Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work: Endings.

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week At Work: Endings.: 

Mid Week At Work: Endings.

I posted this the other day:

Sigh . . .

And depicted with a horse too. . . 

Kroger retires after 35 years of service  CODY - Worland Wildlife Biologist Bart Kroger retired last month, bringing his 35-year career with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to a close.  “Bart has been referred to as the ‘core of the agency’, meaning through his dedication and continuous hard work, he has significantly and meaningfully impacted wildlife management within his district and throughout the state,” said Corey Class, Cody region wildlife management coordinator. “Throughout his career, he has been a solid, steady and dependable wildlife biologist, providing a foundation for wildlife conservation and management in the Bighorn Basin.” Through his quiet and thoughtful approach, Bart has gained the respect of both his peers and the public. Bart is best known for his commitment to spending time in the field gaining first-hand knowledge of the wildlife and the habitat that supports them, as well as the people he serves in his district.

 Found this old draft the other day

RETIREMENT ELIGIBILITY

Vesting Requirements

After obtaining 72 months of service, you are eligible to elect a monthly benefit at

retirement age. The 72 months of service do not have to be consecutive months.

Retirement Eligibility

You are eligible for retirement when you reach age 50 and are vested. There is no

early retirement under this plan. You must begin drawing your benefit no later than

age 65.

Which means, as a practical matter, if you are to draw retirement as a Wyoming Game Warden, you need to take the job no later than the beginning of your 59th year.

Of course, if you started at age 59, you wouldn't be drawing much, if anything.

That doesn't mean, of course, that you couldn't be hired after age 59.  You'd just draw no retirement.

The actual statute on this matter states the following, as we noted in a prior thread, from 2023, quoted below:

2. Wyoming Game Wardens were once required to retire at age 55, but a lawsuit some decades ago overturned that. It, in turn, was later overruled, but by that time the state had changed the system. Since that time, it's set it again statutorily, with the age now being 65 by law.  There aren't, therefore, any 67-year-old game wardens.

Statutorily, the current law provides:

9-3-607. Age of retirement.

(a) Any employee with six (6) or more years of service to his credit is eligible to receive a retirement allowance under this article when he attains age fifty (50).

(b) Effective July 1, 1998, any employee retiring after July 1, 1998, with twenty-five (25) or more years of service may elect to retire and receive a benefit upon attaining age fifty (50) as described in W.S. 9-3-610.

(c) Repealed by Laws 1993, ch. 120, §§ 1, 2.

(d) Any employee in service who has attained age sixty-five (65), shall be retired not later than the last day of the calendar month in which his 65th birthday occurs. 

Age limitations of this type are tied to physical fitness.  But what about mental fitness?  As mentioned here before, Gen. Marshall forcibly retired most serving U.S. Army generals, or at least sidelined them, who were over 50 years of age during World War Two, and that had to do with their thinking.  We now allow judges to remain on the bench until they are 70.  Would 60 make more sense?  And can the same argument be made for lawyers, who are officers of the court?

This differs, I'd note, significantly from the Federal Government.  The cutoff there is age 37.  That's it.

Have a wildlife management degree?  Spend the last few years in some other state agency?  Win the Congressional Medal of Honor for single handled defeating the Boko Haram?  38 years old now? Well, too bloody bad for you.

Anyhow, I guess this says something about the American concept that age is just a number and the hands of the clock don't really move.

They do.

On a somewhat contrary note, I was in something this week when a 70-year-old man indicated he might retire in order to take a job as a commercial airline pilot.

He's never been employed in that capacity, but he's had the license for 50 years.  It wouldn't be carrying people for United or something, but in some other commercial capacity.  

He's always wanted to do it, and has an offer.

Well, more power to him.

I did a lot of what this lawyer is doing here, when first practicing, in front of barrister cases just like this.  No young lawyer does that now.

I spoke to a lawyer I've known the entire time I've been practicing law, almost. He's four years younger than me, which would make him 56 or so.  He's worked his entire career in general civil, in a small and often distressed town, in a firm founded by his parents.  When I was first practicing, it was pretty vibrant.

Now he's the only one left.

He's retiring this spring.  This was motivated by his single employee's decision to retire.

I was really surprised, in part due to his age.  I'm glad that he can retire, but it was a bit depressing.  We're witnessing, in Wyoming, the death of the small town civil firm.  Everything is gravitating to the larger cities, and frankly in the larger cities, they're in competition with the big cities in Colorado and Utah.  That's insured a bill in the legislature to try to recruit lawyers to rural areas.*

It's not going to work.

The problem has been, for some time, that it's impossible to recruit young lawyers to small rural areas.  The economics don't allow for it.  The economics don't allow for it, in part, as the Wyoming Supreme Court forced the Uniform Bar Exam down on the Board of Law Examiners, and that resulted in opening the doors to Denver and Salt Lake lawyers.  It's been something the small firms have been competing against ever since.

