Fr. Tom Collins' Observations on the Behavior of our Catholic Bishops

Editor's Question: While reading Fr. Tom's letter to the Catholic Virginian, the Richmond diocese's newspaper, I recalled Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz's observation during the bishops' 2002 Dallas meeting after our shepherds excused themselves from the sex abuse charter. He described them as "This hapless bench of bishops." Nothing much has changed in the past twenty years.

Our bishops, as a body, are more "hapless" than ever. Their actions during the coronavirus pandemic and now during the riots illustrates that in spades. The USCCB's statement following George Floyd's murder, can only inflame the situation. All good people are angry about what happened to Floyd, not just blacks. All lives matter! When will our bishops stopped pandering to the left?

Was Floyd's killing racially motivated? There were four officers involved: white, black, hispanic, and Asian. Were they all racists?None of three diversity-mixed fellow officers interfered with what was happening? Why not? It was a grievous violent act, but only the man who did it can tell us whether he acted out of racial hatred.

I've read the USCCB's letter on racism. It totally ignores the racism  and hatred by blacks and others against whites, and the examples are legion. Much of its language sounds like sound bites from CNN and MSNBC. Attention, bishops, racism crosses all ethnic lines. It's a sin of the heart, not of the skin!

Will the Catholic Virginian publish Fr. Tom's letter to the editor? What do you think? 

And now, Fr. Tom's letter:

It is sad to see the President of the USCCB [Archbishop Wilton Gregory], following the example of a knee-jerk reaction of some bishops to the response of the Covington High School students to the harassment they were encountering after the March for Life, who decided not to examine all the facts and to so viciously condemn our President as a hate-filled racist.

The archbishop’s response is in sharp contrast to the way the USCCB has chosen to quietly acquiesce to the “legitimacy” of the abuse of power under color of law carried out by high-ranking federal bureaucrats against Gen. Flynn and others working with our President. They have remained conspicuously silent regarding the $30,000,000 “Russian collusion” slander campaign against our
President and his associates. Then again, as is now well documented, many bishops, over the past century, have resorted to intimidating threats and slander against those who were victims of sexual predations by priests and prelates. And even with the much flaunted Dallas Charter, a privileged sanctuary was maintained for predators like McCarrick for close to two decades. It looks like old
habits are hard to change – even for our hierarchy.

Many Catholics are also wondering why there has been hardly a peep of protest from our bishops, as our governor classified Sunday Mass as non-essential, while insisting that abortion clinics and liquor stores were essential. It is another sign of the ongoing incremental degeneration of the Church Militant into the Church Milquetoast, which is guided more by acquiescence to the tyrannical dictates of political correctness and the #Me-too movement than by accountability to the whole truth of God proclaimed by the Church’s magisterium.

If our bishops continue to sympathetically acquiesce to the use of violence, slander and looting in order to promote the secularist “social justice” agenda, the day is not far off when a number of dioceses in the United States will be forced into the status of being merely titular sees.

God save us!

In Christ,

Fr. Thomas Collins
Hot Springs, VA