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I take the Bishop’s resignation as it stated. I don’t deal with supposed reasons. We can get into trouble if we start looking for hidden motives in every action.

He’s not my bishop, and any speculation I could give would only be gossip. I don’t know anything about how he ran his diocese, or anything except his statements that have been publicized.

The pro-life movement does have people who like to stir up controversy. Keeping that in mind, I will simply accept what happened and keep focus on my own business.

One school of thought says that Bishop Martino was too rough in his administrative style. He was a bull in a china shop, constantly making new enemies, needlessly causing division, refusing to act in a collegial manner and respect the advice of his brother bishops. The other school of thought says that he was simply too conservative for the tastes of his brethren in the US bishops' conference-- and especially for his metropolitan, Cardinal Justin Rigali, who has emerged as the most influential prelate in America today.

Uh, I would go with the former here. Rigali doesn't complain about the orthodoxy of other bishops - or their outspokenness, for all of his quiet understatedness.

My guess is that administrative styles are coming under scrutiny. Last year's "removal", our very own Archbishop Raymond Burke, was a lightning rod on pro-life issues, but the general consensus around here is that he was Peter Principled up for reasons of job performance in the administrative arena. Now that he's been gone for a bit, the stories from the Chancery on leadership style are surfacing and they aren't pretty - from holding grudges, to denying promotions to men who are truly worthy, to really BAD personnel moves to fiscal irresponsibility. Get a couple drinks in the right people and all sorts of stuff comes out. My guess is Martino is more of the same.

Rigali is a VERY bright and astute - and under it all, very sweet - man. Yes, he is pretty much the most influential cardinal in the US right now, and he is very much a diplomat, but compromising Church teaching is not on the table for him. There's other reasons why this happened.

Anyone who thinks Martino was pushed - especially by any two-bit politician - is nuts and has a political ax to grind.

His standing pretty much alone among the other bishops was taking its toll on him personally.

It’s also nonsense to think the Vatican pushed him out. Look at what’s happened in some other cases - Bishops resigning to run for political office (South America somewhere), Bishops calling for the ordination of women (the Moonie bishop from Africa), bishops molesting children, and retired bishops writing a book that extols homosexuality (Weakland) - and what do you find? ALWAYS a careful, measured response of Christian charity to assist that bishop in returning to the faith. So because Martino weighed in on the dissenters and malcontents of his diocese, he was removed by the Vatican? Absurd. This is just an agenda being advanced by the moral reprobates of the protestant wing of the Catholic Church and a few people at NCR.