France's Joan, Ovi's (beautiful) chaos, and the news
The Tuesday Pillar Post
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Hey everybody,
Today is the feast of St. Joan Valois, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
French royal history is terrifically complex, and for me it’s difficult to keep straight. This is mostly because every important king in French history, good or bad, seems to be named Louis.
I realize that you and I are part of a church in which almost exactly 20% of the popes have been named John, Gregory, or Benedict. But still, I find those guys much easier to track than all the various Louises who have either honored or disgraced France.
St. Joan Valois’ husband, Louis XII, is regarded sometimes as one of the good ones.
In fact, Louis XII was proclaimed in his time as Le Père du Peuple — the “Father of the People” — mostly because he cut taxes. But to his first queen, Joan Valois, Louis XII wasn’t a good man at all.
And as the story goes, neither was her dad, King Louis XI.
Joan was born in 1464 with physical disabilities — malformed hips, a twisted spine, a hunched back, and eventually a limp.
Joan’s disabilities led people to expect she would be sterile. When he learned that, it seems her father saw an opportunity.
While Joan — whose governess was deeply Catholic — wanted to enter religious life, her father had other plans.
When she was still young, Joan’s dad arranged that she would eventually marry her cousin Louis, the Duke of Orleans.
Louis was from a rival branch of the family, one that seemed to threaten Louis XI’s hold on the French throne. Historians think Louis XI arranged the marriage because if Joan couldn’t bear her husband children, she’d bring his line of the family to an end — strengthening the fortunes of his own progeny.
The pair married in 1476, when Joan was 12 and her cousin Louis was 14.
We don’t know a lot about the early years of their union. But within a few years, Joan’s dad died, and her brother Charles became the king.
There was a civil war going on in France. Joan’s husband fought against the king’s forces, as part of a rebellion of noblemen who opposed Charles’ reign.
But Louis was captured by royal forces and thrown into prison — a dank French dungeon, I presume.
While he was away, Joan managed his estates and lands, to keep their household and enterprises afloat, and she lobbied the king to release her husband. After a few years, Louis was freed, Joan patched things up between her husband and the king, and Louis became a trusted battlefield companion to King Charles.
Even then, Louis was a lout. He fathered an illegitimate child — embarrassing his wife — while Joan stood by his side, advancing his status and fortune in France.
Then in 1498, King Charles died childless, and Joan’s husband Louis inherited the throne.
Joan was suddenly empress.
But that’s where things get awful. For political reasons, Louis XII wanted to marry Charles’ widow Anne. The only problem was his wife, Joan — the one who got him out of prison, and kept him out of bankruptcy. The woman who had loved an ogre, just because he was her husband.
Louis — undeserving of Joan — decided he needed an annulment.
So the French king told the pope their marriage was invalid because he had not actually been 14 when he and Joan exchanged consent. He also said they never consummated the marriage. In fact, he testified, in declarations that became public among Joan’s friends, that he’d never consummated the marriage because he found his wife’s body so disgusting that he couldn’t do the deed.
What a horrible cad. It was a scandal — but Louis was the king, and people are obsequious to power. So Joan, not Louis, became the outcast at court.
She wouldn’t take that without a fight. She presented witnesses to defend her marriage — friends of Louis, who testified that the oaf had actually bragged about how much he had sex with his wife. And she tried to provide documents that proved her husband’s age.
But Pope Alexander VI, because of his own complex political problems, needed the friendship of France’s king. He agreed to give Louis XII a declaration of nullity, even if the case was flimsy.
Louis gave Joan a courtesy title, sent her packing, and married Anne.
So there Joan was. Mid-30s, no children, betrayed by her dad, betrayed by her husband, betrayed by the pope.
You might expect she would have reached the point of despair. You might expect she’d be done with faith, done with hope, and done with love. No one would fault her.
But I think God gave Joan some extraordinary graces.
Rather than spend out her life in perfectly understandable bitterness, Joan told her friends she saw God’s Providence in what happened. She reminded them that she’d always wanted religious life, and now she was free to pursue it.
Joan had the means. She had interest from women who admired her resolve. And Pope Alexander VI felt he owed her something — so in 1502, when Joan presented to him a rule for the Order of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, he approved it pretty fast.
Joan took the habit in October 1502, with the first four nuns of her order, and she began living as a religious. She told her nuns that religious life was the happiest she had been.
And according to her confessor, she heard advice at prayer from the Blessed Virgin Mary:
“You shall seek to establish peace among all those among whom you dwell. You shall speak nothing but words of peace, concerned for the salvation of souls. You shall not listen to slanderous words, and as soon as you see some sinners, you shall say in your heart: these poor people must be saved. For God has allowed them to sin in your presence to see, He, God, how you would pray for them and what labor you would undertake to save them. Excuse them before God in order to be, as I told you, the advocate and defender of all.”
But all of that was short-lived for Joan. She loved religious life, but she lived it only two years. She fell sick, and she died at 40, on Feb. 4, 1505. She was buried in the chapel of her monastery.
