Happy Friday friends,
I have some long thoughts I’d like to think out loud with you today, so I am going to keep the preambles short this week.
In fact, I just wanted to bring to your attention the story of St. Donan, whose feast it is today. He was a seventh century Irish monk who lived in a monastery on the Scottish island of Eigg.
These monks are the sort of hardbitten chaps who did the real business of evangelization the old fashioned way, praying all hours, sparing themselves nothing, and witnessing to Christ with their whole lives. We owe Irish monasticism a lot more than we realize, not least the sacrament of penance as we currently practice it, the Christianization of Britain, and preserving the great treasures of Western civilization during the Dark Ages.
But here’s what we know of Donan of Eigg: In 617 he and his 50-some companions were celebrating Mass on Easter Sunday when a party of Danish vikings arrived to sack the monastery.
Mercifully, the pirates agreed to permit the monks to finish Mass, before beheading them all.
I think how a person reacts to that story is a real barometer about how we really feel about Easter.
Anyway, here’s the news.
The News
A former Catholic school principal in Miami will avoid jail time after being convicted of stealing $200,000 from the school where she worked – the second six-figure theft discovered at St. Coleman’s Church and school in the past eight years.
Former principal Lori St. Thomas received 10 years’ probation and is being required to pay back $121,548 to St. Coleman Catholic School, where she had worked for more than 20 years before being fired in 2024.
The sentence comes less than a decade after another $200,000 theft was discovered at the same parish: The parish pastor resigned in 2018 after the archdiocese announced that he had stolen the money.
A retired IRS investigator told The Pillar the case should serve as a warning to Catholic leaders to ensure that parishes, schools, and other Church institutions have proper internal financial controls in place.
You can read the whole story here.
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As the White House continues its criticism of Pope Leo XIV, Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that the pontiff should be more careful when talking about theology — a surprising admonition from the U.S. vice president.
While Vance’s remarks have been widely panned they also point to the challenges for Catholics and for the pope incumbent in working through a rhetorical shift in the Vatican’s approach to talking about warfare.
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Last month, Pope Leo XIV appointed Archbishop Luis Marín de San Martín, OSA as papal almoner and prefect of the Dicastery for the Service of Charity.
While the office of papal almoner is one of the oldest Vatican institutions, Pope Francis’ 2022 reform of the curia overhauled the position, expanding its mission and turning the office into a dicastery, on par with other senior curial departments with a global remit.
Given Marín’s three-decade relationship with Leo, and his reputation as one of the pope’s closest advisers, the archbishop’s appointment to the almoner role could suggest that Leo intends to give the dicastery — and the pope’s charitable mission more broadly — the same significance Francis did.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Edgar Beltran this week, Marín laid out his vision for the role, and how it relates to the Petrine ministry.
Honestly, this is one of those interviews you positively enjoy reading. The archbishop is the sort of guy who thinks in whole paragraphs and footnotes himself as he speaks. This is the most coherent and thought-through, and yet ridiculously quotable interview I have read in months.
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Survivors of clerical sexual abuse in Portugal have been airing their grievances following the revelation by The Pillar last week that bishops made significant cuts to recommended compensation packages suggested by a panel of experts commissioned by the country’s episcopal conference.
The Pillar reported last week that the Portuguese bishops’ conference cut the proposed compensation packages by about 50%, which in many cases amounted to tens of thousands of euros.
António Grosso of Coração Silenciado (Silenced Heart), an association for survivors of abuse, described the bishops’ attitude as “unspeakable,” but said the decision to reduce recommended compensation payments was unsurprising.
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Some services for students with disabilities are being halted in the Archdiocese of Chicago due to a lack of federal funds, with the archdiocese and the Chicago Public School system offering conflicting accounts of how the funding dried up.
The Archdiocese of Chicago says the city’s public school system abruptly cut off federal funding for the services without warning. Officials with Chicago Public Schools say the archdiocese made the decision to cut services internally, after receiving repeated warnings that it was running through its allotted federal funds too quickly.
UDallas President Jonathan Sanford recently sat down with Katie Prejean McGrady '11 for an inspiring conversation on faith and vocation. Katie's remarkable journey from UD to becoming a renowned Catholic author, speaker, and SiriusXM radio host is a testament to the power of a liberal arts education. President Sanford reflects: "What struck me most was her clarity of purpose." Watch now.
Agree to disagree
Following President Donald Trump’s pointedly personal attack on Pope Leo earlier this week, members of his administration have continued to criticize the pope and the Vatican on the subject of war and peace.
After Trump told journalists and used social media to call the pope “weak,” “terrible at foreign policy” and “a very liberal person,” Leo essentially shrugged off the barrage, saying he thought “very little” of the president’s remarks and insisting that, while he is not a political figure, he will continue to address matters of global importance.
In response, Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, told Fox News on Monday that substantive disagreements on policy between the Vatican and the White House were “inevitable” but that “in some cases, it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what is going on in the Catholic Church, and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”
The vice president followed up his comments on Tuesday, telling a live event that even when the pope was “going to opine on matters of theology,” his comments needed to be “anchored in the truth,” implying that Leo had either an imperfect grasp or articulation of the Church’s teaching in relation to matters of the morality of conflict.
I will admit, I find this whole rolling attempt by the White House to pick a fight with the pope fascinating.
I wrote earlier this week that I see Trump’s decision to go after Leo not so much as a spontaneous moment of verbal incontinence but an illustration of what you might call “gorilla game theory.”
That is to say, Trump’s primary mode of engagement on any given issue is personal rhetorical attack — making it a public feud of chest-beating big beast personalities, not the merits and substance of policy.
In the case of the Iran war, Trump can’t goad, mock, and disparage the Iranian leadership because they are all dead. And he can’t get into a back-and-forth with a particular Democrat like Gavin Newsom because doing so would elevate Newsom and legitimize him as deserving of co-billing with the president.
Instead, going after the pope does all the things Trump wants: he becomes the center of global attention, generating headlines and heat (in the wrestling sense), while firing up the Evangelical section of his MAGA base, who don’t much care for the pope but otherwise seem very iffy about the whole foreign war thing.
And he does it all while elevating himself by squaring off against an arguably bigger global figure — the pope.
Like I said, this is basic gorilla game theory. The more this goes on, the more I am convinced that this is a one-sided work (again, in the wrestling sense) by the White House.
Trump cannot run for a third term (though that doesn’t mean he won’t try) and the pope certainly isn’t running against him. But that is exactly the emotional narrative the president wants to create — it’s his political sweetspot.
A few people have told me this is giving Trump way too much strategic credit, and a few more have told me it’s ridiculous because no-one with the intellectual sophistication of a McNugget would buy such a ludicrously confected and manifestly silly narrative.
To them I say: have you met the American political press?
But this is not actually what I want to talk about.
Instead, I have been thinking more about how the Trump White House relates to the Vatican as compared to the Biden administration, and I noticed something very weird.
And, given people often juxtapose the Vatican’s treatment of Catholic Democrats like Biden and Nancy Pelosi vs Republicans like Rubio and Vance, I think this is very much worth looking at.
So, take a walk with me on this one.