To Bee. . .

My daughter has a blog in which she has mentioned Bishop Braxton of the Belleville, Illinois, Diocese on a couple of occasions. He is not exactly Mr. Friendly and he has a way of spending on lavish surroundings. She has personal experience of the man at a Confirmation. I know him only by reputation. Two other men I know by their reputations are our current leader, Pope Benedict XVI, and the St. Louis Archbishop, Raymond Burke. I am frankly not sure about the pope. Take his recent cancellation of a talk at a secular university in Italy. Does he place faith above reason as the university's physicists, and an earlier speech when the pope was a cardinal, suggested? I would have to look into that further and count on translations. Then there is Burke and his excommunicating of Catholics who would not surrender their parish and its funds to the diocese, a tricky legal question. All three men irritate me. I have always seen myself as just as much the church as any of the hierarchy, but such letter of the law leaders still prove to be an irritation. They are just below the surface of my skin only occasionally flaring into break-outs. Braxton's most recent is his possible misuse of missions funds. Of course, that is not letter of the law, but I think the behavior exemplifies the problems we Catholics must face in our traditionally hierarchical organization.
I like what a nun told my daughter she had nicknamed the three men to whom I refer above: the Killer Bees. How fitting.