Hey everybody,
Thanks for reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
Today I want to tell you about Blessed Sister Rani Maria Vattalil.
She lived in India, was a Syro-Malabar Catholic, and entered religious life with her cousin in the early 1970s, when they were young women.
Her religious community was a local movement of Franciscan sisters, primarily a teaching order.
But Sister Rani didn’t become a teacher. She lived instead in rural dioceses in northern and central India, organizing and overseeing the local Caritas agencies. She was especially committed to providing aid and education opportunities for the Adivasi, a network of tribal groups in India, making up less than 10% of the country’s population, whose ancestors represent ancient cultures on the subcontinent, and who, despite being outside the country’s caste system, have been the victims of discrimination across India.
She lived in the Diocese of Indore from 1992 until 1995. There, she realized how many poor people were being exploited by a cartel of money lenders who would trap people in a mountain of debt, by shifting interest rates and payment dates to leave them cash-strapped, borrowing, and mortgaging land owned by their families for centuries.
Rani started running programs explaining the scheme, and explaining that government grants could create lending co-ops (and possibly trigger audits into local lenders) — so short-term, high-interest, adjustable rate loans were not necessary.
This, as you can imagine, ticked some people off.
—
Sister Rani rode city buses, and intercity buses in the area. On Feb. 25, 1995, she went to the bus stop, to take a ride to the city of Indore, ahead of a longer trip. Sister Rani was with two sisters. The three of them were told their trip had been cancelled.
But as they walked back, a bus actually drove down the street. The driver told the sisters his was the bus to Indore. Sister Rani boarded it. She told her sisters goodbye, loaded her bag, and went to sit.
But things were weird. While the sisters usually sat in the front of the bus — and she’d stowed her bag there — she was told by a steward to sit in the back.
The bus was packed — there were about 50 people on board.
Some of them had nefarious aims. They had been contracted to kill the meddling nun.
Some facts are not entirely clear. It’s not certain how many people were involved in the scheme, or why the bus was switched before she was killed. It’s not even entirely clear how much money changed hands.
Here’s what is known: At a certain point, the bus stopped. Several men started taunting the nun, accusing her of proselytizing poor people — of taking advantage of them.
A man named Samunder Singh got out of the bus at its stop, and broke a coconut against a rock, seemingly as a kind of offering to Hindu gods. He boarded the bus again, and offered pieces of the coconut to other passengers.
He offered a piece to Sister Rani. She put her hand out, and he pulled the coconut away. He drew a knife, and began stabbing her. As people screamed, the driver stopped the bus.
Sister Rani — several passengers testified — cried out to Jesus, calling his name again and again.
Singh dragged her from the stopped bus. He stabbed her more than 40 times, reports say. Some passengers ran away. Others were paralyzed with fear inside the bus.
Her body was left abandoned on the side of the road. Singh had fled. Some priests gathered her body and took it to the bishop’s house, where it was eventually laid in state.
—
There’s more.
Samunder Singh went to prison for Sister Rani’s murder.
There, a priest started visiting him.
After years, Singh repented. He apologized to the sisters, and said he was spending his life trying to do some penance.
In 2010, he told a reporter that “I accept full responsibility for my heinous murder of Sister Rani Maria. I cannot say that I was instigated, because my own hands stabbed her repeatedly and for this, I will regret my actions till the day I die.”
“In my own small way, I try to follow her example, helping those who are less fortunate than me, like Tribal Christians and all those who are marginalized.”
I don’t know if it was hard for most sisters to forgive. But Sister Selmy Paul most have found it most difficult. Sister Rani was her natural sister; Sister Selmy Paul had followed her into religious life.
But Sister Selmy Paul knew she was called to forgive. Eventually, she began visiting Singh in prison. She decided the Lord wanted her to treat her sister’s killer like her own brother. That meant, she decided, trying to get him out of prison.
So Sister Selmy Paul and some priests began asking the prison for Singh’s parole. In August 2006, when he had spent 11 years in prison, Samunder Singh was released. Sister Rami’s family was there to meet him. They welcomed him like a brother.
He went home to his village, doing farm work. While he did not become a Christian, he began visiting every year the spot where Sister Rani was killed, to pray for her.
No doubt, she was also praying for him.
She was beatified Nov. 2, 2017. Singh lives just 10 miles from where she was beatified. I don’t know if he attended the Mass.
The news
A letter published on the subject indicates a continued Vatican effort to rein in on issues central to the German’s synodal way.
Luke Coppen dug in to find out. Both the history, and the present reality, are pretty interesting.
Bishop Fredrik Hansen told The Pillar that a “much greater focus needs to be directed both toward the plight of persecuted Christians and toward our shared obligation to pray for and support them.”
So he dedicated a shrine to call for those prayers, and he talked with The Pillar about what he hopes will come of it. Read all about it.
Astute readers will recall frequent mention during the Francis papacy of a considerable slowdown of cardinatial consistories, as Pope Francis preferred other modes of consultation — chief among them being the “key of synodality,” as it were.
With Leo returning to the modus consistorius, Ed Condon suggests some things which can be gleaned about the pontiff’s governing style, and what might come when cardinals get talking.
Catholics gather around the Altar to enter into communion with the Living God, but sadly many believe “Church” is separate from “the rest of life.” Bishop Thomas Paprocki joins the ICC for this FREE ONLINE EVENT on how the Eucharist should transform our lives outside the walls of the Church.
Seven years ago this month, a new set of norms came into effect in the Church’s life — Pope Francis’ landmark episcopal accountability project, Vos estis lux mundi.
