Bishop Martino should resign and not ruin Catholic education

The following letter to the editor of the Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice appeared on March 11, 2009:

Bishop Martino should resign and not ruin Catholic education

Editor:

It’s time Bishop Martino resigned. We’ve stood by as his mismanagement enabled the dismantling of Catholic community schooling. We’ve been held to the sidelines as his secretive planning continues to crush the heart of parish communities.

He has been a shrill voice, a poor listener and a bad communicator. His actions signal contempt for the “flock” around him when it dares to unhappily bleat. He has railed – embarrassingly enough for our region – about people we’ve elected to Congress. He suspended a priest-writer for another paper because he didn’t like what the columnist reported. And now Misericordia finds itself in his cross- hairs.

His column in last Wednesday’s Citizens’ Voice is nonsense. In his view we the “flock” are to act as unthinking sheep, incapable and unworthy of making our own judgments about what people in the world around us have to say. If Catholic teaching from the time we first attended Mass is so well-articulated and incontrovertible, what does the Bishop have to fear of words spoken to us 18 or 20 or more years later in a university setting? He doesn’t understand, and I believe never will, that he can “promulgate” Catholic teaching and listen, too.

What he fears is that you might listen and that you might think and judge in ways he doesn’t care for. In the Diocese of Scranton it’s his way or the highway. So much for loving your neighbor. For my money, which this bishop will never get, it’s time he hit the road – before he undermines university education here, too.

J. M. Castagna
Drums