Get over it ???
Although the Roman Catholic clergy is quite a bit older than the general population, it does have retirement plans. When a Roman Catholic Bishop is 74, he offers his resignation to the Pope, effective on his 75th birthday. Normally, even if the Bishop has health problems, and there is already a Diocesan Administrator to handle the actual work a Bishop does, their retirement is usually delayed for at least a year, if they are asked to stay on, which is usually the case if there isn’t some pressing health problem.
Onesimo Cepeda Silva — the first Bishop of Ecatepec… carved out of the Diocese of Mexico City in 1995 to create the most populous Diocese in the world — was born on 25 March 1937. While there was no Bishop-in-waiting in Ecatepec in March 2012, and Cepeda was in perfectly good health for a man of his age, Pope Benedict did one of the smarter things during his reign, and accepted the resignation, effective immediately. It took a tad over 40 days and 40 nights, but in record time, given the glacial pace of Vatican bureaucracy, on 7 May of that year, Cepeda and everyone else in Mexico, learned from the Vatican that he was retiring, effective immediately.
Cepeda … even during Benedict’s reign… was an embarrassment to the Church. Unlike the liberation theologian Samuel Ruíz, who didn’t want to retire, but was forced to when he turned 75, it wasn’t a question of pissing off the powers that be, but of being a little too close to them. On top of those embarrassing fraud allegations, and the questions about his “pre-burial niche” sales … more niches being sold (at a group rate to state employees) than existed. While he brought in the dough (which seems to have stuck to his fingers), he was emptying out the pews, and the lower clergy was not sorry to see him go. Even though his replacement was an extreme conservative, he was known to be honest and came from a dirt poor mostly Indigenous diocese.. about the best that Benedict could do (or would be expected to do) on short noice.
For the one-percenters, well, he’s still their unofficial chaplain, apparently.
Cepeda offered this advice to the families of the missing 43 students, and to other families whose loved ones have disappeared: “If they’ve disappeared, they’ve disappeared. It’s too bad that it happened, but it would be better if they just trusted the government, and didn’t let themselves be used for propaganda. ”
Undoubtedly he was just fulfilling his pastoral duties, afflicting the comfortable assumptions of poor indigenous families, and comforting the afflicted Governors of Puebla, State of Mexico and Aguascalientes and other federal officials at a banquet honoring Orthodox Archbishop Antonio Chedraui.
The Mex Files 