If I were bishop for a day.

Criticising offices in the Church is a delicate task if it is to be fruitful and uplifting. We will leave it to readers to judge whether the present writer has suceeded or not.

Editor

Who among us has not indulged in the fantasy of what we would do if we were to run the Church? Which Catholic has not--especially during the last few, trying years for the Church in North America, rocked as it has been by revelations of priestly malfeasance and the appalling episcopal cover-ups--thought about how he would run things differently if only the Pope had the good sense to appoint him as bishop somewhere? Whose mind has not been boggled by the topsy-turvy nature of the Church today, where the defenders of orthodoxy--and its necessary concomitant, liturgical beauty--are often laypeople, whilst the pastors are trying to keep up with the latest trends from the 1960s?

Such a sentiment, alas, is not shrinking but growing; and it is not simply the product of old codgers who refuse to "get with the times." In the December 2003 issue of the American magazine First Things, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus reports on a priest friend of his who has a large number of young, committed, orthodox Catholics in his parish. Their faith and charity are strong in all aspects but one: they "have great contempt for the American episcopate. They expressed total incomprehension at the weakness and folly of the leadership being provided by the bishops, not just in the sexual abuse crisis but in the life of the Church generally ... These Gen X's are the agents of the New Evangelization; they deserve competent leadership they can respect."

Criticism of bishops

There used to be an unwritten rule among Catholics that their bishops were not to be criticized in public. (That rule was born of a gentler age, now long dead.) There is much to commend in that rule. And yet there come moments when this rule must be set aside. As the saintly and long-suffering Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, primate of the Ukrainian Catholic Church for nearly half a century until his death in 1944, remarked immediately after his own episcopal consecration in 1900: "The people are completely right to demand certain things from a bishop, and it is absolutely correct to censure him if he shirks the task that he has to perform on behalf of the Church and his people."

What are the tasks that lay people expect their bishops competently to perform? What would be needed to garner renewed respect for the office of bishop, now at a perhaps historic low in North America? St. Robert Bellarmine, who knew how to be a bishop, once said that the number of sacraments was fixed at seven because no man could be expected to remember a list with more than seven things in it. Let us, then, confine ourselves to seven standards for superlative shepherding.

Prayer

First and foremost, prayer. A bishop must be transparently a man of prayer. Not for nothing do the Orthodox Churches still draw their bishops from monastic houses (where many of them continue to live after their ordination, wearing the same habit as before). A bishop is to be available to God in prayer at all times, which is to say he is to be a monk. A bishop's first job is not as an administrator: his first job is to pray. He should be an embodiment of St. Paul's dictum, "Pray without ceasing."

Thus a bishop should be seen leading his flock in prayer if not daily then, at the very least, every Sunday and feast day. He should be in his cathedral, or one of his parishes, not only celebrating Mass on the feasts, but also praying Matins and Vespers. In so doing, he would contribute to two major renewals (at least): a greater holiness for him and his people (who would therefore come to have greater respect for him), and a greater recovery of the Liturgy of the Hours in parishes as mandated by the Second Vatican Council (but hitherto generally unfulfilled). If it is objected that this would not leave the bishop enough time to fulfill all his tasks, so much the better. Nothing is more important than prayer. Everything else can be delegated or else dispensed with as superfluous. Some bishops nowadays seem to spend time on topics such as economics or terrorism, which are beyond their competence. They--and especially the bureaucracies of their conferences would do well to heed Wittgenstein's famous dictum: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

Simplicity

Second, simplicity. This touches several areas. The bishop should be accessible to the people on a regular basis, both at prayer and in the manner in which he lives. We do not need our bishops to be in episcopal "palaces," as they are still often called today. (In this regard, the decision of the new archbishop of Boston to sell his mansion was highly commendable.) There is no need for him to have a driver and a car, out of which emerges his retinue of lawyers and media advisors who rush him away before he can say something "controversial" or litigious. People should have much more regular opportunity to speak to him and especially to ask questions of him. Anyone familiar with the Apostles and Fathers knows what simple, accessible lives they led in the thick of things, never holding themselves aloof.

