Pope Francis Fires Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland After a Series of Controversial Statements
And the divide in the Church deepens
In a rare but not unexpected move, today Pope Francis relieved Bishop Joseph Strickland of his position as head of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas. Normally, even such an uncommon event as this would garner little media attention, especially for a diocese whose boundaries contain only around 120,000 Catholics out of a total population of more than one million. But these are not normal times, and Strickland’s firing (to call it what it was) was the lead story on many news websites this morning.
You would expect coverage from the two main American Catholic news outlets, of course, and both the National Catholic Register and the National Catholic Reporter put their usual spin on the story. In case you’re not familiar with these two organizations, when it comes to the hot-button issues of the day the National Catholic Register is like the Catholic equivalent of FOX News and the National Catholic Reporter is like MSNBC (the fact that their initials are both NCR causes no end of erroneous clicks by the two factions that read them religiously, pardon the pun).
Reporting on this story, however, went far beyond those two. In addition to coverage from across Texas (which is understandable), I…
