Goodbye to Gumbleton

Well, it happened 37 years late, but the Holy See finally appears to have pulled the plug on Bishop Thomas Gumbleton.
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Celebrated as a peace activist, Gumbleton has always been a strangely un-peaceful man himself. The homilies he posts at the NCR -- as a comparison with Mother Teresa's writings will show -- convey less love of the poor than bitterness at their oppressors: militarists, capitalists, ecclesiastics, etc. It's all about class warfare, in his view, and we shouldn't be surprised that his campaign for "peace" takes on that baleful truculence familiar from Marxist rhetoric. In latter years, Gumbleton added gay liberation to his roster of causes, and his recent announcement that, as a lad, he'd been sexually groped by a priest assured that he'd go out in a blaze of publicity.

Certainly the Vatican apparat Gumbleton so disparaged was lavish in its forbearance toward him. Were it half as intolerant as he claimed, he'd have been out selling vinyl siding by 1980. That makes me wonder whether this heartless institution realized that they had damaged goods on their hands, that his need for self-display was merely the surface symptom of a much deeper problem, and that, in charity, the best thing to do was to isolate his tantrums and leave him kicking theological nerf balls in the basement of the NCR. The pastoral approach.

From Uncle Diogenes at Catholic World News