And not only that, but some sort of demographic change has operated to just keep younger lawyers out of smaller places, and frankly to cause them to opt for easier paths than civil law in general.  I know older lawyers that came from the larger cities in the state, and set up small town practices when they were young, as that's where the jobs were and having a job was what they needed to have.  I've even known lawyers who went to UW who moved here from somewhere else who took that path, relocating from big Eastern or Midwestern cities to do so.

No longer.  Younger lawyers don't do that.

Quite a few don't stick with civil practice at all.  They leave for government work, where the work hours are regular, and the paycheck isn't dependent on billable hours.   And recently, though we are not supposed to note it, young women attorneys reflect a new outlook in which a lot of them bail out of practice or greatly reduce their work hours after just a few years in, a desire to have a more regular domestic life being part of that.

I guess people can't be blamed for that, but we can, as a state, be blamed for being shortsighted.  Adopting the UBE was shortsighted.  Sticking with it has been inexcusable.  I'm not the only one who has said so, and frankly not the only one who probably paid a price for doing so.  The reaction to voices crying in the wilderness is often to close the windows so you don't have to hear them.  Rumor had it, which I've never seen verified and have heard expressly denied by a person within the law school administration, that it was done in order to aid the law school, under the theory that it would make UW law degrees transportable, which had pretty much the practical effect on the local law as Commodore Matthew Perry opening up trade with Japan.

Wyoming Board of Law Examiners bringing in the UBE.

The lawyer in this case is worried, as he has no hobbies and doesn't know what he'll do with himself.  I'm surprised how often this concern is expressed.  To only have the law, or any work, is sad.  But a court reporter, about my age, expressed the same concern to me the other day.

Court reporting has really taken a beating in this state, more so than lawyers.  When I was first practicing, every community had court reporters.  Now there are hardly any left at all.  Huge firms are down to just a handful of people, and people just aren't coming into the occupation.  It's a real concern to lawyers.

It's always looked like an interesting job to me, having all the diversity of being a lawyer, with seemingly a lot less stress.  But having never done it, perhaps I'm wildly in error.  We really don't know what other people's jobs are like unless we've done them.

A lawyer I know just died by his own hand.

I met him when he took over for a very long time Wyoming trial attorney upon that attorney's death.

The attorney he took over for had died when he went in his backyard and put a rifle bullet through his brain.  He was a well known attorney, and we could tell something wasn't quite right with him.  Just the day prior, he called me and asked for an extension on something.  I'd already given two.  I paused, and then, against my better judgment, said, "well. . . okay".  

I'd known him too long to say no.

He was clearing his schedule.  If I had said no, I feel, he wouldn't have done it, and he'd be alive today.

The new attorney came in and was sort of like a goofy force of nature.  Hard to describe.  A huge man, probably in his 40s at the time, but very childlike.  He talked and talked. Depositions would be extended due to long meandering conversational interjections, as I learned in that case and then a very serious subsequent one.

He was hugely proud of having been a member of a legendary local plaintiff's firm.  That didn't really matter much to me then, and it still doesn't.  My family has always had an odd reaction to the supposedly honorific.  My father never bothered to collect his National Defense Service Medal for serving during the Korean War, I didn't bother to get my Reserve Overseas Training Ribbon, or my South Korean award for Operation Team Spirit, I don't have my law school diploma's anymore. . . It's not that they aren't honors, it's just, well, oh well.  We tend to value other things, which in some ways sets standards that are highers than others, and very difficult to personally meet.

Anyhow, the guy was very friendly and told me details of his life, not all of which were true.  He was raised by his grandmother, his grandmother had somehow encouraged him to go to law school,  Both true.

He was from Utah and grown up there, but consistently denied being a Mormon.  His wife was Mormon, he said.  He was an Episcopalian.  As I'm very reserved, I'm not really going to talk religion with somebody I only casually and professionally know, as opposed to one of my very extroverted and devout partners who will bring it up at the drop of a hat, and his religious confession didn't particularly matter to me, given the light nature of our relationship.  As it turns out, and as I suspected, that wasn't even remotely true.  He was and always had been a Mormon.  Why did he lie about that?  No idea.

I suppose this is some sort of warning here, maybe.

The first lawyer noted in this part of this entry had suffered something hugely traumatic early in his life and never really got over it. Some people roll with the punches on traumas and some do not.  We hear about combat veterans all the time who live with the horrors they experienced, and which break them down, all the time, but I've known a couple who didn't have that sort of reaction at all, and who could coolly relate their combat experiences.  Others can't get over something that happened to them, ever.

With the second lawyers, there were some oddities, one being that he jumped from firm to firm, and to solo, and back and forth, all the time. That's unusual.  Another was that he seemed to have pinned his whole identify on being a lawyer.  It's one thing, like the retiring fellow above, to have worked it your whole life and have nothing else to do, it's quite another to have that make up everything you are.  He'd drunk deeply of the plaintiff's lawyer propaganda about helping the little guy and all that crap, and didn't really realize that litigators often hurt people as often as they help them, or do both at the same time.  Maybe the veil had come off.  Maybe he should never have been a lawyer in the first place.  Maybe it was organic and had nothing to do with any of this.

