Happy Friday friends,
My daughter had a birthday recently, rounding the solar circuit for the fourth time.
I don’t know at what age a child is able to conceptualize time, or process the significance of “being” 4, or any other number.
There was initial satisfaction for her in answering the question “how old are you” correctly with a new number, but it soon wore thin. Now she keeps saying increasingly outlandish numbers just to wind us up. Which is, I suppose, reasonable, by her own lights.
Absent a grasp of the basics of astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and eschatology, “how old are you” is a meaningless question to which we demand a seemingly arbitrary answer, and she’s just playing the game her own way and enjoying it.
Of course, being an only child, she’s also used to being the domestic axis mundi, so even the idea of a special day all about her is something difficult to communicate effectively. And, if I am being honest, as a middle aged father of one, I know her birthday is mostly about me.
Being in your 40s and being a first time parent, I have found, gives you an accordion-like appreciation of your life.
Emotionally, I still connect effortlessly with the more bumptious, sophomoric elements of my 20-something self; I am mentally, if very much not physically, a “young dad.”
Conversely, I can only dimly recall the “me” of my 30s, floating free as a yuppie without responsibility and just enough age under my belt to take myself semi-seriously. It’s as if that entire decade of my life has disappeared into a fold.
And the arrival of our daughter may have physically aged me at double speed for the first two years, but it rejuvenated me in almost every other sense.
After nearly a decade and a half without the arrival of kids, I’d become limited in my expectations of life, myself, and of God.
Suddenly I was reminded that, in fact, nothing is impossible for the God of surprises. And, for the first time, I truly had to live my life wholly and completely in service to another.
This isn’t to say a life without children is somehow of a lesser order. Of course not. I lived it — along with all the pains and frustrations and resentments that couples struggling with infertility know so well. And for some, as it was with me for a long while, “openness to life” means embracing with faith the pain of the absence of children.
But it is a simple truth that becoming a father changed me as much as becoming a husband, and in the same way that I can no longer recall clearly or empathize fully with my former single life, so it is with our married life before our daughter.
I became who I am when she was born, so in that sense I turned four this week. Feel free to send cards.
Here’s the news.
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The News
Amid a growing boom in adult baptisms in France, the first in-depth study of the trend has unearthed some surprising causes behind the phenomenon.
Antoine Pasquier, the author of Enquête sur ces jeunes qui veulent devenir chrétiens, found to his surprise that reading the Bible plays a more fundamental role in young adult conversions than does the internet or social media. And that many young seekers arrive at church with an idea of religion shaped not by Christianity but by Islam.
In response, Pasquier calls for a deep transformation of French Catholicism, from a community resigned to decline to a “catechumenal Church,” and he sees signs that this shift may be beginning already.
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The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem has suffered another legal blow, as local authorities have said its municipal tax case will be resolved in court, rather than by a special committee, as authorities had promised in February.
The abrupt change of course is the latest development in a months-long dispute between the patriarchate and local authorities, in a case that is being monitored attentively by other Christian communities in the region, who fear they could face similar demands for tax payments.
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Illinois Senator Dick Durbin declined on Tuesday a lifetime achievement award he was scheduled to receive from the Archdiocese of Chicago’s office of human dignity and solidarity.
Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich issued an announcement on the subject at the same time senior leaders at the U.S. bishops’ conference were preparing to release their own statement on the Durbin award, and they had already informed the Vatican’s U.S. representative of their plans, as we reported this week.
The announcement followed a week’s worth of statements from bishops across the country critical of the decision to offer Durbin an award, especially given a 2004 statement from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Chicago’s own archdiocesan policy, both of which prohibit “awards or honors” to “individuals or organizations whose public position is in opposition to the fundamental moral principles of the Catholic Church.”
Cupich defended the original decision to honor Durbin, though, saying in a Sept. 22 statement that it was in line with Vatican guidance on the need for dialogue with politicians who oppose Church teaching on abortion.
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The US bishops are visibly divided over the issue of Catholic politicians and abortion, with Cardinal Cupich breaking with the USCCB, while publicly calling for consensus.
Meanwhile, in Rome, the pope has given an off-the-cuff answer to a question about the situation, the subtext of which is now being fiercely litigated by Catholics online.
You could be forgiven for having an overwhelming sense of déja vu, all over again. But, as I noted in an analysis this week, things are very different this time around — for a few key reasons — and what happens next is unlikely to be a repeat of what’s come before.
You can read the whole analysis here.
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A senior official in France’s Strasbourg archdiocese said this week he mistakenly told media that a canonical case for alleged child sexual abuse against the vicar general was closed when it was in fact open.
The accusation, that Canon Hubert Schmitt sexually assaulted a 13 year old boy in 1993, was first made in 2021. The canon was removed from office in 2023 amid a police investigation, and then reinstated earlier this year after prosecutors ruled the statute of limitations prevented them from bringing charges.
