Happy Friday friends,
It is the feast of St. Augustine. If I am being totally, brutally, self-defeatingly honest I cannot stand the great saint’s writing. I’m not disputing the sweep of his work, the depth of his thought, the power of his conversion, or the importance of his witness. But as an editor, the constant overworking and unpacking of metaphors labored to death and through hell make me clench my jaw in frustration.
Every year when the Sermon on the Shepherds rolls around in the Office of Readings I flinch. It’s like being trapped in a lecture hall as a man with a great idea which could be brilliantly and intuitively expressed in a few minutes stretches it out until you want to stab yourself repeatedly in the leg with a ballpoint pen.
Again, to be clear, great saint, great mind, great example of conversion. Just not my preferred bedside reading.
No, for my money and my salvation, give me his mother, St. Monica, whose feast was yesterday. Anyone who is lucky, as I am, to have a Mom who treats her son’s salvation as a daily priority of existential magnitude, knows what rightly ordered and total self-giving love is. And sons like us know, too, how much we owe to Mom — because we have felt the relentless tug of that constant, sometimes maddening, urgency with which she calls us to Christ.
All Christian mothers – mine, Augustine’s, everyone’s – are ultimately patterned on the motherhood of Our Lady, who understood the mystery and the majesty of her own son and who points us to him in all things.
They do so with a thousand unspoken and, at least for now, unknown and unacknowledged prayers for their children — prayers at their most efficacious, I am sure, when their kids wander furthest from home and seem the least likely to return, as Augustine surely did for a good while.
So, enjoy Augustine’s day. But celebrate it the way he’d want you to, by praying for your Mom and thanking her. He’d tell you as much, I am sure. He’d just take forever to say it.
Here’s the news.
The News
Chaldean Bishop Emanuel Shaleta, who is facing more than a dozen charges of money laundering and embezzlement, is expected to face a criminal trial after rejecting the possibility of a plea deal, sources close to the bishop have told The Pillar.
A potential plea deal could have seen the bishop handed probation instead of prison time, if he agreed to plead guilty to some lesser crimes. A preliminary hearing in Shaleta’s case began yesterday, with testimony expected to last two days. The bishop could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
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The Holy See’s chief diplomat has been in Moscow this week, meeting the Russian foreign minister. Both men offered sober but broadly positive sounding statements following the meeting, as the Vatican continues to push for peace in Eastern Europe.
But even as the Russian minister was praising the Holy See for its diplomatic efforts, government propaganda efforts were pushing out conspiracy theories about Vatican finances, and spinning the Holy See’s peace efforts as a bid to curry Western political influence and funding.
The stark duality of output from the Russian regime would seem to illustrate several things at once – the unreliability of the Russian government as a diplomatic party and the amount of moral credibility the Holy See has staked on trying to engage with it, the most obvious among them.
But, as I argued in an analysis this week, the dissemination of anti-Vatican conspiracy theories by Moscow’s proxies could be proof that the Holy See has achieved one of its most obvious but unspoken diplomatic priorities — to be taken seriously.
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The Catholic Church in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt is urging voters to shun the Alternative for Germany party when they head to the ballot box Sept. 6.
With polls suggesting the AfD could secure its first outright majority at the state level, the Diocese of Magdeburg has launched an initiative urging citizens to “vote consciously” in the upcoming election.
The Bewusst Wählen! initiative, spearheaded by the local Bishop Gerhard Feige, is appealing to the more than 2 million residents of the eastern state to prioritize charity, dialogue, human dignity, and solidarity when they cast their votes.
The diocese believes that the Church itself could face dire consequences if the AfD, which seeks to curb immigration, wins enough votes to lead the state government in Saxony-Anhalt. This is because the party’s manifesto, released in July, promises to overhaul Church funding mechanisms if the AfD secures power.
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The Armenian Prime Minister has announced an investigation into what it claims is a “systemic crisis” of the Armenian Apostolic Church, just a few days after his administration announced a government-led reform of the country’s majority Church, including a forced change of its leadership.
Nikol Pashinyan said this week, in a speech presenting his new government program in the country’s National Assembly, that “a report is being prepared on the deep systemic crisis that has emerged in the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church, laying out dozens of facts.” Within the reform program, the government signalled that it would move to install an “interim Catholicos” at the head of the Church.
