*EDITED*If you are showering unqualified praise and admiration onto an openly bigoted person....

[Chan790]

68. It's observationally the second.

This conversation actually dovetails quite nicely with one I was having earlier with a friend from college who is now a college professor of public policy in Indiana. We both went to school at Catholic University of America here in DC and are activists for social justice.

The topic of the conversation was a petition on Faithful America, a group that represents the viewpoints of liberal Christians and Catholics (I'm agnostic but I'm on their mailing list because I was involved with their efforts to bar pro-death-penalty politicians from CUA's campus and a signatory of their letter of support of CUA faculty's rebuke of John Boehner 2 (I think) years ago when he was the commencement speaker for his positions in opposition to social justice and human dignity), about the fact that the US Council of Catholic Bishops is likely to elect Joseph Kurtz, a vocally-outspoken critic of this Pope opposed to his social justice agenda, as its President next week. The petition is to urge them to elect a USCCB President more in line with the positions and leadership of Pope Francis.

The people most heavily pushing Kurtz' candidacy are the conservative wing of the USCCB leadership, including Archbishop Lori. The very crux of the problem is that the conservative leadership of the US Catholic church is very much at opposition with both the push for liberalization from Rome and from their own laity, resisting calls for change and actively looking for ways to push back. They're not the only ones, Pope Francis has also gotten a great deal of push-back within the Vatican for his actions to consolidate power and eliminate an entrenched old-guard conservative faction in the church leadership.

The petition, if anybody is interested, is here: http://act.faithfulamerica.org/sign/francis_usccb/?source=fa_campaignpage_img

Tl;dr: The US church leadership is much more conservative than Rome and not at all keen on the direction this Pope is taking Catholicism.