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Happy Friday friends, and a very happy Easter to you all.
I love the octave, the idea of eight days being a single liturgical moment, so great is the feast of the Resurrection’s power and significance that it cannot be contained.
I love, too, the idea of a week — an entire season of 50 days, even — of compulsory feasting.
Feasting and fasting are things I find equally hard to keep to as physical disciplines. I’m hardwired to my daily groove and it takes more effort than I am, to my shame, usually willing to make to force myself into a deliberately out-of-the-normal rhythm of life for any extended period.
But, as an internal disposition, I find it easier by far to live in the headspace of Lent than Easter, defaulting more to self-examination and reproach, as opposed to gratitude and joy.
It is no light command to feast long and to linger in the moment of grace. We all have different pulls on us, I suppose. For some, it’s a disordered sense of humility, or even unworthiness, a discomfort with looking the resurrected Christ full in the face and saying “He is risen for me.”
For others, myself included, there is always a nagging voice that says “get back to work,” lest some unarticulated thing happen — the work dries up, the house falls over, or whatever else it may be.
At the root of all of this is a discomfort, a very human discomfort, with the superabundance of God’s gratuitous love: How can we possibly spend 50 days feasting, how can anyone justify that? And justification is the operative word, I suppose.
My greatest temptation is to self-justification, and like all terrible temptations it cuts all sorts of ways, leading me to try to mitigate my own sins as much as allow myself only as much joy as I think I have earned.
Of course, this time of feasting is not justified by me but by Him. To demur is, really, to decline my invitation to join Christ. How then can one refuse — and if I do, what is any of this for?
So, I say again, happy Easter. Whatever is going on with you, please, I hope you’ll make space for joy. I certainly will, because I need it, and because it is our Christian duty.
Here’s the news — and fair warning we have a very lot of it this week, so get comfortable.
The News
Pope Leo XIV will make his first trip to Africa next week, visiting Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, and Cameroon from April 13 to April 23.
The Algerian leg of the trip — a papal first — is of some special significance, since Leo is expected to visit Annaba, the site of the former city of Hippo, where Saint Augustine served as a bishop.
Ahead of the papal trip, Edgar Beltran spoke this week with Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, secretary of the section of first evangelization and new particular churches of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization.
Born in Nigeria and ordained a priest in 1984, Nwachukwu entered the Vatican diplomatic corps in 1994, serving in nunciatures around the world – including in Algeria for several years – and in the Secretariat of State. His is, as you might expect, a fascinating perspective.
Read the whole conversation here.
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Also ahead of the papal trip to Africa next week, it is worth recalling that Christians in Nigeria once again celebrated Holy Week and Easter against the backdrop of violence.
We have a round up of what we know about this year’s Holy Week and Easter attacks, and I would encourage you to read it, if for no other reason than to pray for our brothers and sisters living through constant and bloody persecution.
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Pentagon and Vatican officials have insisted that a January meeting with the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio and the Department of Defense was a constructive and frank conversation and that no threats were made or implied by U.S. officials against the Vatican.
According to an article this week in the Free Press, defense officials were “enraged” by a speech made by Pope Leo XIV to the Vatican diplomatic corps earlier that month which was interpreted as a “hostile message directed at Trump’s policies.”
Citing Pentagon and Vatican sources briefed about the meeting, the article claimed “one U.S. official went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.”
The Pillar spoke to senior officials, both in the Pentagon and the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, and while no one recalled anyone saying anything about Avignon, it is fair to say there were still varied impressions of the meeting — some called it “cordial,” others “tense” and “aggressive.”
But both sides agreed there was a robust discussion of real issues.
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The bishops of the Chaldean Catholic Church began meeting in Rome on Thursday, with the aim of electing the next patriarch of their Eastern Catholic Church.
The Chaldean Church was rocked last month by the announcement that Pope Leo had accepted the unexpected resignation of Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, who had been the Chaldean Church’s leader since February 2013 and was expected to continue for the foreseeable future.
In an analysis this week, JD took a look at the current make up of the Eastern Church’s governing synod and who the main candidates are to replace Sako — and as he notes, this isn’t a straightforward calculus.
There are real questions of history, culture, and even geography at play here, as much as theology, liturgy, and ecclesiology.
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Archbishop Richard Moth was formally installed as the new Archbishop of Westminster earlier this year, becoming at the same time the de facto leader of the Church in England and Wales.
This week, fresh from presiding at his first Triduum as archbishop, he spoke with Luke Coppen, and discussed whether there are signs of a “quiet revival” in English Catholicism, what he makes of Belgian Bishop Bonny’s plan to ordain married men, and if England’s diocesan boundaries will be redrawn.
This is a fascinating conversation, with some bonus watch chat in there too. Don’t miss it.
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In and amidst all the back and forth and controversy over who said what to whom when the nuncio went to the Pentagon, one thing is clear: what the American pope has to say matters a great deal to the American government.
