Letter to a Young Bishop, by Scott Hahn

By Scott Hahn, First Things, February 25, 2025

Your Excellency,

I’m writing only because you asked. I have so far successfully avoided the role of elder statesman, and I suffer from a mild allergy to the genre of “Letters to a Young [Whatever].” They seem an excuse for making stout pronouncements, and that’s something I was trained not to do. In my youth, theologians and Scripture scholars offered commentary and proposed hypotheses. We left the business of pronouncements to the bishops.

With your request, you’ve declared a kind of ­Saturnalia—the Roman holiday on which masters and slaves, husbands and wives, would reverse roles. In antiquity, the results were often comical. So I’ll accept your invitation. If I entertain you, my time won’t be wasted. If I don’t, then at least you’ll have learned never to do this again.

It’s been thirty-eight years since I began to get used to having a bishop. I like it. In my former, evangelical world, I had nothing like a bishop. The pastor held the fairly undivided attention of his little flock. But he might be idiosyncratic and far different, in significant ways, from other pastors nearby. A bishop, by contrast, transcends differences. He is father to all his pastors. He is father to all their flocks. …

Continue reading >>>>>>>>>>>>