April Fool's Fish, and Blessed Carlo

The Tuesday Pillar Post

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Hey everybody,

It’s April now, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.

If you wondered, as I did, it turns out that nobody is certain why we celebrate April Fool’s Day with tricks and practical jokes.

One theory is that when Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar in 1582, he standardized January 1 as the first day of the year, as there had previously been regional variability over the date.

In France, apparently, some people continued to celebrate the changing of the year as they always had, from March 25, the Annunciation, until the first of April.

When the calendar changed, it became a bit of a custom to wish someone a happy new year then — and if they responded in kind, to dub them an “April Fool.”

That custom developed into other April Fools jokes — including a French penchant for pinning a paper fish, the poisson d'avril, onto a friend’s back when he isn’t looking.

The poisson d'avril. The French love a good fish prank.

Why a fish? Well, maybe because on April 1, 1634, the Duke of Lorraine escaped the captivity of the Count de Brassac by swimming across the River Meurthe — and it apparently took hours for anyone to believe the guard who reported the escape, because they thought it was an April Fool’s prank.

Of course, no one is sure of those theories. Some people think April Fool’s Day has been around a lot longer than the Gregorian calendar reforms. And the custom of pinning paper fish could have several origins, too.

It’s possible that I’m pulling your legs altogether with these origin stories.

On April 1, you can never be sure.

Happy new year.

The news

A Michigan family says their 16-year-old daughter received an inexplicable healing last summer, and that it could be a miracle worked through the intercession of Blessed Solanus Casey, whose cause for canonization is under consideration at the Vatican.

Susan Bartold told The Pillar this week that while she believes the intercession of Fr. Solanus effected a physical healing, she is even more hopeful for his witness.

“Solanus’ life encompasses what I wish I had known earlier in my own life,” Susan told The Pillar. “That even answering the door [as Solanus did as a porter] is powerful if you spread the good news, or be kind, or be encouraging, or pray. That success isn’t measured by accomplishments. It’s measured by who we’ve encouraged, or who we’ve introduced to Jesus Christ, or offered a helping hand toward.”

So could the Bartolds’ story lead to Solanus Casey’s canonization?

Read about that, here.

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The ongoing case of Fr. Marko Rupnik has taken a number of interesting turns in the last week: The Society of Jesus announced it will make reparations to the priest’s victims, while the bishop of Lourdes announced that he would have Rupnik’s mosaics at the Lourdes shrine boarded over.

On one level, the tide seems to be turning — while bishops and religious superiors had once been waiting for the Vatican’s Rupnik trial to conclude, they now seem to be acting on their own to address the scandal of the priest’s conduct.

But at the Vatican, the case against Rupnik hasn’t even started yet. And Cardinal Victor Fernandez told The Pillar this morning that he’s still trying to find personnel for a trial: “We are just trying to find more than three reliable judges outside the dicastery and who do not have offices in the Vatican curia,” Fernández told The Pillar.

The cardinal told The Pillar that the DDF is taking the case extremely seriously and is concerned to ensure the highest possible standards in selecting judges.

You can read Ed Condon’s analysis here.

Meanwhile, I think it’s notable that Cardinal Fernandez says it hasn’t been easy to find judges for the case. I know a lot of canon lawyers, without Vatican offices, who’d be glad to volunteer their time on that case, and would willingly sign up if asked. That’s what leads Catholics to think the case is being handled with an insufficient sense of urgency.

But it occurs to me that there are two practical issues which could be part of the apparent challenge for Fernandez.

First, the case is notorious enough that it could be difficult to find judges without preexisting biases on the situation, which isn’t appropriate for a judicial proceeding.

Second, Rupnik is Slovenian, and at least some of his alleged victims are Slovenian. If much of the testimony in the case is in Slovenian, it could be that the DDF wants to see to it that judges with some actual competence in the language are used, to cut down on the necessity of translations.

That would narrow the pool considerably.

On the other hand, by this point, the case has been lingering long enough that the DDF could have practically sent some Slovenians to canon law school specially to hear this case. And while there is real value to using the original language texts when possible, there is also real value to moving the case along.

In any case, you can read Ed’s analysis on the state of affairs, right here.

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Ed and JD are going to Rome this December, for an unforgettable Pillar Pilgrimage. You should come too. It’ll be a historic time to be in Rome, and it’ll be a lot of fun — including a live show.

Check it out.

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Iraq’s Archbishop Bashar Warda told The Pillar this weekend that he “categorically and unequivocally reject[s]” the charges leveled against him in a recent lawsuit.

The suit charges that Warda “facilitated …the scheme to extort, kidnap, torture, and attempt to kill” an Iraqi-American businesswoman.

Warda said those claims are “false and defamatory.”

The archbishop has told The Pillar in the past that he rejects the lawsuit. But he spoke out again this weekend, because he said that “highly sensationalized” reporting on the subject, from the Catholic news website Crux was “reckless and poorly researched reporting.”

For its part, Crux has stood by its reporting, apart from a graf it removed before Warda issued his statement.

