“FIREBRAND” Bishop Joseph Strickland, above, who despises LGBT+ communities, and had endorsed a video that attacked the Pope as a “diabolically disoriented clown”, was removed from his post yesterday, just weeks after he invited the pontiff to sack him.
Described as the “darling of right-wing Twitter”—now simply X—by The National Catholic Reporter, the 65-year-old leader of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, since 2012 was axed in a short note issued by the Vatican.
The note appeared to indicate that Strickland, age 65, had refused requests to resign. The prelate had been subject to an official Vatican investigation into his leadership.
Massimo Faggioli, a theologian and church historian at Villanova University, said:
The shocking part for me was not that [Strickland] was going against Pope Francis, but seeing a Catholic bishop behaving like a fundamentalist Protestant in being so dismissive of the idea that there is a church authority that he has to obey.
Faggioli told NCR that Strickland’s posts on X, where he once accused the pope of “undermining the Deposit of Faith,” was “the strangest behavior by a bishop” that the theologian had seen in the age of social media.
Faggioli said added:
In his tweets it was almost like he was saying, ‘Jesus told me to do this, Jesus told me to say that,’ which in some other churches might be acceptable but it is certainly not the way in which the Catholic Church understands unity and the responsibility of a bishop.
According to The Texas Tribune, Strickland’s removal has sparked a backlash backlash among the Pope’s conservative critics.
Michael J. Matt, editor of the traditionalist Catholic newspaper The Remnant, declared the move was “total war” and said Francis was “actively trying to bury fidelity to the Church of Jesus Christ.”
Francis is a clear and present danger not only to Catholics the world over but also to the whole world itself. It appears now that he is actively trying to bury fidelity to the Church of Jesus Christ. Let him be anathema.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who has previously called on the Pope to resign, wrote that Strickland’s removal was “a cowardly form of authoritarianism.”
When same-sex marriage was legalised in in the US in 2015, Strickland went postal, saying:
On the morning of June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a 5-4 decision establishing the legal right of two individuals of the same sex to legally marry in all 50 states.
By doing so, the Court has acted in contradiction to their duty to promote the common good, especially what is good for families. I join with the Bishops of the United States in calling this decision a “tragic error.”
Let me unambiguously state at the outset that this extremely unfortunate decision by our government is unjust and immoral, and it is our duty to clearly and emphatically oppose it. In spite of the decision by the Supreme Court, there are absolutely no grounds for considering unions between two persons of the same sex to be in any way similar to God’s plan for marriage and the family.
Regardless of this decision, what God has revealed and what the Church therefore holds to be true about marriage has not changed and is unchangeable.
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