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Happy Friday friends,
I am back in Washington after our first-ever Pillar Pilgrimage to Rome. It was, honestly, a time of great consolation for me.
The first weeks of Advent are meant, as we all know, to lift our eyes a little higher to the horizon of the end of time and the coming of the Lord in glory. As someone perpetually preoccupied with the immediate, it was an immense gift to be “forced,” in a way, to set the quotidian concerns of the day’s news aside — at least a bit — and be reminded that there is a Good News much more important for me to both give and receive.
The pilgrimage came also just as The Pillar is about to turn five years old, and the significance of going to Rome to rededicate ourselves, and recommit our work to the service of the Church was not lost on me.
All of the Church, and the whole meaning of the Christian life, is to serve as a witness of He who came into history with the Incarnation and who is to come again at the end of time. One of the lines of the Gospel that haunts me most is Christ’s question: When the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?
Will he find me worried about The Pillar’s subscriber numbers, the state of the Vatican’s finances, seeking in a dozen different ways to work my own measure of justice in the world? Or will Christ find me waiting expectantly for the dawn, animated by the reality of his incarnation, and confident in the resurrection?
I certainly hope it is the latter.
This weekend is Gaudete Sunday, of course. And as I was discussing with a newly made friend while in Rome, it’s worth remembering that it is an imperative, not a suggestion. Sharing joy around Christmas is an important part of bearing witness to the truth of the holy day. But as important is sharing the reason for our joy.
When I arrived home, there was an immediate seasonal to-do list. There is a four-year-old clamoring for a tree, and I feel the internal impulse of the suburban dad to bust out the ladder and wrap the house in lights, both of which I will see to this weekend.
After getting home from a few months of heavy travel, it’s easy to slip into a sepia tinted season of nostalgia, layering on all sorts of harmless but ultimately empty seasonal traditions and steeping my daughter in their silly insignificance.
Does she really need to develop and share my emotional bond with a 1986 Marshall Fields Christmas teddy bear? Of course not. But there is something to the joy prompted by properly decked halls. Hearing her softly coo “O Come Emmanuel” to herself as she peered over our ever-expanding nativity display may be the most deep-seated festive joy I have ever felt.
I know I can’t claim personal credit for sowing whatever seeds of faith sprouted that particular moment, but if I can play some part in steering her to live in joyful expectation of the Lord, it is the fullest of a life’s work.
I’m still making her watch the Muppet Christmas Carol until she memorizes it, though.
Here’s the news.
The News
Cardinal Baltazar Porras, one of the staunchest clerical critics of the Venezuelan regime, was detained by police and had his passport annulled after he tried to board a flight out of the country.
The cardinal was informed that he has been banned from leaving Venezuela.
“They annulled his Venezuelan passport, and didn’t allow him to board the flight despite the fact that he also has a Vatican passport,” sources close to the cardinal told The Pillar. Porras later said that a Venezuelan official informed him in the airport that he appeared as “deceased” in the passport system.
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Archbishop Bernard Hebda led a rite of reparation at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis on Saturday, restoring the church building for worship more than three months after a deadly shooting took place there.
Mass has not been celebrated inside the church building since Aug. 27, when a shooter opened fire during an all-school Mass, killing two students and injuring 21 other people.
Since Aug. 30, Mass has been held in the school auditorium. An archdiocesan spokesman told The Pillar Tuesday that the parish still needs to make decisions about the sacramental schedule at the church building, and Mass will continue in the school auditorium for now.
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Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin arrived this week in one of the most dangerous places in the world for Christians.
The Vatican’s most senior diplomat traveled Dec. 8 to Pemba, the capital of the strife-torn Cabo Delgado province in northeastern Mozambique.
So, what is happening in Cabo Delgado province? Why did Parolin make the trip? And what’s likely to happen next?
Luke Coppen explains it all here.
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The Syro-Malabar Church’s liturgy dispute flared again this week when protesters occupied a basilica at the heart of the long-running controversy — this time from those favoring, rather than opposing, the Eastern Church’s reformed liturgy.
Dozens of protesters from the “One Church One Qurbana” movement, who support a new uniform Eucharistic liturgy, entered St. Mary’s Cathedral Basilica in Ernakulam, southern India, Dec. 10 and locked the basilica from the inside, preventing worshipers from attending the 6 p.m. Eucharistic liturgy.
The liturgy was due to be celebrated in an older style favored by the majority in the local Archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamaly, in which the priest faces the people throughout (versus populum).
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A new poll suggests that the sacrament of confession may be experiencing a revival in France, at least among regular Massgoers.
A survey conducted by the Ifop polling firm for Bayard-La Croix concluded that 50% of the country’s weekly Massgoers attend the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
The results of the Ifop poll appear to challenge the widespread perception that confession is in terminal decline among Catholics in Western nations.
As a young priest, Robert Prevost was sent in 1981 to Rome to study church law at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas (known as the Angelicum). There he earned a licentiate and composed a doctoral thesis, which made final in 1987. This is that thesis, the first book-length work composed by the man now known as Pope Leo XIV.
Venezuela and the China deal
I am really not sure what to make of the news out of Venezuela this week. It’s one thing for the government there — or others in the region — to harass the local Church, to arrest and detail clerics, and even to expel papal diplomats. But the situation with Cardinal Porras is something else again.
Like all cardinals, Porras has a Vatican diplomatic passport, since, in the event of the death of the pope, the college becomes the supreme governing authority of the Holy See and they need to be able to get to Rome free from any potential interference.
Blocking the cardinal’s exit this week, cancelling his Venezuelan passport and denying him exit on his Vatican issued one, was, then, much more serious than simply harassing a citizen with dual nationality — it was a straightforward violation of diplomatic relations with a sovereign power.
It seems superficially like the most self-defeating maneuver the Maduro regime could think of, since Pope Leo has been one of the more prominent world leaders to warn against escalating U.S. military action against Venezuela.
Yet the government there seems confident in daring the Vatican to shift from its position of somewhat strained and guarded neutrality even while it takes aim at a prominent cardinal. That’s an incredibly dangerous situation for the Church in the country to find itself.
Meanwhile, in Rome, the Vatican’s Secretariat of State and Pope Leo have an unenviable decision to make about how to respond.
On the one hand, any outspoken condemnation of the regime’s lawlessness and violation of diplomatic relations could simply be met with even worse retaliation against Porras and the local Church. On the other, attempting to play down the issue or ignore it completely could only serve to embolden the government’s treatment of perhaps the most credible internal institution the country has left.
If that choice sounds familiar, it should.