Last week, a friend called my attention to a website called "Faithful Shepherds" that was launched a year ago by LifeSiteNews.

They state that their purpose is to provide a "one-stop database" about where Catholic bishops stand on certain issues and to "encourage bishops to be faithful to Christ."

The website considers a range of issue, including homosexuality and liturgy: "Does your bishop encourage Communion on the tongue while kneeling?" is one of the questions posed.

I was glad to see that they properly labeled one category "abortion politics," although they failed to see that certainty about politics is different from certainty about morality.

The weirdest item on the list is Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò's testimony about which they ask "Has the bishop supported an investigation into Viganò's claims?

Does the bishop say his allegations are driven by ideology or are an attack on Pope Franics [sic]? Has the bishop said Viganò is a man of integrity?"

It is odd, is it not, that fidelity to Viganò has become such a calling card among these schismatics.

His screeds are so obviously a combination of score settling, innuendo and simple smearing — if you knew nothing about Viganò and nothing about the people he names and only read the texts as they are, you would be suspicious of the author.

When you find out where your bishop stands on these issues, you can click on a button to send him a postcard, thanking him for supporting the positions LifeSiteNews endorses or asking him to abandon his wayward ways.

First, you are invited to make a donation of $5 or more, and then alerted that your credit card will be charged $2 for the postcard.

You can also "do-it-yourself," as they provide an email address and phone number for each prelate as well.

"For too long, lay Catholics have been without an authoritative accountability tool for U.S. bishops, especially those who deviate from the Church's magisterium," they write.

Seeing as Francis is now the embodiment of the church's magisterium, the fact that they applaud bishops who have criticized Amoris Laetitia and denounce those who have supported it is a bit rich.

Last week, Cardinal Blase Cupich was their featured prelate.

I won't bore you with the bizarre way they frame different items on their list of complaints.

Many are tendentious in the extreme.

Others are true, but in this funhouse of extremism, what is sane is presented as heretical and what is a commonplace is considered an outrage.

I do not believe that any bishop, not even the bishop of Rome, is beyond criticism.

But what makes this Faithful Shepherds website so nefarious, and indeed what makes LifeSiteNews and other conservative outlets so nefarious these days, is that fidelity is defined as being in opposition to the pope.

They do not cite a single instance in which agreement with the pope is a mark of fidelity.

Silly me. All these years, I thought being in communion with the successor of Peter was a significant mark of Roman Catholicism. Continue reading

• Image: LifeSite

By itself, that's probably not something most readers are interested in.

Statistically, perhaps as many as 46,000 American Catholics died in September, and I am sure any reader of these words can name at least one of them.

But this particular American Catholic was my wife's mother and my good friend.

Aileen was one of six children born to a Brooklyn schoolteacher and the son of a New York City police captain who, after a stint on the New York stage and declining an invitation to join the Mercury Theatre of Orson Welles and John Houseman, himself joined the NYPD, later working as a court attorney.

Coming from a family of cops, actors, lawyers, teachers, and proud Irish know-it-alls, Aileen made an unusual choice when she entered a Maryknoll convent after graduating high school.

She eventually left the convent, once telling me that she felt like she might do more good as a layperson.

But she remained close to Maryknoll spiritually and vocationally.

She did plenty.

Aileen taught first in the Paterson, New Jersey public schools, then in a series of Catholic grammar and high schools before becoming a Catholic school principal in 1997.

At 60, she earned a Ph.D. in church leadership from Fordham, and her final professional years were spent as an adjunct professor there in the Graduate School of Religious Education.

Along the way, she had a long, happy marriage, raised two children, adored four grandchildren, and her generosity sustained family, friends, neighborhood children, her parish, and a variety of outreach ministries.

Serving others humbly until the last 17 days of her life, her rest now is well earned.

Like me, my wife was a teenager during the 1980s.

One Sunday, after a few weeks of watching her mom come home from Mass a little exasperated with the direction the church had begun taking in those days, my wife asked an innocent question: "If the church upsets you so much, why do you keep going back?"

Aileen told her daughter, simply and without rancor, "It's my church, too, and I'm not leaving."

That conversation stayed with my wife.

As the crisis in the church continues to unfold, I am thinking about it, too.

The pews were emptying even before the Pennsylvania grand jury report, the McCarrick revelations, and Archbishop Viganò's testimony.

We have been through Boston.

We have seen consumerism and materialism eat into the church's grip on Catholics' imaginations. Polarization has taken a terrible toll.

Still, what we are living through now feels like something different. Continue reading

• Steven P. Millies is associate professor of public theology and director of The Bernardin Center at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
• Image: Things not seen radio.

They did not want to "ruin the brand," in the parlance of marketing.

They did not want people turning against the concept of soda altogether.

So, instead, each company adopted clever ways of situating their project in the consumer's mind, and they even occasionally took an implied swipe at their competitor — e.g. Coke was "the real thing," in one ad campaign, implying Pepsi was not real, or at least nothing better than a copycat.

The Catholic Church is not a soda company.

It is not a company at all.

But it is hard not to recognize that this summer, conservative critics of Pope Francis became so overwrought that they decided to ruin the brand.

As Massimo Faggioli explained in a brilliant essay at Commonweal, in seeking to de-legitimize Francis, they have de-legitimized all popes and more.

"[W]hat is really in danger is the bond between the church as a people and ecclesiastical authority — not just particular church officials, but the very idea of ecclesiastical authority."

The fact that this result is ironic — the same crowd attacking Francis has been repeating, albeit often in a misunderstood way, Pope Benedict XVI's warning against the "dictatorship of relativism" for years — is little comfort.

And, irony is not the problem here. Hypocrisy is.

The face of hypocrisy

Back in 2002, the first public allegation of sexual misconduct was made against Cardinal George Pell, but there had been rumors swirling around him before that.

Later, despite his reputation for being tough on the issue due to the relative forcefulness of the "Melbourne Response" to clergy sex abuse that Pell had crafted when serving as archbishop of that city, he was alleged to have covered up clergy sex abuse.

He is now back in Australia, and his trial is set to start soon.

The facts in the Pell case are not hugely different from the facts in the case of now ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, but I do not recall our conservative friends calling for the entire episcopacy to be overthrown back when Pell was the target.

And they certainly did not try and direct their fire at Benedict XVI, still less Pope John Paul II.

The idea that people who showed no particular concern for the victims or allegations when they were Fr. Marcial Maciel's victims or allegations against Pell are suddenly horrified by the grand jury report in Pennsylvania does not pass the smell test.

It is bizarre to watch EWTN interview two of the women who signed a letter calling on Francis to respond to the allegations hurled at him by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.

They huffed and puffed about Francis, and the host, Raymond Arroyo, did not stop and say: Of course, it was John Paul II who appointed McCarrick to be bishop of Metuchen, then archbishop of Newark, then archbishop of Washington, and then cardinal-priest of the Church of Rome — not Francis.

Like the dubia cardinals, these women are not acting in good faith.

How can I tell?

Because they make demands of the pope but ask nothing of Viganò.

Why should he not be asked to produce evidence?

Why should he not be asked to explain his behavior to McCarrick?

They repeat the obvious falsehood that Francis might have promoted McCarrick when it was John Paul II who promoted this predator.

The pope is well advised not to engage people who act in bad faith. Continue reading

• Michael Sean Withers is a Visiting Fellow at Catholic University's Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies.