Happy Friday friends,
We are well and truly into Advent, though I am already feeling slightly guilty about tipping early into the anticipation of Christmas.
This week’s newsletter comes to you from Rome, where we are currently on the first Pillar Pilgrimage, trucking around the eternal city for the close of the Jubilee year.
Only two days in, and I can genuinely say that at least one of the many prayer intentions I carried here has already been granted — that my sense of gratitude for the grace of being here tip over from the intellectual into an organic, spiritual sense of what I have been given.
We started the pilgrimage off with a talk through the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere from Pillar best friend and columnist Liv Lev, the foremost expert on sacred art anywhere near the Vatican.
I say it was a “talk” because I really don’t know what to call it, since it danced between post-doctoral treatise on the history of the place and the nature of sacred art, and a catechesis on the theology and spirituality of what it is to be on a pilgrimage.
Liz spoke much about the importance of pilgrimage as movement — that to journey is central to the entire Christian experience and spirituality. It felt especially pertinent for me since, yes, obviously, we were all there as pilgrims for the Jubilee, but also because of the season of Advent, the first weeks of which we are called to spend contemplating and anticipating the return of the Lord at the completion of history.
The great temptation of Advent, at least for me, is the petty sin of low horizons and little expectations — missing the moment to focus on the great sweep of the history of salvation and the glorious promise of heaven, held out to me in my baptism, and choosing instead to look ahead to the commemoration of Christmas.
And, of course, the great temptation of Christmas is nostalgia; to wallow in the thousand little seasonal customs of my own life and family, especially now I have a daughter just old enough to appreciate them.
For me, the great urge of nostalgia is to keep still, to stay home, to look back. But, of course, there is no keeping still, and there is no going back. We do not ever stop moving forward in time — and when you consider the orbit of our planet, the sweep of our solar system within the arc of the Milky Way, and that our galaxy is itself rocketing out into the ever expanding void, we never stop moving in space, either.
However much my desire is to stay home, the reality is my home, as a Christian, is not somewhere I can make or maintain for myself. And it is no fixed point on the map to which I can return.
My home, our home, is elsewhere, and we are all on pilgrimage toward it. The challenge, I suppose, is appreciating that reality and not allowing myself to give in to the illusion of a stationary life. Advent is good for that.
So too is Rome. And I am grateful to be here.
Here’s the news.
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The News
A Vatican commission concluded that the Catholic Church should not consider the ordination of women deacons, but said it was not a “definitive judgment.”
The study commission, created by Pope Francis in 2020 to consider the historical role of deaconesses and evaluate calls for female ordination to the diaconate from some during various synods in recent years.
The commission found that the historical research and theological inquiry “excludes the possibility of proceeding in the direction of admitting women to the diaconate understood as a degree of the sacrament of Holy Orders.”
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Pope Leo XIV has suppressed a Vatican donations commission less than 10 months after it was established by his predecessor Pope Francis.
The Vatican released Dec. 4 a chirograph, signed Sept. 29 by Pope Leo XIV, suppressing the Commissio de donationibus pro Sancta Sede, or Commission of Donations for the Holy See, which sought to raise much-needed funds for the Vatican.
Leo instead has created a working group “to formulate proposals regarding the general issue of fundraising for the Holy See, along with the definition of an appropriate structure.”
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Recent data from the General Social Survey found that only about half of young adult respondents from 2018-2022 who were raised Catholic still consider themselves Catholic.
But what is it that leads some young adults to buck that trend – to embrace their faith and make it their own?
The Pillar’s Jack Figge went to the National Catholic Youth Conference in Indianapolis, asking them a simple question: What keeps them practicing the Catholic faith?
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The Minnesota Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of a local Catholic high school that declined to renew the contract of an employee who announced plans to undergo a “gender transition.”
The employee, after announcing an intended gender transition, was reminded that all archdiocesan schools and employees are required to adhere to the text the “Guiding Principles for Catholic Schools and Religious Education Concerning Human Sexuality and Sexual Identity,” and rejected them.
The court held that interfering in the school’s right to terminate the employee would lead to excessive government entanglement with religion.
Read all about the decision here.
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The Eucharistic liturgy was celebrated publicly at St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica in southern India for the first time in three years, bringing to a close one of the most painful chapters in the Syro-Malabar Church’s liturgical dispute.
The Syro-Malabar Eucharistic liturgy, known as the Holy Qurbana, had not been celebrated with public participation at the basilica in Ernakulam, Kerala, since December 2022, due to clashes between supporters and opponents of a new uniform liturgy.
