Hey everybody,
Today’s the feast of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
Well, sort of.
I was out of the office yesterday, and I’m out still today, because I’m giving some talks at a convocation of priests from two dioceses in the Upper Midwest.
I had the opportunity last night to spend time with many of those priests as they held a tournament, playing a complex card game which was brought to the United States by German immigrants in the last years of the 1800s, and is kept alive on the snow-swept prairies of our northern national borders.
I did not enter the tournament, because I don’t know how to play, and a high-stakes presbyteral card night hardly seems the place to learn, especially since it’s a partner game, and I couldn’t ask anyone to sacrifice their run through the tournament to take a newbie as partner.
Instead, I enjoyed drinks and conviviality with many of these men, and I was reminded how blessed we are in this country by the sort of priests who think nothing of routinely driving three hours to offer Mass for disparate communities — or, if they do think something of it, who do it anyway, because it’s of service to the people for whom they have given their lives.
We are not the only country for whom that sort of thing is common: I was friends once with a Congolese priest whose parish territory was the size of Rhode Island, and who could be said to have almost no fixed abode, given the sheer amount of time he spent traversing rutted tracks to administer the Gospel. Leo XIV himself, during his time as a missionary bishop in Peru, traveled routinely to far-flung places, to be welcomed in little villages where he’d administer the sacrament of confirmation, and any other ministry for which his people had a need.
That rather makes the point: The Church in the United States is kept alive in many places by Christ working through priests who can be described best as missionaries, who mediate grace, by the power of orders, at real personal cost, in a spirit of sacrifice that unifies them to the cross.
Many of those priests read The Pillar, and now seems an opportune moment to thank them. Many others are known to you Pillar readers, and it’s therefore incumbent on you to thank them. We have each of us a vocation in the Church, each of us a mission, each of us, as Newman says, a link in the chain.
And at The Pillar, we spend time enough recognizing the areas of the Church in need of reform and renewal, and doing so often by the stories in which the Church does not live as she ought. To do that with the proper perspective, we ought to thank God for the many places, and the many ways, in which she works in spite of obstacles or genuine hardships, largely because of people who take up a heavy cross, and trust the Lord will make it light.
Anyway, given the cards tournament, and my responsibilities to these men today, this newsletter will be a little light — and so are the number of stories we’ve published in the past day or two. Then again, it’s mid-July. Things move slower, don’t they?
I appreciate your understanding.
The news
According to data gathered and analyzed by The Pillar, of the 342 men ordained to the diocesan priesthood in 2026, a little more than half were ordained in Midwest and Southeast dioceses, despite those dioceses making up only 28% of the Catholic population in the country.
And numbers are still lower than they were a decade ago. In 2016, there were 376 men ordained to the diocesan priesthood in the United States, 34 more than this year.
Here’s a good, solid, Pillar look at the numbers.
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Why? Well, because the diocese has discipline problems, the bishop said, leading to the recent suspension of about a half dozen priests. Still, the prohibitions raise some canonical questions, and may well become the subject of appeals to the Apostolic See.
In the wake of a major disaster, the Church in Venezuela is playing a major role in helping people recover and find stability, while bishops call “urgently” for the “help of the world.”
While that could be explained in several ways, it’s also worth noting that 18- to 24-year-olds in the country are more likely to express a high degree of trust in the Church than any age group except the over 65s.
Does this signify renewal? It’s not enough information to tell, especially since the study’s sampling size is pretty small. But the data is an interesting snapshot — and some in Spain are suggesting it could signify the reversal of a trend.
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And finally, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — the second largest of the Eastern Catholic Churches — announced late last week that after 10 years of work, the Church’s leadership is preparing for the promulgation of a code of canon law specifically for its own internal governance.
Eastern Catholic Churches are not governed by the 1983 Code of Canon Law — that pertains to the Latin Church, which constitutes the overwhelming majority of the Catholic communion. Instead, Eastern Catholic Churches are governed by the 1990 Code of Canons for the Eastern Churches, which sets a common framework within which each sui iuris Eastern Church is to be governed by its own particular law.
While Eastern Catholic Churches have developed that law to varying degrees, none have promulgated an entire codified body of law, relying instead on collections of legislation developed piecemeal over time.
In principle, a code could be a very useful organizing tool for the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
But there are some questions which are as yet unanswered.
It is not clear, for example, whether many canonists outside of Ukraine or its European neighbors were part of the actual drafting process. This matters, because the outside-of-Ukraine diaspora portion of the Church makes up an increasingly large portion of the Church’s Catholics, and the experience of ecclesiastical leadership outside the territory of Ukraine itself — in the places where the Latin Catholic Church is predominant — is very different from the context of Church life in Ukraine itself.
The prospect of writing law for those very different contexts is an interesting technical challenge, and one worth further exploring — especially if the Ukrainian code portends the prospect of similar legislation for other Eastern Catholic Churches.
In short, I’m flagging this for your awareness, as I’ll be aiming to raise questions about it in the weeks to come, and as I’ll hope for ongoing reporting on the subject.
I am, as I mentioned, preparing for these convocation talks which I’ll give shortly.
Meanwhile, here are some ways to spend time during your workday.
Including this crazy one, which I really don’t understand at all.
Please be assured of our prayers, and please pray for us. We need it.
Yours in Christ,
JD Flynn
editor-in-chief
The Pillar
You are called to grow in your Faith and to evangelize. Deepen your understanding of the biblical roots of Catholicism and confidently share your Faith with others by becoming a St. Paul Center Member. Encounter Christ. Share Christ. Visit https://stpaulcenter.com/memberships to get started for free.
