Pillar paid subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Happy Friday friends,
It’s good to be back. I mean that.
As much as I enjoy and look forward to the annual Christmas break, by the end I am genuinely eager to get back into the ordinary swing of things.
Indeed, this Sunday closes the liturgical season with the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, after which we find ourselves once again in Ordinary Time, an easily misunderstood season and one which I try to give its proper due every January.
“Ordinary” is a much abused word in our common usage. We tend to throw it around, meaning quotidian, common, without significance. Our democratic sensibilities require us to protest that to be an “ordinary” man or woman is no bad thing, but we reasonably tend to prefer the extraordinary, whenever we can get it.
Ordinary Time, though, is far from this conception of the word.
We can mistake it to mean “unspecial,” the bits of the year when nothing very much is happening, every day just the same as another — a season of spinning our wheels and twiddling our thumbs until Lent begins and we start looking forward to Easter.
Actually, it is the opposite. Ordinary Time, in the sense the Church applies the word here, means literally ordered time, or better put “numbered time.” It is the season of progress — our progress — through history, towards our end.
The Christian experience of time isn’t circular, it is linear. Our extraordinary seasonal devotions don’t come to break up the monotony but to punctuate (depending on your point of view) how far we’ve come or how fast we’re running out of time.
Ordinary Time isn’t, to my mind, a long, disjointed season of not-very-much-going-on, but a period of constant urgency.
Over Christmas I was considering everything that has happened in the five years since we started The Pillar, since I found out I was to be a father, and the way time continues to telescope around me. There’s a lot — but a lot — that needs doing this year, and God willing the next, and the one after that. And I don’t mean just with work or with family, or even primarily with those.
As Pope Leo reminded the College of Cardinals this week, the real urgency is for the mission, to make known the love of Christ Risen to all peoples, most especially to the one standing in front of me, whoever they may be.
I’m grateful for the time I got at Christmas to rest and reflect, but there is work to be done. The urgency is for the mission, and the days are numbered.
Let’s get to work.
Here’s the news.
The News
The top Church story this week, of course, has been the meeting of the College of Cardinals in Rome for an extraordinary consistory.
The extent to which the mood amongst the college has changed since Leo’s election is hard to overstate — as Edgar Beltran reported, even the staunchly progressive Cardinal Hollerich went into the meetings saying he could foresee a more “flexiblist” approach to the TLM coming in the future.
That’s just not something anyone could have imagined a year ago.
—
As I wrote in an analysis this week, Leo’s consistory is billed very much as a papal listening session for the college — a body which got used to being ignored under Francis.
And I do not think it is an accident that the major topics the pope flagged for possible discussion (synodality, liturgy, Church governance) encapsulate the most contentious acts of Leo’s predecessor.
—
A clear and early sign of Leo’s idea of synodality came yesterday at the close of the consistory, when the pope announced the meetings would become annual events.
Leo said that he had listened to the feedback of the college, which reported that they liked the format of the consistory, but wanted more time together and more space to talk about multiple topics, rather than having to choose which ones to address in a tight window.
So, after another two-day meeting later this year in June, the consistories will then meet annually from 2027 onward for double-wide sessions.
—
Archbishop Bernard Hebda of St. Paul-Minneapolis called for prayer and an end to division after a Minnesota woman was killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday.
“We continue to be at a time in this country when we need to lower the temperature of rhetoric, stop fear-filled speculation and start seeing all people as created in the image and likeness of God,” Hebda said in a Jan. 7 statement.
“That is as true for our immigrant sisters and brothers as it is for our elected officials and those who are responsible for enforcing our laws.”
Hebda’s statement came hours after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed in a residential area of Minneapolis Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman who lived in the Twin Cities.
You can read the whole story here.
—
When the German bishops gather for a plenary assembly in February, they will decide who will lead the country’s powerful episcopal conference for the next six years.
There is an obvious candidate: the incumbent bishops’ conference chairman, Bishop Georg Bätzing. But just weeks before the vote, his re-election is shrouded in uncertainty — indeed it isn’t sure he will even stand for election.
Why is there an element of doubt? Who are the other possible candidates? And what challenges are likely to await whoever leads the German bishops’ conference next?
Luke Coppen takes a look right here.
—
A Ghanaian archbishop has said that Rome rejected recent funding applications from his archdiocese, arguing that the local Catholic community is sufficiently large to provide for its own needs.
Archbishop John Bonaventure Kwofie told priests, religious, and lay collaborators that the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization had classified the Archdiocese of Accra as a “big archdiocese” in a “big city,” limiting its eligibility for funds.
Like other Ghanaian dioceses, the Accra archdiocese is financially dependent upon the dicastery which oversees the Church’s mission territories. And Kwofie is not the first African Church leader to report a reduction in financial support from the dicastery.
So what is happening, and what are the consequences of the funding cuts?
—
Of course, not every single cardinal made it to Rome. One of the most notable absentees this week was Nicaraguan Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, who made the very surprising claim that he did not attend the consistory because he “was not invited.”
We found that statement, made to local television, shocking, not to say literally incredible. But, having spoken to local clergy and sources close to the bishops conference in Nicaragua, Edgar Beltran reported that the cardinal may have had other reasons for not traveling.
“It’s more likely that he was invited but was not allowed to leave the country by the Ortega regime,” one told us.
It’s an interesting question whether Brenes decided not to leave the country out of a kind of prudence, or whether the government is actively blocking his departure. As we’ve been reporting for some time, nothing about the Church’s situation in Nicaragua is straightforward.
Leo’s law of attraction
I’ve been riveted by the extraordinary consistory in Rome this week.
As has been observed ad nauseum, the sheer novelty of the gathering, after their long abeyance under Francis, made what had long been a normal event something special. And, for that reason, a certain atmosphere of anticipation was to be expected.
Also to be expected, I suppose, was the knee-jerk framing of the meeting by much of the commentariat as though this were still the Francis era. I’ve seen a lot of takes along the lines of “Leo slams door on conservatives” or “Leo to end synodality” and similar.
It’s not an edifying thing to say of a pope, but it is, I think, at this point virtually inarguable that division and conflict were hallmarks of the Francis years — not for nothing did “anti-Francis” become a daily entry in the Church’s general lexicon, thrown around sometimes as a reasonable descriptor but as often or more with a hint of unhinged ecclesiastical McCarthyism.
It is going to take a minute, we should accept, for that collective muscle memory to wear off.
I think we should also expect that the business of online commentary incentivizes a whole swath of people to perpetuate division and rancour as the Church’s proper resting heartrate. I don’t think we should accept that, though.
Mercifully, Pope Leo seems to have a very different way of thinking and talking about the Church, one which is already making such tribalists look downright absurd.