A sudden move from edicts to scurrying

In the last few days Bishop Walter Mixa was reported to be planning rescinding his resignation. Other reports told the story of the bishop being stitched up by more liberal German bishops and in today's Irish Times there is a short news piece 'confirming' that Germany's Catholic bishops yesterday said that they had sent a damning report to Pope Benedict to persuade him the man had to be removed from his post in Augsburg.

What at all is happening? Here are these men, constantly running for cover, confused and really looking pathetic and yet, in the past they spoke with such 'authority'.

Cardinal Meissner is reported in recent days as saying, "When the faithful ask me: 'How can we help our priests?' I always respond: 'Go to confession'."

If it were all so simple and as 'pious' as that? And why ask a cardinal?

It's difficult to hear those words when one recalls the days when Cardinal Meissner was cardinal bishop in Berlin. The man drove about in a top of the range Mercedes. A catholic bishop driving a Mercedes in the capital city of the GDR looked, to say the least, odd. The then Berlin diocese straddled east and west. On one occasion speaking at a seminar for priests, Cardinal Meissner said that when it came to faith and morals his word was the last word to be heard in the diocese. There was to be no discussion.

If one were to compare the edicts of bishops some 30 years ago with their current scurrying about, once is forced to ask for what do they stand, what do these men hold sacred?

Bishop Mixa has been for a long time associated with a trenchant conservative element within the German Catholic church. Their words have always sounded suspect.

These days it all makes for sad and maybe laughable reading.