Lenten tension, velvet gloves, and watching ‘with love’
The Friday Pillar Post
Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Happy Friday, friends,
It’s Lent, again, obviously.
And Lent isn’t a season one can reasonably say one looks forward to, exactly. Prayer, penance, fasting, and almsgiving are the most salutary of disciplines, but they aren’t any reasonable person’s idea of a good time.
I was struck Wednesday, as I often am, by the Gospel reading in which Christ explicitly admonishes us to hide our penance, anoint our heads, and not trumpet our offerings, spiritual and material, before us like the hypocrites do — before I lined up to literally smear my face with ashes and head out into the city.
There’s a real tension between Christ’s instruction and our pious practice at the opening of Lent, though no necessary contradiction.
In the age of the Gospel, touting your fasting to the wider community was the original case of virtue signaling (bad), whereas today spreading the message to repent and believe the Gospel is very much an evangelical counterculture witness.
The question, I suppose, is how do we wear our ashes, metaphorically speaking. Do we brazen them before ourselves as a sign of moral superiority and condemnation of an unrepentant world, or do we truly walk as though we, ourselves, first, are dust and ashes in need of redemption.
Communicating a penitence that is at once sincere and sorrowful while animated by a sure hope of salvation that is neither presumptive nor casual is not easy. Or, rather, it is natural if you have it and impossible to fake if you don’t.
I suppose that is what Lent is all about, Charlie Brown: sincerity of intention, knowing ourselves, and starting out on the road to Easter in the certainty that we aren’t ready for it and have a lot of preparing to do — I do, anyway.
Here’s the news.
The News
The Vatican has suppressed an Argentine religious order founded by a priest who sexually abused adult members, and abused the confessional to cover his tracks.
The suppression is the latest in a series of moves during the Francis pontificate to address issues with religious institutes founded by abusive priests, and to address governance in new ecclesial movements and religious communities.
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A change to U.S. visa policy is set to happen next week will make it more difficult — if not impossible — for many religious sisters to enter the U.S., and could soon keep contemplative nuns and others from gaining permanent residency in the country.
With a visa program for non-ordained religious workers due to expire March 13, the USCCB told The Pillar Wednesday that its expiration could hit rural and underserved dioceses especially hard.
The EB-4 non-minister special immigration religious workers visa program will close March 13, at the end of a short-term extension signed in December last year.
Follow what’s happening and what it means for Catholic institutions here.
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An Iraqi Catholic leader has strongly denied an allegation of complicity in the kidnapping of a businesswoman in 2014 made in a lawsuit filed in a U.S. court.
The complaint, filed Feb. 13 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleges that Archbishop Bashar Warda “facilitated, through his connections to Iran-backed militias such as Rayan al Kildani’s Babylon Brigades, the scheme to extort, kidnap, torture, and attempt to kill” the plaintiff, Sara Saleem.
An authorized representative for Warda, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Erbil, told The Pillar March 5 that “the archbishop categorically denies and rejects these defamatory allegations and will contest them vigorously in the appropriate forums.”
This is a very complicated case, as you might expect.
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The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith said this week that the writings of Italian writer Maria Valtorta should not be regarded “as having a supernatural origin,” and that passages suggesting the contrary should be taken as literary devices used by the author.
The announcement is the latest such statement since the Vatican changed last year the Church’s process for evaluating visionaries and Marian apparitions.
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The cardinal vicar of Rome has asked diocesan clergy to donate one month’s salary towards a diocesan housing program as a “sign of hope” amid an escalating housing emergency in the Italian capital city.
It is unclear how local priests will respond to the invitation, especially as the request comes amid financial hardship for the Diocese of Rome, and tensions among local clergy following a year of upheaval and transition in the diocese.
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Velvet gloves
I’m somewhat fascinated by the statement from the DDF on Wednesday regarding the “visions” of Maria Valtorta.
