Bad breakfast, four more years, and common people
The Friday Pillar Post
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Happy Friday friends,
And hello from Rome where the synod on synodality approaches the final(?) finish line this weekend.
After an entire month of sessions, I would expect that many, if not all of the delegates are eager to get home, however fruitful their sessions have been.
I’ve only been away for a week, and I have one eye on the exit. Not that being in Rome isn’t supremely valuable for our work, of course. Though if I am being honest my focus hasn’t been entirely on the synod.
I’ve been going to the press conferences, of course, in case something important is said. But really I’ve been spending my time seeing a number of old (and new) friends around the curia, helping to fill in the picture on a few of the other stories we’ve been covering — more reporting to follow.
No, if I want to head home it’s because if there is an antithesis of “synodality” — however you define it — it’s the breakfast room of a Roman hotel during tourist season.
Where I am staying, the breakfast service is an absolute Babel of costume, culture, manners, and social mores. But there is no communion here, only chaos; I find I simply cannot face it much longer.
Perhaps it’s because I am not a “morning person,” but the cacophony of conversations had at full volume (who talks at the breakfast table, I ask you?) is positively jarring to my sensitive soul, and the apparent unfamiliarity of some with the concept of queueing upsets me deeply.
This morning, having poured myself a coffee, I set it down on the counter while I reached for a pastry, only to have a man appear at my elbow and whisk my cup and saucer off to his own table.
Still other people appear to think that a hotel dining room operates entirely like a high school cafeteria, and that you’re free to sit at any old table you think looks worth joining. I had a near panic attack the other day when one particular couple either decided that I looked lonely at my table or that I was entirely invisible, and just helped themselves to seats.
I don’t know what shook me more, their aspect as a couple — she dressed in leather trousers with an enormous black velvet bow in her hair and he in jean shorts, a loud print t-shirt, fanny pack, and the most offensive mullet I can ever remember seeing — or their look of total confusion when I jumped like scalded cat as they sat down.
My nerves simply cannot take many more mornings like this.
Anyway, I’m still here, for now. So here’s the news.
The News
The top story this week is the release of the new papal encyclical Dilexit nos.
The press conference launching the document tried hard to sell this as a kind of spiritual/internal companion piece to Laudato Si and Fratelli tutti which were more externally focused on the state of the world. I suppose that’s probably a fair argument? I don’t especially care, if I am being honest.
I enjoyed reading it purely on its own terms, and Dilexit nos is a quite powerful and often beautiful reflection on the nature of the human heart, the devotion to the Sacred Heart, and the irreplaceable centrality of His love for us, not just to our faith but to the whole of human existence.
But, really, I would urge you to try to find the time this weekend to read Dilexit nos for yourself. It’s worth it.
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The pope’s safeguarding commission has announced the “imminent” release of its first annual report on the Church’s worldwide efforts to protect minors and vulnerable adults.
According to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, the report will “provide an assessment of the nature and effectiveness of safeguarding policies and procedures in the Church, and offer recommendations for continuous improvement.”
So, why is the report significant? What do we know about its contents? And what should we look out for when it’s released?
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A fortune teller allegedly tied to Bulgarian organized crime is suspected of enabling the theft of $67 million from Caritas Luxembourg.
I’ll say that again: a literal, actual, FORTUNE TELLER has emerged as the key suspect in a a gigantic theft which has all but shuttered an international Catholic aid agency.
The authorities seem to be having some progress in tracking where the cash went, even if not in recovering any of it. Around 25 million euros of the stolen cash is now believed to be in China, another 10 million in Hong Kong, and roughly 8 million in Lithuania.
Just read the whole thing. I mean… just read it for yourselves.
—
A minor bit of synodal shenanigans broke out this week, when Kinshasa’s Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo was asked during a press conference about recent comments by Fr. (soon to be cardinal) Timothy Radcliffe OP suggesting foreign financial pressures played a part in African bishops’ opposition to Fiducia supplicans last year.
“We’ve read the article ourselves, but we [the African bishops] are at the synod following the meditations of Fr. Radcliffe, and I can’t recognize at all what Fr. Radcliffe said in the article you mentioned,” Ambongo said.
