By Massimo Faggioli
A national episcopate is free, even obliged, to engage with and comment on the social and political issues of the country. But coupled with an estrangement from Francis it seems to revel in (an effort reaching dangerous levels over the past few years, especially with the attempted coup by Carlo Maria Viganò and his enablers in August 2018), the behavior of the conference is cause for concern.
The internal dysfunction is also troubling; the conference more closely resembles a federation of episcopal committees than an ecclesial body.
Right now, the USCCB is pretty much the opposite of synodality and collegiality between brother bishops, and between the bishops and the pope. Instead of behaving ecclesially, it has been behaving politically, and now it will be
Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is seen at the USCCB headquarters in Washington D.C., November 17, 2020 (CNS photo/Screen Grab).
The second Catholic president of the United States is the first to hold office in the midst of an American intra-Church crisis. John Kennedy never had to deal with the kind of conflict currently roiling the USCCB or the opposition of so many bishops to the papacy. But Joe Biden takes office just as the situation inside the U.S. Catholic Church becomes reminiscent of the Americanist controversy of the late nineteenth century. What divided the bishops then were the warnings put forth by Leo XIII in
Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times
At first, it felt like little more than a far-away rumble. Many of us watched the TV footage of Chinese doctors clad head to toe in protective gear treating intubated patients and thought:
Oh, those poor people so glad it isn’t here.
Then on Jan. 21, a coronavirus case was confirmed in Washington state. Three days later, a Chicago woman who’d recently returned from a trip to Wuhan, China, was confirmed to have the new pneumonia-like virus.
“This is a single travel-associated case, not a local emergency,” Chicago Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said at the time.