Well, the moral of this story, or morals, if there are any, would be this.  You don't have endless time to do anything, 70-year-old commercial airline pilots aside. You probably don't know what it's like to do something unless you've actually done it, but you can investigate it and learn as much as possible.  The UBE, which the Wyoming Supreme Court was complicit in adopting, is killing the small  town civil lawyer and only abrogating it, or its successor, and restoring the prior system can address that.   The entire whaling for justice plaintiff's lawyer ethos is pretty much crap.  And, finally, you had some sort of identify before you took up your occupation.  Unless that identity was what you became, before you became it, don't let the occupation become it.  It may be shallower than you think.

Footnotes:

The bill:

SENATE FILE NO. SF0033

Wyoming rural attorney recruitment program.

Sponsored by: Joint Judiciary Interim Committee

A BILL

for

AN ACT relating to attorneys-at-law; establishing the rural attorney recruitment pilot program; specifying eligibility requirements for counties and attorneys to participate in the program; specifying administration, oversight and payment obligations for the program; requiring reports; providing a sunset date for the program; authorizing the adoption of rules, policies and procedures; providing an appropriation; and providing for an effective date.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:

Section 1.  W.S. 33‑5‑201 through 33‑5‑203 are created to read:

ARTICLE 2

RURAL ATTORNEY RECRUITMENT PROGRAM

33‑5‑201.  Rural attorney recruitment program established; findings; program requirements; county qualifications; annual reports.

(a)  In light of the shortage of attorneys practicing law in rural Wyoming counties, the legislature finds that the establishment of a rural attorney recruitment program constitutes a valid public purpose, of primary benefit to the citizens of the state of Wyoming.

(b)  The Wyoming state bar may establish a rural attorney recruitment program to assist rural Wyoming counties in recruiting attorneys to practice law in those counties.

(c)  Each county eligible under this subsection may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program. A county is eligible to participate in the program if the county:

(i)  Has a population of not greater than twenty‑five thousand (25,000);

(ii)  Has an average of not greater than one and one‑half (1.5) qualified attorneys in the county for every one thousand (1,000) residents. As used in this paragraph, "qualified attorney" means an attorney who provides legal services to private citizens on a fee basis for an average of not less than twenty (20) hours per week. "Qualified attorney" shall not include an attorney who is a full‑time judge, prosecutor, public defender, judicial clerk, in‑house counsel, trust officer and any licensed attorney who is in retired status or who is not engaged in the practice of law;

(iii)  Agrees to provide the county share of the incentive payment required under this article;

(iv)  Is determined to be eligible to participate in the program by the Wyoming state bar.

(d)  Before determining a county's eligibility, the Wyoming state bar shall conduct an assessment to evaluate the county's need for an attorney and the county's ability to sustain and support an attorney. The Wyoming state bar shall maintain a list of counties that have been assessed and are eligible to participate in the program under this article. The Wyoming state bar may revise any county assessment or conduct a new assessment as the Wyoming State bar deems necessary to reflect any change in a county's eligibility.

(e)  In selecting eligible counties to participate in the program, the Wyoming state bar shall consider:

(i)  The county's demographics;

(ii)  The number of attorneys in the county and the number of attorneys projected to be practicing in the county over the next five (5) years;

(iii)  Any recommendations from the district judges and circuit judges of the county;

(iv)  The county's economic development programs;

(v)  The county's geographical location relative to other counties participating in the program;

(vi)  An evaluation of any attorney or applicant for admission to the state bar seeking to practice in the county as a program participant, including the attorney's or applicant's previous or existing ties to the county;

(vii)  Any prior participation of the county in the program;

(viii)  Any other factor that the Wyoming state bar deems necessary.

(f)  A participating eligible county may enter into agreements to assist the county in meeting the county's obligations for participating in the program.

(g)  Not later than October 1, 2024 and each October 1 thereafter that the program is in effect, the Wyoming state bar shall submit an annual report to the joint judiciary interim committee on the activities of the program. Each report shall include information on the number of attorneys and counties participating in the program, the amount of incentive payments made to attorneys under the program, the general status of the program and any recommendations for continuing, modifying or ending the program.

33‑5‑202.  Rural attorney recruitment program; attorney requirements; incentive payments; termination of program.

(a)  Except as otherwise provided in this subsection, any attorney licensed to practice law in Wyoming or an applicant for admission to the Wyoming state bar may apply to the Wyoming state bar to participate in the rural attorney recruitment program established under this article. No attorney or applicant shall participate in the program if the attorney or applicant has previously participated in the program or has previously participated in any other state or federal scholarship, loan repayment or tuition reimbursement program that obligated the attorney to provide legal services in an underserved area.

(b)  Not more than five (5) attorneys shall participate in the program established under this article at any one (1) time.

(c)  Subject to available funding and as consideration for providing legal services in an eligible county, each attorney approved by the Wyoming state bar to participate in the program shall be entitled to receive an incentive payment in five (5) equal annual installments. Each annual incentive payment shall be paid on or after July 1 of each year. Each annual incentive payment shall be in an amount equal to ninety percent (90%) of the University of Wyoming college of law resident tuition for thirty (30) credit hours and annual fees as of July 1, 2024.