“Fr. Radcliffe came to me before we began [the session] because he also read the article only yesterday, and he is shocked that such things may have been written attributing these things to him. Fr. Radcliffe has never said these things and this does not correspond at all to his personality.”
This seemed like news to us, since Radcliffe’s comments were carried under his own byline in L’Osservatore Romano, published and owned by the Dicastery for Communications, and Cardinal Ambongo appeared to be saying the Dominican cardinal-elect was disowning his own piece.
But oh no. The following day the Vatican press office circulated a statement from Fr. Radcliffe “making a few points clear,” chief among them that the article which he had discussed with Ambongo and disavowed was not his piece in L’Osservatore Romano, but a comment piece on it by another writer elsewhere.
“I never wrote or suggested that positions taken by the Catholic Church in Africa were influenced by financial considerations,” Radcliffe further clarified. “I was acknowledging only that the Catholic Church in Africa is under tremendous pressure from other religions and churches which are well funded by outside sources.”
Now, elderly European churchmen saying condescending and slightly catty things about their African colleagues before clarifying they never did any such thing has actually become a fairly standard part of the synodal landscape over the last ten years or so.
But given how senior Cardinal Ambongo is, and how important a role Radcliffe has had in the synodal sessions, I think it's in everyone’s interest if we assume nothing here and just go to the tapes. Intelligent readers can see for themselves what we’re talking about.
Here’s what Radcliffe wrote, himself, discussing the “firm rejection” of Fiducia supplicans by the African bishops:
“African bishops are under intense pressure from Evangelicals, with American money; from Russian Orthodox, with Russian money; and from Muslims, with money from the rich Gulf countries.”
Now, here’s what the writer Phil Lawler wrote in the commentary piece which Radcliffe says misrepresented the above:
“Father Radcliffe would have us believe that the external pressure on Africans [sic] culture reflects the financial clout of American Evangelicals and Russian Orthodox… Is Father Radcliffe asking us to believe that the financial power of the Russian Orthodox Church—in Africa, not a hotbed of Orthodoxy—can rival the influence of Planned Parenthood?”
As I say, reasonable readers can decide for themselves how much distance they can see between the original text and its apparent “misinterpretation.”
Four more years
In and amongst the synodal shenanigans this week, the Holy See announced that it has renewed its “Provisional Agreement regarding the Appointment of Bishops” with the Chinese government for four years — up from the previously rolling two year renewals since the deal was originally struck in 2018.
“The Vatican Party remains dedicated to furthering the respectful and constructive dialogue with the Chinese Party, in view of the further development of bilateral relations for the benefit of the Catholic Church in China and the Chinese people as a whole,” the statement said.
There are a couple of observations that immediately suggest themselves here.
The first is that one of the points of “consensus” would appear to be allowing the Chinese government to draft “the Vatican Party’s” statement for it.
The second, as I noted in an analysis this week, is that there have been some real, and really interesting, developments with regard to the Church on the mainland in recent months. But none of them do much if anything to resolve the real issues which have emerged over the last six years — by which I mean clear violations of the agreement by Beijing.
The government was still, as of earlier this year, arresting dissenting bishops. There are still, right now, multiple mainland dioceses, on the very existence of which the CCP and the Vatican do not have “consensus.”
Forward progress is a reasonable thing for both sides to want, and to want to focus on, though I suspect that the Holy See is putting a brave face on what has become a diplomatic hostage situation, and praying for the best.
But I find it ludicrous — and telling — that while journalists here in Rome are treated (subjected) to near daily servings of anodyne pablum from panels of synodal participants, there has not been, and will not be, a single opportunity for the press to ask questions about the Vatican-China deal’s renewal.
The only real “consensus” I can see is that neither Rome nor Beijing are willing to engage in any frank or fair assessment of the real results of their agreement, six years after it was first announced.
Bishops, noble and common
Amidst the clamor in Rome this week, synodal participants of all stripes have been repeating the mantra that the synod is not a parliament of bishops. By coincidence, back in the UK this week, actual episcopal parliamentarians have been very much in the news.
