About time, about Vatican II, and about life and death
The Friday Pillar Post
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Happy Friday friends,
And a very happy feast of the Ascension to all of you who have already celebrated it yesterday, on its proper day — like Pope Leo XIV.
For those who live in episcopal provinces which decline to follow Leo’s example, I am sorry for you, and I pray your bishops will soon submit to the pope.
I understand that people like me complaining about the ugly, illogical, unnatural, and absurd practice of moving important feasts to the nearest Sunday has become a tedious sidecar to the days themselves.
All I can tell you is: it’s my newsletter so we’re talking about it; and the bishops can make it stop any time they want to. But, with the honorable exceptions of the provinces of Boston, Hartford, New York, Omaha, and Philadelphia, they have again chosen violence against the calendar and against reason.
What infuriates me most about the transfer of the Ascension is the absolute counter sign it makes to the carefully laid out liturgical calendar, the central point of which is Easter. The mandate to mark festivals, seasons, days and years correctly is as old as Genesis 1. These things matter, they are part of the fabric of creation, they instruct us and focus us and attune us to our place in and progression through history towards its end.
The Lord mandated we keep holy the Sabbath, specifically, He did not say “be sure to take a day off every week or so to give glory to the author of creation.”
The symmetry of Christ's ascension to the Father exactly 40 days after his resurrection, having spent the intervening time instructing the disciples, preparing them for what is to come and the advent of the Holy Spirit in ten days time — just long enough for a novena, you might notice, which you can’t do if you wait til Sunday — is not accidental.
It parallels the 40 days Christ spent in the wilderness preparing for his own ministry, and the penitential time of Lent which prepared us for this season of great feasting.
Ascension Thursday is conceived with purpose, it is pregnant with significance, it brings to life something important about this time we are supposed to be living.
Would a bishop transfer Ash Wednesday to the first Sunday of Lent? Of course not, and they’d look at you like you were a psychopath if you suggested it — and rightly so.
But the main reason they’d think you were nuts is because people, by and large, have no issue making time to get to church on Ash Wednesday, it’s one of the best attended days in the year. Yet, somehow, doing so on a Thursday two-and-a-half months later is an insuperable logistical burden for people and it’s an urgent pastoral necessity that the bishops move the date.
It seems to me that if we are, as Catholics, more culturally invested in Ash Wednesday than Ascension Thursday, it says something about our formation and relationship to our Father in heaven. Is our faith primarily lived at the level of fear and penance, or joyfully illuminated by the resurrection?
Every year that the bishops of a province choose to mark the Ascension on the wrong day, they are, I would submit, acknowledging an acute catechetical — not logistical — need among their people which I would hope would be a burning priority for them to address.
If that doesn’t seem to be the case, I am left wondering for whose convenience benefit this is all being done, really.
Here’s the news.
The News
Moving away from my personal feelings about liturgical transferal of feasts.
You should really read that.
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Events continue to unfold in the Diocese of Charlotte this week, following on from last week’s announcement regarding the Extraordinary Form of the liturgy.
Bishop Michael Martin is understood to be preparing new policies governing the ordinary form.
Yesterday, we further reported that when Bishop Martin met with then-Cardinal Robert Prevost in April, the Dicastery for Bishops strongly encouraged him to slow down a slate of major decisions — most especially involving plans to move Charlotte’s cathedral to a parish outside the city — and to take more time getting to know the diocese and the people before introducing big changes.
Needless to say, we’ll keep an eye on this story as it develops.
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The bishops of Washington are challenging a new state law that requires priests to violate the seal of confession if they suspect the abuse of minors.
The suit argues that the law constitutes religious discrimination, because it demands that priests violate the norms of the Catholic Church to adhere to the reporting requirements, while at the same time explicitly exempting multiple other groups from those requirements.
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A German cathedral chapter apologized this week for hosting a performance featuring semi-clad dancers waving plucked chickens wrapped in diapers.
I just… yeah. Chicken dancing. There were scythes, too.
You can read the whole story here.
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Meanwhile, in Germany’s Münster diocese, a lay committee has criticized the decision to award a prestigious Catholic philosophical prize to Bishop Robert Barron, accusing him of making “anti-queer statements” and supporting President Donald Trump’s transgender policies.
You can and should read the whole report.
But it sounds a lot to me like, in this case, the diocesean committee is vexed that the bishop has a track record of defending and promoting Church teaching — including the teachings of Pope Francis — on the subject.
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Mass attendance in Belgium rose by almost 4% from 2023 to 2024, according to figures released this week.
While the Belgian bishops’ conference said “it is still too early to speak of a real change in trend, which may or may not continue,” they did note that the growth in attendance “appears to be a phenomenon concentrated mainly in urban areas, where vibrant religious communities exert additional attraction.”
Go figure.
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Animal rights organization PETA projected an image condemning bullfighting on the facade of the Apostolic Palace Tuesday, in an attempt to encourage Pope Leo XIV to condemn the practice.
Why, you might reasonably ask. Why do these groups think the pope has anything to do with bullfighting? Why does PETA push the pontiff on the issue? What is going on here?
Well, our own Edgar Beltran has an explainer for you.
I urge you to read it, because I have some thoughts on bullfighting, which we’ll be coming to in a minute.
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It’s about Vatican II, actually
The furore in the Diocese of Charlotte continues to roil, both on the ground there and online.
The anger and the offense taken by many Catholics that a bishop would even think about, let alone draft a document, seeking to tell women what they can wear on their heads or ban priests from offering private prayers before Mass begins, have — reasonably — aroused strong feelings.
Writing on Tuesday regarding Bishop Martin’s recent actions regarding the use and restriction of the Extraordinary Form in the diocese, JD offered the observation that “The Mass is the source and summit of the Christian life — which means that fights about liturgy are often veiled divides about what it means to be a Christian.”
I do not disagree with him. Though I would suggest that, as the unfolding story in Charlotte has shown since then, Bishop Martin’s case is increasingly about what it is to be a bishop and — forgive the usage — to be Church.
Really, Charlotte is all about Vatican Council II. And not in a liturgical way. Hear me out.