SPQR was a potent Roman phrase: it stood for the Senate and People of Rome.  This post if about the SPQD–Senatus Populusque Deseretus.

Last week I walked in to a chapel that was stuffed with visitors. I knew them, mostly. They were two family clans which have representatives in our ward. Our bishop had just been called to the Stake Presidency and needed replaced, so I had a suspicion what the crowd was here for.

My suspicion was confirmed right away. The Stake President got up and said everybody knew what he was here for, and he’d start by releasing our old bishop from his position, so all in favor of releasing Bishop X, raise your hand. But for X, he didn’t say the name of our old bishop. He said the name of one of our ward’s members in one of the visiting family clans. We laughed, he grimaced, asked us to bear with him, and fixed his statement. Then he presented our new bishop, who sure enough was X. His first counselor was our representative from the other clan.

Afterwards in the halls, the conversations I got into with other men went along highly conventional lines. “There but for the grace of God . . .” “Better him than me . . .” The conversations were sincere. They are always sincere. That’s why they happen every time a new Bishop was called.

But I got to musing a little. If being the new bishop is a thankless, difficult, unremunerated job, then why would family travel from all over for the occasion? I just had a nasty job to perform myself when my water line broke in the middle of a snowstorm in the middle of a patch of greasy clay soil and I had to dig out the muck in the cold and the wet. My family members didn’t come to commemorate the occasion. The only ones who showed up were the ones who came to help dig.

Now, our new bishop’s family could have come partly to lend moral support. They also could have come for the same reason people went to hangings or rubberneck at car crashes. But it can’t be denied that they partly came because it was a honor for their relative. As much as we Mormons poor mouth being the bishop, and as much as we are justified to do so, no one can deny that being the bishop is an honor. It confers status. It gives the possessor of the bishopric power.   If the new bishop tells me ‘lo there,’ I will probably go loing. And power is always status.

There’s a lot that could be said about the connection between the status of being bishop and the difficulty of it. Perhaps because the welder who is the new 1^st Counselor is fond of obscure bits of Roman history, though, the connection that came to my mind was the municipal senates of the Roman Empire. The Empire, as everybody knows, was basically set up as a state of cities. The provinces were administrative divisions of the central government, but areas that were fully Romanized and fully going concerns were organized into municipalities that provided most of the important local administration. These municipalities were usually modeled on Rome, so they had a Senate to rule them. The Senate and other civic officers usually consisted of prominent local citizens who were expected to do the work for free and even to contribute out of their own pockets to maintain municipal infrastructure and perform city festivals and the like. In exchange they had power and respect and honor.

As the Empire aged, the system broke down.   People started declining office and eventually laws even had to be passed making it obligatory. Much of the municipal administration had to be replaced by costlier and less effective imperial administrators.

Mormon bishops are like those municipal Senators. We can gauge the health of the church by the fact that men keep being willing to serve.

The Roman municipal system broke down because of a decline in civitas (to my mind, civitas is the western equivalent of abasiya—I believe that it is mostly the same but with subtle and important differences). It broke down because the imperial administration increasingly regulated what the municipalities could do while increasing their obligations (we see some of the same thing now. Small municipalities spend a lot of their time doing what state and federal regulators tell them they have to). It broke down because the burdens got to great.

It’s up to the Church how tightly they regulate bishops, or how much the bishops buy into the regulation (no regulation is that onerous if you understand its reasons and agree with the regulation). It’s up to the church and the local congregation who burdensome being the bishop is. Mormonitas is up to all of us.