What's under the Miter?

By Father William Grimm
LaCroix International
June 19, 2019

https://international.la-croix.com/news/whats-under-the-miter/10360

When I was a boy, I watched a narrow clamshell bucket dipping into a sewer up the street from our home to clear muck.I was still too young and too inexperienced in the ways of the Church to be aware of the irony of it, but I found it amusing that the muck-filled bucket looked vaguely like an upside-down version of the hat I had recently seen filled by the head of a bishop who came to our parish for Confirmations.Several years later, I learned to use a post hole digger, and noticed the similarity between it and an upside-down miter. That similarity points to something in Dante's Inferno (hell).In the 19th canto of that 14th-century poem, Dante on his tour of hell encounters bishops and other church leaders who have been turned upside-down and placed in post holes while their feet burn.The ecclesiastics singled out for this punishment are those whose greed...