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Happy Friday friends.
If I am honest, I have been laboring under something of a lingering 4th of July hangover all week. I tried to shoot the festive moon last weekend: family in town, all day cook-out with friends from the parish, time at the pool, full-on fireworks display, the whole thing.
I concede now, as I am doing this week without the Barry Bonds-sized dosage of steroids which had me feeling so good last week, that I may have stretched myself a little thin, considering I’m still in the early stages of a recovery process I have already come to resent.
My recent convalescence meant I didn’t have this year my usual prep time for a long-smoke BBQ, so I pivoted to proper Chicago brats and sausage. I got a little over-ambitious with the homemade giardiniera and have been left with a… substantial quantity, currently hidden in the basement but soon to be discovered by my wife who will, no doubt, start asking awkward questions about what I plan to do with it all.
At one point, it looked like some summer storms were going to rain out the evening, but I ended up spending a good half an hour with my daughter watching transfixed on my lap as the fireworks exploded immediately overhead, launched from a baseball diamond, as we sat in the outfield while Ray Charles’s “America the Beautiful” played over the speakers.
I was basically living that scene from “The Sandlot,” and things got a little misty-eyed for a minute there.
It was a moment of profound gratitude for me. And, to be sure, I have a lot to be grateful for, with first thanks belonging to Providence, an appreciation for which has long been linked to celebrating The Glorious Fourth.
But my thanks properly belong also to the many of you reading this who are our subscribers. It’s a pretty incredible gig I have here, and it’s you who keep this show on the road.
Thanks for that.
Here’s the news.
The News
When the U.S. bishops’ conference met in Orlando last month, bishops voted to pass a revision to the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the USCCB’s landmark safeguarding document, first issued in 2002.
But while the revision passed, it did so amid some criticism. Victims’ advocacy groups gave it mixed reviews. Some had hoped for a document with a much wider vision of safeguarding, including the abuse and manipulation of vulnerable adults.
But bishops involved in the document’s revision said they followed a process of consultation, and that the body of American bishops decided not to expand the Charter’s scope, but to instead address related issues in a spate of documents to be released in coming years.
The Pillar talked with one such prelate, Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, who is chairman of the USCCB’s canonical affairs committee and was a member of the Charter revision working group. He addressed the consultation in the Charter revision process, what the USCCB will work on next, and his hope to address the challenge of electronic letters of suitability.
You can read that whole conversation right here.
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Following the schismatic slate of bishops created by the SSPX earlier this month, July will likely see a second act of illicit consecration, this time by a much more obscure group, the so-called Transalpine Redemptorists.
If you have never heard of them, they are a kind of SSPX splinter faction — initially having broken away to rejoin communion with the Church under Benedict XVI but now well out beyond even the Lefebvrists for schism.
You can read all about them, and what they are planning, right here.
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Nicaraguan human rights activists have raised alarm over the welfare and whereabouts of Bishop Abelardo Mata.
The bishop was briefly detained by the Nicaraguan regime on June 29 and while authorities claim he was returned home later that day, no one outside the security forces has been able to establish contact with him since.
Read the full report here, and pray for the bishop, and for the persecuted Church in Nicaragua.
And when you do, remember that it was the public act of praying for this intention that got the bishop detained in the first place.
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Spanish Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, SDB, Archbishop of Rabat, Morocco, said this week that he will temporarily step back from public ministry, amid a Vatican investigation into allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior toward at least five women.
Meanwhile, a priest who is the cardinal’s cousin has appeared to confirm the veracity of the allegations in a newspaper column, and said the cardinal is privately prepared to lose his rank as a consequence.
This is, well, a pretty unusual sequence of events, as these things go.
You can read all about it here.
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Norway’s Bishop Fredrik Hansen announced Wednesday that he is taking the first steps toward opening the cause for canonization of Nobel Prize-winning author Sigrid Undset.
Hansen, the Bishop of Oslo, made the announcement July 8, while celebrating Mass during an annual pilgrimage to the island of Selja in honor of St. Sunniva, the 10th-century martyr revered as Norway’s first saint.
If the cause reaches its conclusion, Undset would become Norway’s second female saint after Sunniva and the second Nobel Prize laureate to be canonized after Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
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The apostolic administrator of the Diocese of Quelimane, Mozambique, has condemned media speculation over last month’s killing of Bishop Osório Citora Afonso.
Bishop Afonso was killed in his home, which is a secured diocesan compound, by gunshot wound to his chest in June.
The initial theory of investigators was that armed criminals had scaled the perimeter and bypassed the security system, with what motivation was not clear.
Now, though, local newspapers have published reports that the working theory has shifted to an assassination plot from within the diocesan curia.
You can read all about it here.
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The president of Seton Hall University has been cleared by an independent report into a previous independent investigation launched by the Archdiocese of Newark in the wake of the Cardinal McCarrick scandal.
An independent report, commissioned by Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark in early 2025 and published July 1, concluded that Msgr. Joseph Reilly had “acted promptly and substantively” in response to instances of sexual harassment at on-campus seminaries in 2012.
According to the report, complied by the law firm Ropes & Gray, Reilly failed to follow the university’s Policy Against Sexual Harassment by not informing the Seton Hall Title IX Coordinator about the incidents “because he was not aware that he was obligated to do so.”
Read all about the report, and what led to it, right here.
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Germany’s 27 dioceses received a year-on-year increase in church tax revenue in 2025, despite losing more than 300,000 registered Catholics in the same year.
The German bishops’ conference announced this week that dioceses received 6.751 billion euros (around $7.72 BILLION) via the church tax system in 2025, up from 6.628 billion ($7.58 BILLION) in 2024 and 6.515 billion ($7.45 BILLION) in 2023.
German commentators have dubbed the counterintuitive phenomenon in which church tax revenue rises while the number of German Catholics shrinks the “church tax miracle” (Kirchensteuerwunder).
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Private wars
Cardinal Robert McElroy gave an interview this week while in Rome, addressing his recent dismissal of Msgr. Stephen Rossetti from serving as an exorcist in and for the Archdiocese of Washington.
For those unfamiliar with the circumstances, Rossetti’s removal from service in the archdiocese last month followed his appearance on a popular YouTube channel, where he gave an interview in which he opined, inter alia, that “probably many, if not most, UFO sightings are in fact demons.”
At the time, McElroy explained that Rossetti’s comments “gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism.” And the priest in turn apologized publicly for any and all ways in which his comments may “have failed to remain fully obedient to the Magisterium of the Church.”
In his interview published this week, the cardinal explained his thinking a bit further, saying his objection wasn’t to Rossetti’s speculation about aliens and demons, per se, but more generally about the entire nature of the ministry of exorcism.
“It wasn’t touching on the question of UFOs. My major objection is that I think the traditional role of an exorcist is a very private one,” said McElroy. “It’s a sacred one.”
“I think the more traditional approach of an exorcist is a private, within-the-life-of-the-Church ministry to help individuals who are in crisis and seem to be demonically possessed. It shouldn’t go beyond that for people who are doing exorcism.”
Now, I don’t know anything definite about Rossetti, I have never spoken to him, and I am not in a position to render any kind of verdict on his particular case, so I want to be clear that I am not doing so. All I can say for sure is he seems to have made some ill-judged remarks on UFOs and the demonic, and received the correction of the local archbishop with exceptional docility and meekness, which speaks a great deal in his favor.
So again: I have no particular insight into, and therefore am not making a commentary on the specifics of the Rossetti case, one way or another.
But on the general principle, I have to say, I don’t always agree with Cardinal McElroy. But when I do, I really agree with him.