Hat tip to former Green Mountain Daily comrade Apache Trout for putting a bow on the tenure of outgoing Bishop Christopher Coyne of the Catholic Church’s once-powerful Burlington Diocese. Coyne is a true loyalist who did his level best (within the bounds of his ideological worldview) to stabilize the Diocese and perhaps even restore some of its former glory.

Indeed, Vermont was nowhere near the stinkiest set of stables Coyne was tasked with mucking out. He came to Burlington from the Archdiocese of Boston, where he occupied the thankless role of spokesperson during the dismal days of that precinct’s child sex abuse scandal.

The raw statistics show that Coyne was not only unable to reverse the Church’s fortunes, he wasn’t even able to slow the downward momentum. Worse than the membership numbers cited above are the vanishing priesthood (from 276 ordained priests in 1975 to a mere 36 today) and the number of active parishes (from 130 in 2001 to 68 today).

This, for a diocese that used to be a real political power in Vermont and was reduced to making feeble noises of protest during last year’s overwhelmingly successful Proposition 5 campaign.

But then, as Apache Trout noted, the diocese has no one but itself to blame for the dissipation of its moral and social authority.

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