Airplane catechism, Franciscan stigmata, and equatorial tourism
The Tuesday Pillar Post
Pillar subscribers can listen to this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Hey everybody,
Eight hundred years ago today, the poor man of Assisi — the Poverello — was marked with the stigmata, which according to Francis’ best biographers, were seemingly growths that signified the five wounds of Jesus Christ.
What happened to St. Francis was real.
And it is a real reminder that most stereotyped saint in Catholic history was not some kind of cartoonish deer-petting ecological hippy, or instead some half-crazed and impoverished spartan-ascetic — but that he was a real man, and really a follower of Jesus, who made concrete choices, first for him himself, and then as a leader, responsible for a growing menagerie of followers and hangers-on.
He chose to follow Jesus into a desert, into poverty, into mission — but most especially, into a life-long love for Jesus Christ himself, most especially in the sacrament of the Eucharist.
He died with Christ, and was reborn with Christ, and most especially, he carried the cross of Jesus Christ.
As St. Bonaventure said: “ His whole endeavor, both public and private, centered around the cross of the Lord.”
May we follow Jesus as Francis did. May our lives center around that cross.
The news
While the Church teaches that it’s possible to find “goodness and truth” in non-Christian religions, the pope’s remarks have been taken by many as a kind of soft syncretism. And while the Vatican hasn’t commented on those remarks, it’s possible Vatican officials realize the problem in the way the pope phrased what he had to say — since, without explanation, the Vatican’s official English version of the pope’s remarks have been made to say something quite different.
I’ll have more to say about remarks from the pope, but here’s our coverage on the Singapore event.
Bishop Alvarez has been living in a Roman exile since January, after he was arrested by the Ortega regime and sentenced last year to 26 years in prison for conspiracy. The bishop became one of the biggest enemies of Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship following the 2018 protests that swept the country, opposing the lack of free elections and a serious economic crisis.
Next month, he’ll likely have something worth saying at the synod on synodality. Read all about it.
Why?
In an analysis last week, Michelle La Rosa took a look at some inauguration events at Notre Dame, including a speech from a former Planned Parenthood official.
Her conclusion? Those hoping for significant changes at Notre Dame probably shouldn’t be holding their breath.”
Some seminary formators say it could become a significant contribution to priestly formation and Catholic education.
But does it actually matter if seminarians spend a lot of time reading literature? Does it impact their formation? Is it practically plausible?
Edgar Beltran talked with a bunch of formators to find.
And this report — like good literature, I suppose — is worth reading.
—
Readers of The Pillar know that I was in Ecuador last week for the International Eucharistic Congress. I’ll continue to have a bit more reporting on that over the course of this week. But here are three things to read from Quito, Ecuador:
Here’s an excerpt:
“There's certainly a tension in pastoral theology, about how to reach out to people, how to invite others in.
I suppose you might say I fall on one side of that tension — in the sense of firmly believing in the power of grace to transform, and that all of our human actions have to be informed by and led by grace and by the Holy Spirit.
Otherwise, the problems are just too big.”
Finally, the Holy See announced that the next International Eucharistic Congress, in 2028, will take place in Sydney, Australia. So I talked with Archbishop Anthony Fisher about his plans — and why Americans should plan to show up in Sydney. In short, Pillar readers, the archbishop wants you there.
And if enough of you show up, Ed and I will start planning now for a Sydney live show.
Read Archbishop Fisher’s interview here.
Airplane catechism
When Pope Francis flew back from Singapore last week, he was asked about the U.S. presidential election, because — unfortunately — that’s all anyone ever wants to talk about, anywhere.
The pontiff said that both major candidates are “against life,” because one “throws out migrants” and one “kills children.”
Not being American, Pope Francis emphasized that he doesn’t vote in the election, and wouldn’t be deciding, but laid out his position on both abortion (he’s against it), and on migration, about which he said that “failing to care for migrants is a sin, a sin against life and humanity.”
“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong, it is cruelty. Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things,” the pontiff said.
Pope Francis has taken criticism from some observers, who say that the pope didn’t speak clearly enough, or at least not with theological precision: That he seemed to conflate refugees and other kinds of migrants, that he seemed to make abortion and migration equivalent moral issues, and that he failed to mention that the Church has taught that abortion should never be legally protected, while the specifics of migration policy (but not the principles) are a matter of prudential judgment, which must be discerned in the concrete circumstances of each time and place.
It’s true that Pope Francis doesn’t, and didn’t, speak with precision on those significant issues.
And I think they’re important enough, and his platform significant enough, that the pontiff would be well-advised to reconsider the prudence of speaking extemporaneously on complex and highly divisive issues, when his words, whatever they are, are used in ways he seems rarely to anticipate.
But I’d like to add another observation about the pope’s remarks on the airplane.
Pope Francis added to his remarks a commentary on voting.
“It is generally said that not voting is ugly, it’s not good. One must vote. And one must choose the lesser evil,” he told a reporter.
The problem is that he was talking about the U.S. election, and this is not what the U.S. bishops have said about elections in their country.
In”Faithful Citizenship,” the bishops have said that “when all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act… [the voter] may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.”
