The writer Flannery O’Connor once quipped that “the Church’s motto is The Wrong Man for the Job”. She was expressing a common complaint among lay people: that the Church is not the most skilful manager of human resources. Parishes desperate for an energetic young priest instead receive an elderly one. Go-ahead clergy are sent to liturgically conservative parishes, and so on. The wrong priest can set a parish back for years. The stakes are even higher for bishops: an ill-conceived appointment can demoralise a whole diocese.