From Los Angeles Press:
In his first 15 months in office, Leo XIV outpaced his predecessor’s rate of early bishops’ resignations, a proxy to gauge the scale of sexual abuse and other issues in Catholicism.
The early resignation of bishops remains one of the few relatively easy-to-spot “symptoms” of structural trouble in any given Catholic diocese, as the adage goes: “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Even if up now until a bishop in the Catholic Church still holds an almost unchecked power in his diocese, its patrimony, and symbolic capital, before 1966, episcopal appointments were virtually for life. Following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Pope Paul VI issued the 1966 so-called motu proprio, a decree-like document, titled Ecclesiae Sanctae (Holy Church). The document sets norms to limit that unbound tenure by requiring every bishop to offer his resignation upon reaching age 75, among other specific reforms that were later expanded by John Paul II ‘s 1983 Code of Canon Law . While “non-age resignations” were originally intended as exit ramps for health-related cases, they have evolved into a catch-all tool for managing troubled dioceses.