And the situation, to be clear, is complex — that’s why we’ve been reporting on it for months.

The lawsuit hinges on alleged connections between Warda and Rayan al-Kildani, an Iraqi strongman politician. And as it happens, a simmering clash between Warda and Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Louis Sako also involves disputes over al-Kildani. That clash is now at the Dicastery for Eastern Catholic Churches to be resolved.

Meanwhile, Warda is emphatic that he has been “unjustly” tied up in the lawsuit.

You can read about it here.

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The Archdiocese of Chicago filed a lawsuit last week against men it says have made false abuse allegations against a laicized Chicago priest, the notorious sexual abuser Daniel McCormack.

The archdiocese claims that several men conspired for years to commit fraud, pretending to be McCormack’s victims in order to secure settlements.

And, indeed, with jailhouse recordings and gangland violence, the story is extraordinary.

Of course, the archdiocese says its motive for the lawsuit is its concern for real victims, because “false claims make it necessary to investigate all claims more aggressively, which places a greater burden on true survivors.”

Considering the financial state of affairs in Chicago, and across the Church in the U.S., it seems also true there is a financial stake here — false claims cost dioceses real money, and in Chicago, the asset portfolio for settlements won’t last forever.

Still, amid an extraordinary case and a number of motives, there might be another part of the story worth understanding: the suits against false claims, already paid out, bolster the call to reform due process procedures for accused clerics.

Ed and I wrote about that. Read about it here.

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Bishop Joseph Strickland invited priests this month to join a “prayerful community” of fraternity, while criticizing Pope Francis for apparently failing “to reject the siren call of sodomy.”

The invitation came amid Strickland's engagement at a March 19 gathering of Catholics at President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Resort.

When we cover Strickland, we get a lot of questions about why we do, from people who say he’s crazy, and from people who say he’s the only American bishop with the courage to tell the truth.

So why cover him? To me, it’s because he’s an essential part of the story of the Church right now.

Across the ecclesiastical landscape, it’s a fact, and a newsworthy one, that many Catholics are disaffected with or unhappy about the Francis papacy, because of concerns about doctrine, and concerns about governance. And indeed, there are real challenges for the Church in the Francis papacy; we’ve written about many of them.

The question for Catholics is how to respond to those challenges. Strickland represents one path.

To some, he’s a persecuted prophet. To others, he’s incendiary, a demagogue, a man increasingly off-the-rails, and so is the company he keeps.

But division over Strickland and his approach points to broadening divisions among “conservative Catholics” — including Pillar readers — over both ecclesiastical issues and American political issues.

Those issues are playing out in real time in parishes, seminaries, and chanceries — and they impact most of us.

In other words, like him or not, Strickland says something about the state of play for the Church in the U.S., and understanding that “something” is an exercise worth undertaking.

Meanwhile, it is not exactly clear to me what he meant about the pope and the “siren call of sodomy.”

You can read about that here.

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Only 29 new priests were ordained for Germany’s 27 Catholic dioceses in 2024 — a record low for the Church in the country. And 321,611 Catholics formally attempted to leave the Church last year, bringing the total number of Catholics in Germany under 20 million.

The number of ordinations to the diocesan priesthood has declined steadily in Germany since 1962, when there were 557. But the annual figure has never fallen below 30 before.

Read about the state of affairs here.

Blessed Carlo?

The Economist has sparked a conversation among Catholics this week about Blessed Carlo Acutis and the Church’s canonization process, after journalist John Phipps talked with some of Acutis’ friends, who said their experience with Carlo was more “regular kid” than “pious saint.”

Ahead of the Acutis canonization this month, the essay seemed to call into question the authenticity of the Church’s canonization process, suggesting that post-mortem momentum, not actual holiness, has propelled Carlos towards elevation at the altar.

The tomb of Blessed Carlo Acutis. Credit: Vatican Media.

The report is paywalled, but you can read an archived version here.

I have no devotion to Carlo Acutis, and no dog in this fight, but I’ve got a few thoughts:

1. I was talking with a friend the other day about a mutual friend of ours, a holy priest. My friend described the priest this way: “He’s the most integrated person I know.”
   
   I think that’s an excellent way to describe holiness — Christian integration — such that we are really and truly who we are — as sons and daughters of the Father — all the time. We live as ourselves in every moment. And we do that by grace.
   
   Adolescence is perhaps developmentally the most disintegrated time in a person’s own life. I’m no saint — and if I dropped dead today there would be neither cause nor cult of devotion — but it was certainly my own youthful experience to act in different ways with different people. I lived like a Christian in most of my life. But among the high school buds I drank Southern Comfort with on Friday nights, that aspect of my identity was diminished somewhat — though, thanks be to God, not beyond repentance or reform. Still, I didn’t open with an invitation to Bible study or (like a good Evangelical kid) to listen to my Christian ska music.
   