Five decades later, in 1562, during another French civil war, her body was dug up by a Protestant militia, desecrated and burned. Forgotten and rejected in life, she became then a symbol of Catholic France. People began praying for her intercession. Miracles began to be attributed to her. She was canonized centuries later, in 1950.
Joan suffered in every way a person could suffer. Pain. Humiliation. Rejection. Abandonment.
Except for one thing: God made her a witness of hope. A symbol of the cross’ very meaning. God let Joan’s life show us that he is the victor over every kind of suffering. She is a witness to the profound mystery of divine love.
May St. Joan Valois intercede for each one of us.
The news
In response, the country’s bishops’ conference president put out some statements emphasizing the Church’s commitment to addressing safeguarding concerns.
But in the context of those remarks, he said something likely to cause ongoing controversy in the country — that people with suspicion or knowledge of abuse should contact either the police or ecclesiastical officials.
That advice is contrary to the approach recommended by safeguarding experts — namely, that people always be urged to contact the police, regardless of whether they also contact ecclesiastical officials.
It might seem like a small thing, but given the manner in which cases have sometimes been handled in the Church, it demonstrates that the Church in the Philippines is still in the early stages of addressing problems that have framed much of ecclesial life in the U.S. in recent decades.
The bishops have made a few other apparent missteps too, and begun already walking them back.
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The brother of Pillar reader Cardinal Angelo Becciu was indicted Monday, along with Sardinian Bishop Corrado Melis — the pair charged with directing about two million euro of Church money into business ventures of their own.
You might remember Tonino Becciu, because he was prominently featured in his brother’s trial, which saw Cardinal Becciu convicted of illegally steering Church funds into the personal bank accounts of his brother — a move the Becciu brothers said was an ordinary Italian way of running charities, and doing business.
For his part, Bishop Melis has been a long-standing public supporter of Cardinal Becciu.
Also indicted this week was Cardinal Becciu’s niece, Maria Zambrano — who, in 2021, helped her cardinal-uncle illegally record a phone with the pope, during which Becciu tried unsuccessfully to back up his alibi for several (then alleged) crimes.
It’s been quite a week for the Beccius, and today is only Tuesday. Perhaps that’s why Bishop Melis has compared his criminal charges to the Lord’s agony in the garden.
The most recent charges, filed against the bishop last week, include alleged sexual assault against a boy under 13, allegedly taking place in 2009 or 2010.
That charge — for which Saunders was arrested Jan. 26 — could be especially controversial in Australia, as the country’s bishops’ conference said in 2023 that an internal investigation into Saunders had identified no potential victims under the age of 18.
To date, his alleged victims have been identified as young Aboriginal men.
The bishop, 75, has pleaded not guilty to multiple abuse charges. He could eventually face theft or embezzlement charges, as he’s accused of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of Church funds on gifts for vulnerable young men, including cash, phones, alcohol, and travel.
Saunders resigned from his diocese in 2021, citing ill health, and was first arrested in February 2024.
In April 2024, Saunders’ former secretary told The Pillar she had been ordered by the bishop to make “hush money” payments to the bishop’s alleged victims during her time working for him.
Why?
Well, “the crisis is not over for survivors,” Fr. Tom Berg told The Pillar. “Enormous wounds remain, and the work of healing will be incumbent on us for years and years to come.”
Furthermore, Berg said, “We seem amazingly to forget or to just want to ignore the reality that, beyond the immediate harm to survivors of clergy sexual abuse, the entire Body of Christ has been profoundly wounded by this scourge.”
Read about their efforts here.
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The federal Department of Homeland Security rolled back this month guidelines that had mostly prohibited immigration authorities from making arrests in federally-defined “sensitive areas” — including churches.
Predictably, there’s been a pushback against this. Amid the debate, several commentators have floated the notion of “sanctuary” — the idea that churches have historically been places in which suspected criminals are safe from arrest.
I got curious about how true that really is. So I did some research about churches and sanctuary.
I learned that practices have varied considerably across the centuries — and in U.S. history, it turns out the federal government has no record of being concerned with “sanctuary” customs.
Brendan says
Finally, our analysis last week about migration resettlement contracts and USCCB budgets prompted a lot of debate. The conference has not yet agreed to my interview requests on the subject, but bishops have given interviews to some other outlets on the subject.
In any case, some Pillar readers have suggested that the USCCB might use its refugee resettlement federal contracts to cover the costs of ordinary administrative obligations at the conference — categorizing employees or purchases as MRS related expenses when there’s grant money to do so. That seems possible, and I got curious about it, so we asked Brendan Hodge to see what available data could tell us about that.
Here’s what he sent me:
When we wrote last week about the question of whether federal grants to the USCCB for programs supporting refugees and migrants were “padding the bottom line” for the U.S. bishops, we received a lot of feedback. As of now there are 160 comments on the analysis, and my notifications have not stopped pinging.