At the time of his reinstatement, archdiocesan officials defended Schmitt’s reinstatement, saying that “the canonical and judicial proceedings have been closed, and as he has not been brought before the courts of the Church or the Republic, he has not been convicted. According to the sound principle, he therefore enjoys all his rights, including the presumption of innocence.”
It emerged this week, however, that although civil prosecutors were frustrated in their efforts to bring charges, the canonical process is, in fact, still proceeding, and Schmitt has now resigned.
The admission comes weeks after an anonymous group of priests in the archdiocese in eastern France issued an appeal for a new apostolic visitation, arguing that a network of cronyism remained despite a succession of scandals and leadership changes.
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This month marks a transition for the Traditional Latin Mass communities of Charlotte, North Carolina.
The four TLM communities in the diocese have been instructed by Bishop Michael Martin that they may no longer continue to gather for Mass at their regular churches. Instead, the TLM may only be celebrated at one specific location, a small chapel specially renovated for this purpose.
But, as Leah Libresco Sargeant notes in a Pillar column this week, there is simply no way the chapel’s maximum capacity of 350 people can accommodate the 1,200 who habitually attend the TLM in the four parishes.
According to Bishop Martin, this is part of the plan, as he said in a letter to local Catholics, telling them to “understand that the chapel is not meant to be able to accommodate all who are currently attending the TLM in their respective parishes.”
The liturgical restrictions in Charlotte have made national headlines for months, and caused considerable pain and resentment locally.
But, as Leah notes, while Martin has insisted that he has “listened to [their] stories of faithfulness and the ways the TLM has enriched your spiritual journeys,” it seems to many that he struggles to articulate his understanding in a way they would recognize.
In other words, Leah wonders, could he pass a kind of pastoral Turing Test? And if not, how might the bishop live up to the injunction that the shepherd should smell of the sheep?
This Advent, gather with fellow Catholics for a Bible study unlike any other. Bible Across America is a nationwide Bible study hosted by the St. Paul Center. During this inaugural study, we’ll encounter Christ as “Teacher and Lord,” discovering what this means for our lives as modern-day disciples.
Cause and effect
I took the time to read Cardinal Cupich’s 1,000-word statement this week, which accompanied the news that Sen. Dick Durbin had decided to decline an archdiocesan award.
It contains extended sections in which I could not possibly agree more with the cardinal.
Among them, Cupich says he has “seen the divisions within the Catholic community dangerously deepen. These divisions harm the unity of the Church and undermine our witness to the Gospel.”
“Bishops cannot simply ignore this situation because we have a duty to promote unity and assist all Catholics to embrace the teachings of the church as a consistent whole. The tragedy of our current situation in the United States is that Catholics find themselves politically homeless. The policies of neither political party perfectly encapsulate the breadth of Catholic teaching.
“Additionally, polling tends to show that when it comes to public policies Catholics themselves remain divided along partisan lines, much like all Americans. This impasse has become more entrenched over the years and our divisions undermine our calling to witness to the Gospel.”
Amen to all that. Indeed, I have been making substantially the same points for some seven years now, at least.
Cupich also concedes that “some would say that the Church should never honor a political leader if he pursues policies diametrically opposed to critical elements of Catholic social teaching,” and he is right — some of those “some” being the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, of course.
But it’s from there I start to have some divergence of opinion and analysis from the cardinal.
For example, the cardinal defends again his decision to extend an award to Durbin despite his vocally pro-abortion legislative career because “the tragic reality in our nation today is that there are essentially no Catholic public officials who consistently pursue the essential elements of Catholic social teaching because our party system will not permit them to do so.”
This, especially in Durbin’s case, strikes me as rather obviously mistaking cause for effect.
Not so many years ago there were Catholic politicians — Chicago Catholic politicians, no less — who “consistently pursued the essential elements of Catholic social teaching.” The Pillar’s own columnist Daniel Lipinski is an obvious example.
But Dan, like so many other public servants of good conscience in the last decade-and-a-half, was hounded and primaried out of his congressional seat specifically because of his consistency on life issues. Dick Durbin wasn’t a bystander to the relentless campaign against Dan and others like him, which ejected them from serving in national politics and the Illinois Democratic Party; Dick Durbin was an organizing and active participant in it.
Apart from the scandalous nature of Durbin’s personal record on specific life issues, the Chicago archdiocese extending him an award of “praise and encouragement” for his career is especially perverse because his principal legacy is as architect and enforcer of the very “tragic reality” Cupich laments.
But while that seems screamingly obvious to me and to many other native Chicagoans steeped in the generational shifts we have seen in the city’s political landscape and Catholic communities, as a relative newcomer it’s possible — indeed it seems charitable to assume — that the cardinal is simply unaware of all that.
And, afterall, as Cupich himself rightly observed in his statement, “ideological isolation all too easily leads to interpersonal isolation.”