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Happy Friday friends,
Pope Leo has called on all Catholics today to observe a day of fasting and prayer for peace. I certainly will, and I am sure I’ll be joining you all in doing so.
But, while you are doing that, please also enjoy a very happy feast of Our Lady Queen and Mother.
The creation of this feast dates back to 1954, the centenary year of the definitive pronouncement of the dogma of Immaculate Conception. Pius XII inaugurated the feast as part of the Church’s Marian year of celebration, originally setting the date as May 31, as a climax to that month’s special dedication to herself.
“Let her churches be thronged by the faithful,” the pope instructed, “her feast-days honored; may the beads of the Rosary be in the hands of all; may Christians gather, in small numbers and large, to sing her praises in churches, in homes, in hospitals, in prisons.”
It was subsequently moved by Pope St. Paul VI in 1969, who transferred it to today, as a closing memorial to the octave of the feast of the Assumption.
I am not sure if you have prison or hospital visiting on your agenda for the day — to my embarrassment, I do not. I can say the rosary, of course, and shall today. As I try to do every day.
Last week I was invited into one of those bizarre and obscure twitter fights, this one apparently concerning someone’s assertion that her teenage year old son must call home every day so she could check on his welfare — some people were very angry about it, it seems.
I’m not sure of the details, because I’d rather feed my fingers into a paper shredder than get involved in such pointless and performative online slap fights. But I confess I was mystified by the premise of people’s apparent anger for two reasons.
First, it seemed odd to me that a lad wouldn’t be in daily contact with his mother, barring some unusual circumstance like military service or a lengthy sea voyage. When I was in my teens, right until I rented my first apartment, I saw my mother every day, as I did my father and my siblings. We were what I like to call a “family,” so daily contact was rather the norm.
Second, the premise of the debate seemed to be that a mother wanting or expecting daily communication from her teenage son is somehow emasculating and morally stunting. I find this, too, odd.
I try to maintain regular, preferably daily contact with both my earthly mother and the BVM, one way or another. Both, in my experience, are women of strong character who, as Pius XII put it in his bull creating today’s feast “wield royal power, on fire with a mother's love.”
I know my mother(s) take a strong interest in my daily welfare, and they are eager to hear from me — why wouldn’t they be?
And, for myself, it isn’t a question of asking mom what I should wear or eat every day, or her presuming to try to tell me, it’s about something much more profound. My identity, the essence of who I am, is rooted in the identity of those who gave me life.
Being in regular touch with my mom, and Our Lady, is about deepening my understanding of myself, where I come from, what (and who) has shaped me. My identity as a father is a fruit of my identity as a son. My relationship with Christ was birthed and is maintained by the Church, the image and patroness of which is Mary Our Mother.
Yes, of course, all relationships must change as we age. An adult isn’t an adolescent, who isn’t a child, which isn’t an infant. But the idea that an intimate and rightly ordered relationship of love with one’s mother can necessarily mature only through speaking to each other less seems just absurd to me.
By way of extrapolation, more than analogy, would you tell an 18-year-old it’s unhealthy to say a daily rosary if he wants to grow up tough and independent? I think not.
So, young men, my advice is say your prayers and call your mom.
Here’s the news.
The News
Is there a “vocations crisis” in women's religious life? Depending on what you are reading, you could be forgiven for assuming there absolutely is.
But, as you might expect, the reality is a bit more nuanced. As Jack Figge reported this week, there are more than 500 women’s religious communities in the U.S., and many do report they have not had a new vocation in years. But others have — in fact they are growing.
So what draws young women to religious life, and to particular communities?
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The jailed Catholic newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai has been in court all week for the final stages of his sedition trial in Hong Kong.
Lai, who has spent some five years behind bars now, faces an uphill battle to prove his innocence — that’s putting it mildly. The general consensus on Hong Kong and abroad is that he is being railroaded as an example to others who might stand against the erosion of civil liberty in Hong Kong.
But if most dispassionate observers accept he is almost sure to be convicted, what then? In an analysis this week, I considered the cautious hopes of Lai’s friends and family that he could be released after being convicted and asked if, maybe, Lai’s best bet for freedom is actually intervention by the mainland government?
I think it might be. You can read the analysis here.
