MOVE OVER OSCAR

Over a coffee a priest was enumerating his points of disappointment with our new bishop. I was rather blown away for he was quite vitriolic. When he was done I said, “Wow, I rather like our bishop.” He surprised me even further by saying, “Yea, I do too.”

It seems in general man likes to grumble a lot. It’s the old, “You missed a spot” syndrome. It is glossed over that 99.9% of something is great but that one spot sticks out and ruins everything. That’s what news broadcasts are based on. We don’t hear about the hundreds of thousands of kids who went to school today with their homework done, who behaved, and got an A on the spelling test. We hear about the one kid who shot his teacher.

Fr. Crawford who made it a practice to be rather cynical and dry long before his time gave this advice before ordination, “Ten percent of the people will love you no matter what you do. Ten percent of the people will hate you no matter what you do. And the other eighty percent wouldn’t know the difference if there were a trained baboon doing your job.” Though some people will be supportive no matter what, some people will look for the crack in the damn no matter what.

I once had a spiritual director, an Opus Dei priest, who said after I had grumbled about my bishop, “Never speak ill of your bishop.” He was absolute. I don’t know if I am that absolute. Some bishops need to be spoken ill of at least in certain situations. But the vast majority of the Church’s grumbling is simply counter productive. Are we not family? Should we not be as “functional” as possible?

The thing is, the grumbling can bring a community down. The constant tearing down of a pastor, a bishop, or even a pope can only damage us. Look what happened to Saint John of the Cross (notice the saint part) whose community grumbled against him and treated him most sorely. A room full of people each stating one thing that they don’t like about someone up on the chain can leave the whole room with the impression that everyone is in agreement that they do not like him. All of a sudden a bad humor spreads and bad humors are generally hard to put out.

My pastor, my bishop, and yes, even my pope has from time to time done things of which I do not approve. But so what? He has to do something. He simply did not choose my way. Does that make him a bad leader? No. It made him different from me. Is what he did evil? No. Is what he did eternally damaging to the soul? No. So I give the poor guy a break and hope that some day when I am a pastor, the person I displease because a decision had to be made and I did not make it in this person’s favor will cut me a break too.