The New Bishop

On August 1, feast day of St. Alphonsus Liguori, the new bishop assumed his office, giving a most peculiar speech in which he noted that he was absolutely certain that he, like St. Alphonsus, would eventually be deserted by most of his companions, be excoriated for abandoning pomposity for simplicity, and have his neck bowed by the burdensome weight of circumstance. He added that he too had asked that the complex penance of the bishopric not be laid upon his shoulders, weak as his shoulders had thus far proven to be, but such deliverance was not his lot, for which he asked the prayers of the faithful.

Bishopric? said people in the pews. Is that a word?

Ten days later, on August 11, feast day of St. Clare of Assisi, patroness of laundry workers, the new bishop sold the phalanx of washing machines and dryers in the rectory basement. On October 28, feast day of St. Jude, patron of lost causes, he sold the rectory’s entire supply of bingo equipment, card tables, poker chips, and roulette wheels, some of the tables tracing back to the establishment of the parish itself just after the Civil War. On March 9, feast day of St. Frances of Rome, patroness of cars and drivers, he sold all four of the rectory’s cars, including the Buick on which Mr. Mooney had worked so long and assiduously, buffing and revving, polishing and priming, shining even the various small bobblehead statuettes on the back shelf that some bishops, as Mr. Mooney said, the ones with hints of senses of humor, had allowed him to install.

Those were the days, said people in the pews.

On March 8, feast day of St. John of God, patron of booksellers and heart patients, the new bishop had a quiet heart attack while reading John Steinbeck’s masterpiece Sweet Thursday. He joked to his doctors that he would have never had a heart attack, quiet or otherwise, if he had not been reading the greatest of Episcopalian writers, who famously while an altar server at St. Paul’s Church in Salinas, California, dropped a cross on a bishop’s head.

I should have anticipated a blow to the bishopric, said the new bishop.

On March 19, feast day of St. Joseph, patron of shelter and buildings, the new bishop sold the rectory itself, all ten adjacent acres including sheds and the former stable complex, and all attendant woodland except the dense grove of cedars at the very top of the hill behind the rectory. That parcel, approximately an acre of forest that had never been logged, was preserved by trust in perpetuity and granted public access by way of the footpath that was annually cleared by the Boy Scouts as a community service project.

Is he going to sell the church itself, then? said people in the pews.

The rectory staff, generally advanced in years but quietly provided with complete health care and healthy pensions by the bishop with part of the proceeds from the rash of recent sales, retired and mostly arranged to live with their children, although Mr. Mooney, disgruntled, to say the least, moved to another island and offered his services to an Episcopalian parish led by a man who sometimes wore a BOSTON COLLEGE POKER TEAM sweatshirt, which Mr. Mooney did his best to ignore, feeling that even the Jesuits had a place in the Church Eternal, as did, of course, the poor Episcopalians and their ilk, still smarting over the sins of the Church many centuries past, though those days were long ago and far away, and the whole idea of Protestantism being somewhat quaint, what’s to Protest against, with the Church being the poor shaggy thing it is today, exhibit A being this new fella selling off the place lock stock and barrel, I ask you that?

Mooney has a point there, said the people in the pews.