Getting out, getting away with it, and Belle the beast
The Friday Pillar Post
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Happy Friday friends,
Before we get started, a reminder up front for all friends in the DMV: we’ll be making a live episode of The Pillar Podcast in Washington next week — we’ll be at Royal Sands Social Club on Thursday, November 14, from 7pm.
Come as you are, bring friends, and let’s have a great time.
See you there!
It’s the day after the day after the day after the night before and, from at least where I am sitting, a lot of people are still “processing” the result of the presidential election.
For what it’s worth, my abiding takeaway from it all is this:
While I have been telling anyone who asked me all year that I thought Donald Trump looked certain to win, like a lot of people I was surprised by the scale of the victory and his capture of the popular vote. That I did not see coming.
Over the last few days, though, what I found really striking is the near-universal incomprehension and bitterness, not to say personal antipathy, towards Trump voters, all 72 million of them, coming from nearly every major cultural or media figure to cross my screen.
What strikes me is not so much that these figures — “elites” I suppose you can call them if you want to — have a different experience or expectation than the swathes of ordinary people for whom their content is created, or that they should find themselves in the political minority versus the general population. That seems normal to me.
But that they should suddenly find themselves such obvious strangers to the wider society and culture of which they are supposed to be marquee members was genuinely interesting to watch, as was their hostility to it.
I have to wonder how long a mass-media culture of any kind can survive if the straight-faced assessment of so many of its members is that the preeminent motivations of a majority of American voters are fascism, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and a desire to alienate and oppress their neighbors.
That kind of analysis simply isn’t supported by the daily reality of life in this country, nor is it supportable by anyone with even a modestly varied acquaintance with the people around them.
Granted, there are some truly revolting fellow travelers swimming in the immediate wake of the president-elect — as too there were around the current vice president. And I don’t dispute that animus of one kind or another fueled a lot of the most vigorous campaigning around both candidates.
But I’m not speaking of the candidates, their campaign teams, or their most zealous disciples. All together they could not, and did not, make up anything like the 150 million some people who actually did the bulk of the voting this week.
I did not vote for either Trump or Harris, as I’ve made clear before. But I know and love dearly people who did both. While I don’t agree with their political evaluations and choices, none of them are new or incomprehensible to me.
As a result, I found adjusting to an unexpected result somewhat painless. Clearly not so for many others.
For this reason, I suggest that any and all still suffering from a sudden terror of more than 50% of the country get out of the house and do something else for a bit, preferably with other people, and try not to discuss politics. It’s good for you, and it’s good for society.
Anyway, that said, here’s the news.
The News
Bishop Shawn McKnight of Jefferson City has passed and then partially walked back a set of policies on liturgical music in the past week.
McKnight had initially published a decree on sacred music on Oct. 28, banning the use of certain hymns in diocesan liturgies, including perennial felt banner favorites, like All Are Welcome and Table of Plenty, which have already been flagged by the USCCB as doctrinally unsound.
The policy also banned the liturgical use of music composed by credibly accused abusers, like David Haas, Cesáreo Gabarain, and Ed Conlin.
Then, earlier this week, the bishop threw the policy (which was years in development) into reverse, saying that “the decision to prohibit specific songs and composers led to a spirited discussion.” The temptation to editorialize on that sprited discussion is nearly overwhelming, but I forbear.
The bishop has instead determined that a “synodal approach, one of listening and communal discernment, was necessary,” according to the diocese.
So what’s going on? Read all about it here.
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Archbishop Domenico Battaglia of Naples — Pope Francis’ surprise pick to become a cardinal last week — has been the subject of a months-long “poison pen” campaign, it emerged this week.
The archbishop, who is due to receive a cardinal’s red hat on Dec. 7, was accused in anonymous letters circulated around his diocese of failing to address alleged links to organized crime at an academic institution, despite his reputation as an outspoken mafia opponent. They claimed that he possesses an authoritarian streak and shows undue preference for collaborators from his native Calabria.
