Pope Francis Fires Texas Bishop Joseph Strickland After a Series of Controversial Statements
And the divide in the Church deepens
In a rare but not unexpected move, today Pope Francis relieved Bishop Joseph Strickland of his position as head of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas. Normally, even such an uncommon event as this would garner little media attention, especially for a diocese whose boundaries contain only around 120,000 Catholics out of a total population of more than one million. But these are not normal times, and Strickland’s firing (to call it what it was) was the lead story on many news websites this morning.
You would expect coverage from the two main American Catholic news outlets, of course, and both the National Catholic Register and the National Catholic Reporter put their usual spin on the story. In case you’re not familiar with these two organizations, when it comes to the hot-button issues of the day the National Catholic Register is like the Catholic equivalent of FOX News and the National Catholic Reporter is like MSNBC (the fact that their initials are both NCR causes no end of erroneous clicks by the two factions that read them religiously, pardon the pun).
Reporting on this story, however, went far beyond those two. In addition to coverage from across Texas (which is understandable), I saw stories from CNN, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and even BBC News. If you’ve never heard of Bishop Strickland, you might wonder why the sacking of a bishop from deep in East Texas would cause such a stir. Chances are, however, that you have heard of him, because over the past five years or so he has gained much notoriety in the mainstream media because he just won’t be quiet.
Bishop Strickland has always been fond of social media. I can remember following his blog 15 years ago when he was just Father Joe, Tyler’s favorite priest who loved to jog everywhere and was such a kind, warm-hearted man that even the Baptists in East Texas liked him. He took that love of social media to a new level when Pope Benedict XVI named him Bishop of Tyler in 2012, posting on what was then Twitter more often than Elon Musk. Most of his posts were what you would expect from someone who was the shepherd of the East Texas flock, and love for him only increased.
Then came 2018. Perhaps influenced by the ultra-conservatives who now dominate his part of the state by a huge margin, mild mannered Bishop Joe took a hard right turn, both politically and theologically. By 2020, he was decrying the COVID-19 vaccine as immoral for its alleged use of stem cells from aborted babies even as the US Conference of Bishops said this was not true and the Vatican urged Catholics to take the vaccine. This stance made him the darling of right-wing media; FOX News began calling him “America’s Bishop,” a moniker I would not consider a compliment given that they call Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church — Dallas, “America’s Pastor.”
If you’ve ever heard Pastor Jeffress speak, you know what circle Bishop Strickland was now running in: the cadre of Christian leaders who traded their moral character for a few seats on the Supreme Court by supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy for president and then sticking with him for the whole nightmare of a roller coaster ride we’re all still trapped on. None of that, however, was what got Bishop Strickland fired. There are numerous ultra-conservative bishops in America whose jobs are secure.
As I mentioned above with the two competing Catholic news organizations, the divide between so-called Traditional and Liberal Catholics has been widening for far longer than the political divide in America as a whole. As with America at large, the majority of Catholics fall somewhere in the middle of all the theological debates that have raged since the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, and as with America at large, the majority of the noise comes from the two extremes. To sum up those two extremes in a way that will delight and anger both sides at once, the “Trads” seem to think that there hasn’t been a true Catholic Church since Pope Pius XII died in 1958 (though St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI did their best to hold things together) and the “Libs” believe that Vatican II basically gave them permission to be Protestants with incense and candles.
Bishop Strickland is solidly in the “Trad” camp, yet that wouldn’t normally be enough to cause the pope to intervene; many bishops in the U.S. are outspoken about their love of the Latin Mass and they are in no danger of being ousted. He is out of a job today because he forgot the first rule every employee learns: you don’t talk smack about the boss. When the boss is the pope, you definitely don’t imply that the man is a heretic who is destroying the institution that has survived wars, the Protestant Reformation, and the internet age.
Yet that is exactly what Bishop Strickland did. In October of 2020, he called the pope’s efforts at synodality “garbage,” and in July of last year he tweeted out a link to a video calling Pope Francis a “diabolically disordered clown.” The final straw may have come in a post on X in May of this year where, while never actually using the word “heretic,” he accused the pope of “undermining the Deposit of Faith.”
Pope Francis is not quick to slap down his brother bishops (going so far as allowing the German bishops to essentially become schismatic), but that last statement was beyond the pale even for a firebrand like Bishop Strickland. He clearly forgot that long before Pope Francis was the head of the Church he was simply Jorge Bergoglio, the Argentine nightclub bouncer. And bouncers will only put up with so much before you get tossed out on your ear.
Response from both ends of the spectrum has been swift, with those on the left gleefully gloating at Bishop Strickland’s fall while one far-right Catholic organization went so far as to compare the pope’s actions to that of “a Soviet-era dictator.” Clearly the idea of Christian charity is a thing of the past.
As for me, I’m just sad that it’s come to this, partly because I remember Father Joe, the priest even the East Texas Pentecostals thought was a good guy, and partly because he recently showed what he could do when he focused on a truly critical issue in the Church. Recent surveys show that a full 70% of Catholics in the United States do not believe that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. Given that even Martin Luther believed in the doctrine of Transubstantiation (defending the real presence in his 1526 work The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ — Against the Fanatics), this is both alarming and tragic.
In a Pastoral Letter to his diocese in September, the bishop wrote eloquently about the Eucharist in a way that I’m sure many had never had explained to them before (I am putting the link to the letter here). In that moment, he was doing what a bishop is supposed to do: instructing and building up the members of the Church, and doing it in a way that would draw people together rather than divide them. He could have easily done this with the controversial topics he spoke about (they are important as well) but he chose not to, which is a great pity.
Instead, he chose to remain defiant to the very end, even refusing to resign when the pope asked him to so that the firestorm on social media could be avoided. He clearly forgot that when he was ordained in 1985, one of the things he vowed was obedience. He also clearly forgot that you should avoid talking trash about the boss. That never ends well for anyone.
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