Catholics rightly complain when bishops either misuse their governing authority to discipline the wrong people and/or fail to discipline those who are truly deserving of warnings and punishments.

Catholics rightly complain when bishops either misuse their governing authority to discipline the wrong people and/or fail to discipline those who are truly deserving of warnings and punishments. We thus have an obligation to commend a bishop when he exercises his duties as the king of his flock with firmness. It will be very difficult, although not impossible, I realize, for Bishop Burke’s eventual successor to reverse the edict announced on January 8, 2004.