The announcement marks a further escalation in the standoff between the Church and government which some fear could lead to an effective nationalization of the Oriental Orthodox Church.
So what is going on? Get all the background right here.
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After months of controversy in Italy, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Clergy confirmed last week the removal of Fr. Massimo Biancalani, well-known for his pro-migrant activism, as pastor of two parishes in the Diocese of Pistoia.
The move comes after protracted public debate over the priest’s efforts to provide shelter to migrants in the parishes to which he was assigned. Biancalani became famous in Italy in 2016 for hosting hundreds of migrants in his parish churches, with many of them sleeping in the church pews.
After years of protests from the neighbors and attempts at mediation from the Diocese of Pistoia, public authorities eventually shut down the parish buildings, citing security and hygiene issues. In September 2025, Biancalani’s bishops ordered him to leave his parishes and take a position in the diocesan missionary apostolate, where he would continue to work with migrants.
But the priest refused, and the case went to Rome. Read the whole story here.
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And finally, I don’t often read the society and celebrity style mag Paris Match, but fair play to them for getting a real story on this one.
Last week I discussed here the move by Bishop Jean-Marc Micas of Tarbes and Lourdes to cover indefinitely the remaining visible works by Fr. Marko Rupnik, the disgraced sexual predator, previously convicted of crimes against the sacraments, and accused of decades of violent and blasphemous acts of coercive sexual crimes against religious sisters.
I noted that the decision to cover up the last of the mosaics at the basilica at Lourdes, while credited by the bishop to a respect for victims, was surely linked too to the impending visit of Pope Leo.
Leo apparently gave the order only a month into his pontificate. The Vatican comms team had previously, publicly, vigorously, and in somewhat sneeringly hostile tones, defended the use of Rupnik’s work in official communications, and branded calls for their removal “uncivilized.” The pope, it seems, disagreed.
This is an interesting data point for two reasons. The first is that it sheds further light on Pope Leo’s decision to appoint an external candidate of the calibre and background of Montse Alvarado to replace Paulo Ruffini as prefect at the Dicastery for Communications.
The second is that, as major Catholic institutions around the world continue to hem and haw about what to do with Rupnik’s mosaics built into the fabric of their churches and chapels, it’s increasingly clear what the pope thinks: the time to stop displaying his work was a long time ago.
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War and peace
Alongside the coverage of Archbishop Gallagher’s trip to Moscow this week, my old comrade from the trenches of the Vatican financial scandal, Maria Antonietta Calabrò, noted that Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, recently relaunched his book on the metaphysics of war.
The re-release of “War: Beyond the Visible Causes and Effects” was timed, she noted, to coincide with the publication of Pope Leo’s book of collected speeches entitled Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift at the end of last month. I will confess upfront that I have not read the patriarch’s text, though even the official catalogue notes from the Moscow Patriarchate are reasonably illuminating.
The book is, it says, “devoted to the metaphysics of war. Concepts such as ‘sacrifice,’ ‘feat,’ ‘patriotism,’ ‘victory,’ and others are examined from a unique spiritual perspective.” Now, to be fair, absent the obvious context of persons and conflicts I might be interested in a mature discussion of those themes.
But the patriarch’s hand is rather tipped by the promise of an exploration of “Russia’s metaphysical boundaries and goal-setting, and [touching] on the racial aspect of war.” I don’t think I am leaping to unfair conclusions to assume what we have here is a baked over edition of Russkiy Mir, the ethno-religious nationalism used by the Putin regime to justify its campaign of war crimes, mass kidnapping of children, and various other brutalities.
But for me, the most telling line in the book’s official blurb is this: “Since everything in the world stems from the clash of good and evil, the outcome of war is determined by God, and the winner is the one on the side of light.”
That’s… a take. One assumes, then, that God was in favor of, to take a random historical sampling, the Armenian genocide, Mao’s revolution, and — one on which the Patriarchate no doubt has strong views — the ultimate failure of the Crusades.
It’s easy to dismiss this rather bloodthirsty and Old Testamental approach to armed conflict as the jingoistic sloganeering of a Potemkin Patriarch. But we cannot and should not dismiss it so casually.