Q: Why doesn't the pope just replace Bishop Clark?

A: Bishop Jacques Gaillot of the Diocese of Partenia

Bishop Jacques Gaillot seems to subscribe to the philosophy that, when the Church hands you lemons, it's time to learn to make lemonade. 

One source relates the bishop's story as follows ...

Bishop Jacques Gaillot, a progressive and activist bishop in an increasingly conservative Catholic hierarchy, was stripped of his bishopric (at Evreux, in France) in 1995. Summoned to Rome, he was reassigned to a patch of central Algerian desert, once a thriving community in the first millennium but now a sandy wasteland. In response, Bishop Gaillot created the first virtual diocese and has pursued his clerical duties from this base ever since. The website/diocese has become the diocese without borders, the diocese which excludes no one, worldwide, in seven languages.

Other sources tell us the Bishop Gaillot, once he found himself unencumbered by the myriad duties typical of a local ordinary, found that he had a lot of free time on his hands.  This led to his authoring of several books setting forth his heterodox views on various Church teachings and also made him available to be a guest speaker at just about any event anywhere in the world where an audience was interesting in hearing from a dissident Catholic prelate.

And so, given Bishop Gaillot's still ongoing response to being removed from the Diocese of Evreux, it is understandable that Rome might be a bit gun shy at trying similar discipline with other wayward prelates.  It probably seems best, absent any overt apostasy, to just leave them where they are, thus confining the damage to a single diocese, rather than risk creating a whole pack of titular bishops with plenty of time on their hands to spread their poison all over the world.

I know that many of us have been writing letters begging Rome to do something about the situation in DOR. Given the above, I'd be somewhat surprised if we saw any serious response.