Hey everybody,
Today’s Tuesday, in the third week of Advent, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
If I’m honest, readers, I’ve been putting off writing this newsletter until the last possible moment.
I’m shaken today by the enormity of sin on full display over the past weekend: by the antisemitic Bondi Beach attack, by the school shooting at Brown University, by the brutal killing of husband and wife by their own son.
Those things seem like the triumph of death over life, of violence over peace — and they threaten the victory of despair over hope.
But Jesus is coming.
Jesus, who promises that the evil of our own hearts can be conquered through love — and that we can actually love as God loves.
Jesus, who says that everything we think about ourselves and the world is made different because he became a man, and died, and then rose from the dead.
Jesus, who gives new meaning to death itself.
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Today is a kind of traditionally and locally observed devotional feast in some quarters, for a guy from the 1300s venerated as Blessed Adolphus. He was part of an order called the Mercedarians, which was founded in the 1200s to ransom Christian slaves, held in Muslim Spain and North Africa, when they had no one else to arrange their ransom.
The friars would pay, if they’d been given money to do so, or they’d trade themselves for the slaves, who could then be freed and return to their families.
For his part, Adolphus traveled in 1314 to Tunisia with two other friars — Blesseds Arnoldo and James — to free Christian slaves. I have no idea how successful they were. But when they were traveling back to Europe, their ship was captured by pirates. Adolphus and companions were taken prisoner, along with the Christian and Muslim passengers aboard their boat.
Adolphus figured he was there to minister to captives, so he should keep at it. He spent a lot of time with the non-Christian prisoners, it seems, teaching the Gospel to them. Again, I’ve no idea how successful he was.
But I do know the effort got him killed, his captors apparently tired of his constant evangelizing.
In any light but the Gospel, that’s a sad story.
But in light of Christ, it’s exactly the one we need. Adolphus knew that Christ transforms everything, and ransoms every captive. He gave his life to that knowledge, secure in the hope of resurrection.
The news of the week is that the human heart is capable of myriad kinds of darkness, all of which end in destruction, absent grace. The problem which gives way to despair is sin.
It’s not enough to hope we can carve out some enclave of peace for ourselves. It’s certainly not enough to nurse muddled fantasies about policy solutions or battlefield victories.
The answer to sin is only Jesus Christ. And the proclamation of Jesus Christ is only ours to take up.
There is not a reason to despair, but only because Christ is coming — at Christmas, and in the fullness of time. His grace is sufficient to transform violence into peace, and death into life.
But each of us has a role to play, and the urgency is clear.
The news
It’s a “simple book,” the pope said, but the simplicity is deceptive — it is a text written from a seriously rich and vibrant interior life, with suggestions of a pathway to get there.
But don’t take my word for it. At The Pillar, when we want to talk about spiritual things, we talk with Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim, Norway.
Here’s what he had to say about “The Practice of the Presence of God”:
“We do well to practice attentiveness; to nurture silence when we can; to avoid getting stuck in self-centered mental patterns, constantly rehearsing our plans, wounds, and cravings, projecting our lives into some hypothetical, virtual future instead of living in the present.
To learn to pray is to learn to opt for what is real. At the human, natural level I think it’s good advice to spend some time each day doing nothing, simply being still and alert: this is more difficult than it sounds, given the distractions that surround us on all sides, claiming us. Wouldn’t it be good to affirm our personal freedom in their regard?”
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In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo urged leaders Sunday to embrace a peace plan proposed by Catholic and Protestant leaders — as fighting continues in his country’s eastern region despite a U.S.-brokered peace deal.
Ambongo criticized the U.S. peace deal, along with other international efforts to stop a Congolese-Rwandan war, by saying they “subtly exclude the Congolese people and seek to normalize the systematic plundering of Congo’s resources.”
That’s a sharp rebuke, and a push for political leaders to take a different tack, proposed by the country’s episcopal conference, along with a coalition of Protestant ministers.
And the cardinal was stern, saying that lives would have been saved if politicians had already listened to the country’s religious leaders.
“What a waste of time! What a waste of victims that could have been avoided! That is why we condemn, with the utmost energy, as we have already done in other circumstances, all those who see war as the solution to this crisis,” the cardinal said Sunday.
Ambongo is a man who doesn’t mess around. And he seems determined right now to stop a war displacing thousands of people, in a resource-rich country beset by violence, where outside actors, including the U.S., are often perceived to be driven by a desire for mineral rights, rather than peace.
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Lai has been convicted of seditious activity under the provisions of a much opposed National Security Law restricting freedom of speech in Hong Kong.
In an analysis yesterday, Ed Condon asks what message the Chinese government intends to convey by Lai’s conviction, and by what penalty he’ll face next.
The situation exposed a long-running tension in Vatican diplomacy: the attempt to advocate for peace in Venezuela without seeming blind to the human rights abuses fueling Venezuela’s crisis.
The Holy See has long prioritized protecting clergy and preserving its role as mediator, opting for quiet diplomacy instead of public confrontation. But the plausibility of that restraint is wearing thin.
So how do you solve a problem like Maduro?