One of the common pieces of feedback we received was that probably some of the annual $15 million of the federal funding which USCCB’s audited financials said were for the refugee programs’ salaries and administrative expenses were probably paying actually for general USCCB expenses.
To assess this, it would be helpful if the USCCB was more transparent on exactly how all the money is being spent.
Although highly controversial, the USCCB’s CCHD is notably transparent, posting an annual disclosure of organizations they provide grants to and how big each grant is. The Migrant and Refugee Services at the bishops’ conference do not disclose as much information.
But the theory that resources classified as refugee services are actually being used for other purposes within the USCCB is testable to some extent.
During the first Trump administration, the funding grants to the USCCB for refugee services dropped significantly. If those funds were being used for other purposes which the bishops relied upon, it seems likely we’d see other USCCB spending (mysteriously) increase during the lean years of federal funding.
So we took a look at the total USCCB financial picture.
As you can see below, government funding for MRS dropped significantly during the first Trump administration. “National Collections” revenue fell during the same period. Only the general USCCB funding (which comes from an assessment on dioceses) remained steady.
Looking at the expenditures at the USCCB, the refugee programs and the national collection expenditures both drop in sync with the fall in their revenues, while general USCCB expenditures remain flat.
I think the trend becomes most clear if you look at the average expenditures across all three presidential administrations.
USCCB spending on general activities and on national collections has been on a gradual downward trend, even while the federal programs decreased significantly under Trump’s first term and then grew to their highest level ever under Biden.
If during the Obama years the USCCB had been using federally funded resources to do a lot of everyday activities, I would have expected that when federal funding dropped from $85 million annually in 2014-2016, all the way to $55 million annually year from 2017 to 2020, the USCCB would have been forced to spend more of its general funds on whatever expenses it had covered with federal funds before.
But we actually see that when federal funding for refugee and migrant services dropped by $30 million per year, the bishops’ spending on those services dropped by $29 million per year. Meanwhile, their spending on general USCCB operations also dropped from $36 million per year to $34 million per year.
There’s a limit to what we can tell from the level of detail the bishops conference has released, and they’re not currently responding to our inquiries on this topic. But from their official financials, there is not indication, at least, that federal funds are being used to cover general USCCB operations.
A (new, and very different) Great One
While we’re watching trade bluffs and agreements unfold in real time, and sports fans are scratching their heads over an ill-advised NBA mega-trade, you might not realize that we’re on the verge of another historic moment in America.
As the National Hockey League heads into its (cool) new version of the All-Star break, Washington Capitals mainstay Alex Ovechkin is on track to break Wayne Gretzky’s NHL goal scoring record, and possibly this season. Ovechkin has 877 goals to date, Gretzky has 894.
And Ovie, 39, is having an extraordinary season, even for a player half his age.
Barring some catastrophic injury — or Canada shutting us out of a league that’s rightfully theirs — the record will soon change hands.
The players themselves are a study in opposites. Gretzky got the scoring record — plus the assists record, the points record, the single-season goals record, and about 10 others — through hard work, discipline, a commitment to hustle and the fundamentals of the game.
Gretzky was never the most athletic hockey player. He was simply the best, because he studied the game, saw the ice better than anyone, and made the surgically textbook play every single time. That made him successful, and it made his teammates successful.
If you’re coaching kids, you could do no better than having them watch Wayne Gretzky play ice hockey.
But if you’re looking for a good time, Alexander the Great is who you’re after.
Ovechkin is chaos.
He’s unpredictable, he’s often out of position, he’s very physical, and he’s always around the puck.
When Alex Ovechkin is on the ice, you’ve no idea what’s going to happen. When he decides to score, you’ve no idea how he’s going to do it. He’s got a laser one-timer from the circle. He’s got a hard shot from the point. But mostly, Alex Ovechkin stumbles and catapults and explodes towards the goal, dangling the puck recklessly in front of defenses and goalies, before snapping or pushing or tumbling it into the net.
Here’s his most famous — and most Alex — goal, scored against the Gretzky-coached Coyotes.
When you watch him in the slot, everything he does is filthy. It rarely makes sense. But it often connects.
It’s great to celebrate the diligent hard work of a Great One, like Gretzky. But it’s pretty wonderful too to watch the natural genius and raw talent of a player like Ovechkin.
There’s something about brilliant charged play like his which glorifies the grandeur of God, exhibited in the poetry of unfettered humanity.
Even if Alex should be a little more careful with Lord Stanley’s Cup.
Please be assured of our prayers, and please pray for us. We need it.
Yours in Christ,
JD Flynn
Editor-in-chief
The Pillar
Before this comment section becomes totally buried in opinions and pet theories about USCCB funding, I want to thank you for a wonderful introduction and overview to a saint I hadn't heard of! Reading about St. Joan Valois was very edifying, and I'm hoping to learn more about her. Saints who had disabilities are very close to my heart.
Joan Valois was the saint I needed to learn about today, and I’m so grateful!