board up their windows in a couple years.
You're absolutely right. That's exactly how the Catholic Church is supposed to work.
However, that train left the station many, many years ago and it's never coming back.
There's just too much corruption and incompetence among the Church clergy for the authoritarian model to work anymore.
The best that we can hope is that the authority related to theology and dogma is protected, but the kind of authority of which you speak will never return. It's just wishful thinking.
I live in Belleville...this case is nothing less than a challenge by some 1970s left-overs to the authority of an orthodox bishop. They want the happy-clappy 70s back...and Bishop Braxton is an orthodox man...and the rebels don’t like it.
Liturgical abuse is rampant in this diocese...as is all sorts of heterodox hoo-hah. Between Sister-I-Don’t-Wear-Your-Patriarchal-Habit and Father listing the bishop’s “faults” during Holy Mass, there is a lot of work for His Excellency to do. Bishop Braxton has my full support.
A link to that article is:
According to this article, 37 priests met with the Bishop, then they went off to write a letter after this meeting.
These priests decided that Bishop Edward Braxton no longer had moral authority to lead and govern the Diocese since he spent money meant for the poor.
There is a priest, in this article, Father Weidert, who is supporting the Bishop and opposing these priests.
This priest, Father Weidert, has bought an ad in the newspaper in support of the Bishop.
Father Weidert was a lawyer before bcoming a priest. He was ordained a priest at age 63 and is now 75.
[One time ping to let folks on this thread know about the other article and a little bit more information about how this has come about...]
Given the rebellious orientation of the Belleville Diocesan priests and the fact that the diocese was misgoverned by Wilton Gregory before Braxton, if Braxton, for any reason, is no longer bishop at some point in the future, then the Vatican should let St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke choose the new bishop. urke understands authority and its use and can choose someone to clean out the nest of vipers in Belleville.
I don’t think any train has left the station. Rather, we have lived through a thankfully brief period in which the lunatics have been in charge of the asylum. Review the appointments of American bishops in recent years and it is reasonably clear that the days of AmChurch ecclesiastical leftism are numbered. The restoration of genuine authority with real punishment of vipers in clerical garb reflects not wishful thinking but hard current analysis coupled with the virtue of hope, given to us by our Founder. It WILL be how the Church will be governed as it is how the Church has been governed through most of its history.
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