CT Blue

The saintly new pope has seen fit to put a German bishop on leave. Seems he forgot that vow of poverty they take. At least I was always told they took one:

The Vatican has suspended a senior German Church leader dubbed the “bishop of bling” by the media over his alleged lavish spending.

Bishop of Limburg Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst is accused of spending more than 31m euros (£26m; $42m) on renovating his official residence.

The Vatican said it deemed “appropriate… a period of leave from the diocese” for the bishop.

The suspension comes two days after he met the Pope to discuss the matter.

The BBC's Stephen Evans: “Outside the cathedral, people expressed some satisfaction that the bishop had been suspended”
“A situation has been created in which the bishop can no longer exercise his episcopal duties”, a Vatican statement said.

It said a Church commission would rule on the matter, but did not say where Bishop Tebartz-van Elst, 53, would go or what he would do while the inquiry was held.

The head of Germany's main lay Catholic group, the Central Committee of German Catholics, Alois Glueck, welcomed the Vatican's decision.

via BBC News

It's really hard to see what the Pope's problem is, since the German taxpayers are footing the bill:

Bishop Tebartz-van Elst – and his spending habits – had become infamous in Germany, where many people pay Church tax to the state. The tax raised 5.2bn euros for Catholics and 4.6bn euros for Protestants in 2012.

And, anyway, the good bishop needed the money to do good works:

He was criticised for a first-class flight to India to visit the poor.

I mean, what did they expect him to do? Walk to India barefoot? Plus, give the guy credit, it takes a special person to even figure out a way to spend $42 million on a single residence. That kind of money makes Mitt Romney's house with the car elevator a shack by comparison.

What was it that Jesus said?

25 [I]t is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Perhaps the good bishop figures he's found a loophole; after all, strictly speaking, the money he's spending doesn't belong to him in the first place, so technically, he's not rich, he just gets to live like a rich man.

ALMOST COMPLETELY UNRELATED ADDENDUM: By way of treating my readers to a bit of scholarship, I'll pass on something I learned in second grade about the above quote from our lord and savior. We had a priest teaching us religion that year, so you know this is true. It is not as hard for a camel to go through a needle's eye as you might think. The very narrow gates leading into walled cities were, in that day and age (according to our priest and some of the folks here) referred to as “needle's eyes”. It was not at all impossible to maneuver a fully loaded camel through this aperture, but it was, indeed, quite difficult, so there's more hope for the rich than appears at first blush. So there you go, in addition to some good old fashioned mockery, you've learned something new.