Let it linger, hail Caesar, and the politics of heraldry
The Friday Pillar Post
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Happy Friday friends,
The Twelve Days of Christmas are over, though we still have the feast of the Baptism of the Lord to look forward to this weekend. So I am holding on to the trappings of the season — if not always the spirit of it — as tightly as I can for a few more days yet.
I’m pleased to note that around where I live there are still a good few holdouts with their decorations up. It seems weirdly significant to me that the wider culture has evolved so as to decorate early and hard for any and all feasts, then tear down immediately when the day is gone — our local Target had Valentine’s decorations up before December was even over.
The concept of a festive season — that is, a season of feasting which begins on the day, rather than rising to a fever pitch of anticipation which finishes in a single moment — is alien to our culture.
Looking at it through a purely secular lens, it doesn’t make a ton of economic sense to me. Surely, if holidays are all about moving product, you want to stretch them out. Sell hard for the big day, then push for people to reload to cover the whole season.
I suspect the real reason for festive celebrations being over in a moment is that an expectation of anti-climax is built into the experience. If you have nothing to celebrate of lasting impact — the incarnation of the Savior, for example — then to stretch things out is merely to linger over the hollowness of the event. Better, then, to not stop and think, and to simply shift into gearing up for the next thing.
Put that way, a cycle of frenzied anticipation and disappointment and denial seems like an apt description of our culture these days. You can apply it to everything from our politics to the next blockbuster movie release.
It is a recipe for burnout and cynicism, which again seems like a good diagnosis of our society. I have no big-picture plan to combat this, but I’m going to do my small part by trying to rest in the feast and keep Christmas for a few days longer, if I can manage it.
Here’s the news.
The News
Today Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin consecrated a new Catholic church at the traditional site of Jesus’ baptism in the Kingdom of Jordan.
According to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the church will be “one of the largest in the Middle East, joining esteemed places of pilgrimage and prayer like the Church of the Annunciation, the Church of the Nativity, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.”
So, how did a Catholic church come to be built in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the official title of a country with a 97% Muslim population? And what’s the significance of the new church?
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Pope Francis set out his diplomatic priorities for 2025 Thursday, in his annual “state of the world” address to diplomats accredited to the Holy See.
The pope only read out the first few pages of his address before excusing himself due to “a cold.” Msgr. Filippo Ciampanelli, undersecretary of the Dicastery for Eastern Churches, read the rest of the speech.
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We’ve been following up this week on our earlier coverage on the appointment of Cardinal Robert McElroy as the new Archbishop of Washington.
According to some of the people I spoke with, President Trump’s nomination of a new U.S. ambassador to the Holy See helped tip the balance.
Of course, the reason McElroy’s appointment was so contentious is that he was seen by a lot of senior churchmen in Rome and the United States — across the ecclesiastical spectrum — as being potentially very polarizing, both in the political and ecclesiastical areas.
The cardinal went out of his way to be reassuring on the front during his first press conference (if you can call it that, there were only two canned questions). It remains now to be seen if he will confound or confirm the reservations of a lot of Catholics.
As he is my new bishop, I am, of course, rooting for Cardinal McElroy to be a success here in D.C., in just the same way as he said he is praying for the success of the Trump administration.
You can read the whole analysis here.
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There has been a lot of talk this week about Greenland, for reasons. Leaving geopolitics and diplomacy aside for a moment, though, the ecclesiastical history of the place is quite interesting.
Not to inflame international tensions, but it seems like today there is an American who actually has a decent claim to be considered “Bishop of Greenland.”
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A French bishop who oversaw a vocations boom in his diocese, but was criticized for his governance style, resigned Tuesday at Pope Francis’ request.
At 72, Rey is three years below the typical retirement age for diocesan bishops.
The diocese gained a reputation for welcoming new communities from across the ecclesiastical spectrum, including traditionalist groups. The Vatican imposed a rare moratorium on ordinations in the diocese in 2022, amid concerns over allegedly lax vetting procedures, and in 2023 Pope Francis named a coadjutor bishop for the diocese.
As Rey put it, when the coadjutor arrived, Francis asked him to meet him with a spirit of collaboration and specifically asked him not to resign.
Then, a year later, the nuncio told him he had to go “without my having been aware of any new elements concerning those which had motivated the appointment of the coadjutor bishop.”
That is of a piece with an emerging trend for the “resigning” of bishops these days.
You can read all about it here.
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A Syro-Malabar priest in India kicked off a fast/hunger strike over what he alleged is the “abuse of power” in the Eastern Church’s ongoing liturgy war.
“The theme for my hunger strike is it is against the abuse of power, and also it empowers people morally to stand against the abuse of power,” the 61-year-old priest told Luke Coppen.
Kaithakottil said the protest was directed at the actions of the apostolic administrator Bishop Puthur and the local curia, which Puthur controversially overhauled in October.
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Nearly half a million pilgrims visited Santiago de Compostela in 2024, marking a new record for the popular pilgrimage site in northwestern Spain.
