From EWTN:
Throughout his eight-year papacy, Pope Benedict XVI has “carried out a cleansing of the episcopate,” said the apostolic nuncio to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tadjikistan.
“This Pope has removed two or three bishops per month throughout the world because either the accounts in their dioceses were a mess or their discipline was a disaster,” said Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendia during a Feb. 20 address at the University of San Pablo in Madrid.
“The nuncio went to these bishops and said, ‘The Holy Father is asking you for the good of the Church to resign from your post.’”
Nearly all of these bishops, when approached by the Pope’s representative, were aware of the “disaster” and accepted the request to resign, he added.
“There have been two or three instances in which they said no, and so the Pope simply removed them,” he explained. “This is also a message to the bishops: do the same thing in your dioceses.”
Ignoring for a moment the subjective (and incorrect given what we've been seeing at the cardinatial level lately) claim that Pope Benedict has "cleaned up the episcopacy," are those numbers correct?
They can't be right, can they? That seems like a whole lot of bishops.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Are These Numbers Right?
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2 comments:
Assuming an average of 2.5 such actions per month, that would amount to 235 removals over the course of the 94 months of Benedict XVI's pontificate. There are 2,797 dioceses and archdioceses within the Church, according to Wikipedia ("Diocese"); the number of removals does not seem excessive with respect to the number of dioceses.
“This Pope has removed two or three bishops per month throughout the world because either the accounts in their dioceses were a mess or their discipline was a disaster,”
This doesn't surprise me. Within the first two months of his pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI had accepted the resignations of six bishops.
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