Enda, acting, and a few good men
The Friday Pillar Post
Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Happy Friday friends,
And a happy feast of St. Enda, the father of Irish monasticism, to all who celebrate.
Enda was, according to the Martyrology of Oengus, a warrior prince of Ulster who was converted to Christianity by his sister Fanchea, an abbess and herself a saint.
Pious legend has it that — before setting off to battles of conquest following the death of his father — Enda visited his sister in her monastery, where she begged him to renounce war.
Allegedly, he said he would, but only if his sister, the abbess, would give him a young girl from the cloister as a wife. She agreed. That might strike modern readers as a complicated witness to sanctity by both parties.
But, it turns out, God writes straight with our crooked lines, and the girl died virtually as soon as the deal was struck.
Fanchea, to impress upon her brother that the girl in question was actually dead — and thus she had made good on her end of the deal — made Enda inspect the body, catechising him in the process on his own mortality.
Enda converted, took up the priesthood, and learned the monastic life at Rosnat in Britain, before returning to Ireland, where he was given land by his brother-in-law, the king of Munster, to found his own community on the Aran islands in the 480s.
That monastery on Inishmore became the white hot spiritual core of Irish monasticism, which in turn became a kind of living ark of learning and tradition in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the seedbed for the evangelization of Europe.
As a much younger man, I was lucky enough to visit the Aran islands and can easily imagine how they turn the mind to a monastic frame of mind — stark, remote (emotionally and practically), and brutally beautiful.
Though, if I am being honest, at the time of my visit as a 14-year-old, the principal impression left on me was by the sight of a bus full of German tourists decanting onto a windswept beach and, with typically Teutonic pagan abandon, stripping themselves buck neked and sporting in the spray.
St. Enda would not, I am sure, have approved.
Here’s the news.
The News
Appeal court judges have told the former auditor general of the Vatican that he cannot present in court evidence of financial misconduct that could harm the “good name” of high-ranking Vatican officials.
Milone, the first person to hold the position of auditor general of the Vatican, is trying to introduce evidence on appeal which, his lawyers argue, prove he was forced from his job for uncovering widespread corruption.
According to court documents obtained by The Pillar, Vatican judges, however, have ruled that blocking Milone’s evidence was in the “public interest” because it contained “the general and repeated attribution to persons holding top positions in the Roman Curia of practices that are at least immoral and certainly indecent.”
No one, anywhere, covers Vatican financial news and Vatican court cases like we do, because we think it matters — a lot — how the Church’s justice system works, or doesn’t.
We broke this story, we broke the last one, and we’ll break the next one, too. Because we think this is what real, serious, Catholic journalism looks like. If you do too, punch this button and help make it happen. Please.
Lawmakers in Papua New Guinea have voted in favor of a constitutional amendment affirming that the Pacific island nation is a Christian country.
You might expect local Catholic representatives to be delighted. But you’d be wrong.
So, how Christian is PNG, statistically speaking? What does the amendment say? And why are Catholic leaders critical of the change?
Luke Coppen takes a look right here.
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When the Jubilee Year began on Christmas Eve, Pope Francis entered the holy doors at St. Peter’s Basilica, probably obtaining the first plenary indulgence of the Jubilee.
Of course, if there’s one thing a lot of people know about the Catholic Church — and think they understand — it’s that we have indulgences. But what are they exactly? How do they work? And what is the history and theology behind them?
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Ruby Aznaq-Abu Sada was born in a tiny apartment, steps from the place where Christ died. She grew up walking every day through the marketplace that lines the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross, in Jerusalem.
When she had kids of her own, she raised them in the small Christian housing project in which she grew up. But while the Christian population of Jerusalem has dwindled dramatically in recent decades — to about 16,000 today, in a city of almost one million — Aznar has not left.
For the past 15 years, she has led tour groups on pilgrimages through the Holy Land. But after the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing war, tourism has all but ceased.
She talked with The Pillar this week about Catholic life in Jerusalem.
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A Franciscan friar who pled guilty to fraud told a judge last week that he should not be sentenced to more than two-and-a-half years in prison, because he had a troubled childhood.