It’s actually the second year in a row that the Camino has seen historic high numbers of pilgrims. So we took a look at who is coming, where are they coming from, and how are they getting there.
You can read (and see) the breakdown here.
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And finally, in his final dispatch from last weekend’s SEEK conference, Jack Figge reports this week on a massive speed dating event for young Catholics.
More than 2,000 people showed up for the event — and it looks like it would have been recognized as a world record, had it not been for a technical glitch.
Most tellingly for me was what one attendee told Jack: that he just wanted an opportunity to practice talking to the opposite sex.
“I first thought the speed dating event was a joke, but then I realized this was real and thought that I needed to get myself out there to meet and talk to some women,” he said. “I have never dated anybody, and there is a part of me that is scared to talk to girls.”
It seems to me that for the kids these days — I say that with full eye roll, I have become an old man, I accept it — so much of the common social space has moved online that the normal social interactions are now terra incognita.
One of the most basic life skills I can think of for a young man is the ability to confidently go up to a girl in a bar, offer to buy her a drink, and be emotionally equipped to deal with being shot down in flames.
If you don’t have that, you’ll never be able to fully value what is standing in front of you when a girl wanders up to you in a bar and announces she’s thirsty already, and are you a gentleman or not?
That’s how I first met my wife, but I digress.
Read this whole story, because it isn’t really a report about a speed dating event. It’s an up-close look at what young Catholics are hoping for as they look for a prospective spouse, what they are afraid of, and how they are going about it.
This is a look at how the future of the Church is being formed.
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Ave, Caesar
I read this week that the Russian Orthodox Church has sent commanders fighting in (against) Ukraine a Christmas gift of icons and crosses, blessed by Patriarch Kirill and bearing the initials of President Vladimir Putin.
“Our comrades will be honored to receive these symbols of faith,” Putin told Kirill, though in whom they are expected to have faith, and to whom they are expected direct their prayers is vague, at best.
It is the latest, but by no means most surreal move by the patriarch to wrap the Church he leads around the feet of the president — for Easter last year, soldiers were sent care packages which included holy water and icons of “The Almighty Vladimir Putin.”
We’ve covered for a while the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in trying to sanctify the invasion of Ukraine, and cast the Russian campaign of war crimes and mass child abduction as a battle for Christian civilization.
The extent to which Kirill continues to canonize Putin, a dictator and war criminal, in real time, and to bind the soul of his Church up with his crimes has become, it seems to me, an existential problem for Russian Orthodoxy.
There is no question that the Russian Church is a real, apostolic Church. But the extent to which it has institutionalized a stance of caesaropapism, hailing Putin as a near messianic religious as well as political figure raises profound questions about the Church’s status.
It seems to me that it is approaching a point where its personal devotion to Putin is becoming a form of institutionalized heresy — as some Orthodox scholars and theologians have argued already.
What that means for the Church in the medium term remains to be seen, but the ecumenical consequences within the Orthodox communion are already significant and visible — as we have seen over the wider recognition of the autocephalous Ukrainian Church, and the isolation of Russia.
It seems clear, too, that spiritual devotion to Putin is no more universally popular within the Russian Orthodox than his invasion and war are among the Russian people, though clerics of every rank would have good reason to fear saying so in public.
Putin is not going to live forever, of course. Nor can or will his regime carry on indefinitely once he is gone.
But the extent to which the Russian Church has and is continuing to canonize both him and his war — a war being waged through the mass kidnapping of children — means that some reckoning will eventually have to be made.
What kind of scope the Russian Church will have to one day repudiate its own current leadership, along with Putin, is also an open question. Russian history points to precious few, if any, moments of real ecclesiastical independence.
But until it claims for itself the space to do that — and is willing to incur the necessary costs of doing so — the Russian Church has become a dangerous countersign in the world, an institution dedicated to sacramentalizing brutality and death, and the targeting of the most innocent and vulnerable, perhaps the most nauseating inversion of Christ’s mandate imaginable.
I have to wonder about Kirill’s legacy for his Church in a post-Putin Russia. As things stand, I wonder if the former KGB officer hasn’t more effectively discredited Christianity among the Russian people as patriarch than his former Soviet masters ever managed.
An empire, if you can keep it
As readers of this newsletter know, I did not vote for President Donald Trump in November.
But, as a faithful Catholic, I listened when my new bishop, Cardinal McElroy, enjoined the people of the Washington archdiocese this week to pray for the success of the incoming administration and of our nation.
In that spirit, I have been thinking about Trump’s increasingly importunate comments on the subject of Greenland.
On the one hand, I am tempted to dismiss the whole thing as an exercise in absurdist rhetoric at which the once and future chief executive excels.
He cannot possibly be serious when he appeared to suggest military action to acquire the semi-autonomous territory, should the Danes refuse an offer to buy it. I doubt it would ever come to that anyway. I am pretty sure the Danes could be removed in about 15 minutes without a shot fired, if it came right down to it.
But, on the other hand, the supposed secret to Trump’s success is you really never know with that guy.
