"Monday I will look at the piddling agenda for this year's meeting, an agenda that marks the decline of the conference and its significance for American society."  Right.  That's exactly what the restaurationist JPII/BXVI papacy wanted; an emasculated bishops' conference, everywhere.  We got it here in the US and suffer grievously because of it.  Yet perhaps this is the way God wants the US Church to be: not a major power player, but the very humble yeast without which God's People will not have Bread, without which they are only fed stones (thrown at them by clerics of little faith and huge fear, but power-hungry).  Where such a "yeast"-Church is, its true pastor-bishops shall follow, called by the Spirit through election by the faithful, confirmed by the Church Universal in the person of the Bishop of Rome, whose ministry is to exercise faithfully the Petrine Office as the Founding Principle of the Church's Unity (not uniformity!), always "presiding in Charity" (Ignatius of Antioch).