Under this rubric, the bishop could also make several important changes that would be simple to implement and would clear up confusion. I speak of the liturgy in particular and the sacraments in general. How the faithful long for a bishop to simply inform his priests that, from a certain date, the policy of his diocese is to follow, in fullness and without alteration or deviation, the General Instruction on the Roman Missal (and, for Eastern Catholics, the 1996 Instruction for Applying the Liturgical Prescripts of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches) and so to celebrate the Eucharist according to the norms of the Missale Romanum (and other officially approved books). In one stroke so much of the ugliness and chaos could be swept away. Gone would be the entire so-called experts and their needlessly complex programs retailed out of diocesan liturgy offices.

Such an approach could also be taken to the question of confession. In 1984, in Reconciliatio et Paenetentia, Pope John Paul II would frankly admit that "the Sacrament of Confession is in crisis." There is little evidence in the twenty years since then that bishops have done much to change this. In addition to beginning a new catechesis on the nature of sin and the importance of confession, one change a bishop could effect would be to implement the law of the Church as it is written: in a one-sentence decree, the bishop could simply insist that general absolution in his diocese is forbidden and regularly scheduled individual confessions are the norm. If we want people to return to the sacrament, we have to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Scheduling 20 minutes on one Saturday a month is grossly insufficient.

Truth

Third, truth. Every penny catechism will tell you that a bishop is ordained to "teach, govern, and sanctify." What is a bishop ordained to teach but the truth? A bishop should speak the truth forcefully and courageously; he should not hedge or defer to lawyers, or dash away when the questions get difficult. If the bishop is a man of simple truth and goodness, there will be no sleight-of-hand moving of problem clergy from parish to parish.

But the bishop must do and be much, much more than this. He must be a living embodiment of the truth, so much so that simply by looking at him one can "behold the Pierced One." As St. Seraphim of Sarov used to say, "Acquire the peace of the Holy Spirit and thousands around you will be saved" or as St. Francis of Assisi famously put it: "Preach the gospel, using words if necessary." The bishop not only lives the truth but he must defend it vigorously and unfailingly--all of it. It is well and good to defend the popular bits like feeding the poor or decrying war but it is depressing to see how the rest of the symphony of Catholic truth gets drowned out by the cheerleaders of these trendy bits. Where is the defence of Humanae vitae--and not merely a "defensive" defence but a passionate, joyous defence of it as leading to human happiness, instead of being considered as a papal celibate's crabbed restriction on human libido? Do bishops write columns in their diocesan paper explaining the necessity of going to confession regularly? How often do so-called Catholics--not least in the federal cabinet--claim to be in good standing with the Church while concomitantly defending the so-called right to kill the unborn child in the womb? When is this truth defended? When are these contumacious leaders brought to heel by their most reverend fathers in God? The bishops have the power of the keys: why do they not use it more often, not as a punitive device but in order to guard the truth for protection of which they were ordained and to correct the wayward sheep for whom they are to have boundless pastoral solicitude?

Joy

Fourth, joy. One of the most widely ignored and little known documents of the troubled pontificate of Paul VI, Gaudete in Domino (9 May 1975), was an apostolic letter that dealt winsomely and exclusively with the topic of Christian joy. In an age where Paxil and Prozac are invariably in the list of the top drugs prescribed for North Americans by the millions, and when at the same time Catholic teaching is presented as a series of dour negations (no to pre-marital sex, no to abortion, no to homosexuality, no to divorce, no to the ordination of women), the bishop must embody that joy which comes from knowing Jesus Christ and His liberating freedom that leads to the unending joy of eternal life. It is not enough to know the truth: we must also embody it concretely in the joy of living each day in and for Christ. As Paul VI put it, "This joy of living in God's love begins here below. It is the joy of the kingdom of God. But it is granted on a steep road which requires a total confidence in the Father and in the Son ... The message of Jesus promises above all joy--this demanding joy; and does it not begin with the beatitudes?"