Either way, acquiring Greenland seems to me to be a no-brainer for America, if you can do it. The strategic significance of the place, with China and Russia amping up their Arctic shenanigans is clear, and, whether one is in favor of exploiting potential energy reserves off the Greenish west coast, the fact is they are there and someone is going to have them eventually.
While many seem to view the idea of “buying” countries as out of the question, I'm not inclined to dismiss the idea out of hand. That is, after all, how the United States ended up with the majority of its territory in the first place.
I do think, though, it would be better framed as “liberating” the Greenlanders from their colonial masters, rather than annexing them. The painfully liberal and right-on Danes insist that Greenland is an integral part of their kingdom, of course, and has been since 1953. Though this is rather belied by history and fact.
“Integral” parts of countries are not granted “home rule” as Greenland has been. While it does send two representatives to the 179-member Danish parliament, repeated polls have shown that the local population of 56,000 mostly native Inuit people want more independence, or indeed all of it.
Whatever the Danes might claim, Greenland is a colonial territory with a subjugated native people — you know they know this, because however hostile to the idea they might be, the Danes don’t dispute that they could sell the place, lock, stock, and oil barrel, if they wanted to.
I don’t think we should buy it, though. Not from the Danes, anyway.
Better would be to simply recognize the free determination of the people there and make them a big, open, offer of entry into the U.S. with an “admin fee” of, say, $5 million for each of its citizens and a fast track to statehood.
Two-hundred and eighty billion dollars is a very competitive price for adding such an important territory to the country.
By comparison, Alaska was purchased in 1867 for $7.2 million, which is about $129 million in today’s money, which works out to 2 cents per acre, more or less. The Louisiana Purchase weighed in at about 4 cents per acre. We’d be getting Greenland for about $523 per acre with my plan, so we wouldn’t be cheaping out on them, and we’d be paying the money directly to the people, not their imperial overlords.
At the risk of being presumptive, who turns down $5 million and an American passport? I really doubt that any one of the island’s populace would be offended by the offer.
Apart from that, their two U.S. senators (to say nothing of a congressman) would instantly give them greater proportional democratic representation than they currently have in the Danish parliament.
You could even bring Puerto Rico into the Union at the same time, to keep us at an even number of states and give the whole thing a domestic bipartisan flavor.
Frankly, if we put a hard offer on the table to the people of Greenland, I think the Danes would be left without an argument to make, other than “but we own them!” — and maybe they do, if they can keep them.
Really, they need to win the hearts and minds of the local populace if they want to stop them going for free agency, and to head off a serious bid from the U.S. of A.
To that end, King Frederik X opted to redesign the Danish royal coat of arms this week, junking the image of the triple crown (representing the historical ties between Denmark, Sweden, and Norway) to feature more prominently a polar bear and goat, representative of Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
Now, while I am as ambivalent and unromantic about monarchy as I am about democracy — whatever works best for the common good, I say — I do like a good bit of heraldry.
Pictorial representations of people and institutions and what matters to them is, I think, a visually pleasing and aesthetically stimulating bit of fun.
But I am not sure that a slightly bigger bear is going to sway the Greenlanders here. If for no other reason than it kind of doubles down on the premise of the place (and people) being under the sway of a foreign crown.
When faced with a popular pro-independence sentiment, usually the smartest thing for a constitutional monarch to do is smile warmly, wave, and try not to do anything silly. That’s how King Charles has handled such things, including on his recent trip to Australia.
Even though there are real republican elements Down Under and in Canada, you don’t see Charles rushing into a hastily heraldic facelift, because he knows that even if it were done in the most sensitive way and with the best of intentions, people would probably just get more annoyed.
I gave a more Canada-and-Australia-forward royal shield my best shot and, while any reasonable person would agree it is solid heraldry, I don’t think it would be enough to win over any republicans.
As I see it, the real problem for the Danes, and the opportunity for America, is that there is no real cultural pull on Greenlanders to be “Danish.”
The local populace is very much its own people, and could find it socially, politically, and economically beneficial to become an American state without sacrificing its identity.
The real risk to the accession of Greenland seems to me to be if Donald Trump will give in to his baser instincts for conflict and make this a standoff with the Danish state.
Instead, he should cut them out of the conversation entirely and make his pitch to a proud people who ought to have sovereign say over their own destiny, and who have been itching for independence for some decades. That would be the real “art of the deal.”
Let’s get them out of there.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
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EDITOR’S NOTE: My math was off when this went out and I misstated the proposed purchase price of Greenland by a factor of a thousand.
Sorry about that, but I still think it’s a good deal.
This is the best spin on how to approach Greenlanders themselves I’ve seen. When put this way, I’m more open to taking it seriously and considering it. Also, I hope everyone reads that link to the article about Danish doctors forcibly implanting IUDs in Greenlander girls; that is truly horrific and has had very long-lasting consequences for the girls involved.
"Apostolic Prefecture of the Arctic Pole, which has to be the coolest title in Church history."
"Coolest" — har, har.
Lord, have mercy on your Church in Russia.