Hey everybody,
Today is Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, and the final day of Fastelavn, or if you prefer, Carnival.
Tomorrow begins Lent: We’ll go into the desert with Jesus, who himself went into the desert like his ancestors did, wandering 40 years while they waited for God to bring them into his promise.
Before Lent begins, I’ll give you the take that might prove my most controversial yet.
Ready?
Here it is.
King cake is terrible.
Whether it’s for Epiphany or Mardi Gras, if you see a dry brioche covered in a thick armor of teeth-shattering sugar paste — probably green-and-purple dyed — you should get out of there.
New Orleans people, and their kin folk in the much cooler city of Mobile, are sure to blanch at my truth-telling here. They’ll probably insist that anyone who doesn’t like king cake hasn’t had the genuine article.
That might be true. Like most Americans, I’ve only had king cake from the grocery store, and I’ve found it uniformly awful — stale before it even hits the shelf, and sure to test the limits of both your dental fillings and your body’s capacity to produce insulin.
It’s no good, and everyone knows it.
If the Gulf Coast version is something different, its promoters ought to get serious about defending their intellectual property from the inedible version most of us have tried in the office break room.
Still, with all that said, the king cake custom is responsible for one of the most surreal minor league baseball logos in recent history — the now-defunct New Orleans Baby Cakes.
If any Louisianan can get me a Baby Cakes jersey, I’ll change my tune on king cake, I promise.
Even if the King Cake Baby is the creepiest mascot in sport:
Let’s do the news.
The news
“The [contract] termination effects a government-wide refusal to spend funds that Congress appropriated for a statutorily mandated purpose based on a policy disagreement,” USCCB lawyers told a judge Feb. 28.
“The suspension continues to inflict irreparable harm on USCCB because, as the termination notices make clear, the suspension is the reason that the government will continue to deny reimbursement requests for costs USCCB and its partners incurred between January 24 and February 27 — preventing USCCB from receiving the funds necessary to carry out its mission to assist the refugees the government already placed in its care,” they added.
The conference asked the judge to rule that the federal government has to pay millions for contracted work already performed, and that the State Department’s decision last week to cancel its migration contracts with the USCCB is illegal.
The suit — and the disagreement — are fast becoming a major issue for the bishops’ conference, especially after the government raised the stakes last week.
In a story that’s seen one young Catholic occupy the parish ambo to defend Fr. Charles Jacobs, and dozens show up to protest, an archdiocesan spokesman is being unusually candid about his read of things too: While supporters say the priest only took money to help the poor, the archdiocese said it is “patently absurd” to regard Fr. Jacobs as a “modern-day Robin Hood.”
As for Fr. Jacobs himself?
Well, he told a local news station that Archbishop Christopher Coyne has “had no use for me” in the archdiocese — in part, the priest said, because his Masses are “pet-friendly,” and Catholics are encouraged to bring their dogs and cats to worship.
Meanwhile, an expert on parish theft told The Pillar that no matter what happens with the protest, the 73-year-old Jacobs is likely to eventually reach a “plea agreement and repayment plan acceptable to all parties involved.”
This story has a lot — even cats and dogs. Give it a read.
Given that the bishops’ strong condemnation of the AfD party seemed to have little effect on voting habits in the country, it’s worth asking what’s next for the German bishops. And Luke Coppen did just that, in a Look Closer analysis worth reading.
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Archbishop John Wilson of Southwark, England, has an idea. Or a proposal, really.
He proposes three new sets of mysteries for the rosary, drawn from the Gospel, and influenced by the life of St. Oscar Romero: The mysteries of charity; the mysteries of compassion and mercy; and the mysteries of justice and peace.
You might think this is a good idea. You might not. But Wilson says he hopes the idea might encourage more people to consider, pray, and love the rosary.
He talked with Luke about all of that this week.
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Ash Wednesday is tomorrow, Lent begins, and Easter is April 20.
Around the school pick-up line, and in conversations at the parish, I find people keep commenting to me about how Easter is “so late this year.”