(d)  Subject to available funding, the supreme court shall make each incentive payment to the participating attorney. The Wyoming state bar and each participating county shall remit its share of the incentive payment to the supreme court in a manner and by a date specified by the supreme court. The Wyoming state bar shall certify to the supreme court that a participating attorney has completed all annual program requirements and that the participating attorney is entitled to the incentive payment for the applicable year. The responsibility for incentive payments under this section shall be as follows:

(i)  Fifty percent (50%) of the incentive payments shall be from funds appropriated to the supreme court;

(ii)  Thirty‑five percent (35%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by each county paying for attorneys participating in the program in the county;

(iii)  Fifteen percent (15%) of the incentive payments shall be provided by the Wyoming state bar from nonstate funds.

(e)  Subject to available funding for the program, each attorney participating in the program shall enter into an agreement with the supreme court, the participating county and the Wyoming state bar that obligates the attorney to practice law full‑time in the participating county for not less than five (5) years. As part of the agreement required under this subsection, each participating attorney shall agree to reside in the participating county for the period in which the attorney practices law in the participating county under the program. No agreement shall be effective until it is filed with and approved by the Wyoming state bar.

(f)  Any attorney who receives an incentive payment under this article and subsequently breaches the agreement entered into under subsection (e) of this section shall repay all funds received under this article pursuant to terms and conditions established by the supreme court. Failure to repay funds as required by this subsection shall subject the attorney to license suspension.

(g)  The Wyoming state bar may promulgate any policies or procedures necessary to implement this article.  The supreme court may promulgate any rules necessary to implement this article.

(h)  The program established under this article shall cease on June 30, 2029, provided that attorneys participating in the program as of June 30, 2029 shall complete their obligation and receive payments as authorized by this article.

33‑5‑203.  Sunset.

(a)  W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 are repealed effective July 1, 2029.

(b)  Notwithstanding subsection (a) of this section, attorneys participating in the rural attorney pilot program authorized in W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 shall complete the requirements of the program and shall be entitled to the authorized payments in accordance with W.S. 33‑5‑201 and 33‑5‑202 as provided on June 30, 2029.

Section 2.  There is appropriated one hundred ninety‑seven thousand three hundred seventy‑five dollars ($197,375.00) from the general fund to the supreme court for the period beginning with the effective date of this act and ending June 30, 2029 to be expended only for purposes of providing incentive payments for the rural attorney recruitment program established under this act. This appropriation shall not be transferred or expended for any other purpose. Notwithstanding W.S. 9‑2‑1008, 9‑2‑1012(e) and 9‑4‑207, this appropriation shall not revert until June 30, 2029.

Section 3.  This act is effective July 1, 2024.

Lex Anteinternet: On being an only child.

Lex Anteinternet: On being an only child.: 

On being an only child.

My father (left as viewed) and his siblings.  I don't know the date, but given their apparent ages, this photograph would have been taken in Scotsbluff, Nebraska, in the late 1930s.  His borther is the only one left alive.  My father was the first to pass, at age 62.

My father was very close to his three siblings, one of whom is still living.  He was particularly close to that sibling, his brother.  They spoke by phone nearly every day when my uncle, who was a fireman, was not working.

My mother's parents and their children.  My mother is seated, fourth from the left as viewed, next to her mother.  Her youngest sister, seated far right, was the first to pass.

My mother was close to most of her siblings.  They were a feisty bunch in general, and they argued amongst themselves, but they were close. Like all such relationships, some were closer than others.  My mother was particularly close to her youngest sibling, one of her four brothers (she had three sisters as well), and he was very close to her.  A very long-lived family as a rule, her sisters have passed, but three of her brothers are living.

I'm an only child.

That was not my parent's desire.  They simply had a very hard time having children, and they were not young when they married, really.  Indeed, in the common understanding of the time, while they'd be regarded as "young" today, but only barely so, at the time of their marriage, at the time, they would have been regarded as middle-aged. Certainly my mother would have been, she being three years older than my father. They were married five years at the time of my birth, and she was 37 years old.  My birth was it, she'd never have another child.  Indeed, in retrospect, while was a remarkably fit person her entire life, my birth took a lot out of her in other ways and a significant psycho-medical decline would set in with in thirteen years of that event.

When you grow up as an only child, you constantly hear how "lucky" you are.  That's the point of the post.  You really aren't.

People like to imagine that only children are "spoiled", but at least in my case that wasn't true. The concept of being spoiled even has a name, Only Child Syndrome, but research has shown it's largely a myth.  My parents probably made a dedicated effort to keep that from happening to me.  What you are, however, is deprived in some very significant ways, all of which have to do with the close bonds that form between siblings being absent.

If you grow up an only child, you miss out on ever having that close relationship that can only come through a blood bond.  Siblings never escape their siblings, even under extreme stress. This is not true of any other relationship whatsoever, although a real, not an American Civil Religion, marriage does that in another fashion.  

