Hey everybody,
I’m headed to Orlando, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
That’s right, I’m headed right now to the annual convention of American canon lawyers, held this year in the place we know as Orlando — a nebulous constellation of hotels, theme parks, golf courses, and lazy rivers in a spectrum of crystal clear blues never seen in nature.
The central Florida city of Orlando is actually a cool spot with great restaurants and people, but most people who fly into its airport, never see that place — we’re ferried to mammoth conference complexes carved from the wetland and prairie expanses of peninsular Florida, still north of the Everglades, but close enough for us to hope for an actual encounter with a real alligator, or a genuine Florida Man.
Anyway, this newsletter seems as good a time as any to remind you of something important.
Two things, actually. First, I want to provide you with analysis on the 10-man presidential race at the USCCB this November, but you might have to wait a couple of days so I can do this canon lawyer thing.
Second: Here at The Pillar, Ed and I are canon lawyers, and that obviously informs our reporting, interviews, analysis, etc, in a way that we hope serves the Church. That’s why we go to conferences like this in the first place, so we can keep up-to-speed, and keep you up-to-speed.
But most canon lawyers we know are doing the considerably harder work of serving as judges and defensors vinculi in diocesan tribunals, or trying to ensure that bishops avail themselves of canon law when they make decisions about personnel, policy, or property.
There can be a tendency from outside the experience of a chancery to malign ecclesiastical bureaucrats as inflexible, inhuman, or malicious, even — as impediments to the faith alive in parishes, or families, or communities of various kinds. And there’s enough history in this country to find plenty of examples of that.
But here’s what you may not know — in the past decades, I’ve seen a kind of aggiornamento of orthopraxy among lay and clerical canonists, aiming to help their tribunals be faithful to the processes prescribed by the law, and to ensure that their bishops know how to observe universal law and promulgate particular law. Those are exactly the kinds of things that Ed and I call for constantly at The Pillar, and it’s worth noting that it’s happening, in many places, and often against the ennui of custom or institutional habit.
When I started in canon law, almost two decades ago, I met a lot of members of the old guard who had a very different mentality. Some were lions. But plenty had the kind of “pastoral” approach to law that’s led to scandal, or compromise, or chaos in the Church, or had a “flexible” understanding of the relationship between law and doctrine.
That’s not what I see any more — despite serious challenges in recent years to the stability of the rule of law itself.
If it is not easy or fast to turn a battleship, catalyzing change in a chancery is no less difficult.
At the same time, I know chancery education officials who are reclaiming the Church’s patrimony on education — in both content and method — sparking a renewal in Catholic education that might well help parish schools to actually form lifelong living disciples of the Lord.
I know parish staffers helping to usher in a culture of Eucharistic and liturgical spirituality in their communities, and chancery people helping to cut through the red tape that might impede that. I know vicars for clergy taking new and serious interest in the mental and spiritual health of diocesan presbyterates. And every month or so, I get a call from a diocesan finance officer, who has read in The Pillar what can go wrong, and wants to do it better.
The Church in the U.S. — and globally — is in need of serious reform and renewal. And the overall trend toward secularization means already smaller chancery staffs — which is not always a bad thing.
But ecclesiastical administration is not easy work. Especially if you’re not the bishop, actually. (Being bishop is no picnic, but not being bishop comes with its own calls to humility, docility, and obedience — not natural virtues for most people.)
If you work around the kind of people I describe, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t — if you’re skeptical about the bureaucrats and paper-pushers downtown — well, do me a favor. At least pray for them.
And pray for the canon lawyers down in Florida — especially that we’ll see some gators, or some mullets.
The news
First, before I start the news, let me say something real. I wish there were more of us.
Every day, I hear from people in my inbox who have a story to tell — or one which merits serious, fair, and informed investigation. Every day, we’re asked to explain things that are happening, or offer analysis on how the Leonine papacy is unfolding. We’ve got documents we want to dive through, interviews we want to conduct, stories we want to uncover.
But I wish there were more of us to get it done. Ed and I have a great newsroom at The Pillar — we’ve got a real team in Luke, Michelle, Edgar, and Kate. We’ve got talented freelancers like Jack Figge and Brendan Hodge. But there is so much more I want to do with The Pillar to serve the Church. And for that, I need either boundless energy and more hours in the day, or I need more people.
If you know how to stop time for a few hours each day, let me know. Otherwise, we just need more subscribers, so we can set more people to work on the kind of serious and independent coverage that contributes to reform and renewal in the Church.
