Chilean bishops on the hot seat in Rome

Pope Francis’s move to summon the Chilean bishops for “reflection” on the collapse of confidence in their church – one to which he glaringly contributed – is a distinct rarity: you’d have to go back to 1980, when John Paul II convoked a Synod intended to wrest Dutch Catholicism away from its perceived post-Conciliar excesses, to find the last instance of an entire national bench being called to Rome outside of a standard ad limina visit.