Battaglia, known as “Don Mimmo,” has a public reputation as a fierce anti-mafia campaigner and a “street priest” pastoral style. While he has not publicly addressed the allegations, he did call a meeting of the Naples curia Oct. 14, to discuss “urgent and important matters concerning the life of the diocesan Church.”
Supporters of the archbishop have suggested the anonymous letter campaign was kicked off specifically to keep him off the pope’s list of new cardinals in September.
This is one of those “only in Napoli” stories. Read all about it here.
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Even before this week’s presidential election, senior Churchmen on both sides of the Atlantic had Washington, D.C. on their minds, with the selection of a new archbishop foremost in their thoughts.
Last month, it was widely reported that three well-known American cardinals met with Pope Francis to discuss “challenges in the United States.” Obviously, JD and I spent a lot of our recent time in Rome talking to people to find out what those “challenges” were.
As you would expect, this complaint wasn’t exactly universally embraced. “Diligence is not delay,” one Roman official close to the Dicastery for Bishops told me. “Just because [Cardinal Pierre] does not defer immediately to some [American cardinals like Cupich and Tobin] does not mean he is being obstructive. You might say he’s doing his job.”
It seems clear that the process of naming the next Archbishop of Washington is turning into a replay of the same logjam that delayed an appointment for Boston until the stalemate was broken this year.
The same figures seem to be involved, making a lot of the same arguments. And this is only one of many archiepiscopal appointments that need to be made in the coming months.
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The installation of a new Bishop of Plymouth, England, has been delayed for the second time in nine months.
The bishop gave no details of the reason for the delay, prompting questions and speculation among local Catholics. The bishop did, however, reference the need for “due process” to be observed, raising the prospect that the bishop could be the subject of a canonical investigation.
The delay comes just 258 days after another installation ceremony was canceled for the previous nominee to become bishop of the diocese.
Canon Christopher Whitehead, a priest of the Diocese of Clifton, was due to be ordained and installed in Plymouth, but the bishops’ conference announced in February that the ceremony would not take place amid a canonical process for Whitehead, one which eventually determined that “no canonical action was warranted” but saw Whitehead return to parish ministry.
As Oscar Wilde might observe, to lose one bishop of Plymouth is misfortune, but to lose two in a year begins to look like carelessness. The nunciature in London is now facing some quiet but quietly furious questions about its process for vetting candidates for office.
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With Donald Trump returning to the White House in January, the bishops of the United States will once again be recalibrating their expectations and approach for an incoming administration.
But today we have a new man bound for the White House and a new archbishop serving as the bishops’ conference president. So what kind of tone might the USCCB try to strike with the new presidential administration?
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And finally, the Vatican announced Wednesday that Chicago priest Fr. Manuel Dorantes will play a leading role at the Laudato si’ Center for Higher Education at Castel Gandolfo.
Dorantes, currently pastor of Saint Mary of the Lake and Our Lady of Lourdes parish, will begin a four-year term as the center’s administrative management director Dec. 1.
How they get away with it
Speaking, as I was earlier, about important stories that fall through the cracks, I’d like to just flag, again, what I still consider to be the most important Catholic news story of this year — indeed of the last several years at least.
Recapitulating the facts as briefly as possible:
Last month we learned of an order, signed by the papal chief of staff Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, attempting to vacate not one but two canonical verdicts laicizing a priest in Argentina for multiple counts of sexual abuse of minors and restoring him to ministry.
We also learned that the head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s disciplinary section, Archbishop John Joseph Kennedy, swiftly moved to nullify that order — declaring it legally void and reimposing laicization on Ariel Alberto Príncipi.
Equally extraordinary was the action of the secretary of the DDF to publicly and with force of law overrule the sostituto of the Secretariat of State, the pope’s chief of staff.
Even more extraordinary was what happened next — nothing.
