A CREATURE NOT TOO BRIGHT OR GOOD

The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind. Gilbert

Lately we've received a flurry of irate e-mails taking us to task for summoning "One-Hand Dan" before the solemn tribunal of public opinion. In quite a few of these missives, the overwrought writers, with their heads in the clouds or in that darker zone where the sun doesn't shine, labored mightily to vindicate lusterless Li'l Dannie as a "good bishop." In the past, we've often come across that puzzling phrase from Wee Dan's apologists. Given that the subject of all these communications wasn't chess, we didn't know what to make of it. We Readers, as you know, are inveterate semanticists with a pronounced philosophical inclination, so it'll come as no surprise, then, that we got to reflecting on the meaning of good.

If, in our correspondents' airy utterance, the word good means "having the characteristics or aptitudes necessary or suitable in a certain capacity," then we can easily grasp the meaning of phrases like "a good scrounger," "a good panhandler," "a good grifter," and "a good impostor." Accordingly, if our hyperventilating pen pals were referring to, say, a Novus-Ordo, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Greek-Orthodox, Coptic, Jacobite, or Abyssinian bishop with an assigned territory or district to administer, we'd  have no difficulty in decoding the phrase "a good bishop."

But Dingy Dan is a sedevacantist episcopus vagans, and consequently the phrase "does not compute" (as the old TV and movie robots used to intone).

Dull Dan is no bishop-in-ordinary. He has no jurisdiction, and certainly no authority. He does not possess formal apostolic succession. He cannot rule or teach in the ecclesiastical sense. He's nobody's superior -- in any sense of the word, religious or secular! From a strict point of view, under Catholic law, he's not even a pastor. Therefore, there cannot exist objective criteria to measure his performance qua bishop (that is to say, if he is a bishop in the first place: the jury's still out on that matter, as we've proved). 

Granted, you could say he adequately consecrates holy oils on Maundy Thursday. You could add he hasn't yet committed the same mistake at priestly ordination ceremonies as Abp. Lefebvre is said to have made at "One-Hand Dan's." You might even argue he confirms satisfactorily. But so what? Acceptable execution of these rites is by no means a measure of overall excellence in the occupational capacity of a Roman-Catholic bishop. (Anyway, if Dannie can pull 'em off, anybody can.)

Priests, please keep in mind, can confirm, too, so confirmation isn't exclusive to the episcopacy. Besides, in the past, many an aging or preoccupied bishop-in-ordinary must have flubbed ceremonial details yet effectively carried out his duties as ordinary, administering his diocese soundly through wise, deft, just, and charitable rule. Such measurably good (= competent executive) bishops spent their days and nights seeing to the weal of their flock while zealously governing their territory, rather than endlessly rehearsing for showy, resource-consuming liturgical extravaganzas starring themselves.

Let's keep in mind that the idea of a "wandering bishop" is odious to the Church. For heaven's sake, the creature is unnatural, an anomaly. The term itself is inherently pejorative. In truth, an episcopus vagans is a grotesque monster -- a head without a body. This misbegotten ecclesiastical teratism is produced only in times of dire crisis for the Church. The norm demands that Roman-Catholic bishops possess a lawfully erected diocese, a territory within the Church to oversee.

For that reason, only residential bishops may be judged as good bishops in accordance with the above sense of good. Some titular bishops (bishops whose sees have lapsed) may be good in the aforementioned sense of the word, but they are good only insofar as they are adept in their capacity as diocesan or curial bureaucrats. But Dismal Dannie isn't a titular bishop either; in fact, he's never received an episcopal portfolio of any kind from the Church visible.

You can now see why "One Hand" -- and for that matter any other sede enjoying episcopal character -- cannot ever be coherently styled a "good (sedevacantist) bishop," if good means "demonstrating the qualities requisite for a specified occupation." In that signification of the word, it makes no more sense to talk about a "good (sedevacantist) bishop" than it does to speak similarly of other fanciful monstrosities, as for instance, "a good troll" or "a good incubus" or "a good satyr" or "a good Sciapod."

That's why we had to scratch the first interpretation of the phrase. After that we had to put on our thinking caps again, asking ourselves whether if by good our viper-bitten correspondents meant "of moral excellence, virtuous, benevolent," with the word bishop in this case being shorthand for "a man who happens to hold episcopal orders."* 

Now, if that's really and truly what they intended, then we have a freight-car load of rock-hard, spiked rejoinders to hurl in their dirt-encrusted faces. For starters: 

Why did such a "good man etc." allow the SGG School Scandal to boil over and send scores of the faithful running?

Why didn't such a "good man etc." intervene when anguished protests about mistreatment at the school came flooding in?

Why did a "good man etc." write a vicious nasty-gram to an overseas lay board, calling a young priest "a chronic troublemaker" and accusing him of "instability and misconduct" without bothering to hear from the accused his side of the story? (N.B. This "good man etc." knows the real circumstances under which the young priest left the pesthouse, and he himself has in the past roundly derided the academic standards of the other priest-mill from which the priest delivered himself.)

Why didn't this "good man etc." resolutely denounce Tony Baloney's life-denying, blood-curdling opinion about the Schiavo abomination?

More harrowing than these and a thousand related queries is this question: Why do so many former members of this "good man etc.'s" chapels along with so many Traddies unattached to his cult-center hold him in raw contempt? After all, Saint Paul teaches (1 Tim 3:7) that a bishop "must have a good testimony of them who are without." More pointedly, we ask: Why do brother priests here and around the world disesteem and mock him? All too often, when his name is mentioned to self-respecting clergy, they either shoot back an angry look or contort their lips into a dismissive sneer.

Doubtless our hysterical correspondents will spit out some incoherent, morally dubious riposte to embarrassing interrogatories of this sort. That's fine with us. As far as we're concerned, every man has leave to embrace the opinion he wishes, notwithstanding the out-and-out absence of supporting evidence for it: If you want to believe that pigs can fly or that your dog or cat can go to heaven, then, by all means, imagine on, Macduff! However, for all future communications in defense of Dim Dannie, we advise

(1) that "a good sedevacantist" ban the phrase "a good bishop" in the first sense of good since it's meaningless; and

 (2) that "a good cultling" bar the phrase in the second sense of good so as not to scandalize Sedelandia when Pistrina comes right back with a withering, fact-based, no-holds-barred rebuttal.

* For a brief moment, we thought the word good in the phrase "a good (sedevacantist) bishop" might be used oxymoronically, somewhat like "The Good Thief." We dismissed that fancy immediately, for we know there are two, maybe three, sedevacantist men of episcopal character who are entirely praiseworthy. Accordingly, in spite of the cult masters' unstinting efforts, the term sedevacantist bishop cannot yet have acquired the completely negative connotation needed to produce the figure of speech.

REMEMBER: STARVE THE BEAST, AND IT'S OKAY TO WALK AWAY.