By centuries-old custom, 28 of the most senior bishops of the Church of England enjoy ex officio membership of the House of Lords, the upper legislative chamber of the UK Parliament, charged with revising and amending legislation on its way into law.
A move is now afoot to expel them, in the interests of making the unelected chamber more “representative” and “democratic.”
Somewhat perversely, calls to expel the bishops are coming not from the new Labour government, whom you might instinctively expect to sympathize with the idea but are in fact trying to head it off. The move comes instead from a clutch of Conservative MPs, ordinarily reflexive defenders of institutional continuity.
This bit of political inversion is all thanks to a move by the government — promised in their election manifesto — to overhaul the House of Lords, beginning by expelling the 92 remaining hereditary peers who survived the last round of constitutional class warfare, which followed the election of the previous Labour government in 1997.
The Tories calling for the bishops to be turfed out along with the last of the aristos are arguing — some suspect mischievously — that the government plans don’t go far enough, and Labour are trying to kill the issue lest it gum up the speedy legislative process.
Complicating the calculus, the Anglican bishops themselves tend to be reliably left-wing in their political interventions, on the rare occasions they bestir themselves to take their seats in Westminster at all — they only actually show up for about 6% of the chamber’s votes.
It is, I grant, somewhat absurd that Britain is the only country, apart from Iran, to constitutionally enshrine the participation of clerics in the legislative process. And given that only about 2% of the country are actively practicing Anglicans, their spiritual lordships can hardly be said to be speaking for some important national demographic.
Conservative (small ‘c’) calls for retaining the bishops tend to argue that kicking out the hereditary peers and bishops is all of a piece with undermining the foundations of the monarchy, and to lose one (or both) is to put the country on a glide path to republicanism (small ‘r’) and the disestablishment of the national Church.
I think those warnings are somewhat overwrought — plenty of countries have constitutional monarchies without the aristocracy sitting in the legislature.
And, perversely, I think the shrinking attendance at Church of England services, and the relative silence and anonymity of its episcopate, are actually an argument for retaining its legal status. It increasingly now serves a mostly national decorative function, lending solemnity to public occasions, without actually imposing any demands of dogma or discipline on anyone.
But while I would, I suppose, defend the place of Anglican bishops in the Lords on general principle, I won’t really see their departure, should it come, as anything much to lament, simply because I think the House of Lords has become a ridiculous institution over the last 25 years.
The real rot set in with the Life Peerages Act of 1958, which cleared the way for successive governments to cram the upper house with party place-men (and women), but worse came in the late 1990s, when the bulk hereditary aristocrats were turfed out and the “Lords” was almost entirely turned over to political cronies, party donors, and superannuated politicians who couldn’t keep their seats.
Since then, the upper chamber has morphed into a kind of technocratic chamber of life-time party appointees — albeit with some notably independent bright stars, like my old friend Clare Fox — lacking both democratic accountability and mandate but consumed by establishment politics.
Ironically, as a class, the hereditary peerage (who’s generational wealth was largely eroded through targeted taxation in the post-war decades) now probably represents a more diverse group of people, by education, political disposition, employment history and creed, than does the current House of Lords.
While I’d unironically vote to bring them all back and restore the upper house to its pre-reform state, I’m not sure the current iteration of the chamber has anything to recommend it on constitutional paper — and it’s only likely to get worse with a new round of half-arsed tinkering.
Bishops or no bishops, the slow motion train wreck of House of Lords reform shows the dangers of dramatic, spasmodic, reforms to ancient institutions made as short-term answers to contemporary calls for change.
There’s a lesson for the Church in there somewhere I’m sure, if I thought about it. But I’ve got to go see a man about the final synodal document.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
Your description of the breakfast room in a Roman hotel is absolutely horrifying. I, too, would be startled if a strangely dressed couple just parked themselves at my table, but I would be even more offended at someone absconding with my anti-murder juice, I mean, coffee.
Thanks for the history primer on the House of Lords, Ed! I appreciate it!