A lot of this would have worked a lot better if American bishops were pastors, not businessmen. They need to have businessmen working for them as administrators to keep things running and keep the bills paid, but the bishop should be primarily a pastor - serving people on a heart-level.

Trouble is, that's not the tradition in the American Catholic Church, where the best candidates for bishop were the "brick-and-mortar men" who made names for themselves collecting huge donations and erecting impressive buildings. I thought we had moved away from that after Vatican II, but then John Paul II selected a new crop of bureaucrats and businessmen as bishops. We now have a whole generation of yes-men bishops. I hope Benedict XVI will help change that climate a bit. We need more bishops like Oscar Romero of San Salvador and Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago. We had a good one in Sacramento, Francis Quinn, but he retired 15 years ago and was replaced by a businessman bishop.

-Joe-