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Happy Friday friends,
For reasons of, I assume, terrible coincidence, this last week has seen several friends of mine, and friends of the Pillar family all, dealing with urgent medical emergencies. They’ve all been in my prayers this week, and if you’ve room I’d ask you to include them in yours, too.
It’s a sobering thing, standing in close proximity as families you care about see their lives upended, forced to confront the fundamental precariousness in which we all live but spend so much of our time skating over the top of.
Speaking only for myself, I see-saw violently in my own spiritual life between either treating Providence with a kind of unhealthy fatalism or petitioning the Almighty over daily trivialities. Neither is especially healthy, since neither reflects the real relationship I am called to have with God.
The truth is my life neither runs on rails like an inevitable pre-planned journey, nor is it simple chaos, practical and moral, which I can more or less successfully mitigate by the right kind of Divine propitiation.
Christian life is the messy mashup of individual choices, accumulated experiences (good and bad), unexpected consequences and unforeseen events, all set within and under an overarching love, which is its ultimate context and narrative force.
It is, in this sense, family life centered around the generative love of God within the Trinity.
I suppose like a lot of parents, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make things secure, safe, stable. Where, my mind often goes, is security to be found, for me and those I love?
While it might drive me to prayer at times, fundamentally, this is an impulse to approach God out of fear, not faith. And the hard truth of the Gospel is, I think, that security, at least in the earthly sense, is nowhere to be found.
Instead, in prayer and through the Church, I am reminded, though never often enough, that it is love I should be looking for — the love which saves and consoles and redeems and which faith, when I have it, instinctively grasps for.
It’s this love which is the rock on which I am supposed to build my house, in the image of the Gospel parable. Watching the storms hit those close to me this week reminds me I have a lot of work to do on its foundations.
Here’s the news.
The News
An Italian archbishop has faced criticism, even from other bishops, after signing a petition to exclude a well-known Israeli novelist from a local literary festival.
Archbishop Franco Moscone of Manfredonia-Vieste-San Giovanni Rotondo has been accused of antisemitism after signing up to an appeal organized by the Communist Refoundation Party calling for Eshkol Nevo’s exclusion from the Libro Possibile festival.
Moscone said that said he signed the petition not because Nevo is Israeli, but because he believes the novelist has not sufficiently opposed what Moscone describes as a genocide in Gaza which he has compared to the Holocaust.
Nevo, in fact, is an outspoken opponent of the conflict in Gaza and a frequent and strident critic of the current Israeli government.
The archbishop is no stranger to controversy, read all about it here.
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A priest in the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kansas, used embezzled parish money to fund cruises, casinos, and a variety of medical treatments, according to an affidavit in the case.
Fr. Richard Storey, was arrested last month after an internal audit at his former parish alleged that he stole nearly $160,000 prior to his resignation. He faces charges of theft of property or services worth $100,000 — a crime classified in Kansas as a level five felony charge, which can be punished by up to 10 years in prison.
Storey had already resigned as pastor of Curé of Ars Parish in Leawood, Kansas, last September, when police launched a separate criminal investigation into unspecified allegations involving an adult.
He had served as pastor of the parish for a decade prior to his resignation.
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Archbishop Hubertus van Megen touched down in Berlin Monday to begin his challenging new assignment as the apostolic nuncio to Germany.
The 64-year-old Dutchman was greeted at the airport June 15 by a delegation representing the German government, the bishops’ conference, and the diplomatic corps.
He succeeds the Croatian Archbishop Nikola Eterović, who was nuncio to Germany from September 2013 to April 2026, a turbulent period — to say the least — in relations between the German bishops and the Vatican.
Who is van Megen? And what challenges await him at the nunciature in Berlin? Read all about it here.
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Peruvian President José María Alcázar met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican yesterday, formally inviting the pontiff to visit Peru in November.
Both the Peruvian bishops’ conference and Alcázar have said the trip is expected to take place that month. But a papal visit could be complicated by Peru’s fraught political climate and a series of scandals involving members of the country’s episcopal hierarchy, where Leo served as a missionary and bishop for nearly three decades.
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A total of 196 new priests are scheduled to be ordained in Poland this year, continuing a long-term decline in numbers.
