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Hey everybody,
It’s the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary — and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
You probably know the story of Our Lady of Victory, and the Oct. 7, 1571, Battle of Lepanto.
A European armada of warships aimed to defend Venetian outposts on the island of Cyprus. The Ottoman Empire wanted Cyprus, so that it could use the island as a launching point to invade Italy and take the city of Rome.
The Ottoman Empire had a superior navy, and ruled the eastern Mediterranean. On the day of the battle, its fighting force was superior to Europe’s.
It was the biggest naval battle ever to be fought in the Mediterranean, I’ve read. And the fight raged for hours off the Greek coast. In Rome, Pius V called Catholics to pray for a victory, and he led a rosary procession through the city.
And indeed, despite great improbability, the Europeans won the battle — holding back the Turkish navy — and crippling it for a generation — leaving the European countries safe from the threat of a naval invasion, and freeing about 15,000 enslaved Christians, who had been pressed into service of the Ottoman forces.
Mary showed up.
That’s the lesson. That Mary shows up.
I’ve never called on the Blessed Mother while fighting foes on the deck of a ship (more on that in a second), but whenever I am tempted to doubt the veracity of the Christian Gospel — and all of us are tempted to doubt the veracity of the Christian Gospel — I call to mind my own experience with the same reality:
That when the chips have been down, when I’ve had personal or spiritual crises, I’ve turned to Mary, as a mother and an intercessor, and that I’ve had the clear and unambiguous knowledge that she’s been there.
In fact, of religious experiences in my life, almost all the ones I’ve had most certainty about have been the presence of Mary in a moment of genuine need.
She shows up.
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By the way, I learned something interesting today about the Lepanto battle itself.
See, it was a big naval battle, so I’ve always pictured it like some kind of major artillery slog, a proto-WWII slugfest, with big cannons exploding all day between rival navies miles apart.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. The battle was instead the last major bit of naval warfare conducted with oar-propelled vessels. And those guys fought by getting very close to each other, and then waging hand-to-hand combat on the decks of their ships, sometimes starting fires along the way.
The fighting was close, intense, and brutal. And when Mary showed up, she brought it to a close.
That brings me to this point:
October 7 is now culturally recognized for more recent acts of warfare. It was on October 7, 2023, that Hamas and other militants attacked Israel, with rockets, guns, and knives, killing more than 1,100 people, and seeing about 250 Israelis taken hostage.
What has transpired since is a period of unspeakable violence and depravity, with the UN calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, (though Israel obviously and vehemently disagrees).
Last year, Pope Francis called for fasting on October 7. Today, the world is waiting to see whether a Trump-crafted peace plan, which Leo XIV has expressed hope about, will move forward.
It seems like fasting is again a good idea.
And it seems worth remembering that Mary shows up.
May she bring to the Middle East the peace of Christ.
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Ok, one other thing before the news, and this is a bit of shameless begging.
Readers know that I’m on the board of a non-profit called the FIRE Foundation of Denver. We give grants to Catholic schools so they can enroll children with significant learning disabilities, including my own children, who have Down syndrome.
Last year, we gave schools more than $800,000 to enroll and support kids with profound needs — to make it possible for them to have a Catholic education.
To give that money out means we’ve also gotta raise it. We are always raising money for FIRE. And last week, a wholesale baker here in Colorado donated to us 6,000 pies.
Six thousand pies. That could mean a lot of dough.
In fact, if we sell them all, it will net FIRE more than $100,000, all of which we’ll give in grants to Catholic schools, to allow them to enroll kids with disabilities.
Here in Colorado, that means we’re selling pies at parishes all over the area, ahead of Thanksgiving, when people will pick them up and eat them.
But for you readers, it means a chance to do two good things: If you donate a pie, the money will go to the Catholic education of kids with disabilities, and the actual pie will go to a family in need, as we’ll give all donated pies to the shelters and residences and programs of Catholic Charities.
Someone who needs it will get a pie, and FIRE Denver will be able to fund Catholic education for kids with intellectual disabilities.
(On the first page, you choose how many pies you’d like to buy. On the “pick-up location” page, you indicate that the pies are for donation.)
And by the way, watch this address from FIRE Denver’s gala. It will move you:
The news
Twenty-seven new Swiss Guards were sworn in Friday in the presence of Pope Leo XIV.
