Happy Friday friends,
It was Remembrance Day this week, 11/11.
I have family in the military, on both sides, in several branches, and I try to take the day as a serious reminder to pray for them and everyone else who is literally serving me and my family in a way I simply have not — and realistically at this point, never will.
Thank you to them, and to those of you who have offered the same service.
There’s also the, I think good, tendency to celebrate the heroism, in many cases the sacrificial heroism, which forms part of the story of what we call the West at this time of year. World War II is the great cultural touchstone in this regard since it is, I think inarguably, the great example of a moral conflict with the sharpest possible lines between good and evil.
But I try to remember World War I, which sadly earned the initial designation the “war to end all wars,” even if it proved tragically untrue. That was, famously, not a war with nearly so clear a distinction between the good and bad, at least at the outset. More importantly, I would say, it was a war no one wanted.
There’s a lot of popular history about the incompetence of generals on the Western Front and the senseless loss of life endured by the men in the trenches. But above that narrative is the uncomfortable reality that no one wanted to be there in the first place.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire didn’t want to invade Serbia, and probably had good reason to doubt it would carry it off cleanly. But answering the assaination of the imperial heir was an existential issue for a sclerotic and increasingly ramshackle state.
Russia didn’t especially want to go to war with Austria, but faced its own questions of existential credibility as a nation if it did not, having kept its hands in its pockets in several previous incidents in the region.
Germany wasn’t spoiling for a fight with Russia, but once the Russian mobilization trains started running, everyone was locked in, the dominos started falling as, as the line famously has it, the lights went out all over Europe.
The lesson of this I try to recall is that the worst, most costly, military conflict in history to that date came about not by any one person or nation’s desire to fight. Rather, it was the product of a series of diplomatic and logistical inevitabilities, all conceived and put in place to prevent war in the first place.
No one has to will the worst to happen, catastrophe can run smoothly on rails if we let it. Lest we forget.
Anyway, here’s the news.
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The News
Pope Leo’s tour of South American countries continued this week, with a raucously successful swing through Argentina before the pope headed “home” to Peru, where he spent so much of his life and ministry as a priest and bishop.
Our correspondent Edgar is not, naturally, swimming the wake with the papal entourage. Instead he went out ahead of the pope to Peru, making it to Lima and Chiclayo to get the measure of the reception of Leo from the ground.
He’s also had a weather eye on Argentina and how Leo used the trip to Francis’ homeland to reframe some of his predecessors most well-known ideas.
You can read all of Edgar’s dispatches and analysis right here.
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The Diocese of Hong Kong has called The Pillar’s coverage of a recent speech by Cardinal Stephen Chow SJ “regrettable” and said the cardinal’s address to a conference in Rome last week was a “moment of communion” which has been “turned into a story of capitulation.”
The speech was delivered at a Nov. 5 conference commemorating the centenary of the consecration of the first Chinese-born Catholic bishops. The conference was held at the Urbaniana University, run by the Dicastery for Evangelization, and discussed the history and contemporary reality of the Church in China, and the concept of inculturation and the mainland government policy of sinicization.
In the Sunday Examiner, the official newspaper of the Hong Kong diocese, an unsigned leading editorial on Nov. 7 said that Chow had not “defended sinicization as a form of inculturation” but presented the two concepts as distinct, and cited The Pillar’s coverage by name repeatedly.
You can read all about it, and how we actually reported the story right here.
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In the year 2000, the new Archbishop of Barcelona was a layman working in a newspaper archive in Tarragona, a port city in Spain’s Catalonia region.
Octavi Vilà Mayo was then in his late thirties, and became involved that year in the Germandat de Poblet, a lay association connected with Poblet monastery, a Cistercian community at the foot of the Prades Mountains, a roughly 40-minute drive from Tarragona.
At the age of 43, he entered the monastery. At 53 he was ordained a priest. To put this in perspective, the new Archbishop of Barcelona did not become a priest until two years after Pope Francis was elected.
It’s quite the rise. Read all about it here.
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The administrator of a vacant German diocese has said he will reluctantly comply with a Vatican instruction to suspend a plan to cut the number of parishes from 70 to nine until a new bishop takes office.
In a Nov. 11 letter to clergy and staff of the Speyer diocese, administrator Fr. Markus Magin said he was “disappointed” by the request, conveyed to him by Archbishop Hubertus van Megen, the new apostolic nuncio to Germany, after consultation with Vatican dicasteries.
Magin argued that the planned work was consistent with canon law [apparently he has never read c. 428, but whatever] and that suspending the project would be harmful to the diocese.
He also suggested the decision was at odds with efforts to create a more “synodal Church.”
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A recently published decision by the Roman Rota upheld a complaint of defamation against a religious order, brought by a former member over his inclusion on a list of “credibly accused” clergy.
The decision is the latest in a years-long series of Roman denunciations of so-called credibly accused lists, which have been branded as unjust by both the Dicastery for Legislative Texts and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Nevertheless, dioceses and religious orders have continued the practice of maintaining the lists, despite the repeated Roman injunctions. Defenders of the practice cite various justifications.
And, to be clear, the practice has no shortage of defenders or critics. But with the Vatican having issued successive condemnations, why are they still being used?
You can read my whole analysis here.
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Authorities in the Swiss canton of Ticino have voiced hopes that Pope Leo XIV will end the Diocese of Lugano’s four-year wait for a new bishop, in a case that highlights the complexities of Switzerland’s federal system.
The predominantly Italian-speaking diocese has been vacant since Bishop Valerio Lazzeri resigned at the age of 59 on Oct. 10, 2022, citing “inner fatigue.”
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The Tightrope
Pope Leo’s trip to Argentina and Peru this week is obviously the feel-good story of the day — and rightly so. If seeing the pope receive a rapturous welcome while boldly and unambiguously proclaiming the Gospel and calling the faithful to discipleship doesn’t give you “all the feels” as the kids say, you must have a heart of stone.
But if I am being honest, the most interesting story of the week — by some considerable margin — is the Hong Kong diocese’s op-ed about our coverage of Cardinal Chow last week.
I’m not interested in litigating the diocese’s concerns vs. what we reported line by line. You can read it all for yourself and make your own mind up. Suffice to say I am more than comfortable that our coverage accurately reported what the cardinal said, in his own words, and the diocese conceded as much. As for the general characterization of the multiple speeches and comments by several bishops, including not just Chow but Cardinal Parolin and Bishop Li, I also think we fairly conveyed the general tone and thrust of what was said at the conference.
But that isn’t what is interesting here. For anyone with eyes to see, the diocesan op-ed was a thinly coded public message which needs to be heard, understood, and amplified.