Indeed it does, and so must we, led by our bishops who will teach the world that saying yes to Jesus Christ, and therefore saying no to such things as debauchery and evil, leads not to a miserable, cramped, unfulfilled existence but, instead, to a fullness of life and an abundance of joy such that the world cannot imagine or replicate with all the technological advances it can muster. If we wish to convert people we must attract them by our life, and few things are more infectious or attractive than joy.

It cannot be manufactured and a pill cannot replace it. It can come about only by knowing Christ and by making Him known to the world.

Fatherhood

Fifth, spiritual fatherhood. A bishop must be a father; a father by nature has children; and a father must know his children intimately. He must, perforce, be an image and an icon of our heavenly Father, who knows His children so intimately that even the hairs of their head are counted by Him. If a bishop is to be a father to his people--and to his priests in an especial way--he has to be something more than an absentee father who comes every couple of years for the patronal feast of a parish and then disappears. A bishop cannot be an abstract, distant figure (and, in this regard, the Vatican practice of naming "titular" bishops with no flock--a category now encompassing a stunning 43% of the bishops listed in the Annuario Pontificio--should be looked at).

As we noted above, the first and foremost responsibility of a bishop is to be a man of prayer. Only if he prays constantly to the Father of us all will he be transfigured into a spiritual father to his people. In order to become a father, a bishop must be freed up from the myriad demands on his time. He is not a judge, financier, personnel co-ordinator, or chief executive officer (there are lay people more qualified as each of these). He was not ordained for those things and should not be expected to do them. (With the number of permanent deacons these days, some of them should be doing these things.)

What aspects of the fatherhood of God must he embody--in addition to those listed above? Three come immediately to mind: fecundity, firmness, and forgiveness. Like good fathers everywhere, the bishop as a man of love knows that love kept to itself is no love at all. Love of its nature seeks to disseminate itself everywhere, withholding nothing. If the bishop is a man of love, his episcopate will be one of fecundity: he will beget spiritual daughters and, especially, sons, chiefly by inspiring men to become priestly "co-operators in the truth" (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's motto on his coat of arms as a bishop). The bishop, precisely as a celibate (and preferably as a monastic also), has unparalleled opportunity to spread the love of Christ everywhere. A married couple's fecundity is limited by biology; a bishop's fecundity knows no such limits.

As he is spreading that love, the bishop, as a father, must not give in to that common fallacy which portrays love as nothing more than a sentiment of sweetness and light. He must know and tell others that love sometimes consists in forbidding things that do not contribute toward the good of his sons and daughters. Among a typical bishop's more contumacious sons and daughters in North America are those of the catechetical establishment, the teachers' unions, and the academic guilds who run the closed shop of Catholic schools and parishes. When do we hear a bishop taking any of them on? (To the objection that they attempt such things in private and we lay people do not know everything they say sotto voce or do behind the scenes, we may answer that this is correct: we do not know what they do, and that is precisely the problem. Public scandal from so-called Catholic leaders should be publicly corrected.)

Who can name a Canadian bishop who has resisted the rank nonsense and open heresy that more often than not gets passed off by the parallel "Magisterium" of theologians who have arrogated to themselves the right to decide what the Church should and should not teach as truth? Which bishops in Canada have attempted to receive from the theologians in their diocese the Mandatum that the Holy See expects all theologians to have who wish to teach in the name of the Church? In which Catholic universities or colleges in this country have bishops attempted to implement Ex Corde Ecclesiae? If the faithful are to live the truth, the bishops must first teach it; if the children of the faithful are to be brought up in the truth, the bishop must protect it--and them from the devouring lions often lying about in their educational dens. The bishop, in sum, should be transparently and manifestly convinced that those who know the truth who is Jesus Christ have no reason to be afraid, least of all about what the Toronto Star or the New York Times will say.