The dicastery concluded that, compelling as her apocryphal Gospel narratives might be for some, the Church “does not recognize them as divinely inspired” and considers them to be, basically, literature of variable theological merit (tempered by some rather appalling antisemitism in places, I’d add).
It’s the most recent in a growing litany of similar pronouncements from the DDF since the dicastery minted new criteria for assessing visions and apparitions this time last year.
The new normal seems to be to assess doubtful but doubtlessly popular spiritualities, like those around Valorta’s writings and the “visionaries” of Medjugorje, and whenever possible praise the mostly positive fruits of trees with highly suspect roots.
It’s a very interesting exercise in needle threading, and credit to the DDF for trying to find a way of not denigrating innocent acts of sincere piety while separating them from the likely spurious claims of supernatural visitation which inspired them.
A few people I have talked to about this consider the whole thing a fudge — the point of the Holy Office isn’t to spare feelings, it’s been suggested to me, but to speak in clear black-and-white terms about matters of faith and morals. I guess I sort of agree. But I also think that’s what they are doing. Sort of.
For example, I’ve always been a confirmed skeptic of the Medjugorje “visionaries” and for many years it irritated me deeply when otherwise devout and pious Catholics would make pilgrimages there despite the pleas of local bishops not to.
But I cannot deny that people I know have had or seen for themselves real experiences of faith along the way there. And after all, why not? Our Lady doesn’t, I hope, look askance at sincere supplications just because they come from a suspicious zipcode.
One of Cardinal Fernández’s key priorities since taking over at the DDF has been to grapple with instances of false mysticism and spiritual abuse, going so far as to propose codifying it as a separate crime in canon law.
Charlatans certainly exist in the Church — they always have — and they can lead the innocent astray and leave them open to all kinds of abuse. Cracking down on them with a more direct and focused approach seems laudable to me, and arguably long overdue.
But doing so in a way which marks their victims out for what they are, victims, and not co-conspirators seems an equally just and, dare I say it, pastoral approach.
I’d also note that this via media being blazed by the DDF has allowed for rapid resolutions of cases that have languished for decades without resolution, even when the mind of Rome seems to have been made up long ago.
I recall sitting next to a DDF official on a plane a decade ago, long before I was a journalist, and being told that the Medjugorje visions were, as he put it, stronzate, but that there was real concern about appearing to deny the validity of connected devotions to Our Lady and causing spiritual distress to innocent people.
If they have now found a velvet glove to fit comfortably the iron fist of clarity, so much the better.
Watching, with love
Earlier this week, my wife and I needed something to watch instead of the president’s address to Congress and the ensuing cacophony of opinion.
We wanted something to insulate us, just for a few minutes, from the crushing seriousness of world events, and the spiraling cycles of panic and anger which I certainly feel, I don’t know about you, when forced to listen to other people’s political opinions for very long.
What we needed was an impregnable bubble of triviality, something that exists in a world totally without context, significance, or responsibilities. An absolute vacuum of values and consequences. In that vein at least, I must recommend Meghan Markle — excuse me, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, she’s very firm on this point — in “With Love, Meghan,” her new… “content” on Netflix.
And it is content, properly speaking. It takes up space on the streaming site and on your screen, but past that it is impossible to say what it is, exactly — part cooking show, part infomercial for her “lifestyle brand” shop, part social cosplay. It’s maybe all of these things, or a sincere attempt at none of them, or a cunningly devised piece of performance art.
Whatever else it is, it is the most gloriously fatuous and flatulent waste of digital space I have ever seen. It is so perfectly, absurdly empty of any obvious merit or purpose that I have to assume that it is deliberate on the part of some impish production executive.
What else do you call Princess Sparkles’ walkthrough of how she likes to receive house guests if not surrealist satire? It’s like watching a “Spinal Tap” version of Martha Stewart.
For a start, she’s not even using her own home, she rented her neighbor’s house for the show — which is a totally normal thing people do when getting ready for guests.