And having siblings teaches you things that lacking them does not, and which can never be made up for.

Growing up as a child, my closest friends were my parents.  Having no siblings to distract me, if I wanted to interact with somebody close to me, my parents filled that role.  In most houses, you see children play various sorts of games with each other.  I'd certainly do that with friends, but there was no playing board games or card games with my siblings. I've never developed an affinity for card games, although both of my parents were good at them, and my father taught them to me.  For board games, however, my father was the go to.  It wasn't until I was an adult that I appreciated that most children, if they wanted to play a board game, would do it with a sibling.

Moreover, if adults are your playmates, you enter the adult world very quickly.  And not only that, you enter the adult world of your parents.  Either genetically or through environment, I obtained my parent's love of history very rapidly.  Not only that, however, but I entered it at an adult level quite quickly.  When I went from grade school to junior high at 7th Grade, at which time I was 12 years old, I remember being glad that the library had such adult books.  One of the first I checked out was Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far.  The sight of a short 12-year-old lugging up the massive tome to the library desk caused the librarian to nearly reject checking it out to me, and she warned me that it was a book for adults.  I was stunned.  I was reading adult books at home already, almost all the history tomes.  I loved A Bridge Too Far.

This made me, I suppose, "bookish" and it gave people the illusion that I'm "smart".  My father and mother were both extremely intelligent, likely both geniuses actually, but I'm not as smart as either one of them by a long measure.  I'm just well-read, really.  And being an only child makes you a loner in significant ways, as you do so much all by yourself that other people simply do not.

In my case, this was amplified at age 13 when my mother became profoundly ill.  Then it was me and my father, and from that point on, really, I was an adult.  And for a lot of things, I was an adult with nobody to turn to.  My father was my closest friend, although I certainly had other friends, but the problems you take to your siblings, I bore, like I am sure all only children do, by myself.

I still largely do.

This makes for a rough existence in a lot of ways.  As an adult, I really didn't have anyone to go to advice to.  I mostly made my own decisions, and started doing that at about age 13.  A lot of those decision, made only in the context of my own experience, were wrong.  Being insecure about the state of existence itself due to my mother's condition and due to a childhood asthma condition, I valued security way over that which other people do, which ironically ends up making you potentially insecure in certain fundamental ways.  My post high school academic career can probably be defined by that.  I studied geology first, and then law, not because of a deep love of the topic, but because they seemed to offer secure occupations.

My father died when I was in my 30s.  My mother when I was much older, I think in my early 50s.  With them both gone, there is no connection like that.  My wife was great during my mother's illness, particularly since they did not get along, but the strain of that did not help in our relationship and continues to have a lasting impact.  I can't go to siblings like she does with family problems, and her being the one I'm closest to on earth means that I'm uniquely vulnerable there in a way, frankly, that she is not.  My connection with things, basically, is razor-thin.

I note all of this for a simple reason.

Being a teenager without siblings proved to be difficult.  As a young adult, out in the world like young men are, I didn't notice it at all, but once my parents started their final descent, the lack of a sibling was agonizing.  As I've aged now into my 60s, I feel imperiled by it.  I wish I had a brother to talk to, like my father did, or like my mother did.

I don't understand why married couples forego children, and in a lot of ways I feel that people who don't have kids never really become adults.  Those having children, however, shouldn't have a single child.  It's not fair to the child.

Lex Anteinternet: The Shoes of the Fishermen, Tax Collectors, Tent M...

Lex Anteinternet: The Shoes of the Fishermen, Tax Collectors, Tent M...: 

The Shoes of the Fishermen, Tax Collectors, Tent Maker . . .

The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew.

In spite of commenting on nearly every social trend imaginable, one thing that I've generally not done here is to comment on Pope Francis, at least not often, even though I'm obviously Catholic.  The reasons are several fold.

For one thing, the Pope is the Pope, like the Pope or not.  As the Pope, he deserves respect of a special kind. Every occupant of the office deserves that.

Additionally, orthodox Catholics believe that no Pope can damage the essential teaching of the Church, and I’m an orthodox Catholic. This is often misunderstood. The Holy Spirit protects the Church from error, but not from having bad Popes, and we've had plenty of them.  We were exceedingly lucky in recent decades in having excellent Popes, with the examples stretching from at least St. Pope John Paul II the Great up to Pope Benedict (well, I guess that's two Popes) being paramount.  This is not to dis the examples prior to that, although there are some things that the Pope John and Pope Paul did that I'm not thrilled with, but there are things that they did which I think were outstanding.  

To really get horrifying examples of bad Popes, you need to go to the Middle Ages. But at the same time, they provide a comforting example, as even though there were some that exhibited terrible personal vice, and at least one who was elected specifically to attempt to make a major theological change, they didn't damage the Church.  Indeed, the one who was inclined to make a major theological change, couldn't do it when he was elected.  He felt himself held back, which is an example of my point.

