Even legitimate authority can be abused. Amidst all the furor over Bergoglian validity, to which Bishop Strickland manifestly subscribes, there arises the question of whether or not a pope can do what Bergoglio has just done. Can he do it, in the sense of having the power to carry it out?
Yes, just as the father of a family is able to break the bones of his wife and children, being, generally speaking, the physically strongest member of the group. Can a pope use his power in the Church to do to someone like Bishop Strickland, who is canonically innocent, what has just been done? By saying yes, Bishop Strickland adopts the spirituality of the victim of domestic violence, justifying his own victimization and even giving it a “Catholic” justification.
To say “Bergoglio has committed an atrocity in the sight of God and man, which God has not given me the power to amend, and so I place everything in His Almighty hands, entrusting myself to His justice which is the basis of His mercy” would be one thing; then the “I’m good with it, in the Lord” part would make perfect sense. But this is not what the witness of Joseph Strickland–for all his heroic defenses of other points concerning Catholicism–amounts to. Bishop Stickland’s witness, instead, says: “The Faith is a nominalist one, just like Lutheranism or worse, because obedience boils down to what the Nazis demanded of other people.
1 If I am commanded to do something, I have to do it, because that is what God wants–‘God,’ evidently, not being the Logos but an irrational being whose whims must be submitted to regardless of their correspondence to goodness in and of itself. The choices of a Thomas More are meaningless ones; he should have done what the King wanted and been good with it ‘in the Lord.’ Galatians is an epistle of straw; if Peter said so, Paul’s place was to go along to get along. We must obey man rather than God.”
Bishop Strickland, you cannot be good “in the Lord” with something the Lord Himself is not good with. https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2023/11/bishop-strickland-just-obeying-orders.html