We can attend mass at any Catholic church, though we remain members of the parish and diocese in whose territory we actually reside. Occasionally one may encounter inconveniences if one regularly attends a parish that is not one’s own, when it comes to marriage or baptisms or things like that.
Anyway, I think we definitely need to make an effort to be respectful to our pastors, both our priests and our bishops. Over all greater respect and deference is probably what we need more of. But that doesn’t mean we should go to the opposite extreme and regard any suggestion that a bishop is not impeccable, either morally or prudently, as a sort of blasphemy. In the United States in particular we have undeniably come face to face with episcopal mismanagement and sin. To blind or gag ourselves regarding those problems would be rightly seen by outsiders as creepy and fanatical.
Of course, it’s also true that sometimes what is right is not always popular. In my own diocese we’ve seen massive parish and school closings. While I sometimes disagree with the choices and criteria we have seen regarding these decisions, it is obvious that with such an extreme priest shortage as we have in this diocese some of this did need to happen. Also there is a feeling, out here in the more distant, western part of the diocese, that our bishop ignores us (the feeling can be especially bitter in remote parishes, such as my own, that have not had a parish priest for a long time). This is, in my opinion, mainly an inevitable effect of distance and comparatively sparse population, combined with a feeling as old as the colonial era that no one in Albany knows or cares about anything west of Schenectady.
