VATICAN CITY
Chiesa
That is, forced by the pope to leave their posts for immoral acts, administrative faults, or other serious violations. They number in the dozens. Their names have disappeared from the Annuario Pontificio. Here they are
VATICAN CITY, June 15, 2012 – The old-timers of the curia remember a quip that one cardinal loved to repeat: “Among the apostles one out of twelve betrayed, and today among the successors of the apostles the average is certainly no better.”
Today, without counting the other Christian denominations, the Catholic bishops who are the heirs of the apostles number about 5200, and so by applying to them this “evangelical” proportion, there should be more than 400 emulators of Judas Iscariot in the Church of Rome. A figure that may be too optimistic in the eyes of the Lefebvrists, or from the opposite perspective, of the progressive ecclesial galaxy, but certainly much higher than the number of prelates who in various ways have been punished in recent years by the only person who has this power, the pope.
There are no complete statistics in this regard, in part because beyond the most spectacular cases, it normally happens that a bishop who is asked to leave the leadership of a diocese for doctrinal or moral reasons, or because of ecclesiastical or administrative mismanagement, is convinced to hand in his resignation to the pope before reaching the retirement age of 75, on the basis of paragraph 2 of canon 401 of the code of canon law, which states: “A diocesan bishop who has become less able to fulfill his office because of ill health or some other grave cause is earnestly requested to present his resignation from office.” And the pope accepts his resignation very quickly.
Normally, this paragraph 2 of canon 401 concerns churchmen afflicted by physical or psychological “ill health,” but there is no lack of cases of “other grave cause.”
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