Kissing the ring, the first 100 days, and real fiction
The Friday Pillar Post
Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Happy Friday friends,
Quite a few people seem to be annoyed with JD this morning.
Vance, that is, not Flynn. Though I concede m’colleague’s miserablist take Tuesday on the term “popemobile” has generated some considerable and not entirely unwarranted feedback.
Anyway, JD the VP has come up for some discussion about his recent audience with Pope Leo following the Mass of inauguration on Sunday, which Vance attended as the head of the U.S. diplomatic delegation.
The substance of the chat I have been seeing concerns Vance’s discussion with Ross Douthat about the complexities of meeting and greeting the pope when one is oneself a Catholic and yet standing in persona popoli for the country.
Vance noted that, as a Catholic himself, he would have been comfortable kissing the pope’s ring in greeting, as a sign of filial devotion to Leo, but, as a diplomatic representative of a secular state, he was obliged to meet the pope on those terms.
I’ve seen some frankly bizarre takes on this, ranging from those who think Vance’s possession of any relevant religious sentiments should bar him from office, to others, who seem to think his separating of personal disposition from the formal requirements of office represents the heresy of Americanism — and that failure to kneel before the pope shows an unacceptable division between the private and public man, demanding correction of some kind.
Now, I don’t think it will come as a galloping surprise to any regular readers of these newsletters to learn that there is a lot about the Trump administration’s policies to which I object on moral, political, and legal grounds.
And I do think any Catholic in politics has to weigh carefully the policies of his party and government, and the moral acceptability of his cooperation with them. I certainly did, and it’s why I abandoned my career in politics and went to study canon law.
But it seems to me more than slightly ludicrous to suggest that a Catholic cannot serve in a secular official capacity in good conscience unless he conducts himself conspicuously as a Catholic when making an official appearance.
The American state enjoys relations with the Holy See at the level of two sovereign diplomatic powers. It is a relationship of equals, and it seems not just natural but necessary that Vance reflect this when appearing in an official capacity. The government of the United States is not Catholic, and it is unserious to suggest the VP should have bent the knee to kiss hands on meeting Leo in an audience granted not to him but to his office.
To argue otherwise, I would counter, should logically bar any Catholic from serving as ambassador to the Holy See — since the supposed requirement would be they act first in the interests of the Vatican in their role.
Of course, some people would contend the only real solution is for every state to be confessionally Catholic and all secular leaders acknowledge the spiritual and temporal sovereignty of the pope. Ok, if they want to live in La La Land, fine for them; I’m talking to grown ups in the real world.
Again, if the government of the day is pursuing policies opposed to the faith, contrary to human dignity, or repugnant to the moral law, then any Catholic should, of course, resign rather than cooperate.
But proposing that Catholics in public life cannot legitimately conduct themselves as representatives of the secular state in encounters with the Church in an institutional capacity doesn’t strike me as a reasonable or serious position.
Anyway, here’s the news.
The News
Four German bishops have confirmed they will not take part in a proposed new national synodal body in a letter to organizers.
The body is intended to “take fundamental decisions of supradiocesan significance on pastoral planning, future perspectives of the Church, and financial and budgetary matters of the Church that are not decided at diocesan level.”
The Vatican has repeatedly opposed the creation of the body.
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The Catholic University of America laid off 66 employees Monday, as the university aims to address a $30 million deficit.
While the layoffs come after several years of deficit budgets, the university’s president told The Pillar that Catholic colleges and universities need to reconsider their financial and business models, to face the serious enrollment crisis reshaping American higher education.
“Our situation reflects financial challenges faced by many Catholic universities nationwide,” Catholic U president Peter Kilpatrick explained. “The headwinds facing Catholic higher education are serious and require a fundamental reconsideration of the university’s traditional business model.”
How Catholic U is planning to face those headwinds is crucial, given its special status as the bishops’ university, and the home to critical ecclesiastical faculties, like the school of canon law.
