"Transparency" was one of the buzzwords over the four days of February 21-24, during which 190 people gathered in the Vatican to discuss child protection in the Church. So it was hard to avoid the impression the Vatican scored a bit of an own goal on Friday last week, when it announced the resignation of 57-year-old Archbishop Lionginas Virbalas SJ from the Lithuanian Archdiocese of Kaunas, to which Pope Francis had appointed him in 2015.
The problem wasn’t the resignation, per se, but that no explanation accompanied the announcement from the press office. Bishops resign several times a week, but when a 57-year-old bishop of a major see resigns unexpectedly, people ask questions and journalists look for reasons.
