Bishop and Black agree to peace.

It is a unique form of discomfort to be caught between your bishop and your boss of bosses.

The closest comparison that comes to mind is being the unwitting intermediary of an elbow to the sternum and a simultaneous cuff on the back of the head.

In both cases, the only sensible strategy is to collapse quietly sideways and adopt a posture of invisibility until the principal combatants finish with each other.

So it seemed to me in April when Calgary's Bishop Fred Henry squared off in the national media against Conrad Black, owner of the world-wide newspaper empire that includes the journal for which I toil.

As I wrote in Catholic Insight earlier this year, (Jan/Feb. p.7) Bishop Henry had been waging a cold-shoulder campaign against the Calgary Herald by refusing to speak to us so long as journalists from our newsroom were on strike. Perhaps something I wrote lit his fuse. I don't know. The Bishop, however, abruptly broke his vow of silence and went vesuvial with declamations of his disgust for Herald management in general, and anger at Conrad Black in particular.

Black, never short of polysyllabic ammunition, roared back by firing off from his base in London, England, a riposte so scorching it risked melting the presses on which the Calgary Herald is printed. Even he acknowledged in a later published reckoning of accounts that some of his phrases contained a superfluity of vitriol. It was a bit like admitting the Hiroshima bomb released a few spare atoms into the atmosphere.

Still, in concert with a similar letter of apology from Bishop Henry, it allowed the two men to crawl out from the smouldering wreckage of their respective outbursts and agree to depart in peace. As often happens in such cases, I felt a curious need to make some sense of the pieces left behind.

Both Bishop Henry and Conrad Black are highly intelligent, powerfully-minded leaders at the apex of their vocations. I don't think they have ever met, but have little doubt they would know each other well within moments.

So what in heaven's name prompted them to fling verbal rockets at each other from beyond the curvature of the earth? My best guess is that the Herald strike was really only a staging ground. The real rancor was unleashed, I strongly suspect, because each reduced the other to a mere political type.

Bishop Henry fell prey to the stereotype of Black as some kind of a 19th century robber baron striding across the faces of the workers. Black, for his part, seemed to buy into reports of Calgary's prelate as a Red Bishop readying himself to occupy the ideological space left by the late occupant of the diocese of Victoria.

Both estimates seem as erroneous as they are uncharitable. I do not pretend to know Bishop Henry well but what I've seen and heard reassure me he has no secret desire to follow Che Guevara's path into the jungles of Bolivia. His pro-worker tendencies reflect a Rerum novarum understanding of the need to safeguard labour from the unbridled power of capital.

With the Herald labour situation, he just misjudged where true justice lies. Certainly it does not belong to the pro-abortion, anti-faith, union potentates who led journalists into such a self-destructive strike. Well, bishops are people, too, and so humanly fallible.

As for Black, even distant regard of the man reveals him to be the opposite of the image projected by his enemies. Not only is he a genuine intellectual, he is also far from the extreme-right ogre they portray. As he has pointed out to little avail, he is an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt as well Lyndon Johnson and knows, as his biography of Duplessis shows, what happens when tradition ossifies into tyranny.

More, it is often forgotten that Black saved dozens of unionized jobs at a cooperative news gathering agency when he saved the Canadian Press wire service from being shut down in the '90s. Black's track record is one with which even Fred Henry could be comfortable. In reality, the differences between my bishop and boss of bosses don't justify their war of words, if you catch my drift.