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An Iraqi political movement has denied any connection with a controversial media interview in which Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako appeared to discuss details of the papal conclave.
In a statement sent to The Pillar May 20, the Babylon Parliamentary Bloc called for a “transparent investigation” into a May 9 broadcast by the Arabic-language Charity TV, run by the Congregation of the Maronite Lebanese Missionaries, in which the cardinal apparently discusses details of the recent conclave.
Sako, the head of the Chaldean Catholic Church, one of the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches in full communion with Rome, has denied giving the interview at all and told The Pillar that Iraq’s Babylon militia had published false information concerning his remarks about the conclave.
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During an audience earlier this week, Pope Leo XIV said “Peru is present in my life and in my heart… I give my thanks to Peru for all this solidarity, and for so many signs of affection and friendship… Long live Chiclayo!”
It’s clear that the Diocese of Chiclayo has left its mark on Pope Leo.
But how do the people of Chiclayo remember the man they still call Monseñor Roberto?
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Of course, the good old US of A has left its mark on Pope Leo, too — most palpably in the form of his American citizenship.
Every pope has to come from somewhere, of course, and every new occupant of the chair of Peter arrives as a citizen of one country or another.
In fact, the unique and potentially very problematic questions raised by Leo’s U.S. passport are such that senior curial figures have started having serious conversations about the pope giving it up all together and renouncing his American citizenship. That would be a big deal, with enormous diplomatic significance, so the fact that the conversation is happening says a lot about how seriously this is being taken in the Vatican.
You can read the whole analysis here.
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Whatever he decides to do with his American passport, before he became Pope Leo XIV Robert Prevost was a confirmed globetrotter. And as pope, the invitations to come for a visit are already pouring in.
Reports suggest he has no immediate plans to travel outside of Italy, preferring to spend the first months of his pontificate attending to pressing matters at the Holy See (hopefully including Vatican finances).
But when Leo does reach the papal in-tray marked “foreign trips,” which invitations might be at the top of the pile?
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The other U.S. official to have an audience with Pope Leo this week was, of course, Secretary of State Marco Rubio. And the two men share a mutual interest in the writings of the pope’s most recent namesake, Leo XIII.
Indeed, as Michelle La Rosa noted this week, it was Rubio who as a senator took the principles laid out in Rerum Novarum and tried to use them as the foundation for a new way of approaching the American economy.
Over a series of speeches and articles, Rubio hailed the principles of Rerum Novarum as a desperately-needed “third way” between socialism and unregulated free markets and elaborated on his vision for what he termed “Common Good Capitalism.”
Fast forward a few years and, as Michelle writes, Rubio now stands interestingly poised within a Trump administration not obviously in lockstep with the thinking of Leo XIII or XIV.
But could the Secretary of State end up as a bridgeman between the thinking of the pope and president — or, looking ahead three years, could he frame a vision for a post-Trump Republican party that is something more than MAGA?
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The first 100 days
The theory in politics is that the first hundred days of any new government are the most crucial.
Fresh off an election win, the incoming president or prime minister has the most political capital, the most time to recover from necessary but unpopular decisions, and the best window for enacting big picture reforms.
Generally speaking, this is a sound theory. But it doesn’t tend to hold for pontificates. Because new popes enjoy such direct and sweeping power to govern, the need to husband or expend political capital with prudence isn’t really at issue. Neither is the looming need to run for re-election at some point.
On the contrary, it is kind of a reverse case: such is the expectation and enthusiasm for new popes, such is the sweep of their ability to govern, and such can be the desire of those who serve below him in the Church to do so with enthusiasm, that everything they do in their first 100 days can have an outsized significance.
In Pope Leo XIV’s first hundred days there will be actions that matter, and speak to urgent papal priorities, others that do not and shouldn’t be over-interpreted, and some we won’t know which is which unless and until the pope himself decides to tell us.
We can’t and won’t always be able to tell the difference. But there are some actions the pope will or won’t take in his first 100 days which we can say will matter, and will tell us something about the Leonine pontificate.