Modern media tends to exaggerate things and not grasp it, while current audiences in the Internet Age tend to do the same.  And all this focuses attention on everything the Pope says or does, which was never the case to this extent in the past, and certainly not in the pre World War Two past.  This really impacts how we see the Pope.  Today, lots of Protestants who don't really understand the Papacy and have a Protestantized inaccurate view of the Church and its history will cite to the example of Galileo as something horrible the Pope did (not grasping that neither the Pope nor the Church did what they think was done), but at the time, the average Catholic would have known nothing about it, which would include most Priests.  For most of the post Apostolic Age history, the local Bishop mattered more to the average Catholic, in terms of day to day living, than the Pope did, which is not to say that they were not aware of the Pope.

Pope Benedict was really the first Pope of the Internet Age, with Pope Francis being the second.  Pope Francis has been particularly liable towards being misunderstood and misquoted due to change in information technology.  He has actually said some extremely orthodox things that get very little attention, and some of the things he's otherwise said or written have been highly misunderstood. 

In an example of the latter, in what we'll not coin as the Fox News Effect, the Pope's early encyclical that discussed economics was immediately branded by conservative American Catholics as "socialist" when it was anything but, really being more Distributist in nature.  However, Internet media allowed for an audience that was already expecting anything written by the Pope to be left wing leaped on it, which was made easier as current Americans are pretty much wholly unaware of Catholic Social Teaching and the concepts of Distributism.  If it ain't Capitalism, it must be Socialism, and therefore Pope Francis must be a Socialist, ran the defective logic.

Finally, in something I've noted for a while but which I heard just this past week in an interview of the head of EWTN News (with EWTN actually being a media source that the Pope has criticized), Pope Francis has a very odd, and slow moving, management style in which he draws things out over a very long time, while rising up things to the top that he actually opposed, only to cut them off at seemingly the point at which they're fully developed. I've suspected for some time that the upcoming Synod On Synodality¹ will feature that, with all sorts of radical things being suggested and then cut off, issuing something pretty orthodox.

Having said all of that, and while being respectful of the Pope, I don't think the Pope grasps very well the nature of the Church in its loyal orthodox quarters and his managerial style doesn't correlate with the modern Internet Age at all.  For that reason, it's hurting the Church.  Not only hurting it, but it's pushing it towards schism.

Pope Francis issued some blistering criticism of the German Bishops and their radical views arising out of their synod, for example.  While getting into the mind of the German Bishops is something we really cannot do, and they deserve respect as Bishops, it seems clear that they ignored his entreaties and pushed ahead with the potential goal of trying to influence what the Synod on Synodality will do.  It's worth noting that the Church is really suffering in Germany, and there's no good reason to believe that abandoning St. Paul's guidance and instruction on matters will change that. There's certainly no good reason to believe that this can validly be done.  The Pope spoke, but he didn't crack down on things.  He seems to have allowed it to play out, knowing that it will come up again in the Synod.  Interestingly, while it hasn't gotten very much attention in the U.S., he's appointed at least one German critic of the German Bishops, who is a Bishop, as a German voting delegate.

Again, I suspect that he intends to allow a general airing of everything, and then cut off that which is not orthodox.  Not that there won't be changes made.

Anyhow, this slow motion managerial style is hurting the Church and driving it towards schism.  Pope Francis doesn't seem to realize, or if he does, appreciate that by the time the Snyod arrives we may be so far down this path that avoiding a massive level of damage may be impossible.

I feel so strongly about this I ardently wish that Pope Francis would resign and a younger, more plainly orthodox Pope, and much less culturally European one, be elected.

Indeed, one of the things that I feel really needs to occur is that there be a general overhaul in Bishop's ages.  It's the old Bishops, and lots are old, that seem to be rooted so strongly in the 1970s that they can't get their Weltanschauung out of it.  The artwork for the Synod bizarrely demonstrated that, as it was right out of the horrifying 1970s in appearance, complete with Comic Sans Serif font.  The appearance of that was almost calculated to disinterest anyone born after 1960, let alone 1980.  Added to that, the announcement early on, which was from the Vatican, that there be local meetings of parishioners for input just doesn't match, in my view, the reality of every location in the Church.  My guess is that in Africa, where the Church is strong and orthodox, you would get a lot of rank and file parishioners at meetings.   In the worn out industrialized West, you aren't going to.  And I'm not the only one with this view.  Indeed, I read a blog entry by a highly orthodox Priest, Fr. Dwight Longnecker, a convert from Anglicanism, who wrote a really bitter blog entry which noted:

All these efforts are akin to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. They all have minimal results and are usually remembered for their sappy media efforts (badly produced videos- tacky brochures with stock photos of smiling Christians doing good things–ill conceived “youth events” etc) and their inept attempts to be cool, relevant, up to date and simply irresistible.

However they are all highly resistible. Ordinary people smell a committee and simply ignore it or run the other way. The only people who get involved are the earnest activists who use the gimmick to promote their own agenda and ideology.

* * *

In the meantime vast numbers of ordinary Catholics are simply going about their business of living the historic faith and getting the job done.