That could be taken as some form of a “lesser of two evils,” argument, I suppose — though it’s not so much weighing various kinds of evils, as it is weighing the likelihood of their “advancement” through a particular administration.
But the bishops also say that the “conscientious voter… may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate.”
In other words, it’s not true, at least according to the U.S. bishops, that “one must vote.”
Of course, not voting is an extraordinary measure, and one can see why Pope Francis defaulted to the position of the Catechism, that, in general, “co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory … to exercise the right to vote.”
Still, the U.S. bishops have emphasized that there are exceptions to this, and, in the case of an election where both major candidates are promising taxpayer-funding for the destruction of human life, I suspect some American Catholics indeed feel themselves unable to vote for a presidential candidate.
Others, as the bishops direct, will choose the candidate they believe less likely to “advance a morally flawed position.”
According to the guidance of the Church, both choosing and not choosing can be a reasonable and valid choice.
That is why it’s probably important for the pope to recognize all of that as he talks about the subject, rather than offer remarks subject to multiple interpretations, and at odds with the concrete directives of the relevant episcopal conference. For no good reason at all, “Faithful Citizenship” and Pope Francis can now be spun as at odds with each other, ahead of the extremely contentious American election.
And if all of that seems complicated for an airplane catechesis to secular media — especially after a grueling 10-day trip across four countries, which included an attempt on the pope’s life — well, again, that might be exactly why the advisability of such pontifical situations is worth revisiting.
Varia
Finally, three personal notes:
First, if you’re ever in Quito, Ecuador, do avail yourself of the opportunity to visit the two dueling tourist traps at Mitad Del Mundo, the locus of the equator just outside of town. Go especially if you’re traveling with my dad, as I was, because he’s one of the funniest people on the planet.
One tourist trap is a nearly abandoned theme park, with a very crummy planetarium show, a petting zoo full only of llamas, and the opportunity to sample the fruit of unroasted cocoa pods — the raw ingredient of chocolate.
The inside of those pods is disgusting, and looks, as my dad discovered, like some kind of unshelled arthropod:
The other equator tourist trap in Ecuador — just down the street from the first one — styles itself a “museum,” and purports to conduct “science experiments” on the equator, like pouring water atop a yellow brick line it says is the actual equator, and then two or three feet in either direction, purportedly to demonstrate the Coriolis effect, and other science-ish oddities of the earth’s belt.
But the experiments are actually carnival tricks, which don’t prove anything. And they shouldn’t. At the equator, one degree of latitude is about 70 miles wide, which is why moving a sink three feet in one direction isn’t going to demonstrate very well the physics of our planet’s rotation.
Plus, according to my GPS, neither of the equator tourist spots are actually at precisely 0 degrees latitude — both are a football field off, in one direction or the other. At the actual-factual-0.000∞-degrees-equator, so far as I could tell, was a neighborhood, an auto-parts store, and the Ecuadorian equivalent of a Wal-Mart.
Still, they’re fun spots for cross-hemispheric photos like this, and both equator “museums” will put a quasi-illegal “center of the earth” stamp in your passport for a couple of bucks. And isn’t that really the point, after all?
Second, in the ongoing saga of hilarity at the Flynn’s house — Pia decided my absence was a good time to break two bones in her foot. She’ll be off-her-feet and in a cast for the next 4-6 weeks.
All we can do is laugh. Really.
So if you’ve been doing our family the favor of praying for Max in recent weeks, it’s time to make a change. You could pray for Pia, of course, but you could also pray for Mrs. Flynn, who has had a very, very long summer, to say the least.
Finally, Ed wrote a note to free subscribers of The Pillar this weekend, asking that you consider paying for the journalism you read — mostly so that we can stay afloat, as we fight tough economic times, normal subscription turnover, and a rising cost of living for our journalists around the world.
If you subscribed, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you thought about it, and didn’t do it, we wanted to give you another chance:
And if you didn’t think about it, well, we’d be grateful if you did. We make news worth paying for, funded by readers like you:
Please be assured of our prayers. And please pray for us. We need it.
Yours in Christ,
JD Flynn
Editor-in-chief
The Pillar
It’s true that Pope Francis doesn’t, and didn’t, speak with precision on those significant *insert topic* issues.
-Repeat ad-nauseam until a new pope is elected.
"the pontiff would be well-advised to reconsider the prudence of speaking extemporaneously on complex and highly divisive issues, when his words, whatever they are, are used in ways he seems rarely to anticipate."
-It's been 11 years. Anecdotally, it's this point in a marriage where divorces tend to flare up because one party, the other, or both realize that the other won't change. They either walk away or begin working on themselves. Pope Francis isn't going to change. I will not leave the Church. So, I can only work on myself (assuming that this isn't a sin against synodality).
I also love that JD and Ed and their colleagues can stir the pot on hot button issues, and this is the only place on the internet where that can be done and at least 99% of the people who comment on here act like adults and have reasoned conversations about those issues that respect the dignity of all participants in the conversation, as well as the readers of the comments. That gives me hope for the future. It’s the virtual equivalent of a giant dinner table or front porch conversation 🙂