That’s what Cardinal Pietro Parolin is now mulling inside the Apostolic Palace. And if the U.S. launches a ground invasion in the country, the multivalent situation will be all the more complex for the Church to discuss.
Edgar Beltran — himself a Venezuelan national — breaks down a complicated situation.
Both countries are more than 90% Buddhist, and in conflict with each other — and Catholics aiming to provide humanitarian aid have been caught in the middle of the war.
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Finally in the news, reports are emerging from Rome that Pope Leo’s planned consistory of cardinals in January will include discussion of three topics: evangelization, Vatican governance/organization, and liturgy.
That the pope is having a consistory at all is remarkable and, for many people, refreshing: “Extraordinary consistories,” as they’re formally called, are meetings of cardinals, convened by the pope to advise him on the needs and life of the Church. And among the most common complaints of cardinals in the late years of the Francis pontificate was that His Holiness was not convening them — meaning that decision-making felt centralized to Rome, and without their voices, and that when they eventually came together for a conclave, they didn’t know each other, making the few days beforehand especially important.
Ironically, in some sense, the complaint of the cardinals was that there was not an especially acute sense of synodal collaboration between them and the pontiff.
Leo has called for a big consistory relatively early in his pontificate, and signaled by the apparent topics those issues most prominently on his mind — which, if you follow the challenges facing the Church right now, should not come especially as a surprise.
Bishops and cardinals who have already spoken with Pope Leo give consistent feedback: That the pope is a listener: That he wants to hear different perspectives, and there is no sense that he wants only to be confirmed in his own viewpoint on issues.
That could make the consistory a wide-ranging conversation, with the same sense of freedom among participants expressed about the pre-conclave meetings, when cardinals said really frank exchanges were helpful to them, and a positive experience — especially as at least some felt that the Francis pontificate did not lend itself to that kind of liberality in exchange.
But we don’t yet know what comes after the listening. The pope has now had more than half a year in office, but all of it has been occupied by the Jubilee Year, imposing a fairly exhausting schedule on his calendar, and consuming many of those with whom he’d consult.
He’s been frank about his willingness to use the authority of his office as he sees fit on controversial issues, like the German synodal way. But after the consistory, the jubilee doors closed, we can expect to start seeing Leo be Leo.
It’s too soon to predict what he’ll say, if anything, about the issues under discussion at the consistory. But when the cardinals head home after meeting with him, Leo will finally get some time behind his own desk.
Let’s see what happens then.
Scoop city
In the past 24 hours, I’ve been asked roughly 3 million times about a rumor, begun in the Spanish-language Catholic press, that Illinois’ Bishop Ron Hicks will be appointed to the Archdiocese of New York — a move that was confidently predicted to happen today.
It didn’t, as I told people it wouldn’t, but I think there’s a bit more for us to say on the subject — and about why speculation over an episcopal move seemed to set the Catholic internet on fire yesterday.
See, there was a time two decades ago when a cardinal had a blogger’s ear. The internet was young, and media was changing, and for a solid half-decade this blogger tipped off the American Church to near every ecclesiastical appointment coming down the pike.
It was a heady time; each little scoop made people feel like we were in the know, even goofy canon law students, like I was back then.
We were impacted by all of that. See, since then, we’ve all labored under the illusion that “scooping” imminent appointments is the sure sign of an elite Catholic journalist. It’s not, of course — there’s far more important news to break, and far better ways to spend time than in the vampish game of “who’s-going-where.”
But the people have come to expect it. And so we all play, even Ed and me sometimes, especially when enough people ask us, and when we judge the appointment significant and newsworthy.
But we’ve wrestled in recent years with what we should be doing when these things arise — driven by questions about whether any of that — whether the entire gossipy culture that’s risen up around episcopal appointments — is good for the Church.
In the comments, some of you will say you’d be fine if we don’t play this particular game. And we’d be fine not to play, too. We mostly regard the whole business as a sideshow to the stuff which matters most, with just a few notable exceptions.
But information is currency in our business, and when bishops or other Church leaders call, as a lot of them did yesterday, to ask what’s going on in New York, we feel the same pressure as everyone to prove our ecclesiastical bona fides with a good answer.
So we talk with people, and piece together bits of information which might convey this or that, and we read the tea leaves and make conjectures, and then we bat around whether we’ve got enough to “call” an appointment, even if others would have done so with far less information.
But we offer at the same time a warning: A focus on spectacle over substance cheapens the quality of our Christian life together. And a desire to know stuff, singularly for the flex of feeling like we’re on the inside of something, probably isn’t very good for us either.
So let me tell you what I absolutely know for certain: Barring Christ’s imminent return, there will soon enough be a new Archbishop of New York. He will or will not be the current Bishop of Joliet, a well-respected guy who seems likely eventually to take up a pallium, and the cross which goes along with it.
And sure, if we can 150% confirm that something’s happening, we’ll tell you, because that particular party trick is a part of the business we’ve chosen — and because it would maybe quell the fever pitch speculation about all that.
Anyway, my friends, this seems like a good segue to the story of getting lost last Sunday, inside a Roman catacomb.