That's much more bitter than I'd dare post, and I think it may cross the line on respect to the Pope, but the committee thing strikes me that way.  The Catholics you need to speak up are the young, orthodox ones, in the pews, not the aged hippy Boomer parishioners who have time on their hands and who like committees.

If I were the Pope, and of course I'm not, and never will be, I'd open the Synod with a request that any Bishop over 40 years old resign.  If they wouldn't, I'd start reassigning them to Bishopric's dating from the early Church in North Africa (which does happen, actually, in order to preserve their place) and appoint new ones. But I'm not the Pope.

That's really rude, of course, and not all of the Bishops are ancient by any means.  I saw that one of the former Bishops of my diocese, who I'd regard as an orthodox, and not ancient, Bishop was appointed by the Pope to go.

Bishop Etienne of Seattle, who was once the Bishop of Cheyenne, who has been appointed by the Pope to attend.

And indeed, perhaps that Bishop, Bishop Etienne, may be more representative of the general ages than others that I seem to have in mind.

I hope I'm wrong about all of this, and I don't expect the Synod to do anything so radical as to be destructive, other than that its current format itself is doing damage.  I don't expect it to endorse sodomitic unions, or anything of the like.  I expect that it will confirm what the Church has always taught about marriage and the like.  It may very well suggest that Priests be allowed to marry, which I think the Church should, but which s really only a popular idea amongst practicing Catholics in certain regions, rather than globally, which raises another problem.  I think the Pope, coming from Argentina, and of strongly European background, doesn't really get that the problems in some regions are totally different than those elsewhere.

In terms of controversy, I do suspect that some controversial things will be done, with possibly allowing women to be deacons to be one. And I fear that.  The Church in the United States has never really gotten over the "Spirit of Vatican II", which wasn't actually the same thing as Vatican II itself.  There's a real risk here that some efforts to reach "understanding" on things that are solely European culture developments and byproducts of wealth and idleness, such as self-absorbed focus on gender, will end up in a "Spirit of Snyodality" which will breath a last gasp of life into the Boomer era and all its resultant ills.  It's not hard to go from, essentially, don't oppress the those afflicted with gender confusion into localized clerical blessing that were never actually authorized.

Leaping back to something noted just above, I'm going to leap back to Fr. Dwight Longnecker's blog entry, where he stated:

One of the precious Catholic principles is that of subsidiarity which teaches that “solutions should be found and initiatives taken at the lowest local level possible.” In other words, “Live local. Do what you can with what you have where you are.” The clergy, the bishops, the Diocesan hierarchy and the Vatican are all there to serve, direct and guide these local efforts. The synodical process made a show of consulting at the local level, but it was the ordinary clergy and people at the local level who were expected to serve the synodical process by filling in a form of carefully worded “Questions”–questions devised by the synod people in order to facilitate their pre arranged agenda.

In any business of even moderate level of success the leadership will watch what is going on, see what is working well, support those efforts and seek to replicate them throughout the business. If you ran a chain of hamburger restaurants and you had one branch that had sales greater than everyone else’s you would study what was working well and motivate the other branch managers to imitate that success.

But in the Catholic Church there does not seem to be any awareness of such a tactic. We have reports of parishes and schools closing, dioceses amalgamating parishes, Catholic colleges languishing, religious orders closing down and dying out while at the same time we have reports of parishes packed with young families, schools with waiting lists, religious orders thriving with many young novices and colleges and universities with record enrollment.

If subsidiarity instead of synodality were the guiding principle the Catholic leadership would look again at the parishes, schools, colleges and religious orders that are thriving and ask why they are bucking the depressing trends and how their example might renew the church. This strategy might just inspire and motivate the clergy and faithful. More top-down mandated committees steered by failed ideologues will not.

Again, without really endorsing everything he has says, I think he's really on to something.

St. John by Rubens.

The Church was spread by fairly young Middle Eastern men, at least one of whom (St. Peter) may have had a family in tow.  Some of them lived into their 60s, which is remarkable for their era, and all the more remarkable as their deaths came violently. St. John lived to the blistering old age, then or now, of 88.  The real exception of St. John aside, and noting that it's remarkable that some lived into their 60s, and one perhaps into his very early 70s, it's interesting to note that they commenced their work when still int their vigor, and it was concluded when they still were as well, it being the case that save for the ill or very injured, men in their 60s are still pretty able.²  

There's a real lesson in this.  St. John, the last living Apostle, never became the Pope, and he lived into the papacy's of at least two successors to St. Peter.  He never became head of the Church. That went to younger men.

Right now, the College of Cardinals are voting in Pope's who are well above the ages that the first Popes were, and well above the ages of the Apostles.  

Those Apostles spread the Church from a localized subset of Jews to a Church which, even during their own lives, stretched beyond the borders of the Roman Empire.  It's not folly to think that regaining ground lost, and gaining new ground today, needs the involvement of orthodox men who are of the same age now that the Apostles were when they started off.  And it's not folly to think that a Church spread by a fire lite in Africa by the orthodox devout shouldn't now be spread by a fire burning in Africa, by the orthodox devout.

