Happy Friday friends,
I am back. It was a truly restful vacation and I thank you all for letting me have it.
It was the first time I have taken two weeks off — actually not working as opposed to working from somewhere else — since my honeymoon. After nearly two decades, I was a little out of practice and found it quite disorienting at times. Honestly, there was a little anxiety, sometimes more than a little.
The problem is that, with a small business like The Pillar, especially one which relies on an equally small group (you) staying engaged enough to keep us open, it can often feel like staying in business is a constant, continuous act of the will.
It’s not that I worry everybody else here, Luke, Michelle, Edgar, Kate, even JD, can’t manage without me or will stop turning up for work if I look away. That would be mildly insulting on my part, but at least a concrete concern. My vacation anxieties are more like the nervous traveler who thinks they somehow can and must continually will the plane to stay in the air. Having to stay away — and to be clear JD and Mich all but took my keys away from me — long enough to emotionally unclench was seriously salutary for me.
I was having a think the other night about one of the psalms, 128, if you are curious. You might say I was “meditating” on it, but I have longstanding personal prejudices against the verb for its New Age woo-woo connotations. Anyway, I was considering the psalm’s opening line, “Happiness for the man who fears the Lord and walks in his ways.”
Fear is an emotion I am all too familiar with. I think any reasonably self-aware adult is. But the fears I have, about my family, my ability to provide for them, our health, the well-being of my friends and loved ones, are all fundamentally bound up in either a denial of God or a disordered fear of him. Do I think of God as an essentially pagan deity who watches, waiting to punish me for my misdeeds, or afflict me, either as an example or for his entertainment? Or is he a father, fear of whom is properly rooted only in a loss of communion or an ungrateful renunciation of his love for me?
To fear the Lord, in the sense of the psalm, is to be happy indeed, since to fear him is to first know how much he loves me. And to know his love, not as an abstract but as an existential underpinning of my life, is to be free. That freedom is the necessary condition of true rest.
Absent private revelation, which I do not have, trusting that love and living that freedom, learning that it isn’t any act of my will that keeps the plane in the air, takes a dedication of time and thought and dialogue in prayer. That’s what a long vacation started to give me. So, again, thanks for the time off guys.
But break’s over, here’s the news.
The News
The Archdiocese of Rabat, Morocco, has announced the temporary appointment of Msgr. Mario León Dorado, OMI, as apostolic administrator while the Holy See investigates allegations of sexual misconduct against Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, SDB.
The move follows allegations from five women about López Romero’s conduct during his tenure in the archdiocese, including accusations that three women experienced inappropriate behavior from the cardinal during the sacrament of penance.
López Romero, who has been Archbishop of Rabat since 2017 and was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2019, announced July 6 that he would temporarily step down from his post while the investigation proceeds. He has denied committing “any acts of sexual aggression, violence or harassment.”
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An Australian bishop has appeared in court as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of the former head of the neighboring diocese on charges of sexual abuse.
Bishop Michael Morrissey of the Diocese of Geraldton appeared in court to give evidence in the trial of Bishop Christopher Saunders, the former leader of the Diocese of Broome on Monday, August 4, in Perth, Western Australia.
So far as I can tell, this is the first time a bishop has appeared in court on behalf of the prosecution in a sexual abuse trial of another bishop.
You can read the whole story here.
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The Administration for the Patrimony of the Apostolic See released its annual report last week, hailing strong and stabilizing results for 2025 and what it called a “return to ordinary operating conditions” after a change in investment strategy yielded extraordinary returns the previous year.
Archbishop Giordano Piccinotti, APSA’s president, sought to frame the 2025 returns “in the proper perspective” in a lengthy interview with official Vatican media, noting that 2024 was an exceptional and unrepeatable year, driven by reallocation of investments and a rebalancing of portfolio priorities.
But, he said, APSA still grew its assets and investments by some 89m euros last year, and managed to send 20m to help fund the Vatican operating budget.
That all sounded very positive. But I read the whole report to try to get, as the archbishop put it, the proper perspective. What I came away with was a rather more guarded assessment of APSA’s performance.
You can read the whole analysis here.
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The Spanish bishops are sharply divided in their responses to the recent influx of undocumented migrants from Morocco into the autonomous Spanish city of Ceuta.
The president of the Spanish bishops’ conference called last week’s migrant surge “an invasion,” a striking contrast to the local diocese’s emphasis on a humanitarian response to the migrants.
Archbishop Luis Argüello of Valladolid, president of the Spanish bishops’ conference, said Aug. 2 on twitter.com that the influx of migrants was part of a broader political strategy.
“Games are being played with life and people are being used – their dreams, hunger, sexuality, and data – in favor of money and power. Migrations are part of this strategy. The Ceuta invasion is a test. Demographics are a weapon,” he said.
You can read the whole story here.
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The big picture and fools’ gold
As is always the way when you take a break, all the things you want to be paying attention to happen while you are off.
In my case, two news stories in particular streaked straight across my personal radar. Since both merit serious comment, I am not prepared to let either of them go. So we’re going to crash through both of them here, now.
In the two weeks I was off, the Vatican announced both the approval and installation of two bishops for the Chinese mainland under the provisions of the Vatican-China deal AND some key financial results.
Both stories got a lot of superficial coverage while I was out, but neither seems seems to have been widely appreciated for its actual significance. Let’s crack on.