Scant Time for Celebration

Bishop Jerome Listecki, of the Diocese of La Crosse, will soon travel three hours east to take the helm of the beleaguered Archdiocese of Milwaukee. As visitors to this blog are well aware, I'm less than sunny about the state of the Catholic Church in that city. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that, after eight years of Archbishop Dolan, a restoration is already well underway, but this is emphatically not the case. For the better part of the last ten years or so, I've lived outside of Milwaukee, and every time I return home for a visit, I hope to notice some small sign of improvement, some indication that things are on the rebound. But, time after time, year after year, I've noticed that the status quo ante remains the norm in Milwaukee.

To be honest, I am thoroughly tired of returning to this depressing theme since, to me and others, it is nothing new. It's just jaw-dropping that people who should know better cannot perceive the ubiquitousness of the wreckage in Milwaukee Archdiocese. So for that reason, it bears repeating, once more:

The Catholic schools, in terms of fidelity to Church teaching, are in an atrocious state. I speak from experience.

The typical Catholic parish in Milwaukee is a bastion of liturgical abuse. These abuses have long since become normative, so that many Catholis are completely unaware of what, in fact, should be happening during Mass, as opposed to what they are experiencing, week after week. Again, I speak from experience.

The Catholic culture and identity of the city have been utterly decimated after over thirty years of shilly-shally from the leadership, only to be replaced with soft-sofa relativism, milquetoast preaching and aberrant theology. (Note the ever-dwindling number of Catholics in the city over the past several decades.)

The veracity of this catalogue of grievances is obvious to anyone who isn't completely blinded by the myopic provincialism of the place. Unfortunately for every-day, hard working Milwaukee Catholics, their archdiocese has been suffocating as a result of rampant abuse and institutionalized corruption (of course, stemming from the Weakland epoch of over a quarter of a century; an era that, stunningly, remains intact to this very day).

Bishop Listecki will need a superabundance of prayers as he assumes the mighty job of setting a massive, listless ship back on course. He certainly has his work cut out for him. The choices are as follows: In a delirium tremens, we can pretend that everything is peaches and cream in Milwaukee and watch the slow demise of a once-great center of Catholic culture, or someone at the top can finally make some long-overdue, tough decisions about the serious changes that need to be implemented from the top down. Then, perhaps, there just may be a chance for our beloved archdiocese.