Either Peña Parra acted illegally to put a child abuser back into ministry, in which case his position would be clearly untenable.
Or he did so under the personal authorization of the pope, in which case the Roman pontiff had acted or allowed the entire canonical process around clerical sexual abuse to be circumvented after lobbying by some Argentine bishops.
While the Holy See press office did its best to muddy the waters with some possible alternatives, they did not stand up to basic scrutiny.
Yet, despite the frankly shocking, and shockingly obvious implications of the Príncipi case, nothing has happened as a result. Apart from at The Pillar, no questions have been asked in print, no efforts made to follow the story up, no answers offered by the Vatican.
There are, perhaps, several contributing factors at work here.
The Holy See’s interest in seeing this story sink without a trace (or an official comment) is obvious. Bandwidth for Vatican reporting is limited for a lot of outlets, and reader attention spans can be notoriously short — especially for secular media.
All this unfolded right as the synod on synodality’s final session was getting underway in Rome, and there was a steady drumbeat of stories coming out of that to keep people occupied.
Then, just as it became clear the assembly wasn’t going to recommend or even really discuss anything especially controversial, the Vatican press corps was (conveniently) handed a new papal encyclical to digest and report.
So there are some reasons why the Príncipi case might struggle to catch its own news cycle — though I would have thought “Pope’s chief of staff tried to bring back laicized child abuser” is a headline to grab even the most unchurched reader.
But what I don’t understand is how virtually every outlet working the Vatican beat could then turn around last week and report with a straight face on the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors’ first-ever assessment of global processes and safeguards to combat abuse.
“The commission found a persistent concern regarding the transparency in the Roman Curia’s procedures and juridical processes. The commission notes that this will continue to foment distrust among the faithful, especially the victim/survivor community,” the commission found.
How this report was presented in the Vatican’s press office hall, to a room full of accredited Vatican journalists, without a single question about or reference to the Príncipi case, which touches the absolute highest exercise of authority in the Church, baffles me.
Frankly, I am running out of innocent explanations here.
Two things I know for sure are this:
When cases like Príncipi’s pass unexamined and unexplained, and when those responsible go unchallenged and are not held accountable, bad things happen — and those bad things multiply.
Transparency and accountability cannot be abstractions, they have to be real commitments, applied to real situations and, where necessary, actual people.
And, as the Vatican’s own McCarrick Report showed in excruciating terms, when journalists decline to follow what is in front of them for fear or favor of those in power, things only get worse, and more people get hurt.
We cannot tell you who did what on whose say-so in the Príncipi case. Yet. Nor can I offer you an answer for why no one else seems to care about this.
But I can promise you this: We are not letting this one go. Cases like this are the reason we started The Pillar. We aren’t afraid to sink the man hours and resources it may take to get to the bottom of it.
It took years to get to the bottom of the Vatican financial scandal, but I don’t think anyone questions now why it matters — and plenty of the same Vatican journalists who called that story a “scandal without a sin” are equally uninterested in Príncipi’s case, I’d note.
So be it. We’ll do it ourselves, all of it, if we have to. That’s why we’re here, and just as importantly, it’s why you're here with us.
Belle the beast
One of the minor penances of fatherhood is having to watch the same film over and over again until it drives you mad.
Just now, my daughter is obsessed with Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”, one of the trifecta from my own youth which marked a return to form for the studio, in its strongest suit of animated musicals, along with “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin.”
As with “Aladdin,” childhood nostalgia was enough to get me through the first dozen or so viewings of Belle and the candelabra without any real pain. But, again as with “Aladdin,” eventually I find myself actually paying attention to what’s going on and it’s hard not to be horrified by Disney’s narrative choices — and you realize that pretty much all three of the main characters are grossly misrepresented.
Let’s start with the basic premise for The Beast, who is treated as a savage, violent-tempered aristocrat who is running out of time to reform himself.
