Here’s a little bombshell that may have larger implications.

One of America’s most outspoken and controversial bishops is stepping down:

Bishop Joseph F. Martino will resign as head of the Diocese of Scranton, Pa., as early as next week, according to sources within the diocese, it was reported today by several outlets in the Scranton area.

The Towanda Daily Review and TV station WNEP each reported the impending shift and that Cardinal Justin Rigali of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the metropolitan see in Pennsylvania, will oversee the diocese until Martino’s replacement is named.

Attempts to reach a diocesan spokesman this morning were unsuccessful.

The Times Leader newspaper in Scranton reported yesterday that Martino was moving out of the traditional downtown residence for Scranton bishops at the rectory of St. Peter’s Cathedral to a rural retreat center that once served as a diocesan seminary.

The 63-year-old Martino’s six-year-tenure has been distinctive for an almost non-stop round of battles with Catholic academics, Catholic teachers’ union, Catholic politicians and a range of other groups, including his own peers among the Catholic hierarchy.

Martino, highly regarded by the Catholic right for his rigid anti-abortion stance and repeated condemnations of President Obama and other pro-choice politicians, once famously arrived unannounced at a discussion in a parish of a document on political responsibility that had been passed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and declared: “No USCCB document is relevant in this diocese. The USCCB doesn’t speak for me.” He told the assembled crowd that “The only relevant document … is my letter,” referring to a letter on politics he had mandated be read at all masses on a given Sunday. “There is one teacher in this diocese, and these points are not debatable.”

He has urged priests and Eucharistic ministers to deny communion to politicians whose views on the abortion issue differed from those of the bishop. He placed an official notice in the diocesan newspaper informing Eucharistic ministers that they had a duty to refuse communion to anyone whose “unworthiness” to receive was publicly known. The notice emphasized Catholic politicians.

There’s more at the NCR link.

UPDATE: Tom Peters at the American Papist indicates there are “health reasons” behind the decision, but that information isn’t contained in any of the news reports.

UPDATE II: Rocco, of course, has even more:

The cloud of speculation over Martino’s future began in June after the 63 year-old prelate was spotted in Rome, where, according to multiple reports, he met with officials at the Congregation for Bishops after the dicastery’s intervention was sought.

At the helm of one of the nation’s most staunch, reliable bastions of Catholicism, while the kind, bookish cleric’s fierce advocacy for the pro-life cause has won him fervent admiration from church conservatives nationwide, the quarter-million member Scranton church has been roiled since Martino’s 2003 arrival by swaths of contentious parish and school closings, strained relations with the presbyterate, a perceived indifference to the media, clashes over the diocese’s de-recognition of the local union for Catholic high school teachers (a move upheld by the Vatican) and, most famously, a steady stream of statements on politics, parades and public officials which served to draw lines in the sand in the socially conservative, heavily-Democratic area, home to both the revered Casey clan and, in his boyhood, Vice-President Joe Biden.

Earlier this week, reports emerged that Martino was vacating the ordinary’s traditional downtown residence at St Peter’s Cathedral and relocating to the diocese’s former seminary at Dalton, 15 miles outside the city. Additionally, however, several sources have indicated that many of the bishops’s effects were likewise moved to St Charles Borromeo Seminary in his native Philadelphia. Fluent in six languages and made a bishop before 50, the church historian served on the faculty at the Overbrook house as a young priest, and is known to return there often in his downtime.

He reports that a news conference on all this will be held Monday, at a location TBD.