A papal plea, a legal legacy, and men with mustaches
The Friday Pillar Post
Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Happy Friday friends,
We’ve had the usually busy week in the newsroom, and there’s plenty to get through.
But before we get down to business, I was charmed this week by the picture of Pope Leo signing a baseball— as were a lot of you. I know because a lot of you told me so.
And it is a great image, for a couple of reasons.
At a basic emotional level, it’s just fun to see a pope doing something so fundamentally American, in the same way many Latin Americans got a kick out of seeing Francis drink mate, or Germans felt seeing Benedict with an enormous beer stein.
It’s the perk of a hometown pope.
More generally, the sight of Leo signing a baseball is also a kind of subliminal reminder that work isn’t everything, and that leisure matters, too.
As many of you know, I draw a joy from my local parish dads’ softball team out of all proportion to its objective significance, allowing me as it does to celebrate modest achievements in two things at which I have never excelled — making friends and doing sports.
On a related note, I would like here to make a special plea to Pope Leo, should he end up reading this. I know everyone — including us here at The Pillar — have picked over the many competing priorities for urgent papal attention.
And everyone has that one thing they’d beg Leo to consider, if they got close enough to whisper something in his ear. I have about five. But right now I am going to shoot my shot on behalf of others and ask the pope for one simple favor: Bring back the Clericus Cup.
For those who don’t know, the Clericus Cup is (was) the annual inter-seminary and pontifical academy football (soccer, if you must) tournament.
I say “was” because while in Rome for the conclave I learned, to my horror, that the tournament was cancelled during covid lockdowns, and simply never brought back.
I have heard from Roman seminarians and students from all hemispheres and multiple continents that the event is sorely missed, for all of the obvious benefits that leisure, healthy competition and teamwork bring. And it was just fun.
I’m told that there were some excuses offered for not bringing the Cup back after Covid, regarding cost-cutting across the Vatican and the looming cash crunch, and that the funds just aren’t there to organize such frivolities anymore.
I think I am safe saying no one, anywhere, has a more acute appreciation for the Vatican financial situation than I do.
But a Sunday soccer tournament for seminarians is not where the savings are to be found. In fact, I would bet you could run the Clericus Cup — for a decade or more — with just what the Synodal Secretariat spent on free iPads for participants during the synod on synodality.
But to accompany my plea to the pope, I’m willing to make an offer, too: If money really is the issue, Your Holiness, please just let me know.
I will personally organize the fundraising to sponsor it if that’s what it takes. And, frankly, if we end up organizing sponsorship of the whole thing and calling it “The Pillar Clericus Cup,” I wouldn’t complain at all.
Anyway, here’s the news.
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The News
Archdiocese of Washington will layoff one quarter of its chancery workforce today, as Cardinal Robert McElroy aims to address five years of major deficit spending in the nation’s capital see.
The drastic announcement follows our first reporting the deficit, and years of economic crisis in the archdiocese, in December last year, prior to McElroy’s arrival, though I was told at the time that our reports were vigorously rubbished internally, with staffers and clergy being assured we were printing fake news.
Here in Washington this morning, though, this isn’t primarily a news story. It is a deeply sad day for dozens of local Catholic families, who have to weather the suffering and fear of unemployment.
My heart and prayers are with them. I’d ask you to remember them, too.
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Young Catholics walking across the United States as part of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, faced protestors in Dallas Wednesday night, with pilgrimage organizers saying they expect to see protests continue as the group makes its way to Los Angeles.
The pilgrims first encountered the protesters while in the Diocese of Peoria, during the first week of the procession. Since then, the protesters have been following the procession, with their group growing in size and volume.
The protests are organized by a Texas-based group which opposes Eucharistic adoration as contrary to the Christian gospel.
Jack Figge, our man on the ground, was there to report on what happened, as it happened.
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Disgraced Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta is back in his former Diocese of Orán, and will continue serving his four-year prison sentence under house arrest in a local convent, local media reported this week.
Zanchetta had previously been in Rome since November receiving “medical treatment.”
The bishop, who was convicted of aggravated sexual abuse of seminarians in 2022, arrived in Rome in November 2024, for cardiac treatment which his lawyers argued he could not receive in his home country, undergoing heart surgery at the Gemelli Hospital.
Under the terms of his permission to travel, issued by an Argentine court last year, Zanchetta was to return to Oran by April 1, where he had been serving his sentence under house arrest in a home for retired priests.
And we are going to talk more about it in just a minute.
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Nearly 800,000 “unskilled foreign laborers,” mostly from Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam work in Taiwan.
They get to Taiwan through a phalanx of employment brokers, who ensure their hiring — and in exchange take sizable monthly cuts from the workers’ low wages, over contract periods of three years that rarely lead to more stable employment.
That, along with the country’s aging populace and fertility rate — the world’s lowest — has prompted a frenzy for “cheap labor” in the nation’s microchip factories and to assist their sick and elderly.
As you can imagine, the pastoral needs and challenges here are enormous — and acute.
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Cardinal Matteo Zuppi criticized the Italian government this week for making a “unilateral” change to a tax system that helps fund the Catholic Church in Italy.