The thumbnail set up we’re given in the prologue is that he was a prince in a castle who refused hospitality to a witch (“magical enchantress”) who cursed him — and all his innocent staff — as punishment for his rudeness, turning him into a beast and they into animate household objects.
This is treated in the film as, basically, justice from a semi-divine force, though I fail to see how.
But if you listen to the preamble enough times to hear the details, you notice something even worse — the beast is given until his 21st birthday to reverse the spell, via the usual means of “true love.”
Twenty-one is young to find true love these days but, to be fair, people used to marry a lot younger, and this is set in the decades before the French Revolution, sometime in the 1700s.
But you start to get a sense of the true awfulness of the premise when the songs make clear later in the movie that they’ve been laboring under the curse for 10 full years, meaning the witch cursed dozens of adults servants for the crime of a 10-year-old child refusing to allow a stranger into his house on a “dark and stormy night.”
He has to learn to control his temper, we’re repeatedly told. Frankly, it’s a miracle of self-control he didn’t go totally mad and rip that witch limb from limb.
And speaking of crazy — can we talk about Mrs Potts and her son Chip? I don’t want to infer anything from the absence of a Mr. Potts, accidents happen and china is breakable.
But it’s clear that Chip is a young child, certainly no older than 10. Meaning that, whoever his father was, Chip was conceived and born under the curse — while his mother was a teapot. The mind boggles.
But all this is as nothing compared to what’s wrong with the supposed heroine, Belle, who is the real monster of the story.
We’re introduced to her with a musical number during which she despises her “provincial life” and pours scorn on her hardworking neighbors as a bunch of uncultured bumpkins.
Worse than her appalling snobbery to those around her, voiced as she causes mayhem and actual bodily harm to them as she wanders around town, is that it’s totally unmerited.
At one point she interrupts a baker in the middle of the morning rush to try to impress him with the “most wonderful book” she’s just read, rolling her eyes that he’s unwilling to break off from serving his customers to discuss literature.
What book is it she’s so on fire about — The Republic? The Iliad? Plutarch’s Lives? She tells us: Jack and Beanstalk.
This dilettante is swanning around town judging respectable people for their lack of sophistication while she’s reading at the level of my three-year-old.
She reserves her particular contempt for Gaston, a flawed man but inarguably the tragic hero of the tale, whom she reviles and humiliates for having the temerity to pay her court with the promise of a marriage open to life.
Undeterred, and clearly motivated by her best interests — to which Belle is herself consistently oblivious throughout the film — he even goes so far as to propose again, despite her previous treatment of him, while promising to take her deranged lunatic of a father into the family home with them.
The guy is an exemplar of family values.
He perishes bravely in combat with the beast, after marshaling and leading the townsfolk for a sortie which is both brave and the only reasonable response to discovering a slavering monster is lurking on the town’s periphery.
Prior to getting Gaston killed, Belle also nearly does the same for the beast, by the way.
He is savaged by a pack of wolves while rescuing Belle, who broke her word and fled the castle because he got a bit short-tempered after finding her having a good rummage around his bedroom — literally the only thing he asked her not to do, as if a person of any upbringing would need to be told.
My fury that this over-entitled narcissist winds up with the run of a castle and mistress over all the people she’s used so appallingly is mollified only by the knowledge that, a few years after the film closes, the beast-prince will have been summoned away to the Estates General, unlikely to return, and those same despised peasants will return and join with the oppressed family servants to sack the castle again.
Let’s see Belle sing a song about that.
I’m not explaining all of this to my daughter, of course. Yet.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
Having a childhood favorite Disney princess movie destroyed by a Brit on Substack was not on my Friday Bingo card today. And now I'll try not to let the teapot situation distract my thoughts too much today. (I bet there is a Scrub Daddy to blame....)
“One of the minor penances of fatherhood is having to watch the same film over and over again until it drives you mad.”
It’s a tale as old as time.