The plea came as a federal judge considers the possibility of a 20-year prison sentence for Fr. Pawel Bielecki, a Capuchin Franciscan who stole more than half a million dollars in an elaborate scheme involving several invented personalities, claims of royalty, and phony Lebanese medical clinics.
That fraud, his attorney told the court last week, was an attempt “to buy self-worth and acceptance.”
When is a papal act?
As you might imagine, I have given a lot of thought this week to the news out of the Vatican City appeals court in the case of Libero Milone. And I have a lot of thoughts.
I am, of course, somewhat dumbfounded that more than a decade after he was appointed to comb through curial finances and clean them up, Milone still cannot seem to find a willing pair of eyes or ears anywhere in the Vatican to consider what he found, still less do something about it all.
Putting that to one side for a moment, I have also been considering his case from a strictly legal perspective.
Lawyers for the Secretariat of State contend that his whole lawsuit should be thrown out. The rationale advanced is this: Milone was appointed by the pope and, assuming he was forced to resign as he claims, such a move would have to have been approved by the pope and, therefore, is a papal act. And papal acts cannot be appealed or challenged in court.
There’s a superficial logic to the argument. No one disputes that Milone was appointed personally by Pope Francis. And his resignation was coerced under threat of prosecution by the then-sostituto Cardinal Angelo Becciu, as the cardinal himself has made a matter of public record.
The cardinal has also claimed he did so with the placet of the pope. And, as Milone’s lawyers noted in court, Becciu would seem to have some implied basis for that assertion, since he continued in his role for another year after forcing Milone’s departure before being promoted to become a cardinal. If he had acted without the pope’s assent, one would reason, he’d have been dismissed.
But here’s where the logic breaks down for me, legally speaking.
Becciu either forced Milone from office as a rogue agent who went unpunished, or he did it under some kind of papal order, formal or implied, and the pope may have been acting on good, incomplete, or maliciously bad information at the time.
If there was some kind of papal order, it could be either produced in writing or attested to by the one who received it, and that would, I suppose, bring a measure of clarity to things.
But the cited law in this case (canon 1404) provides only that the pope himself cannot be put on trial — “The first see is judged by no one.” The subsequent canon states that “A judge cannot review an act or instrument confirmed specifically (in forma specifica) by the Roman Pontiff without his prior mandate.”
Now, speaking as a canonist, it seems to me that there’s a lot of middle ground to be explored between these legal provisions in the Milone/Becciu case.
No one contends that Milone was fired by a legal act specifically approved by the pope (though if he was this is actually available for judicial review if the pope allows it — which he might, if the evidence suggests he was brought to act by maliciously bad information).
Instead, the Secretariat of State’s argument seems to be that the pope approved passively of Becciu’s actions to coerce Milone’s resignation — though Milone has always maintained the pope was kept ignorant of what was being done to him. Either way, there’s a real question here about whether a pope’s passive and unwritten approval constitutes a “legal act” at all.
The only “legal” act at issue is the act of Milone’s resignation, which he placed under duress, as everyone seems to concede.
A legal act of the pope is one which has to be directly attributable to him, even via delegation, as an exercise of his Petrine office. Such an act requires and presumes a certain external and manifest active papal fiat rather than passive placet which — and I have followed this story as closely as anyone, I think — does not appear to be there.
And one does not have to assume, let alone attempt to litigate, a judgement of the person of the pope to assert that Becciu acted illegally in what he did — and publicly acknowledged doing — to Milone.
Could one legally contend that Pope Francis illegally coerced Milone to resign? No, that would be an attempt to judge the first see, which is judged by no one.
But, I would submit, arguing that to consider Milone was illegally pressured to resign is in itself to attempt to judge the pope personally is very tricky legal ground — though that is what the Secretariat of State is doing.
That argument presumes, and invites the court to affirm, that if Milone was illegally coerced to resign then it can only have been with the willful cooperation of the pope to a formal degree that makes it a papal act, and presuming a knowing complicity by Francis in Milone’s treatment by Becciu.
Given Becciu’s unsuccessful attempts to hid other criminal misdeeds under the mantle of papal authority, this strikes me as very questionable strategy indeed.
