Live in St. Louis, episcopal health concerns, and a New York state of mind
The Friday Pillar Post
Happy Friday friends,
Let’s kick off with something fun: We have a live show coming up!
Next month will see (finally) the beatification of Ven. Fulton Sheen. After a lengthy, sometimes acrimonious, and always contentious back-and-forth between the archbishop’s home Diocese of Peoria and the Archdiocese of New York, where he served as an auxiliary bishop and was buried for many years, the beatification is now scheduled to take place in… St. Louis on September 24.
I tease. The Diocese of Peoria opted to move the event to a larger city because Sheen is a towering figure in American Catholic culture and, hopefully, there will be a lot of people coming to celebrate. JD and I will certainly be there, in fact we’ll be combining work with personal piety and rolling along the Sheen celebrations on a small Pillar pilgrimage, which you can still attend.
But, while the main event of the week is the beatification itself on the 24th, JD and I will be pre-gaming with a live Pillar Podcast at 9pm on September 23rd and we want you all to come.
Thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Catholic Education Fund, we’re able to go a little bit bigger than our usual MO of taking over a local dive bar and turning the mics on before they realize what we’re doing. We’ve got an actual room to ourselves at a local brew pub, our legendary live show guest producer Kyle is coming in to run the board, and it is going to be a great night. For those of you who came to the Eucharistic Congress Live Show in Indianapolis, you guys know what I am talking about.
And the best part is, while St. Louis might be home to the most boring baseball team in the country, it is in the more-or-less exact center of the country, which means it is local for literally everyone!
So, at 9 pm on Wednesday September 23, JD and I will be at Schlafly, the first and oldest brewery-pub in the state, founded with the express purpose of bringing proper English ales to the home of Budweiser, and I ask you: what nobler work is there than that?
So please, come along for a great night. These live shows have become the standing exception to my acute social awkwardness. Every one, wherever it is — Chicago, Baltimore, Indianapolis, St. Paul, Rome — feels like a friends-and-family affair.
We say it often, because it is true: The Pillar exists because it is a community of people who love the Church and love the truth, and because of that, we are free to love each other, even when we disagree. That’s nothing to take for granted, and it’s a joy to be a part of. So come out and be a part of it, drink some real beer with me, and let’s have a great night.
See you then. Now, here’s the news.
The News
The top story this week is that Bishop Christopher Saunders, the former leader of the Australian Diocese of Broome, has been convicted of 13 counts of sexual abuse — including against a canonical minor.
The bishop was arrested in 2024, following a second police investigation into widespread rumours and allegations he used diocesan resources, for years, to groom young aboriginal men to abuse them. That second investigation came after an initial police enquiry closed without charges in 2021 for lack of evidence. What happened in between was a Vatican-ordered Vos estis investigation into Saunders, the results of which were leaked to the cops.
All of this followed Saunders first voluntarily stepping back from governance of his diocese in 2020 — when all of these allegations were well-known in the diocese — and then resigning for “health reasons.”
There’s a lot to unpack about this story, and we will get there in a minute. But for now I just want to say we’ve been across this story for years, following every development, interviewing people in the diocese — including those who went on to testify against Saunders — because it matters, and it is worth the investment of time and work.
That is what we are here for, that is why The Pillar exists. Read the whole thing here.
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An English bishop accused of raping a minor appeared in court on Thursday, where he was ordered not to contact his alleged victim ahead of his plea hearing set for next month.
Bishop David Okaley appeared in Westminster Magistrates’ Court via video from his lawyer’s office for the Aug. 13 preliminary hearing, with the bishop released from custody on bail as he awaits his upcoming trial.
The bishop, 70, was charged last month with two counts of rape of a minor, over claims dating back to alleged sexual misconduct involving a girl younger than 16, which reportedly took place between February 2000 and February 2001, when Oakley was in ministry as a priest.
While charges were announced in June, Oakley was under investigation for months before that, and the bishop began a leave of absence in October 2025, which he and his diocese announced was taken for “personal reasons,” although he was initially arrested on the charges a month earlier.
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The head of Catholic schools in New South Wales is being investigated over claims that he hired political allies and allowed them to engage in political efforts during work hours.
The Independent Commission Against Corruption is looking into allegations that Dallas McInerney, chief executive of News South Wales Catholic schools, hired people affiliated with the center-right Liberal Party for the purpose of having them spend a significant part of their working hours on political efforts to recruit new party members.
McInerney has spent nearly 10 years leading the Catholic schools in the Australian state. He has a background in financial regulation and policy, and he previously served for years as General Manager of Government and Public Policy at National Australia Bank. He has stepped aside from his position while the investigation proceeds.
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Thankfully, the Church is always blessed with the witness of new saints. But it is a rare thing when a married couple starts on the road to canonization together, as a couple. But that’s exactly what is happening with the Servants of God Tomás and Paquita Alvira.
If they make it all the way, they will be only the third married couple to be raised to the altars together. This week Edgar Beltran spoke to the postulator of their cause about what made their marriage a unique witness to everyday holiness.
They also talked about the canonical technicalities of a joint cause for beatification, because who doesn’t want to get into the weeds on that?
Read the whole interview here.
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The head of the Armenian Apostolic Church faced a courtroom last week. Catholicos Karekin II faces obstruction of justice charges alongside five other Armenian bishops, as the latest in a long-running and complex dispute between Armenian Apostolic prelates and Armenia’s prime minister.
Karekin and six other Orthodox Armenian Church officials are accused of disobeying a court decision ordering the reinstatement of Bishop Gevorg Saroyan, an ally of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who was dismissed from his post and laicized by Karekin after repeatedly calling for the Karekin’s ouster.
The trial is the high point of a conflict between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Armenian government which began with Pashinyan’s election in 2018.
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One of the more remarkable stories to emerge thus far in the Leonine pontificate is the rise of a cadre of fiercely qualified lay leaders, the best known of them women, all on the younger side — certainly by Vatican standards.
As Tim Glemkowski wrote in a column for us this week, “Millennial” doesn’t mean “young adult” in Church speak anymore, and this emerging cohort of Catholic leaders have some distinct generational markers, too.
This ain’t your Grandma’s lay leadership.
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A healthy episcopate
The Saunders case has, at least from what I can tell, failed to make much of an impression outside of Australia, and I really don’t understand why.
The horrific nature of the crimes of which the bishop is now convicted speak for themselves and are now public record. But there remain some distinctly unanswered questions about the case and how it unfolded which should be of keen interest to Catholics, wherever they live.
One of which must surely be how the bishops’ conference came to announce, while keeping the conclusions of a 2023 Vos estis investigation confidential, that it found no suggestion of minors being involved — this despite that same Vos estis forming the substance of the police investigation which led to Saunders’ conviction of, inter alia, sexual abuse of a canonical minor.
But the one I want to focus on now, and which extends well beyond Australia, is how Saunders was allowed by the Vatican, in what is now almost a nauseatingly time honored tradition, the privilege of first stepping back from the governance of his former diocese and then resigning under the ludicrous and patently specious pretense of “ill health.” This, even as his entire diocese was under no illusions about why he was stepping down and the bishop himself was under police investigation.
Of all the trappings of a disordered clericalist culture the Church was meant to have had an ultimate reckoning with after the McCarrick and Chilean bishops scandals of 2019, perhaps the most stubbornly enduring — and from a lay perspective inexplicable — is extending disgraced bishops the “professional courtesy” to dissemble and even deceive their flocks on their way out the door.
Lest anyone be tempted to think this is a far away issue in a distant land, it is not. In the last five years alone it has spanned continents and pontificates.