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Happy Friday friends,
Iannone took over that role from the previous incumbent, Cardinal Coccopalmerio, in 2018 — and at least in direct comparison he was a success.
In the early days of the German Synodal Way, it was Cardinal Ouellet, Pope Leo’s own predecessor at the Dicastery for Bishops, who had to sign letters to the bishops’ conference, telling them to stand down, but was it was Iannone’s name at the bottom of the four-page legal briefing which patiently explained that what they were doing was “not ecclesiologically valid.”
Iannone, too, has been responsible for issuing a number of important legal clarifications over the last few years — including several moves to reassert the Church’s total prohibition on Freemasonry, if that sort of thing appeals to you.
But many canonists who’ve had to work with the Dicastery for Legislative Texts during Iannone’s term have usually come away with the impression that the bulk of the scholarly assessment was done by the department’s long serving secretary, Bishop Juan Ignacio Arrieta, with Iannone operating as more of a non-executive chairman.
When he did choose to get involved directly in thorny issues, his canonical thinking appeared decidedly mixed.
Last year when the Vatican was facing persistent questions (admittedly only from The Pillar) about how sosituto Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra attempted to reinstate a twice-convicted and laicised child sexual abuser, Iannone gave an interview to Vatican media attempting to explain the controversy away. Instead he ended up suggesting that Pope Francis may have personally ordered the attempted rehabilitation of Ariel Alberto Príncipi.
We will see how he shakes out as prefect of the bishops’ dicastery, responsible for coming up with episcopal nominations and also for investigations of bishops conducted under the norms of Vos estis lux mundi.
But if I am being totally honest, Iannone has always struck me as what you might call either a “good soldier” or a “company man,” depending on how you want to put it, but not exactly a firm hand at the controls.
That, to me, is what makes his appointment by Leo so interesting, since it comes along with Leo’s confirmation of Archbishop Ilson de Jesus Montanari, the dicastery’s long-serving secretary, for another five-year term.
As we’ve noted previously, Montanari came to operate as a virtual shadow prefect in the later years of Cardinal Ouellet’s tenure, and he was known to be Pope Francis’ preferred pick for prefect — only the Brazilian archbishop kept turning Francis down, apparently, hoping for a return to his home country as head of an archdiocese.
Instead, Francis gave him the title of Vice Camerlengo in 2020, and from what I have heard from guys working in the dicastery, Montanari was still a pretty activist secretary under Cardinal Prevost.
I’ve been saying for a while that what Leo does with Montanari would be the real bellwether of his early appointments — does he make him prefect, or send him home?
Frankly, I was not ready for the pope to confirm him as secretary for another five years — by the end of which Montenari will be 71 and have been in the job for nearly two decades.
I’m not sure yet what to make of the pope’s motivations here, but it seems clear he’s opted to install a prefect known to rely on his secretary over a secretary known to act like he’s the real man in charge.
At least for the moment, that’s now the most interesting dynamic in the Vatican.
Here’s the rest of the news.
The News
The appellate court of Vatican City began hearings this week in the case of the London financial scandal which resulted in the 2023 conviction of Cardinal Angelo Becciu and eight other defendants.
Opening proceedings on Sept. 22, city state judges led by Archbishop Alejandro Arellano Cedillo were asked to consider appeals by parties from all sides of the case — both from those convicted and from the prosecution, including a motion for the chief prosecutor to recuse himself.
You can read all about the case here.
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Bishops in the United States have continued to criticize publicly the decision by Chicago’s Cardinal Blase Cupich to honor a committed pro-abortion politician with a lifetime achievement award.
Sen. “Dick” Durban of Illinois is due to receive the award at a Chicago archdiocesan gala in November. Cardinal Cupich has defended the decision to honor the politician — a choice which seems at odds with clear USCCB policy on the subject — as a kind of “dialogue.”
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Armed groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo have committed a string of deadly attacks against civilians, including Catholics, in recent weeks.
The list of attacks, and of the dead, is long — and growing. And the situation on the ground is incredibly complicated. There are an estimated 252 local armed groups and 14 foreign armed groups operating in the lawless eastern region of the country.
This is a story that matters: for our brothers and sisters living there; for the local bishops, led by Cardinal Ambongo; and for the geopolitical significance of the region’s mineral wealth.
Recording the individual attacks is important, obviously. But we wanted to do more. So this week our local correspondent Antoine Lokongo wrote a lengthy explainer surveying the whole situation.
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For a while, World Youth Day Lisbon seemed destined for disaster. First, the Covid pandemic caused the international gathering to be delayed from 2022 to 2023. Then, the invasion of Ukraine launched a war which created economic uncertainty across Europe.
World Youth Day organizers braced for the worst, and were conservative in their expectations.
But in the end, the number of pilgrims far exceeded expectations. As registration fees and last-minute donations poured in, the team of organizers, headed by now-Cardinal Américo Aguiar, realized the event might even end with a budget surplus.
When the dust settled and the final accounts were presented, organizers discovered that they had not only covered their expenses, but were 35 million euros in the black.