Moreover, this suggests an incredibly expansive understanding of papal power and executive privilege (legally speaking) which is, essentially, Nixonian: if the pope allows it, it cannot be illegal — and even if he was duped into allowing it there can be no examination, no reconsideration.
That sort of conception of executive maximalism is normally reserved for defenders of illegal break-ins and wire-taps (which, I would note, Milone claims he was a victim of), or the sort of people who can say things like “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” without irony.
I doubt that is a conception of the papacy the Secretariat of State means to advance, yet it seems to be what the Vatican City court is being asked to affirm.
A few good men
Sir Gareth Southgate, the recently former manager of the England football (soccer etc.) team gave a lecture this week which has won the former player and coach plaudits. His subject was the character formation of young men and the “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers” to whom they often fall prey.
“They willingly trick young men into believing that success is measured by money or dominance, never showing emotions and believing that the world and young women are against them,” he said. “They are as far away as you could possibly get from the role models young men need in their lives.”
While no names were named, the speech was universally received as a direct reference to figures like Andrew Tate, the “online influencer” who is wanted on charges of sex crimes and human trafficking in various jurisdictions, and who makes his money through online lifestyle coaching seminars and pornography farms.
Tate and his brand of “influence” have been in the news of late, since he was allowed out of Romania and into the U.S. under circumstances which remain, I would say, unclear.
Tate is, by any reasonable assessment, a vile character who boasts of sexually trafficking and physically abusing women as some kind of proof of his masculine bona fides. In so doing he’s become wrapped up in the world of the online ultras, and feted as a kind of (flawed?) culture war hero, rather than fugitive sex criminal.
I’ve seen this at first hand: that criticisms of Tate and what he has done, by his own proud admission, are instantly met with a chorus of mitigating rationalization for his apparent sway over a large segment of young men.
His overt misogyny is appealing, and understandable, so the thinking goes, because of a broad cultural disenfranchisement of men and a vilification of “masculinity” by the feminist movement.
Young men have no one to look up to and admire, I have been reliably informed. The world is full of “cucks” and “betas” and the only acceptable male template is weakness and submission, so I am told. The will to dominate is what defines masculinity, according to this view, and the ability to dominate is the measure of a man.
Even the most guarded and qualified presenters of this point of view — and Lord knows there are plenty of them — suggest that Tate and his ilk are regrettable, on balance even bad, models for young men to pattern themselves upon, but understandable once you accept that there are no positive role models (none!) of authentic masculinity.
While I certainly don’t agree with any of this, I have given some thought to why I hear it so often.
For a start, I think it’s worth speaking plainly about whom one hears such things from: I do not tend to hear it from young men, though I speak to plenty, but from middle aged men who themselves often seem more than a little wistfully enamored with Tate’s hyper-aggressive-posture-in-skintight-pants schtick.
And I suspect Tate’s appeal is actually pitched as often at my own generation of 40-50 something suburban guys as it is at younger men in their teens and 20s. And I detect more than a hint of projection in many of my own cohort’s supposed diagnosis of younger men’s feelings on the subject.
This being the case, I think trying to treat Tate and his kind as a “young men’s problem” can lead to only partial diagnosis and, by extension, treatment.
Though Tate’s cultural currency does represent a crisis of masculinity, the notion that there are no “real” role models of “real” masculinity strikes me as false on its face.
I know plenty of men who model manhood admirably and unaffectedly in their daily lives. Though ordinary people and ordinary lives don’t count for Tate types: by their very nature they are “betas”; fame and/or notoriety, especially online, is itself a criteria for “alpha” status.
Andrew Tate and his sort aren’t stepping into or being produced by some absence of understanding around masculinity, they are pitching a rival version.
Our public life, to be sure, increasingly seems to lack a glut of obvious examples of good men, though Gareth Southgate himself poses an interesting illustration here.
He is, by all accounts, a thoroughly decent man — thoughtful, polite, considerate, modest. He was universally praised and respected by his players as a mentor and former of character.
His professional achievements, while not world-beating in the strict and ultimate sense, saw him represent his country as a player and as a coach, where he equalled or exceeded those of every other holder of the job for the last half century.
But Southgate is — and as England manager often was — dismissed for lacking edge, aggression, the ultimate will to dominate. He is, Tate-ists would contend, the archetypal “beta”; no one wants to be a good guy.
