Just for fun...
... two funny variations on an old clerical joke
If you spend enough time with Catholic clerics, you’ll eventually hear the quip about bishops who, when they hear that an auxiliary bishop will be named for their diocese, hope that the auxiliary will be short in stature, so that he, the bishop, will still stand out in processions.
It’s a fairly lame joke (at least I hope it’s only a joke). But it’s given rise to two moments of real hilarity in my life:
1) At a conference some time ago, someone mentioned the short-auxiliary-bishop rule, and applied it to the case of a particularly diminutive bishop. What if he was given even shorter auxiliaries, and then those auxiliaries were appointed to their own dioceses, and they in turn wanted still shorter auxiliaries? From a corner of the room, the late, great Father Paul Mankowski, who previously been silent, piped up in a singsong falsetto: “We represent…”
(If you don’t ‘get it,’ you need to watch The Wizard of Oz.)
2) When President Reagan gave Mother Teresa the Medal of Freedom, I was among the local Catholics invited to the Rose Garden ceremony. Arriving early at the White House, we were ushered into a waiting room, where the casual conversation, predictably enough, ran along clerical lines. Eventually the short-auxiliary line came up, and someone wondered aloud whether it would apply to Mother Teresa (who was a small woman). Would she be accompanied by one or two tiny nuns, he asked? There were a few light chuckles, and then the door opened, and in walked two tiny members of the Missionaries of Charity, who had obviously arrived with Mother Teresa. Neither one could have been as much as five feet tall. The two sisters stood in the doorway, smiling a bit nervously, as one does when entering a room full of complete strangers. They had reason to be self-conscious, because conversation in the room came to a complete stop, as we all struggled to avoid bursting out in laughter, at what almost seemed to be a deliberate punchline to the old joke.