   I know extraordinarily integrated adolescents, and you might too, but I think most kids go through a phase of trying different identities, or at least slightly different hues, until they figure out exactly who they are and who they want to be. That’s … normal. So if Carlos wasn’t as outwardly religious or pious among his high school chums as he was around his family, that certainly doesn’t mean he didn’t have a living and active faith — or that he had a “secret life,” as the Economist put it.
   
   That framing is sensationalized, and fails in my view to account for basic human development, let alone Christian maturity.
   
   But does Carlos’ “ordinariness” among his pals undermine the claim of sanctity?
   
   WELL
   

2. The report seems not to have taken into account Carlos’ death. As I read his story, Acuitis, diagnosed with promyelocytic leukemia, spent 11 days at the end of his life in extraordinary suffering, during which he seems to have exhibited real holiness — an unusual death, according to the testimony of his medical caretakers.
   
   It seems possible to me that you can’t really understand Acutis without understanding the way he lived his final days. That he was a seemingly faithful-but-still-ordinary Catholic kid who exhibited heroic virtue in the days of his suffering and death, and that’s what makes him worthy of veneration and imitation.
   
   BUT
   

3. If I’m correct about that, I think it also means that people aren’t always telling his story correctly. Acutis is often presented as a kind of cherub-with-a-playstation, for whom every uttered word was a spiritual nugget of wisdom, who effected conversions at every turn, and whose every moment on the internet was spent saving souls by cataloguing Eucharistic miracles.
   
   That narrative is sometimes told with such cloying piety as to be unbelievable. For his part, the author of The Economist piece tends to put that on Acutis’ mother. And indeed, I’ve heard her speak, she seems to have immense maternal devotion, pride, and affection for her son. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think a more realistic account of Carlo Acutis’ life would emphasize that he seems to have deepened in Christian holiness and maturity as he prepared for and underwent a good and holy death.
   
   AT THE SAME TIME
   

4. It used to take longer to be declared a saint, and I think that’s good. The test of endurance of a cult of devotion is a good thing, and it allows the story of a would-be-saint’s life to crystallize and mature itself a little bit, so that it can be looked at soberly and maturely. It also ensures that a few people with financial resources (like the Acutis family) can’t drive a canonization cause singularly, when the process itself lasts a bit longer than the surge of devotional energy among a potential saint’s friends and relations. In short, Carlo wasn’t going away, and the Dicastery may well consider what drove the haste.
   
   WITH ALL THAT SAID
   

5. The process at the Dicastery for Causes is exhaustive, and I don’t think is easily taken over or strong-armed — despite the various administrative and political dysfunctions surrounding the dicastery. The same friends who talked to The Economist talked to the dicastery. So did his medical caretakers, his teachers, and presumably his parish priest. With all that information — not just the enthusiasm of a loving mother — the dicastery proceeded. That shouldn’t be discounted entirely.
   
   Further, the declaration of a saint is an act of papal authority concerning faith and morals — and the consensus among theologians is that it is an act which binds the conscience of Catholics to belief. As that’s the case, I’m inclined to believe the act of declaring is protected from error by the Holy Spirit, even if there are reasonable questions about prudence, process, or timing that the Church can ask — questions which believers themselves can ask, in a spirit of synodality.

Again, I’m not really an Acutis guy. And if the conversation continues, we’ll do more reporting on him. I don’t think there’s a kind of “smoking gun” in The Economist’s report. But it might be useful if it helps us to think more soberly about who Acutis was, and how God might have acted to reveal himself in the young man’s good, holy, and faithful death.

One final note on this: I was amused by the presence of Msgr. Anthony Figueiredo, once a priest of Newark, who is now incardinated in a small Italian diocese, in the story of Carlo Acutis.

Figueiredo, according to The Economist — who seemingly got it from Figueiredo himself — became apparently a few years back a central figure in promoting Acutis’ cult of devotion.

That’s remarkable to me, because Figueiredo has previously identified himself as having had a close personal relationship with St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and being a close collaborator of Pope St. John Paul II. Then, when the McCarrick scandal emerged, he made headlines by saying that he had been for a while McCarrick’s man in Rome, the former cardinal’s “personal Roman secretary” — a fact that he hadn’t previously disclosed in any way whatsoever.

I was a bit surprised that Figueiredo got The Economist’s credit for advancing and popularizing Acutis’ cult, given that Acutis was beatified in 2020, the same year the priest moved to Assisi and got involved.

In either case, Figueiredo has had either a “Quantum Leap” level of serendipitous priesthood, or there’s been a little bit of storytelling going on along the way. So when The Economist leaned on him for a source, suffice it to say I’d suggest more reporting is probably merited.

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You know those inflatable figures at used car dealerships that wave around and attract your attention from the side of the road?

Well, if you like those, here’s a website for ya.

If you want something slower paced, watch this. Just not on a Friday in Lent.

Or something even more relaxed?

In short, I hope your day is as good as this guy’s.

Meanwhile, please be assured of our prayers. And please pray for us. We need it.

And happy new year.

Yours in Christ,

JD Flynn
editor-in-chief
The Pillar