I find this interesting. The idea that only flint-eyed roided-up jerks can inspire or achieve is a relative cultural novelty, or at least it is only newly back in fashion.
Not so very long ago it was accepted without question that “goodness” was a constituent part of authentic masculinity. Its obvious absence, or the obvious presence of moral turpitude or ungentlemanly behavior, was called out as such, and those who reveled in it were seen as fundamentally lacking.
A man couldn’t be “great” without being “good,” it used to be understood. Now, the two qualities are held to be contradictions. So much so that it is possible to see and hear Catholic men openly opine that constituent qualities of goodness — like self-sacrifice, humility, loving concern for the other — are weak, feminine, and fundamentally unsaleable as a pattern for manhood.
Is the man who rises at 3am to feed the baby a loving father, or just a cuck? Is doing the dishes an act of modeling service, or a beta move?
One wonders what these people make of St. Joseph, let alone Christ and the cross, but I’d be afraid to ask for fear of the answers.
How did this come to be?
I would suggest that the conception and celebration of Andrew Tate’s idea of “masculinity” has gained traction in exactly the same way, and with exactly the same people, as pornography has come to shape their conception of women and femininity. In fact, I don’t think it is reasonable to separate the two.
They are both fueled by the same sudden cultural ubiquity of unfiltered internet content and they seem to me to act in the same way — with habitual exposure drawing people towards ever more extreme content. And in Tate’s case they are produced, for profit, by the same people.
Perhaps tellingly, the same sort of people who make excuses for the likes of Andrew Tate along the lines of “there are no better ‘real’ male role models to follow” tend also to insist that there are no “real women” around worthy of young men’s attentions and devotion.
Both are, of course, obviously untrue, unless your frame of reference is a very particular and narrow window into the online world.
Andrew Tate as a role model makes sense if your conceptions of authentic masculinity and femininity are filtered through the kind of debasing and degraded material he pumps out on the internet.
Any defense or mitigation of what he represents is as perverse as saying “well of course young men watch hardcore pornograpy, there are no better models of human sexuality for them to follow.”
We don’t need “better versions” of Tate’s conception of masculinity to speak to young men — or men of any age for that matter — any more than we need a “better class of porn” to address a general social crisis of human sexuality.
What we need is to articulate a cultural and moral cancer for what it is, and excise it from our communities and, when necessary, from ourselves.
I’d also argue that the best way of doing that is showing up men like Tate for what they are, and doing so, first of all, by striving to be good.
If anyone truly thinks there’s a lack of “real men,” I’d expect them to respond by trying to “be the change one wants to see in the world.” Unless, of course, they think Gandhi is a cuck and a beta.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
P.S. Having been as clear as I can be about the “what” of Andrew Tate and the like, let’s be equally clear about the “why”.
Guys like him are in business because selling sex and a sense of grievance is good business. Feeding people’s basest desires and fueling their anger and bitterness are the easiest and most lucrative grifts there are.
What’s not easy, and not lucrative is producing the news — real reporting, on real stories, that doesn’t pander to a crowd or slant to an agenda. That’s our business.
And we can only stay in business if and because people like you are in it with us, up on the wall and holding the line.
We all choose and sustain and amplify the work we think has value, one way or another. We’d be grateful if you chose The Pillar.
Heading over to read the Milone piece next; that story is so bonkers.
My response to the Andrew Tate stuff: get all these young men (and women and all of us) offline. I’m a parent and it is hard and Lord knows we use too many screens (here I type online) but if we want “real men” and “real women” we have to live in the real world. People young and old can see actually real men and real women in the real world and then make judgements about whom to emulate. Ed’s point about this online masculinity and pornography as two sides of the same coin is so apt. It’s all fake. Even the lingo (“cuck”, “beta”etc) is meaningless away from the world of online personas and memes. Andrew Tate is no one except online and if you log off, thank goodness, you never have to encounter him in any way.
Andrew Tate is basically Jeff Epstein but with 1) a social media presence and 2) a willingness to brag about his crimes. All the people demanding the Epstein Files be made public would have been feting Jeff as a martyr if he'd gone on a podcast and said "Feminism is cancer."