Media organizations get money from big donors with agendas, from mind-warping clickbait, from ven cap investors who want to blow it all up… or from subscribers, one at a time, who believe in the project. We really like that last option as a business model.
The Pillar is the best and most widely-read Catholic news outlet in English. When I go to the Vatican, people always assume we have a team of like 20 people, and skillions of dollars behind us. But we don’t. We’ve got a little crew, and we’ve got 8 bucks a month from people who believe in us. That’s how we want it. And with more people behind us, we can do a lot more.
So if you read The Pillar’s news and you think it matters, do me a favor and click this button. Give me a bigger newsroom, and I’ll give you results. I promise.
—
Ok, so the U.S. Supreme Court last week heard arguments in Chiles v. Salazar, a lawsuit aiming to overturn a Colorado ban on providing “conversion therapy” to minors.
The USCCB has weighed in to support the lawsuit, along with a group of Catholic experts in law, theology, and psychology. But on the other side, a Colorado Catholic psychologist, who describes herself as a “conservative” and faithful Catholic, has filed a brief in favor of Colorado’s law, saying that she works with people struggling with orientation and gender identity, and that conversion therapy causes harm.
But this is a complex debate — with some people saying “conversion therapy” doesn’t even really exist in the way most people think of it, and that therapists shouldn’t be impeded from helping clients with their goals.
We took a deep dive into all of this, wanting to understand it, and then explain it to you.
The judges are both laity and clergy, men and women, none of whom work in the Roman curia — which means that the Vatican dispensed in this case from the procedural rule requiring judges to be clerics.
So what happens now? Read all about it.
This Advent, gather with fellow Catholics for a Bible study unlike any other. Bible Across America is a nationwide Bible study hosted by the St. Paul Center. During this inaugural study, we’ll encounter Christ as “Teacher and Lord,” discovering what this means for our lives as modern-day disciples.
The U.K.’s Syro-Malabar bishop stressed last that he has jurisdiction over Knanaya Catholics who leave India to settle in Britain. While that might seem unobjectionable to you, it signifies a lot to Knanaya Catholics, who have a unique status in the Syro-Malabar Church.
—
Feast days are one of the great gifts of the Church, helping us to mark annually the lives of our intercessors, and our gratitude for them.
Except, of course, when they get bumped. See, the liturgical calendar is a complex thing, with a lot of moving parts, and a few parts which are absolutely fixed and inflexible. And that means feasts sometimes run right into each other on the calendar.
So what happens? What’s going on under the hood of the liturgical calendar?
If you’ve always wondered — or if you never wondered until now — here’s what you need to know.
You might have immediately formed some judgments — “fer or again’ it,” as they say in the Old West — pretty quickly.
But we thought it was worth learning a bit more about a Eucharist procession of hundreds of people, and what they were doing at an ICE detention facility that has been the center of national controversy.
So we talked yesterday with Fr. Larry Dowling, the priest who carried the monstrance to the facility, about the aim of the procession, and what he hoped it would accomplish.
And when Dowling accused several bishops of affiliation with “white Christian nationalism,” we asked the bishops in question about that.
Several of them had a clear response — and aimed to turn the focus toward the religious liberty of ICE detainees.
—
From columnists this week:
Stephen White on knowing the poor.
Bronwen McShea on Catholic conversions in presidential families.
And Susan Mulheron, chancellor of the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, on how a safeguarding proposal from Archbishop Shawn McKnight fits in with the priorities of Pope Leo XIV.
Piddling tours
If you scrolled the Catholic internet in the past few days, you may already have streamed the video of a piddler at St. Peter’s Basilica — a man who climbed up under the Bernini baldachino inside the basilica, dropped trou, and begin urinating on the altar, before security guards yanked the man out of the basilica, and, hopefully, into some pants, and then a jail cell.
The altar will receive the appropriate rites in response to an act of desecration, and it’s not clear what charges the man — reportedly still in custody — will face.
I won’t show the video. It’s gross.
But I have seen online suggestions from Catholics that the altar at St. Peter’s needs to be covered with plexiglass, after several desecrating acts over the past year or so. Or that tourists to the basilica need to be more tightly restrained, so they can only view the church from predetermined holding pens.
I don’t know the right solution, though I don’t like either of those. But the whole thing has gotten me all the more fired up about a pet issue of mine, a project I’m hoping that some of you will take up.
Here it is. At the sacred sites of Rome, the Eternal City and See of Peter, most tours are terrible. Really, really bad.