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Six Carmelite nuns will begin a new monastery in the Diocese of Fort Worth, Texas, this month, more than one year after the Vatican-ordered suppression of a controversial Carmelite monastery, which had been embroiled in a years-long scandal including allegations of sexual misconduct, drug abuse, and schism.
Fort Worth’s Bishop Michael Olson told The Pillar this week that the new Carmelite monastery is a “fresh start” in his diocese, and that he is grateful to have nuns there who are dedicated to prayer for the spiritual needs of local Catholics.
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The Vatican association of lay employees criticized the Holy See’s recently released financial report, saying in a statement this week that many Vatican employees “received the news with skepticism.”
The statement from the Association of Vatican Lay Employees (ADLV) said the organization wished the Vatican would publish the complete budget, “detailing each item and providing the relevant explanatory/certification documentation.”
Instead, the group said, the Vatican has provided “slides that, while visually appealing, cannot be considered exhaustive for those wishing to delve deeper.”
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Spanish judicial police have arrested two nuns of the excommunicated Poor Clares of Belorado for alleged illegal sales of artwork.
The Monastery of St. Clare of Belorado is officially recognized by UNESCO as part of the Camino Francés and routes of northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela. The sale, manipulation, or transfer of assets from the monastery is subject to strict rules and approval from relevant authorities, which the sisters allegedly did not seek.
The arrests are the latest chapter in a dispute that erupted when 10 members of the Poor Clare community signed a 70-page “Catholic Manifesto” in May 2024 describing the post-Vatican II Catholic Church as illegitimate.
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Croatian police said this week that a religious sister who claimed to have been attacked by a stranger with a knife had actually harmed herself and then filed a false criminal report.
A 35-year-old member of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, was injured Nov. 28 by a sharp object. She was admitted to a local hospital in Zagreb for treatment, where she was diagnosed with minor injuries, according to a local police report.
After being discharged, Zrno filed a criminal report with police, saying she had been stabbed by an unknown perpetrator with a knife.
Several media outlets in both Croatian and English reported that the sister had been stabbed in the abdomen by an unknown assailant who shouted religious slogans, including “Allahu Akbar.”
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Germany’s largest lay organization has called for a review of the practice of notifying German Catholics who formally leave the Church — often to avoid paying a mandatory church tax — that they may no longer receive the sacraments.
Everyone living in Germany — including foreigners — who identifies as a Catholic on an official registration form must pay an 8-9% surcharge on top of their income tax liability, depending on the state in which they live.
The only way for baptized Catholics to opt out of the system is to declare formally that they are leaving the Church, after which they are told they may no longer receive the sacraments, hold Church posts, or serve as baptismal or confirmation sponsors. The ZdK has challenged these consequences, saying canon lawyers argue they are against the Church’s norms.
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Paper money
I continue to be fascinated by the Vatican’s budget statement from last week.
I won’t try your patience by going over again the thrust of my analysis from earlier this week, which essentially concludes that while things are — on the somewhat minimal amount of evidence presented — looking better for the Holy See, there’s a lot we don’t know.
My read of the report is that it is a kind of exercise in forced perspective. If you look at it straight on and take it at face value, things are good: budget deficit halved, revenue up, small surplus recorded.
But if you look at it side on, you suddenly see the proportions of things aren’t actually what they first appeared — costs continue to rise, operational revenues don’t cover the budget, and the bulk of the income is coming from non-recurring donations, or the one-time cashing in of investment gains.
And what we don’t have is anything like a full and credible breakdown of what the Vatican actually owns or makes its money from, or how it calculates or even defines “profit.” Indeed, friends close to APSA have been warning for some time, and with increasing concern, that the financial reality of the Holy See’s sovereign asset and investment manager is hard to credibly assess.
On the contrary, I am told — including in the last week by friends here in Rome — the tracking and recording of what is invested where, worth what, owned by which institution, and generating what kind of return and for whom, is kept in a state of almost deliberate chaos, intended to make the Vatican’s accounts something of a financial Rorschach test, you can make of them what you want to see, and more importantly if you show it to someone and tell them what to see, they will.
Now, to be clear, I am not suggesting that the Holy See put out a budget report last week for the purposes of bluffing the world at large into believing things are financially great at the Vatican.
For a start, and I say this with informed regret, the reality is most people just don’t care. But we are living in the era of a new pope, one who has, probably, come into the role peripherally aware of the decade of financial reforms and scandals under Pope Francis, though not likely to have much sense of the Byzantine interrelation of the various curial financial institutions or the personalities running them.