Raleigh's Babylonian Captivity To End Soon
Smilin' Joe to join the ranks of Law, Gumbleton and Weakland

The 31 year long wandering through the wilderness is about to end. The decades long wreckovation wrought by His Accidency F. Joseph "Just Call Me Joe" Gossman will mercifully come to a close on Aug 4, 2006.

The incoming bishop, Auxiliary Bishop Michael F. Burbidge of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia certainly does appear to be an interesting choice. A few bits of information I've found so far are as follows;

Bishop Burbidge led the 5 member team that inspected Aquinas Institute of Theology on the campus of St. Louis University for evidence of homosexuality in the seminary, among other deviations from Catholic teaching.

While assigned as the Auxiliary Bishop of Philadelphia, he was responsible for the months long planning of a procession and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament that was attended by tens of thousands of Catholics.

Bishop Burbidge is the former rector of St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Overbrook, PA. Many consider St. Charles to be one of the few "conservative" seminaries left in the United States, but there still are some very valid questions being raised concerning the priestly formations at St. Charles.

Example, from CRISIS magazine: One seminarian I interviewed had been assigned to a Catholic high school to assist in teaching religion classes. As part of a lesson about liturgy, the sister who was the teacher (and supervisor for the seminarian) instructed the girls to invent their own liturgy: a “Celebration of Womankind.” In this “liturgy,” the girls were seated in a circle around a lit candle (the seminarian, being a man, wasn’t allowed to sit in the circle). Then began the “ritual” of stretching a Slinky around the circle so that each girl could hold on to it. After all had held on to the toy for several moments, they let it go all at once and allowed it to spring back together. Then one girl announced, “When we stand alone, like the Slinky stretched out, we are weak. But when we are united, then we are strong.” What that exercise had to do with liturgy or the Catholic Faith is a puzzle to me. Someone may protest and say that the seminary can’t be responsible for what a loopy nun comes up with outside its walls. That is certainly true. But it is also true that the seminary is responsible for forcing seminarians to endure such nonsense.

One thing's for sure, this choice... any choice... is a step up from what we currently endure in the Roman Protestant Diocese of Raleigh, NC.