So the foundation created to organize World Youth Day Lisbon decided to change its name — and its focus. Fundação Jornada announced it would be investing the surplus money, and using the proceeds to perpetuate the legacy of World Youth Day in Portugal.
Today, the foundation is led by executive director Marta Figueiredo, who brings with her more than a decade of experience in strategic operations and nonprofit work.
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An avowed Catholic narrowly failed Wednesday in her bid to qualify for Ireland’s presidential election.
Maria Steen, a barrister who publicly upheld Church teaching during referendum debates on abortion, same-sex marriage, and the definition of the family, fell just short of winning the support of 20 members of the Oireachtas, Ireland’s bicameral legislature, which would have enabled her to stand in the Oct. 24 ballot.
With even committed secularists in the country having said the election needed “a serious conservative Catholic” in the race, what does the field look like now?
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Australian auxiliary Bishop Richard Umbars returned to public ministry Wednesday, after an investigation concluded that an abuse allegation against him was “not sustained.”
Umbers of the Sydney archdiocese had withdrawn from public ministry in early July, as an independent third-party investigation began into a civil claim of past abuse. Umbers denied the allegation “emphatically.”
An email obtained by The Pillar informed archdiocesan employees Sept. 24 that “an independent investigation has now concluded and returned a finding that the allegation made was ‘not sustained.’”
“The report from the independent investigator highlighted information given by the complainant that was inconsistent with other evidence obtained and therefore, the investigator could not be satisfied that the alleged conduct occurred,” explained the email, sent by archdiocesan vicar general Fr. Samuel Lynch.
“Accordingly, Bishop Umbers will now return to public ministry, and to the office,” Lynch wrote.
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In a recently published interview, Pope Leo XIV addressed the Latin Church’s roiling liturgical disputes, and the subject of the traditional Latin Mass. In his remarks, the pope lamented “polarization” of the Church’s liturgy, including the celebration of the ordinary form.
In the course of the interview, he suggested that while he has been lobbied on loosening the restrictions of Traditionis custodes, he could be more interested in broader liturgical reform and renewal as a means of de-escalating the polarization in the liturgy.
If so, the question could become whether he is willing to intervene as decisively over diocesan handling of the ordinary form as his predecessors have been for the extraordinary — and whether many devotees of preconciliar liturgical texts would be swayed by the effort.
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Bishop Georg Bätzing said Monday that he saw no need to withdraw guidance for German dioceses on blessings for unmarried and same-sex couples published in April.
The chairman of the German bishops’ conference was speaking after Pope Leo XIV criticized blessing practices in Northern Europe in his first major interview since his election in May.
Fire on the Altar is a uniquely liturgical reading of St. Augustine’s Confessions. In this companion to Augustine’s classic work, Dr. Chad Pecknold unpacks Augustine’s vision of the human heart as an altar. When united to Christ’s self-offering in the Eucharist, our hearts are set ablaze with divine charity. At once challenging and edifying, Fire on the Altar emphasizes the call to transform your life into an offering acceptable to God.
All to play for
The kicking off of the appeal stage of the Vatican financial trial is something I have been anticipating pretty much since the return of the first instance verdicts in December 2023.
There is a lot to play for, at least for some of the key defendants.
For a start, there is Raffaele Mincione, the investment manager convicted of embezzlement by the city state court. According to the judges in the Vatican, he was found criminally liable for managing money for the Secretariat of State which he should have known was ineligible for investments.
Reasonable people can disagree with the logic of that verdict; Mincione certainly does, and he has launched lawsuits to establish he had no way of knowing he was, in effect, taking charge of “embezzled” Vatican funds.
And his qualified but significant win in a lawsuit in London earlier this year could pile pressure on the appellate judges to reconsider if, just maybe, there was a flaw in the lower court’s reasoning.
Cardinal Becciu, meanwhile, is once again pressing his case that he is the innocent victim of a frame job; that all that money he funneled to family members and to his “private spy” and personal house guest didn’t benefit him personally, and that he had some kind of implicit or explicit papal mandate for it all anyway — though he’s never been able to prove it, despite trying to trap Pope Francis into alibiing him on secretly recorded phone calls.
While the evidence has never seemed to be on his side, the cardinal has appealed to a kind of Nixonian philosophy of Vatican governance — that as the pope’s deputy, if the sostituto does it, it cannot be illegal.
While it isn’t an argument I can find much legal basis for, it is clearly still the operative logic employed by Becciu’s successor, Archbishop Peña Parra.
Given the mountains of documentary evidence that Becciu did, in fact, break various laws, his vindication at appeal would be seen by many as the ultimate endorsement by a Vatican court of a culture of clericalist impunity.
But it really can’t be ruled out how effectively Becciu has lobbied the Italian press to portray him as a victim of a conspiracy. It’s a remarkable posture to strike, given his own “private spy” is on record saying he paid her to compile dossiers on the private moral failing of other curial prelates, but he has certainly been given a boost by the case’s prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi.