Vacant Sees

Counting vacant Latin rite dioceses alone (omitting sundry eparchies, territorial prelatures and so forth), the Holy Father has well over a hundred appointments to make just to catch up on filling the many sees without bishops; as of today, the number of such widowed dioceses is as follows:

39 since start of 2013;

57 since start of 2012 to end of 2012;

18 since start of 2011 to end of 2011;

4 since start of 2010 to end of 2010;

5 since start of 2009 to end of 2009;

2 since start of 2008 to end of 2008.

Here in Australia, Wilcannia-Forbes has been vacant for over four years now (why Cardinal Ouellet didn't decide to suppress it I cannot tell), Canberra-Goulburn has been a year without an archbishop, and three dioceses – Lismore, Rockhampton and Hobart – have ordinaries who have passed retirement age; in the case of Hobart, my own archdiocese, poor Archbishop Doyle has been waiting for a successor for more than eighteen months.

I recall another prelate saying to me over a decade ago, "Where will the next generation of bishops come from?", meaning that those priests in the usual age range for promotion were by and large formed in the worst years of the postconciliar chaos, prior to the reform of seminary life carried out during the nineties and more recently. We don't need any more men like Morris, late of Toowoomba, who was damnably described by Benedict XVI as lacking the theological acumen necessary for a bishop (a polite way of characterizing his gormless heterodoxy).

Pray for good and holy priests to be appointed, and that the Holy Ghost grace them to become yet holier as bishops yet.

What River is That?

Heard by some seminarians on the same bus as that carrying the Australian bishops to St Paul's outside the Walls, during their last ad limina visit to Rome: "What river is that?" – as the bus carried them over one of the Tiber bridges.

The Rhine flows into the... what?

So much for our successors of the Apostles having even a merely natural level of ordinary education.

Quo vadis indeed!

(Surely Cooees has better sources than I – why haven't they picked this up?  How slack.)

To Holiday in Partibus

Off to Queensland to-morrow: where the episcopal sees are in partibus infidelium, at least insofar as their occupants are concerned!

I'll have three days in Brisbane, then a day in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast, before driving further inland, visiting Toowoomba for two days (though I daren't go to Mass there, for fear of what I might find), and then gratefully returning to Christian lands by crossing the border into New South Wales, first visiting Armidale (where I plan to catch Mass at the Cathedral on Sunday evening, so as to fulfil my obligation licitly and validly), next Coffs Harbour, and then Lismore, before a final night on the Gold Coast.

At least, as Cardinal Pell observed some years ago, given the current holders of the sees of Armidale and Lismore, "The northern frontier is secure".

Bishops Bark at Last!

St John Fisher complained that his brother bishops seemed asleep when they ought have spoken out against Henry VIII; they were indeed as dumb dogs that barked not.  Hooray, then, for (nearly all) the Bishops of New South Wales, who have bravely and most counter-culturally spoken out against the anti-Christian, intolerant social engineering agenda of the Greens, warning all believers against voting for such persons at the impending State Election.  Excellent, Your Eminence and My Lords!  God grant all men of good will listen and heed, not least the flocks of Catholics, many of whom are as those referred to in Scripture as perishing through lack of knowledge.