Pope Francis fires anti-LGBTQ bishop
Bishop Joseph Strickland of Eastern Texas has been “relieved” of his position as head of the Diocese of Tyler by Pope Francis after Strickland’s refusal to resign in a dispute over the church’s LGBTQ inclusion in Catholic practices.
The pope’s decision to fire Strickland was made public in a statement released on Saturday. According to the Vatican, the decision came after an apostolic visitation ordered by the Pope last June in the Diocese of Tyler, which was entrusted to two U.S.
bishops, Bishop Dennis Sullivan of Camden, N.J., and Bishop Emeritus Gerald Kicanas of Tucson, Ariz. In the Catholic Church, an apostolic visitation is a papal representative with a transient mission to investigate a special circumstance in a diocese or country, and to submit a report to the Holy See at the conclusion of the investigation.
In the case of Strickland, who had established himself as a public critic of the pontiff, had claimed Francis was “undermining the Deposit of Faith” and a “diabolically disordered clown.” Strickland recently criticized the month long conference this past October known as a Synod of Bishops, held in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, regarding the future of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church ended on Saturday, without a clear course of action for the church on the issues of ordaining women as deacons or the treatment and care for its LGBTQ members.
