Hey everybody,
Today’s the feast of St. Abraham the Poor, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
He was not, as you might have surmised, a wealthy man.
He was born in Egypt around the turn of the fourth century, a period in Christian Egypt’s history which seemed to oscillate between persecution and heresy, and sometimes both at the same time. He heard the Gospel, was baptized, and moved out to the desert, where he lived for about 20 years in a kind of early religious community, and then another 20 as a cave-dwelling hermit.
He was poor in spirit, and thus blessed. So be like Abraham. And may he intercede for us.
Now before the news, let me mention something else.
A Pillar reader wrote to me this week to cancel his Pillar subscription. He was quite polite, but explained that mostly, while he likes the news reporting, he doesn’t enjoy reading the Tuesday and Friday Pillar Posts. He just doesn’t find them interesting, and fair enough — he needn’t.
We write The Pillar Posts because we think you should know the people who are making your news as people, because some readers enjoy them, and because, frankly, we’re grateful for the chance to do so.
But this guy wanted “pure Catholic news.” And whether you like The Pillar Post or not, you might want that too. So I’m taking the opportunity to tell you about Starting Seven, our daily news roundup, which puts the top seven Catholic news stories — and a whole lot more news — in your inbox, every single morning.
Starting Seven is only available to paying Pillar subscribers, and if you ask me, it’s worth 8 bucks a month all by itself. If you’re already a paying subscriber, you can set it to come in your inbox every day just by clicking here. And in fact, if you want to, you can turn The Pillar Post off in the exact same spot, and never have to deal with our chatty meanderings in your inbox again.
If you’re paying already and you’re not reading Starting Seven, you’re just leaving a lot of value on the table.
If you’re not a paying subscriber, well, I’ll wager you’d find Starting Seven alone worth the price of your subscription. And I’d remind you that your subscription isn’t just to get this newsletter, or even that one, in your inbox.
Subscribers keep our entire team breaking “pure Catholic news” — the news that matters, every single day.
I don’t know if Abraham the Poor would have read Starting Seven. But I’d definitely give him a free subscription if he asked! May he intercede for us.
The news
If you’ve looked at the Catholic internet in the past couple of days, you’ve probably seen a lot of posts about a traditionalist pilgrimage to Rome, which was apparently prevented from having a Mass, procession, or adoration at St. Peter’s Basilica.
What we noticed about those posts was that they seemed to be populated entirely with breathless misinformation, from all sides and at all times.
So Edgar Beltran did what he does best. He talked with the Vatican, he talked with the organizers, he nailed down the facts, and he wrote the definitive report on a controversial subject.
When you read it, you can reach whatever conclusion you like. But if you read it, you’ll reach that conclusion with facts separated from fiction.
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On another controversial topic: A group of U.S. bishops prayed over President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Thursday, after they were invited to a meeting by Heritage Foundation exec Mario Enzler.
It was a spontaneous blessing, seemingly requested spontaneously, which is the kind of thing that clerics do these days, in fact.
But there were just fewer than two weeks until midterm elections in this country, which led to a lot of concern about the timing and optics of the meeting, and the sense among many that the bishops were manipulated for political purposes.
In the fallout, some bishop attendees have defended the meeting, while one has apologized for going at all.
And whatever you think of the meeting, you can be sure it will be discussed at next month’s USCCB fall assembly — and, as I write in an analysis on the subject, the bishops might hear then what Pope Leo thinks of the gathering.
Meanwhile, there has been a minor dispute playing out in the news coverage surrounding the meeting about the degree of involvement from Mario Enzler, a former Swiss Guard who has long claimed a friendship with Pope St. John Paul II, claims to have dated two of Pope St. John XXIII’s nieces, and who was dismissed from a university position when it was discovered that he had fabricated entirely his academic degrees.
Enzler has said he was only a “participant” at the meeting, and the Heritage Foundation has denied he played any key role in the planning.
We’ve confirmed with several bishops that invites to the meeting — repeated invites, in some cases — came directly from Enzler. Again, Enzler’s camp insists the guy was just there. When he denied it, we confirmed it again just to be sure.
It matters to the story because it raises a question about whether bishops could have known that the meeting was going to be an especially political affair, and how they should approach such things in the future.
