Uncharitable Thursday: Why Does Bishop X Check His Cell Phone While Taking Confessions?

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From the comments section on one of the most perceptive pieces on Bishop X:

Oh, and one piece of advice for any of you who ever happen to go to him for confession: ask him to turn off his phone BEFORE the sacrament begins. He is on his phone CONSTANTLY, (which is not news to residents of his former city), but I was STUNNED to hear text beeps occurring while he was listening to my confession. To this day, I regret not asking him why he would leave his phone on during this holy sacrament.

Now, this has never happened to me. Once in a while I have snuck a peak at priests in-between confessions at our church. In every single case, they've either been praying the Rosary, saying other prayers or reading what looked like a Bible or a Missal.

They're probably guilty of crypto-Lefebvrist tendencies.

But back to Bishop X. Now, I've heard other negative things about his personal behavior, some of them directly from "insiders" that I personally know, not from comments on the internet. That I've heard them is one of the reasons I'm using the above public bit of "hearsay" in this blog post. But for a couple of obvious reasons, I'm not going to talk about the other things here.

Whoa! How unfair of me. How uncharitable. How gossipy. Accusing the man without allowing him to defend himself.

Well, give me a break. Anyone that has followed his career knows what he is. And from a number of other personal accounts, the man is a stewing bundle of bias, uncharity, selfishness and hypocrisy. Sure, I hope he goes to Heaven. But at the moment he's greatly harming the Church and endangering souls. I hope he has a change of heart.

And he can defend himself whenever and however he wants. For example, this blog is entirely open to him.

Why does Bishop X check his cell phone while taking confessions?

Q: You seem to also embrace this idea that we've heard-- from Cardinal Kasper and also from Pope Francis the idea of mercy. Not ideas, but the mission of mercy. Why mercy?

A: Well, as Cardinal Kasper said in his very important book on mercy-- there really has not been a fully developed theology of the mercy of God, and so that's why he wrote about it. And yet, it's at the heart of the Scriptures. That if you read throughout the Psalms, also through the Prophets and then how Jesus conducted himself, mercy is at the heart of what God does for us. And it's because the condition that we're in of sinfulness....And so the only remedy for that is God's mercy. It's not something that we can do. So we are thrown at the feet of God's mercy, because we're enslaved by sin. All of us are.

So then, in the confessional, the primary and most physically obvious and consistent mechanism for mercy in the Catholic Church,

Why does Bishop X check his cell phone while taking confessions?

Q: So it's about listening? 

A: It is. It's about listening.... 

Q: And so to win a convert, what you have to do is? 

A: Listen, talk, be respectful of people—and make sure that you really have an openness to where people are coming from...

If it's about listening,

Why does Bishop X check his cell phone while taking confessions?

A: ...And I just think that more and more you're going to see that kind of appointment (the Pope appointing me--Bishop X--and other likeminded clerics) happening... 

Q: When you say “that kind of appointment?” 

A: The kind of appointment that you're talking about of somebody who looks at people the way the pope does and wants. The pope has said this and the nuncio has said this. The nuncio told us last year the pope told him, I want more pastoral bishops...the Holy Father wants bishops who know “the smell of the sheep.” The pope has been very direct about that. 

Q: What do you hope to accomplish as Bishop? 

A: I'm going to be attentive to the needs of the people that are there and get to know them...

So, why does Bishop X check his cell phone while taking confessions?

Because he's a fake.