This is expected to be the first year in the 21st century with fewer than 200 priestly ordinations in Poland. There were 208 new priests in 2025 and 235 in 2024.
The drop in priestly ordinations is likely to be felt far beyond Poland, because the country has traditionally supplied priests to other European countries, both East and West. Poland has also long been an important source of missionary priests to Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
But despite the ongoing decline, Poland remains the European country with the most priestly vocations. And that is its own potential problem.
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Since he became pope last year, Leo XIV has become the recipient of many gifts, including an increasingly large collection of sports jerseys.
It seemed to us that it was getting a bit out of hand, and more than a little silly. And we thought it would make a nice bit of early weekend reading to do a quick tour of some of the more obscure team shirts given to the pope.
Instead, in an act of unprovoked and unbridled violence against various cities, teams, sports, and even entire countries, Michelle La Rosa turned in one of the funniest things I have read all year.
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As Magnifica humanitas illustrates with its more than 42,000 words in English, popes today love to write long encyclicals.
Francis was also known to cruise past the 40,000 words mark, which he did twice, in Laudato Si’ and Fratelli tutti. St. John Paul II as you might expect, still holds the record, though, with Evangelium vitae ringing in at well over 48,000 words, inclusive of its 142 footnotes.
As Bronwen McShea explains in a column this week, it didn’t used to be like this — Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum was fewer than 14,800 words.
In fact, popes of the past regularly produced encyclicals that were in the range of 500 to 1,500 words.
For the first time in over 50 years, the Church in the U.S. will begin praying a new translation of The Liturgy of the Hours. Ascension is designing an edition with exceptional readability and top-of-the-line materials to faithfully serve the Church’s daily prayer for generations. Preorders open July 1.
Ecclesiastical dark matter
At the U.S. bishops conference meeting last week, one of the less remarked upon sessions was a presentation from Bob Cunningham, the executive director of the Catholic Prison Ministries Coalition.
It was a deeply sobering and spiritually challenging speech he gave, sadly somewhat lost amid the more immediately news-y events of a new USCCB president and apostolic nuncio, and the bishops’ vote to revise the Dallas Charter.
Cunningham noted — I say “noted,” though it came as a numerical shock to me — that a very conservative estimate of the number of self-identified Catholics currently incarcerated in the United States stands at, in Cunningham’s estimation, close to 400,000 people — possibly more if you factor in ICE detention centers.
For comparison, that is larger than the Catholic population of the Archdiocese of Denver.
The thrust of what the bishops were told was that the essence of prison chaplaincy in the United States is just showing up. There is no community of Catholics more marginalized, in a practical sense, than those in prison. And what they need, what they crave most of all, and ultimately what benefits them the most, the bishops were told, isn’t programs or curricula, but real pastoral human contact.
“Encounter” was the term used, though I think I would rather the more visceral word communion. I know myself some people who have spent more than a little time engaged in prison ministry and from all I hear this is what is desired above all, not to be acknowledged as a statistic but to be known as a person.
Introducing Cunningham to the assembly, Bishop William Wack of Pensacola–Tallahassee described receiving a letter from a local inmate which, as he put it, “convicted” him. “We need a shepherd,” Wack recalled reading. “No matter what we’ve done, or where we are or for how long, you’re our bishop and we are your sheep, please come and visit us.”
I would imagine such a letter would strike a bishop exactly as Wack reported it struck him. But I am not sure it should hit any of the rest of us any less hard. Somewhere between a quarter and a half a million of our brothers and sisters are in prison. Have we visited them, as Christ commanded us? I know I have not.
On the podcast last week, JD and I talked about the scope of prison chaplaincy in this country — which really ought to rank as a diocese, at least by the numbers — a personal ordinariate, in canonical terms.
We also talked a bit about the enormous logistical hurdles which can make just getting in to see our brothers and sisters in Christ anything but straightforward. And that is before we talk about the known barriers to bringing them the sacraments that crop up in different states and can sometimes be entirely arbitrary.
Since then, I have been wondering about the effects on the Church, as a spiritual ecclesia, of a situation in which hundreds of thousands of Catholics are cut off from the rest of us, often totally forgotten.