While they celebrate, here’s everything you ever wanted to know about the pope’s own army — and there’s a lot to know.
In an insightful analysis, Ed explains the possible reasons for that shocking decision, and why it might mean an actually escalating fiscal crisis for the Apostolic See, with managers looking for high return (and high risk) investments to do something about the dwindling bottom line.
That’s only one possibility, though.
Edgar Beltran breaks down where things stand in the world’s nunciatures, and why the stakes are highest where the Church is persecuted.
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The attack was the latest in an escalating persecution of Indian Christians, which has seen houses destroyed and crops burned, religious sisters arrested and beaten, amid growing Hindu nationalism in the country.
It’s about methodologies and theologies of evangelization in tension — a tension which animates a lot of Catholic life in the U.S., but is rarely addressed directly.
And if you ask me, the U.S. bishops’ conference might find more actual fraternity by having a real conversation about those methodologies and tensions, instead of just fighting about the issue du jour.
How will her appointment impact the Anglican-Catholic relationship? Luke Coppen did some very good reporting on that, and you should read it.
At Castel Gandolfo
There has been a lot of debate online over Pope Leo’s comments at Castel Gandolfo last week about what it means to be pro-life — addressing the Durbin controversy, the pontiff made the argument that opposition to abortion isn’t the only “pro-life” issue, and that people who support the death penalty or the inhuman treatment of migrants aren’t fully “pro-life,” even if they also oppose abortion.
It was a point meant to suggest that the inherent dignity of the human person demands respect in both practice and law, and that policies which degrade human dignity should not be supported by Catholics.
Ed and I will talk about this in depth on The Pillar Podcast this week, but there are a few points I want to make now.
First, I find useful the arguments that “pro-life” is an inherently political term, and not especially helpful for theological conversations. In fact, I think it’s unfair to extend its use too far.
In the 1960s, anti-abortion advocates tended to use “right-to-life” language to describe what they were doing when they opposed abortion.
They wanted to emphasize that everyone has a right to life, including the unborn, and to use “rights” rhetoric that would be familiar because of the various civil rights campaigns underway in that decade.
In a 1971 Chicago Tribune article, a young anti-abortion campaigner used the term “pro-life” in order to link her cause — the end of abortion — to people who protested the Vietnam war. She used the term in a way that made clear that anti-war protestors should take up opposition to abortion if they wanted to be consistent about “protecting other people’s lives.”
After Roe v. Wade in 1973, political anti-abortion groups began explicitly and consistently using the term “pro-life” to describe their position. The idea was linked directly to their “right-to-life” rhetoric.
Since then, “pro-life” has been used as a signifier in American politics for opposition to abortion. In fact, the term became so successful that pro-abortion campaigners had to scramble to market themselves in response as “pro-choice.”
As a rhetorical tool, “pro-life” works because we have to confront the idea that abortion ends a life, every single time we talk about it.
Except, of course, when the term gets stretched to mean a bunch of other things — and often by people aiming to point out the perceived hypocrisy of anti-abortion advocates.
It is a political term. And I think we should be careful asking the phrase to do too much, lest it become absolutely meaningless in the process. If one can only be pro-life by assenting to the whole of Catholic doctrine, we already have a term for that: “orthodox.”
And if one can only be “pro-life” if they agree with my policy preferences on a bunch of matters demanding prudential judgment, well, then the term is just a cudgel with which to badger my opponents.
And if being pro-life is too often used to mean the panoply of every good thing under the sun, well then, even people who aren’t opposed to legal protection for abortion will grab the rung, saying that in the grand scheme of things, their views are the most pro-life.
If it can mean everything, it will soon enough mean nothing.
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Second, the pope’s remarks have in some corners stirred up a familiar trope that I think should be put out of its misery.
I found it first this week at Crux, in the writing of John Allen, Jr.
Allen wrote an analysis Sunday aimed at explaining that “Catholic cultures in most other parts of the world simply aren’t as obsessed with abortion as in the United States.”
He meant that abortion is a more settled question in other places — in Europe, abortion access is basically settled policy, and in Latin America and Africa, he said, abortion’s prohibition remains fairly well protected in the law.