And, while it is known that Leo will not be returning to the U.S. this year, either for the 250th anniversary celebrations or the beatification of Fulton Sheen, the question now is — when will Pope Leo come home?
In an analysis this week, I took a look at some of the factors, but stateside and in the Vatican, which will weigh in the balance. But most of all, I concluded, it comes down to what kind of pope Leo wants to be, what his vision for his home country is, and where he sees himself in all of it.
I’m not sold on the received wisdom that a pope cannot and should not be an active voice in the public affairs of his homeland — and I can think of some fairly obvious recent examples to the contrary.
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Since Pope Leo was elected last year, 14 cardinals have turned 80, aging out of eligibility to participate in the next papal conclave.
In fact, the number of cardinal electors around the world has fallen to 121, just one above the limit set by norms promulgated by Pope St. John Paul II for the election of a pope. And several more cardinals are set to age out of their conclave voting rights in the next few months.
All this being said, at some point Leo is going to name his first slate of new red hats, and Edgar Beltran took a look at who Leo might be thinking of, and what kind of cardinal he’ll be looking for.
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An Indian bishop has expressed relief after 10 members of a religious congregation were released after being briefly detained at a railway station in response to an allegation of human trafficking.
The detentions occurred April 7, when a group from the Sisters of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary entered Indore Junction railway station in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.
The party consisted of two sisters and eight candidates, who are discerning their vocation within the Syro-Malabar religious congregation. The candidates were scheduled to take a train from Indore to the eastern Indian state of Odisha, to spend a vacation with their families. Police detained the party as soon as it arrived at the station, having received an allegation of human trafficking of the candidates.
The incident mirrors a similar arrest made in July last year against religious sisters in a train station, though in that case a mob of Hindu nationalists were also involved.
Thankfully this case resolved quickly and without further incident, though it highlights the kind of legal harassment Catholics face in some parts of the country.
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The president of the Portuguese bishops’ conference confirmed this week that “significant cuts” were made to the recommendations from an independent commission for financial compensation packages to victims of clerical sexual abuse.
On Tuesday The Pillar broke the news that the Portuguese bishops’ conference voted in a February closed-door meeting to make cuts to the amounts proposed by an independent Compensation Determination Commission, which had been formed in 2024 by the bishops’ conference.
But until news reporting was published April 7 on the subject, the bishops’ conference had declined to confirm the cuts, telling The Pillar earlier this month only that “the final amounts attributed were defined in accordance with the procedural regulation, which allowed for a distinction between the technical report and the final decision” and “taking into consideration” the work of the CDC.
Listening to Leo
Ok, so we all know the thing we have to talk about this week, so let’s just get right to it.
The Free Press reported that sometime in January, reportedly after and in direct response to the pope’s annual address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, the apostolic nuncio here in Washington, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, was summoned to the Pentagon for a meeting with a junior minister, where he was given a severe dressing down.
Reportedly, during the meeting, some even more junior staffer got a bit excited while trying to impress upon the nuncio how really really really big the American military is and brought up the Avignon papacy as an example of what could happen if the Holy See didn’t get on side.
Taken purely on its own terms, I found the Free Press story almost too entertaining to be believed.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the cut of Vatican diplomats — and Cardinal Pierre in particular — would know this kind of hyperbolic nonsense isn’t going to get you anywhere, and leave him only with the impression that you are not serious people.
The reported Avignon papacy reference and implied threat I found downright comical. What, exactly, was meant to be the threat implied? Delta Force is going to spirit Leo away in the night and make him prisoner of a puppet-state Vatican on Martha’s Vineyard?
If there is one diplomatic power in the world immune to implied military force or economic sanction, it’s the Holy See. And the more you attempt to browbeat or threaten the pope, the more moral authority you give him.
As you might expect, both the Pentagon and the Vatican have issued statements denying any such thing happened and, having spoken to quite a few people with pretty direct knowledge of the meeting, no one could corroborate the whole Avignon papacy thing — nor could they say for sure something wasn’t said, in some kind of innocent context.
I’m not, therefore, in a position to say it did or didn’t happen. I would say, though, that I do not believe this story came from the Vatican side of things.
If there is one class of person I am willing to claim I understand, it is curial civil servants. And while I would obviously never claim they don’t leak, they don’t tend to leak stories which make everyone involved look faintly ridiculous, or bring down a ton of scrutiny and pressure on their office to confirm or deny awkward details from the secular press.
And they absolutely don’t try to conduct state-to-state relations through press briefings.
If you ask me, the Avignon anecdote — real or invented — seems like the kind of embellishment you might get from a junior government staffer getting a bit big for his tan shoes and too-tight suit and playing fast and loose with his narration for a reporter. That’s just my gut check.
But, it is now a matter of public record that Cardinal Pierre did go to the Pentagon in January, and did meet with the undersecretary of defense, Elbridge Colby. From there, though, “recollections may vary” as the late Queen Elizabeth used to put it.
So, having talked with some people, here’s what I know and what I think.