It’s hard to say much about how Vos estis has worked — despite the policy’s intended goal of greater transparency, U.S. VELM investigations have taken place under a deep cone of silence, with even their existence mostly going unacknowledged. That means only two kinds of outcomes are publicly known for the VELM investigations that have been uncovered — a very small number of episcopal resignations, and otherwise, seemingly no conclusion, and no consequence.
It seems that a binary has developed: Either a Vos estis will see a bishop lose his office, or it will have no consequence at all.
But what if there were more options available to bishop-investigators and to the Vatican? What if, like most of canon law, there were graduated options available at the end of Vos estis probes, to be doled out according to the gravity of the situation?
Might that increase episcopal accountability, and public trust?
I ask those questions in this analysis.
—
Fr. Estevan Wetzel is the director of prison ministry and restorative justice in the Diocese of Phoenix, Arizona.
He recently ministered to Catholic death row inmate Leroy McGill and celebrated Mass for him on the morning of his execution. It was, Wetzel said, a “weird” and solemn experience — both similar and unlike what he had done previously as a priest.
Wetzel talked with The Pillar about accompanying a condemned man to his execution — and how to find the Lord in that experience.
It was, I think, an important conversation. Read it here.
A paradigm shift
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia told a reporter last month that he played a major role in the 2017 dismantling of the JPII Institute for Marriage and Family in Rome, and its reestablishment as a new institute with a focus on “marriage and family sciences,” rather than “marital morality.”
Paglia said that he aimed to bring about a “paradigm shift,” (partially influenced by Paglia’s zeal for robotics, he seemed to say), which would move away from the institution’s “moralistic emphasis,” in favor of “a theology and pastoral care capable of engaging—dialectically and dialogically, not just apologetically and conflictually—with a new humanistic sensibility.”
The archbishop said the heart of his changes at the JPII was to “question … the essentialist and ahistorical paradigm that had supported all sexual and family moral theology developed to date.”
That’s a word salad, but if you cut through, the meaning is clear — Paglia argued that the basis of the Church’s moral theology was, as it pertains to matters of sexual morality, philosophically flawed.
It’s a bold claim. And a claim unpacked in a recent essay, very much worth reading, by Monsignor Livio Melina, a former professor at the JPII Institute.
For myself, I’d offer two observations.
The first is on Paglia’s claim that the JPII Institute offered before its reconstitution a kind of “armchair theology” that was divorced entirely from people’s ordinary experiences of marriage and family life. I see no evidence of that.
Look, it is obvious the interpreters and promoters of John Paul II’s “theology of the body” have at times gone off the rails, and that online discussions about any topic touching on marriage and family can become very weird, very quickly.
But it’s also obvious, at least to me, that the family is actually the school of charity. There is a tendency among “paradigm shifters” to suggest that questions about sexual and medical morality — family questions — are somehow divorced from big social questions about caring for the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, or even “caring for our common home,” as it were.
I just don’t see that, at least in a family that’s pursuing Christian discipleship. Such a family will be inevitably a school of virtue — a place where self-sacrifice, forgiveness and reconciliation, inclusion, charity, and concern for the common good is learned. Such a family, in my experience, becomes the place where the prospect of widening the gift of love becomes possible.
Truth be told, the family, like the parish beyond it, is the most common locus of the Christian life — and it’s obvious to those living it that family life is the place from which any hope for a broad sense of the “human family” is fostered by actual real-life experience of actual parents and actual brothers and sisters.
So questions about how families ought to live in fidelity to Christian revelation are not questions of “armchair theology.” Getting things right in the little picture of the home is the first step in “the Christian animation of the temporal order,” as Christifideles laici puts it.
There are two possible dangers of which to be aware.
One is the kind of divorce that has been made by Paglia and his ilk, which seems to bifurcate the life of the family, and even the intimate life of the husband and wife, from broader social concerns — rather than understanding them as an essentially unified realities.
The other is a danger for families — the danger of seeing the family as a kind of end in itself, and family comfort and security as a kind of primary end of the Gospel, fostering a kind of insularity in family life that fails to see the family’s call to surrender those things in service to the mandate of the Gospel. In short, the failure to see that the fundamental vocation together is a missionary one, and that family life should have an apostolic character.
My second observation is that Paglia’s judgment about the irrelevance of the John Paul II Institute as it was originally constituted is not supported by what’s happened since 2017. Since Paglia recrafted the JPII as an academy for social sciences, the institute itself has foundered, we’ve been told, with cratering enrollment and an increasingly precarious financial position.
There was a great deal of desire, from bishops around the world, to send students to Rome for studies in the theology of marriage and the family. There is far less desire, it turns out, for the kind of third-tier mishmash of sociological theory on offer now at the Institute, which means far fewer promising students are actually attending the Roman institution.
The wisdom or intuition of sending bishops is that building strong families builds strong societies. And that sacred revelation, expressed in the unpacked doctrine of the Church, might have something to say about building strong families.
Imagine that.
Bar talk
The United States continues to do well in the World Cup, and fairweather fans like me will continue having the time of their lives watching the tournament, for exactly as long as our country remains a participant.
But if you’re like me, watching the games in bars or with soccer fans can be tough — because if you get into a conversation, you run the chance of being exposed real quick for the soccer noob you really are.
So I’ve compiled a few phrases you can offer if your World Cup bona fides come into question. Drop these with confidence, and people just might believe you’re a student of the beautiful game.