We open, though, to her “staying connected” amid her beehives (at least I assume they are hers and not rented) where we find Meghan in a reflective mood. Apiculture makes her philosophical. She last visited her (?) bees a few months previously, she says, telling us a great deal about the size of her back garden by implication. An old-school hippie named Branden has been keeping things humming along in her absence.
Meghan chats with Branden about the zen of beekeeping, and the need to keep doing things that “scare you a little bit” and “stay in the calm of it all.” She provides the “good vibes” while he collects the honey, but she doesn’t look scared. She’s very brave, Meghan is.
Branden seems nice, very centered, as the seraphic duchess would put it, though I suppose you have to work at keeping your grasp on reality if your job is minding hives at the bottom of rich people’s yards.
From there, she’s back in the kitchen — a kitchen, someone’s kitchen — to get ready for her friend Daniel’s arrival for an overnight stay.
Daniel, like Branden, actually works for Meghan, he’s her make-up stylist. But I guess if you’re the class of person who rents your neighbor’s house for a TV show, all your “friends” being on the payroll is normal, too.
Anyway, prepping the house (or one of them) for guests is one of Meghan’s “favorite things.”
Almost everything seems to be one of her favorite things — scented candles, truffle popcorn, saying the word “crudités,” she’s like a West Coast Maria von Trapp, really — but getting ready for the “joy of hostessing” is one of her very favorites.
I think of “hostessing” as something you do at Applebee’s a few shifts a week to make ends meet, but given she’s “hostessing” her stylist in a rented house for a TV show, maybe she does, too.
Hostessing the Meghan way involves prepping an industrial quantity of bath salts and repackaging grocery store snacks into clear, single-use plastic bags of the kind I assumed were now illegal in California.
I was always taught that not eating in the bedroom was a moral imperative, and in my 40 years of life it has never occurred to me to take a bath in someone else’s house. Indeed, if one of our guests indicated they wanted a bath while staying with us, I would assume they were mildly psychotic.
But all this goes to show why people like me need Meghan, to show us the way. Perhaps the road to a better life is paved with peanut butter pretzels and runs through our neighbor’s tub.
When Daniel does arrive, the pair get down to the serious business of making spaghetti, which Meghan calls “noodles” in a way I found significant, like Ray Liotta in the final voice over in “Goodfellas.”
She has such a deliberately bourgeois vocabulary — glass jars are “vessels,” repurposed popsicle sticks are “dowels,” a word she repeats with audible satisfaction five times in 90 seconds — it’s hard to imagine her calling pasta “noodles” isn’t a deliberate choice, but what does it signify?
Indeed almost everything the duchess says seems pregnant with some hidden significance or zen-like quality: “The brightness of citrus helps so many things.” It’s language but with a kind of Gwyneth Paltrow patina, pasting over the most mundane observations with verbal chalk paint.
The episode concludes, as I suppose most days in the life of Meghan do, with her eating cake and enjoying a multi-million-dollar panorama of mountains from the back patio. “I feel like this is all fake,” Daniel enthuses.
Me too, Daniel. Me, too.
Spending 40 minutes in Meghan’s virtual company is… otherworldly. It’s the media equivalent of an ether high. I wouldn’t say I loved it, or would recommend it as a lifestyle choice, but it’s a hell of an alternative to reality.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
Okay, the bit about Meghan Markle definitely deserves a place in the eventual "Best of Ed Condon" anthology. I needed that this morning.
"And Lent isn’t a season one can reasonably say one looks forward to, exactly."
Then I am unreasonable. Starting Ash Wednesday our Lord has six and a half weeks to live, and suddenly time gets short.
Now he's on the mountain for the Transfiguration. And now he's passing through Jericho on his way up to Jerusalem. And now Mary of Bethany is pouring spikenard over him and the fragrance fills the house and goes with him to Jerusalem. And now the hosannas are ringing out. And now it's Wednesday and Judas has suddenly gone missing, isn't that odd...
Sure, I find Lent may start slow, but by the end I can feel time slipping away.
And now it's the evening of Holy Thursday. And this is it.
Lent can take your breath away, if you let it.