Maybe I’m inattentive — ok! Fine! Yes, I am inattentive — but when I hear people say that, I usually just nod to be polite. I realize that Easter comes to us in the spring, but I have never been especially aware of the range of dates in which it might fall.
Until now.
See, it turns out Brendan Hodge had the same problem. So he decided to identify the possible range of Easter dates, and chart their frequency over a 500 year period.
Armed with that data, it turns out that — guess what?! — Easter is pretty late this year.
Along the way, Brendan also offered a very systematic account of a difficult job that has vexed the Church a couple of times — calculating when Easter should be commemorated.
This is a very good read, on a very interesting historical subject, and it’s the kind of stuff I love for The Pillar to publish.
Plus it’s inspired all kinds of interesting pedantry in the comments.
Being great and good
In 2003, President George W. Bush launched a program that aimed to address the crisis of HIV/AIDS around the world, most especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where the AIDS epidemic has killed millions.
The program — the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — aimed to marshall federal agencies to prevent HIV infection across the globe.
In total, PEPFAR claims to have saved 25 million lives around the world, and prevented transmission of the virus between mothers and children — allowing almost eight million babies to be born without HIV. The program has also provided the kind of treatment which ensures that children born with HIV have hopes to live an ordinary, flourishing life.
In short, PEPFAR has changed the face of AIDS — and ensured that around the world, an HIV diagnosis doesn’t have to be a death sentence.
To be sure, the program is not without issues. Controversially, for example, it provides low-cost or free condoms to African countries, as a means of preventing the spread of HIV. Some advocates of the program say those condoms protect women from the potentially viral consequences of infidelity or sexual assault, especially as HIV transmission is a significant risk for women in the countries PEPFAR serves.
Advocate Leah Libresco Sargeant mentioned to me the other day Benedict XVI’s 2010 remark, that some use of condoms in illicit sexual activity could be seen as “a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants.”
Still, in the same interview, Benedict said that condom use “is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.”
And other advocates of the PEPFAR — among them the USCCB — say that the distribution of condoms should be curtailed, because it can “diminish the value that persons attribute to one another and even increase risk-taking behavior, which should be considered in pursuing holistic and authentic solutions.”
But while the USCCB criticizes that aspect of the program, it praises on the whole “PEPFAR’s extraordinary life-saving work to date,” and has recently expressed “strong, ongoing support for its goals and hope for its robust continuation.”
Sargeant pointed out to me that the program’s provision of anti-retroviral therapy and post-exposure prophylaxis — anti-HIV drugs taken very soon after possible exposure — are increasingly significant for dramatically decreasing the transmission risk of HIV.
To a lot of policy observers, the program is particularly remarkable because its budget has been basically flat since 2009, costing the federal government roughly $6.5 billion annually.
At present, the program is suspended by the Trump administration’s freeze of foreign aid funding.
In a NY Times column last month, Sergeant and three other pro-life PEPFAR advocates said that a 90-day freeze in PEPFAR funding means “an estimated 136,000 babies will be infected with H.I.V. at birth who otherwise would not be.”
In his first term, President Trump worked to ensure that PEPFAR contractors neither promote nor perform abortions — he saw to it that the program was audited to that effect, and violators saw their funding terminated.
But in his second term, the program’s pause could lead to death — one African doctor says it means his Kenyan hospital will be without funding to treat its 3,160 HIV patients. On the whole, the funding freeze impacts millions of such patients.
On Friday, advocates are planning to rally, many of them pro-life, outside the State Department to see funding restored as soon as possible. Many say their pro-life convictions compel them to do so.
By scale and scope, they say the program will continue to save millions of lives annually. And they say that’s the kind of project which makes America great.
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Please be assured of our prayers this Lent, and please pray for us. We need it.
Be careful of the King Cake Baby. He’s out there, somewhere.
Yours in Christ,
JD Flynn
editor-in-chief
The Pillar
