When we picture an intellectual bell-curve, the smartest people are over in the right hand corner, beavering away on one thing and another. Some of those to their left, back in the bulky body of the bell curve, don’t like them or what they do. “What makes them so special? They’re no better than I am. I’m just as good as they are.” is the eternal manifestation of how the demons of envy have possessed them.
There is another bell curve, more important than any IQ bell curve, by which we may crudely picture how souls are placed. The souls of the most faith-filled and most obedient saints may be pictured in the right hand corner of that bell curve. Somewhere on that bell curve is a vertical line. Those on the right side of that line are saved.
Those in support of inserting another layer of management, one with which The Church has managed to live quite successfully without, are not in the far right hand corner of either bell curve. On the first bell curve, measuring IQ, they are to the left of the real intellectuals. On the second, spiritual bell curve, they are much farther away from the right hand corner, and may, in fact, be past the divide that separates the sheep (right side) from the goats (left side).
Until Vatican II, we who are mere sheep in the sheepfold could be reasonably certain that our parish priests, the individual shepherds of our parish, were far to the right side of the Faith Bell Curve. We also believed that our Bishops were even farther to the right.
Since it was Bishops who forced through the many damages caused by Vatican II, we can no longer automatically believe that trustworthiness and being a Bishop are the same thing. If Dante was correct in his depiction of so many Bishops in various circles of Hades, we who are faithful should, one may now suppose, not have been making that comforting, automatic assumption since the 1200s.