In that sense, he wrote, only in America is abortion a volatile and divisive political issue, and a defining political issue for Catholics. And because of that, he said, Catholics in other places have a more expansive approach to integrating Catholic social teaching into their politics — without the direct killing of the unborn taking center stage.
To me, that summary isn’t quite fair to the European Catholics marching in their capitals for an end to abortion, or to the developing world Catholics raising alarm bells — and loud — about ideological colonization in their countries.
But I don’t think the analysis was fair to American Catholics either.
“American Catholics,” Allen wrote, “especially those most convinced of the anti-abortion position, often have a hard time understanding that there’s more to the church’s pro-life teaching.”
You hear this a lot: That the people defending the unborn don’t remember the needs of those who have already been born. I don’t know the intention at Crux, but that kind of thing is often a cheap shot aimed at picking on pro-lifers, to demonstrate one’s political affiliation and social status.
But I have been hanging out with American Catholics for 30 years, and I can tell you, it’s simply not true. And it’s completely unfair.
The American Catholics I know who are “most convinced of the anti-abortion position” are the ones whose lives most reflect it — most especially, the kind of salt-of-the-earth older people you find praying the rosary every single Saturday on little patches of sidewalk outside abortion clinics.
They are there when it’s 100 degrees in a merciless sun, or when it’s blowing snow at 20 below. They’re there with lawn chairs and water bottles, and with rosaries and little plastic babies. They’re there with hope.
They don’t always get it right. Sometimes their graphic signs could use revision, and their rhetoric some updating. But their time is committed, every Saturday, to prayer and sacrifice for the unborn, while most of us are still eating Cheerios and watching Instagram reels.
And if you peel back their lives a little bit, you tend to notice a pattern. They’re not usually wealthy. They usually don’t have much. But I’m never surprised in that crowd to meet a widow who has an entire immigrant family living in her house. Or an old man who has handed over his car to a single mom and her kids. I notice those people outside the clinic tend to know the name of every heroin addict and panhandler for blocks, and they tend to bring them water and sandwiches, and kindness. They knew where the food pantries are, and how to get parents diapers, and how to talk to the mentally ill who need an ear.
They know there is more to the Church’s pro-life position, because they live it.
But I suspect John Allen is talking about the voting booth — which is, if you ask me, a fairly reductive vision of the Church’s pro-life teaching.
As to voting, well, I know a lot of practicing Catholics who voted — with real reservations about other issues — for the person they thought would do the most for the unborn, because the Church told them that abortion is the preeminent priority in the voting booth, and because they think the 1 million people killed in the U.S. by clinical abortion each year demand their primary attention.
I’ve written before about the possibilities of voting for a third party, or not voting at all, and I maintain those are morally legitimate options. But the Church also says it’s morally legitimate to vote for a deeply flawed candidate if he is “deemed [by prudential judgment] less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.”
How to apply that is a discernment each Catholic has to make in a well-formed conscience.
Among those I’ve spoken with, most such voters don’t forget about the broad spectrum of issues at play in Catholic social teaching — even when I disagree with whichever of the choices at hand they’ve made, or with their assessment of the best policy solutions to social issues.
We are, as Cardinal Cupich said, “politically homeless” in this country. We’ve each got to make the prudential judgments we think will do the best good. We’re not going to agree on those.
And it seems to me unreasonably condescending to conclude that ordinary Catholics making those hard judgments must do so — in one direction or another — because they “have a hard time understanding” the Church’s doctrine.
Ultimately, it is far more respectful to say someone is wrong, if that’s what you think, than to suggest they must be too dumb to get it in the first place.
—
Third, the pope’s remarks stirred a minor controversy by suggesting that opposing the death penalty is a sine qua non of pro-life identity. While that’s not a new idea and it’s been in the Catholic ethos for quite a while, Leo’s comment on the subject prompted debate.
But the debate isn’t just “death penalty: right or wrong.” It’s multi-faceted, and a continuation of conversation that began in the Francis papacy — neuralgia over how Francis spoke about the death penalty, and what it means.
With regard to Leo, I think it’s clear to me that he was talking about the American context, and the unjust use of the death penalty here, and not intending to wade into a broad theological conversation about what the Church teaches regarding execution.
But because of the “inadmissible” language Francis added to the Catechism about the death penalty, this is a fractious issue today, and the pope’s remarks became something of a land mine about the development of doctrine itself.