Zuppi called the government action “a choice that goes against the contractual logic of the agreement, creating a disparity that harms both the Catholic Church and the other religious confessions that have signed agreements with the state.”
So what is the eight-per-thousand system and what has changed?
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A genetics company went a little viral this week as Nucleus Genomics rolled out the technology for would-be parents to screen embryos for virtually every predisposition and characteristic and compare them side-by-side.
It’s dystopian and terrifying. And, as I hope you would expect from us, we kind of saw it coming.
Jean-Marie Le Mene told us that we’ve got to a point where “bioethics has forgotten about ethics.”
“We have bioethics committees in which the sole question is: will the law allow it, or will it not allow it? But at no point do we really ask ourselves whether it is right or wrong,” he told Edgar Beltran.
As for the kind of Gattica-style gene screening being offered now by Nucleus, he made the undeniable but widely forgotten central point:
“When you talk about chimeras, manufactured embryos, everyone says that it's horrible. But that's not the problem.”
“The problem lies upstream. Everything starts with contraception and with making gametes available for experimentation and to create embryos in the lab. What's difficult for people to understand is consistency. People need to be consistent. You can't reject transhumanism and not be consistent in your own life.”
Bingo. It’s called a consistent ethic of life.
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Another papal image which went a little viral this week was of Leo hanging out with some fellow Augustinians at a birthday party on Sunday.
As I wrote in an analysis this week, being the Bishop of Rome is probably the loneliest job in the world, with one man expected to exercise global governing authority over a Church of 1.4 billion people and be a spiritual leader for them as well.
Popes need friends to stay sane and make good decisions, and given the papal court is packed full of placemen, favor-seekers, sycophants and worse, it is difficult if not impossible for a pope to make new friends once he’s elected.
As I wrote, Leo’s predecessors St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI had their own circles of close confidentes to rely on, while Francis by contrast often appeared isolated. So, I am very glad Leo seems to have a real network of friends and family to lean on in his ministry — he is going to need them.
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The Bishop of Charlotte has delayed the implementation of new restrictions on the use and celebration of the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy in the diocese.
The new policies were initially slated to come into force on July 8, but will now be delayed until October — the deadline originally set by the Vatican for the end of transitional accommodations and full compliance with the norms Pope Francis’ motu proprio Traditionis custodes.
The reversal comes after considerable public criticism of diocesan liturgical policy in recent weeks from within the diocese and online, following the May 23 announcement that existing parish TLM celebrations would end months earlier than required by Rome.
Get caught up on the whole story right here.
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The global discussion about the safe and ethical development of AI continues, and it continued at The Pillar this week.
As readers of these newsletters know that I am something of an AI paranoiac — which doesn’t mean I am wrong, by the way — but Aaron, being an accomplished man of science, takes a rather more open minded and well reasoned approach to these things.
Yet even he notes that “there are really smart people, with serious resources, racing towards what seems to be a pretty bad idea. We should, and can, put some guardrails on this until we know more.”
What guardrails would work, or are even possible at this point?
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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have filed a complaint accusing a former investment adviser of defrauding Catholic dioceses and clergy in Venezuela out of millions of dollars in a Ponzi-like scheme.
The SEC filed a 16-page complaint May 28 at the Florida Southern District Court alleging that Andrew Jacobus and two companies he controlled misappropriated more than $17 million from 40 clients, most of whom were Venezuelan nationals, including elderly people.
The complaint did not name the Venezuelan clergy and dioceses who were among the defendants’ clients, but said they lost around $3.2 million in misappropriated funds.
Unfinished business
It is reassuring, to a degree, to see that Bishop Zanchetta has resurfaced in his home diocese, and is presumably to resume his sentence for the serial aggravated sexual abuse of seminarians, albeit under the favorable conditions of house arrest aranged for him by the local Church.
Whatever the true extent of Zanchetta’s reported health issues, and whatever the real need was for him to spend several months in Rome, his effective holiday from justice was well-marked by his victims, local Catholics, and others watching the case from around the world.
Of course, within the Church itself, the bishop has seemingly not, to date, faced any consequences whatsoever. He remains a bishop, there are no known restrictions on his ministry, beyond the practical limits placed on him by his civil criminal sentence.
For many who watched Zanchetta’s story unfold, it was hard to escape the obvious conclusion that he was shielded from justice by his friend Pope Francis, who first accepted his resignation under face-saving terms, allowed his Vatican to deny knowledge of allegations they had been informed of years previously, and then made space (and a job) for him in the Vatican.
When the criminal justice system caught up with Zanchetta, Francis’ Vatican ignored repeated requests by the court for Church files on his case — even though Francis had issued an actual law saying the Church should comply with such requests.
For many, Zanchetta’s case was just one of many instances, some high profile, others less so, in which Pope Francis appeared to apply his own ideas of justice — either for the benefit of friends or to the detriment of others out of papal favor.
The results were serious damage to the rule of law in the Church, and the creation of rival cultures of impunity and fear among clerics who were left to guess what, if any, weight the actual law might be allowed to have in any given circumstance.
This is perhaps one of the least pleasant and most difficult legacies left for Pope Leo to grapple with. And his options are clear, if none of them terribly appealing.