It seems that just about nobody is happy about the debt deal. Tea-partiers feel they lost. Liberals feel they lost. The American people certainly lost and whether he feels that way or not, President Obama surely lost. But there are others that also lost in this deal. Others that many people would be surprised to see in a list of losers because of the debt deal, Bishops Stephen E. Blaire of Stockton, California, and Howard J. Hubbard of Albany, New York. And by extension, all the Bishops of the USCCB lost in this deal.
Americans may have lost a great opportunity to get our fiscal house in order, politicians may have lost their base or some political capital, but the bishops lost something even more precious–their credibility.
It is often appropriate and even necessary for bishops, either individually or collectively, to weigh in on important moral matters of the day and I am usually…