Bishop Martino Goes Network

You remember Bishop Martino, right? Thank you Rocco Palma for keeping us up to speed on the Shepherd of Scranton, PA.

Here's the deal. A church in his jurisdiction decided to have an "election forum" mostly to discuss abortion. Apparently, the discussion there was centered entirely around the USCCB's "Faithful Citizenship" document with nary a mention of the bishop's letter I mentioned in my earlier post. More than that, folks were using the USCCB document to justify their political positions that contradicted Martino's crystal clear elaboration of Church teaching on issues of abortion, euthanasia, and stem-cell research.

Hearing about all this, His Excellency decided to crash the party. He showed up uninvited and then let loose with what pretty much every bishop in the country needs to understand.

“No USCCB document is relevant in this diocese,” said Martino. “The USCCB doesn’t speak for me.”“The only relevant document ... is my letter,” he said. “There is one teacher in this diocese, and these points are not debatable.”

If only someone could have set off fireworks or something when he dropped this on the folks present. This bastardized notion of collegiality whereby national episcopal conferences can dictate what a bishop does in his own diocese has got to go. On a side note, here's another wacky result of the post-conciliar efforts. Vatican II was supposed to be all about the role of bishops and collegiality and helping each to assert himself more. The end result has been domination by the national conferences.

Anyways, back to Bishop Martino. He then followed up with:

“No social issue has caused the death of 50 million people,” he said, nothing that he no longer supports the Democratic Party. “This is madness people.”




Awesome. What made it even better were the comments in the Wayne Independent (which, by the way, clearly doesn't concern itself with learning what Catholics actually believe- note the description of Communion). Here's what the moderator said:

“I think this meeting was torpedoed,” said Gene Tagle, the forum’s moderator. “He’s (Martino) known for three months that this has been in the works.”

No crap, Gene. Torpedoed, nuked, and cremated with the ashes shot to the freaking moon.