In the words of the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, "the ultimate act of teaching is knowing when to raise a finger at the right time." Thus must the bishop be firm in adhering to the truth and in correcting the wayward, but he must do both with boundless forgiveness. In the abuse crises of the last several years one of the more depressing aspects has been watching the language of sin and forgiveness get chucked overboard amidst media-inspired talk of "zero tolerance." Even so beastly a man as the late ex-priest John Geoghan retained a call on the Church's--which is to say God's--forgiveness. The bishop must be firm with such sinners, but he must not deny them forgiveness or fail to acknowledge that they, like he--and, indeed, all of us--remain sinners forever in need of the mercy of God and to that extent members of the Church. There may be "zero tolerance" for priestly sodomy, but there is, and must be, "seventy times seven" (and more) opportunities for the sinner to crawl back, confess, and be forgiven.

Healing

Sixth, healing. Following on from his commitment to forgiveness, a bishop should be prepared to seek out the lost sheep and offer healing to the prodigal son and the wounded Samaritan in whatever "distressing disguise" (to borrow Blessed Mother Theresa's phrase) he appears in our day, including in particular the lapsed Catholic--lapsed because scandalized by the Church's inaction in the past in righting injustices like child abuse. In particular, the bishop should be a healer of memories. Since 1980, Pope John Paul II has used the phrase "healing of memory" or "purification of memories" dozens of times, chiefly in his relationship with other Christians, especially the Orthodox. Yet for others it has remained just a phrase. Such healing cannot take place at so far removed a level as a papal letter. It must be enacted concretely, locally, personally. Here bishops have a splendid opportunity to give and receive mutual forgiveness, especially with their brother bishops in the Orthodox Churches. They should undertake such healing not only because it is right and necessary for the cause of Christian unity. They should also undertake it because of what the English Dominican Aidan Nichols has frankly admitted is Catholicism's great need of Orthodoxy:

At the present time, the Catholic Church, in many parts of the world, is undergoing one of the most serious crises in its history.... This crisis touches many aspects of Church life, but notably theology and catechesis, liturgy and spirituality, religious life and Christian ethics at large. Orthodoxy is well placed to stabilise Catholicism in most if not all these areas."

The sooner we are able to achieve reconciliation with the Orthodox, the better off the Catholic Church will be. Bishops are uniquely placed to help this process along.

Holy sheep

Seventh, holy sheep. The last standard concerns not so much bishops as us. It is sometimes remarked that people get the leadership they deserve. While this may be the case sometimes, it does not always hold (who deserved Stalin?) and in the case of the Church, which is God's, He never gets the leaders (or followers) He deserves. The seventh and last standard of a sound shepherd, then, will be that he raises worthy and upstanding sheep and that such sheep, in turn, prove worthy of such a father. We must become better ourselves. If we wish to see a holier Church, we must ourselves set out to fast more frequently, to pray more fervently, to tithe more generously, to live more faithfully. It is no use blaming bishops for everything; it is equally fatuous to demand that everything be set right by them. They are men as we are, full of weakness and sin. If we wish to see the Church led by holier men, let us make that known by our own deeds of fidelity and fecundity, raising up vocations to monastic and priestly life from which the Lord can then call the brightest and the best to be shepherds after His own heart.

This past summer of 2003, when Lubomyr Cardinal Husar, the patriarch of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, was in Canada to ordain the new bishop, Stephen Chmilar, for the Eparchy of Toronto and Eastern Canada, his homily exhorted the hundreds gathered that day to remember that, for all the glimmer of gold in the mitre and staff, for all the exalted titles and extraordinary deference shown to a bishop, a bishop at the end of the day remains a man desperately in need of our prayers, our support, our forgiveness, and our filial affection. Let us not forget to pray for our bishops often and ardently--but above all let us not forget to love them deeply. If they are not what we wish them to be, let us remind them--by our words but especially by our actions--that, as Leon Bloy memorably put it, "there is only one true sadness: not to be a saint." Let us love them into becoming the saints God deserves for His Church.

Adam A.J. DeVille is a Ph.D. student at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute for Eastern Christian Studies at St. Paul University, Ottawa. He is presently a subdeacon in the Toronto Eparchy of the Ukrainian-rite Catholic Church. He was married in August 2003, and he and his wife, Annemarie, are expecting their first baby in June 2004.