At The Remnant there is an open Letter from “The Catholic Faithful of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas”. How many of the faithful, I don’t know. However, even if it is tens rather than hundreds or thousands, they deserve to be heard. If their arguments are sound, it doesn’t matter how many of them there are.
So, go over an have a look. A sample:
We wish to raise our grave concern with the recent apostolic visitation of Bishop Joseph E. Strickland and the Diocese of Tyler by papal representatives. There are two grounds for our concern. First, no special circumstances exist in the Diocese of Tyler, whether spiritual or administrative, that warrant an apostolic visitation. Second, the visit to a diocese without such special circumstances when public and demonstrably grave circumstances of heterodoxy and moral failure exist in other unvisited dioceses worldwide raises legitimate questions about the justice and charity of the process, as well as potentially gives rise to scandal among the faithful.
The concern on the part of the faithful of Tyler is all the more warranted by choice of bishops to make that visitation.
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Maybe they should have used the MO of the present pope.
After thoroughly questioning the members of the diocese of Tyler, the following signees were selected for being typical of the entire diocese.
I look forward to reading it in entirety. Good for the laypeople of Tyler, maybe Catholics are tired of taking it all on the chin and being “obedient”, which now means, we’re doing this so shut up. We don’t have a church with Catholic religious leaders, we have czars. Their will be done. There is almost no trust at all for these men. We don’t like what they say, we don’t like what they do, so what’s to trust?
When things get as serious as they are now, with good bishops getting ousted and faithful orders being disbanded (Texas), it’s time to resist. Resist now means say no and stick to it, as a starting point. Catholics have been brainwashed with obedience, which has been used to pacify us so we don’t call out injustice or heresy coming from within the church and now they are emboldened to the point they will erase faithful Catholics and the practice of Catholicism.
Saying nothing while they do it is going to have to end.
First, no special circumstances exist in the Diocese of Tyler, whether spiritual or administrative, that warrant an apostolic visitation.
If you were to think about it in principle, this cannot be a fully sound basis for complaint: part of the purpose of a visitation is to investigate whether any facts are behind, say, an accusation. The higher authority can’t know, a priori, that no special circumstances exist. If, that is, there is some accusation that is even slightly credible to be investigated.
The reality, though, is that the “special circumstances” are merely that the good bishop is outspoken about Catholic teaching, and willing to be visible in saying hard truths – something that is noticeable precisely because virtually no other bishop in the country is. Sadly. If Rome were in the hands of the good guys, Strickland’s reputation as saying hard truths would get him promoted, and would get Rome picking more of his priests as new bishops to clean up other hell-holes of terrible heresy and apostasy in the Church.
Second, the visit to a diocese without such special circumstances when public and demonstrably grave circumstances of heterodoxy and moral failure exist in other unvisited dioceses worldwide raises legitimate questions about the justice and charity of the process
We already know how these things go: Torres, the bishop of Arecibo, PR was given the full-scale treatment. In his case, his capital crimes were two: NOT signing the joint statement of the Puerto Rican bishops demanding everyone to get the vaccine; and NOT having his seminarians go to the joint seminary that the other bishops all used in PR. (Merely from the fact that they thought it was remotely viable to mandate the vaccine tells us their seminaries must be quite bad indeed, so…he made a good judgment not to send his seminarians there.) Whether these choices by Torres were justified or a little unnecessary, though , they represent nothing like the level of abuse of power or canonical crimes that warrant removing him – they aren’t even in the same county as the ball park. It would be like impeaching the president for jaywalking. Bishops JUST DO get to decide where their men are trained for the priesthood, and for other bishops to complain about it is just so much gaslighting.
It is notionally possible that the visitation will find “nothing wrong”. But given who it is that the pope picked to do it, that’s not likely. What seems to me more likely is that the pope sent hatchet men to find something, anything, that could be used as grounds to dismiss Strickland. Be prepared for some outlandish thesis put forward that won’t make much sense and has no actual evidence backing it up, just claims made.
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