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Father Pius Pietrzyk, OP, is used to turning heads when he walks onto Capitol Hill. After all, it’s not every day that a habited Dominican priest walks through the halls of the U.S. Capitol.
But, in Fr. Pius’ case, it is a fairly regular event. For 15 years, he has served on the board of Legal Services Corporation, a publicly-funded nonprofit founded by Congress, which works to provide low-income people with legal services across the country.
He talked to Jack Figge about his work, and how a Dominican priest and canon lawyer ends up a presidential appointee.
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The Apostolic Vicariate of Southern Arabia announced this week the Vatican’s formal approval of its new patron saints and liturgical calendar.
The vicariate, which is of the Latin rite, covers the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Oman, and has 69 priests serving more than one million Catholics. And their new calendar has some pretty wild saints included.
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Summer is winding down, and soon Pope Leo will return from his second stint at Castel Gandolfo, moving into the newly refurbished papal apartments with a small community of Augustinians.
When he gets back, the pope will have a groaning intray to deal with and, while most of the summer speculation has centered around what if any major curial changes he might make, it will come as no surprise to you that I highlighted this week the job ahead of him regarding Vatican finances.
Given the weight of scandal and dysfunction which has stubbornly clung to Vatican financial affairs for decades, it would be understandable if Pope Leo is mulling a kind of “great reset” and gaming out how to reboot the entire curial system.
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Fact Checking
Following on from my analysis this week on Pope Leo’s uneviable task of coming to grips with Vatican finances, I got a bit of feedback I’d like to share and address.
A reader — one whose good faith I trust and whose judgement I value — told me he had read the piece on Tuesday and, presumably because he had an entire day free, actually followed all the links to previous stories and read them, too.
His question at the end of it all was this: What’s the point?
What purpose, he asked, is served by reporting, as we have, what the Vatican’s Council for the Economy was told in 2016 about efforts to sabotage the Secretariat for the Economy?
And what, really, is the hope for breaking news of a nearly decade-old investigation into potential money laundering at APSA?
For that matter, who cares how bad the state of the Vatican pension fund was 10 years ago, given Pope Francis conceded last year that it is pretty much bust? Isn’t it all just new old news, raking over the coals of past scandals?
These weren’t questions asked with cynicism or sarcasm, and I want to answer them as best I can.
For me, there are two reasons these stories matter and why we will continue to report them as we can — one reason is broad and one narrow.
The broad reason is that journalism is, as a professional vocation, a service to the truth. I hope that what we report, on Vatican financial affairs but on other issues to do with public accountability, contributes in some way to the historical record. Facts matter.
What really happened, when, why and how, is what the business of reporting the news is all about.
The Vatican has spent a decade and a half mired in a rolling series of financial scandals, alongside which we have seen unprecedented efforts to reform how curial economics are run. And, at this point, the Church seems to be worse off than when it began.
Understanding what worked, and what didn’t, what was actually tried, by whom, and blocked, and by whom, is something that should matter to everyone concerned with the Church today.
So when we report that there were internal warnings 10 years ago that some of Pope Francis’ key reforms were, in the words of an internal Vatican report, “useful to give the appearance of ongoing reform, but with no real substance,” that seems like essential context for assessing what has happened in the years since.
That’s part and parcel of the work of public accountability journalism, at least as I see it. And that is what we set The Pillar up to do — cover the minutiae of confusing, or as JD chooses to call it “unsexy,” stories which defy easy editorializing and lazy armchair diagnoses. I’ll happily leave that sort of thing to the thriving and profitable industry of “content creation” and hot takes — they are better at it then I could be if I tried, and I’m a big believer in the economic theory of specialization.
That’s the broad reason for following these stories. The narrow one I tried to explore a bit in my analysis this week, but I’ll unpack it a little more explicitly here.
We have a new pope.
He has inherited: a 1.5 billion euro pension black hole; a structural budget deficit estimated to be closer to 100 million euros than 50; a dysfunctional regulatory and legal system few of his own officials understand and fewer are invested in seeing work; and several ongoing court cases in Vatican City.
He needs all the help he can get.
I, as a Catholic and as a reporter, would like to do what I can to help him.
I’m often asked what I would tell the pope to do about Vatican finances if by some bizarre turn of events he asked me.