If the Synod accomplishes something, and we should all hope it does, perhaps it should accomplish that. The problem today isn't the passing relevance of a small number of clerics in European cultured countries who took up their vocations in a different era, let alone the lingering zeitgeist of a small number who took up vocations to escape the public eye when homosexuality was disdained, or the culture of countries that are so rich that they have nothing to think about but food and sex.³  The problem may be, in part, the problems that those problems are causing, but there's reason to think that regions of the globe that haven't addressed them culturally aren't going to clerically.  Africa, and North America are where things have more hope, Africa in particular.  Fr. Longnecker's point above would suggest that a really radical solution to the problems in the Church today might be warranted, grounded in subsidiarity and solidarity, but that's not going to come out of state funded churches that are a legacy of a German concordat or from a those sectors of the globe where pondering sex all day prevails.  

Footnotes:

1. The official title is the Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops.

2.  It can be hard in some instances to know when the various apostles were born or died.  Indeed, the circumstances of their deaths, undoubtedly known to the early Church, have been lost over time.  To the extent that I can easily find references, their ages ate their times of death were:

St. Peter and St. Paul were both martyred in their 60s.

St. Andrew was between 55 and 65.

St. James:  40s?

Thomas was 62 or 68

St. Bartholomew was 68 to 70.

It's really worth noting that all of these men lived pretty long lives, except for St. James, who was martyred in his 40s.  They didn't live easy lives at all, but they lived into ages that many people did not, due to disease and injury. Given their travels, this is all the more remarkable.

3. The entire focus on homosexuality and the made up category of LGBTQ+ is a Western World, rich country, thing.

We do not mean to say that same sex attraction, or people afflicted with a desire to be a different gender (or even species. . . yes that occurs) doesn't happen, but the concept that it categorizes a person or that it is "normal" is entirely a European culture thing and occured only very, very recently.

We've gone into this before, but in some cultures, including cultures which are very well populated and frankly outnumber our own, the concept that people "are" something like LGBTQ is disdained and not believed.  It's regarded, in fact, and perhaps rightly, as an evidence of a vast stage of cultural and moral decay.

As noted in other posts, as recently as the late 19th Century Western culture didn't recognize homosexuality or gender bending as anything other than odd vices, although it treated them as very serious odd vices.  It's only much more recently that they were treated as psychologically organic in the person afflicted with them, and for much of that time these were regarded as mental illnesses.  Treating them as "normal" is very recent, and comes with virtually no scientific backing whatsoever.  Indeed, the entire field of psychology in this area is really just European cultural sociology focused on radical individualism.  Not only, therefore, might it be wrong, but evolutionary biology would suggest that it probably is wrong.

The reference to misdirected vocations here refers directly to a thesis developed here that the appearance of homosexuality in a small number of Catholic clerics in the middle section of the 20th Century is related, in the author's opinion, to an effort by middle class American (and probably other) men to have an excuse as to why they didn't marry.  Unmarried men were a suspect class throughout the second half of the 20th Century, after societal wealth rose to the level that bachelorhood due to economics no longer provided an excuse for being single.  Prior to that, actually, quite a few men didn't marry simply because they couldn't afford it and marriage was often noted to be a heavy financial burden for men.  Middle class men who, prior to 1940 could have passed it off due to circumstances no longer could.  For Catholic men, the clergy presented an opportunity for a more or less middle class career where the question of "why aren't you married"" wasn't going to arise.  Again, only a small number of clerics were every homosexual, but it doesn't take a large number to do damage.

It's become popular to immediate declare that this really has no relationship to the Priest abuse scandals that the Church has been rocked with, but to at least a certain extent, this is a willful ignoring of the evidence.  The John Jay report clearly noted the following:

From the John Jay Report.

Usually you are supposed to issue an immediate disclaimer and note that homosexuality isn't associated with pedophilic behavior.  Well, frankly, homosexuality was associated with homosexual men hitting on homosexual teenage boys.  It simply was, and this was very well known prior to the official shift in attitudes.

With that shift in attitudes has come the entire "homosexuality is normal" mantra, while at the same time nobody wants to say the next few lines, which is that if homosexual attractions are normal, and wanting to be another gender is normal, then why wouldn't trying to bed teenagers and children be normal?  Indeed, they would be.  In truth, however, they're all abnormal, and we know that instinctively.

But in the rich Western society of the late 20th Century and early 21st, we now hold that all sexual inclinations and desires, other than ones that drop below a statutorily set line, are normal.  That we know that is wrong is part of what is enraging conservative Catholics now, as they watch Fr. James Martin, S.J. be appointed to the Synod.  And its hard not to be sympathetic with the upset.  Fr. Dwight Longnecker suggested, in jest, that Fr. Z be appointed, but not in jest, I really wish he would have been.  

But here's the thing, the entire Priest scandal thing is really old news. The young Priests have rocketed past it, and are orthodox.  This topic is really, in may ways, a Death of the Reformation, death of the WASP class, topic that we don't need to discuss at all.  That we are, shows a focus on a decaying, Boomer centric, European society that will itself move past this, one away or another, as Boomers fade.