Two national surveys six years apart asked U.S. bishops to write in open-ended responses identifying what in the U.S. Church gives them most hope, what they see as the U.S. Church’s greatest challenges, and what steps need to be taken to improve priests’ trust in their bishops. This paper examines how the perceptions of bishops have changed over the past six years and how the bishops’ self-identification of their theological orientation (between the very traditional/moderately traditional U.S. Catholic bishops and the moderate/moderately progressive bishops) is related to their responses to those three questions.
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