It also matters to us, because Enzler and his camp have challenged the veracity of our reporting — either we’re not being truthful, or he isn’t. We hope we have a demonstrated track record of being scrupulously truthful in our reporting. And I hope that’s enough said.
In any case, here’s the analysis.
If you love reading The Pillar, you should be listening to Sunday School, our weekly readings podcast. Each week, Scripture scholar Scott Powell breaks down the Sunday readings. Whether you’re a priest preparing your homily, or a Catholic wanting to go deeper with Scripture, Sunday School is worth a listen. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Well, The Pillar talked with Ecuador’s Cardinal Luis Gerardo Cabrera, who told us that the accident points to a critical problem of deferred maintenance in the historical churches of the country.
If you’re a parish pastor, that might sound familiar. And actually, it’s a problem in many places with centuries-old churches, and one that will require a significant investment across Latin America in the decades to come.
Here’s what Cardinal Cabrera had to say.
Nona, new to the patriarch’s chair, is apparently eager to bring good governance to the embattled Chaldean Catholic Church.
But while there has been a great deal of outcry about his being detained Oct. 12 by recruitment officers and taken to military training camp, his own diocese says the priest’s situation was caused by his failure to follow the steps required for clergy draft deferment.
The diocese also pushed back directly on news reporting which it said inaccurately portrayed the situation.
The Pillar talked with Bishop Mark Beckman about his decision, which the bishop said was made to ensure respect for Catholics wishing to pray silently in parish churches after Mass.
You can read my report on the subject here.
But I’ll mention two other things I’ve since been told. At least one Knoxville Catholic told me that Beckman seems to be trying to curtail congregation-led prayers at the conclusion of Mass that take place in some parishes during the recession, rather than when Mass has formally come to an end — though the bishop didn’t mention that. Another Knoxville Catholic told me that in many places in the diocese, the St. Michael prayer after Mass has association with Bishop Rick Stika, Beckman’s predecessor who resigned in disgrace, and that for some people that association itself has made the public recitation of the prayer seem a bit more nuanced than it might be in other places — though again, Beckman didn’t mention that.
What he did mention, and what he thinks about post-liturgy prayers, you can read right here.
Chicago prizes
By all accounts, the Milwaukee Brewers seem set to win the World Series tonight. And if they don’t do that, they’ll probably win it tomorrow night.
That means that by Thursday night, you might be free to attend the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Rerum Novarum Banquet, an annual event involving the seminary, and offering a “salute to labor, business, and government.”
The Archdiocese of Chicago announced recently that it will confer at the banquet the Nostra Aetate Award on Michael Sacks, who it has identified as “a well-respected leader in Chicago and in the Jewish community.”
Sacks, the billionaire chairman and chief executive of investment firm GCM Grosvenor, has given some $600,000 in donations to the Prairie State Access Fund, which is meant to offset abortion providers’ loss of federal funding — providers including Planned Parenthood.
That might sound familiar to you. It was just a year ago that another office in the Archdiocese of Chicago was set to give a lifetime achievement award to abortion-supporting Senator Dick Durbin, before the senator declined amid controversy, and — if you will recall — I was briefly and mysteriously detained by the Chicago PD, in one of the strangest nights of journalism I have yet engaged in.
Well, just like last year, 2026’s Cupich-gives-award-to-abortion-supporter plan has generated some controversy.
But the cardinal has been content to defend his plans. In fact, Cupich released a statement Monday defending his plan to give Sacks the award.
But the cardinal’s statement was focused on anti-Semitism.
“Some have voiced criticism that a Catholic group would honor a person who does not hold to core beliefs of the Catholic Church, primary among them being the divinity of Jesus Christ,” the cardinal wrote.
“As a Catholic community in Chicago, we recognize that now more than ever we need to find ways to reinforce the special relationship between the Catholic community and the Jewish people. Refusing to honor or engage with Jews solely because they hold conflicting religious or political positions can risk mimicking historic patterns of antisemitism through exclusion and bigotry, which, frighteningly, is on the rise. Nostra Aetate urges us to be proactive in separating personal and community respect from doctrinal agreement, ensuring that disagreement does not regress into hostility or social ostracization. This we cannot tolerate.”
I am, I must admit, befuddled.
It seems there are a few possibilities. And I don’t like any of them.