Happy Friday friends,
We had an election this week, you’ve probably noticed.
If I am being honest, I probably feel the same about democracy as I do about that other great American cultural institution now firmly in the grip of a corrupt cabal of unaccountable self-serving extremists, looting our cultural heritage and splitting our social fabric in the process: Baseball.
Like baseball, I cannot shake the raw emotional pull of polling day, the sense that I am being allowed to participate in something good, something other people wish they had, something which — if done right — can be ennobling and salutary for us all. And, like baseball, it seems to me that American democracy has been overrun by people who despise it, and despise those of us who love it, and who are hellbent on twisting it to perverse and corrupt ends.
Case in point, where I live ballots are now always a dozen or so pages long, with actual elections to office comprising barely the first page or two. The rest are a series of referenda on various amendments to the state constitution — usually amounting to less oversight for elected officials or permission to gerrymander at will — and a never-ending series of bond issues. The truth is that I scrutinize each of these carefully out of a sense of civic duty, but I vote straight ticket no. If you live where I live, and if you know that if the local county executive supports it, it ought to be illegal and probably already is.
Speaking of the county executive’s office, once again we were asked to elect to this enormously influential – and well-remunerated – post and there was only one candidate, running unopposed, as is apparently tradition around here. Ballots for the local legislature were similarly one-party affairs.
Meanwhile, my placet or non placet was sought for the continuance in office of a slate of state judges about whose judicial philosophy and record I could discover very little, despite my best efforts.
Indeed, below the governorship and congressional level, solid information is difficult to come by for almost all candidates, apart from on those issues about which I feel it is safe to take them at their word — if a person tells you they’re an antisemite, for example, I tend to believe them.
Anyway, all this being the case, I don’t think it is any wonder I continue my streak of writing in candidates for most offices. Despite what I am frequently told by acquaintances of both parties, I actually believe I am doing my bit to save democracy, rather than sabotage it.
I don’t pick my candidates unthinkingly, I name good lawyers for judgeships, competent moneymen for comptroller, and my wife for county executive — and not ironically. If democracy, and especially local democracy, is meant to mean anything, it is meant to mean you know who you are voting for and you trust them to do a good job and to do it in your name. I’ll start voting for major party affiliated candidates when any of them meet those basic criteria.
Meanwhile, the antithesis of the spirit of the American democratic experiment is our current pendulum swing of voting out first this sack of criminals and then that clatch of lunatics, while alternatingly empowering the other and investing them with delusions of a popular mandate for indulging their political ids for two, four, or six years, as may be the case.
I confess I wrote myself in for sheriff, and that may have been a moment of frivolity. But given the state of our public affairs, in which everything seems to be in existential danger and yet shot through with triviality, I am not going to reproach myself too harshly.
And anyway, I think I might take to the gig.
Here’s the news.
The News
The Hungarian bishops’ conference asked for forgiveness this week on behalf of Church members who collaborated with the Communist state, following the release of secret police files.
Hungary’s new Prime Minister Péter Magyar ordered the publication of the secret police files in an online database Nov. 4. Magyar argued that he was fulfilling a promise made 36 years earlier, during the country’s transition to multi-party democracy in 1990.
But the bishops’ conference also called for recognition of the Church’s resistance to the regime that held power from 1949 to 1989, as well as for careful appraisal of the newly published documents.
It said: “The names of individuals associated with the Church who appear in the documents that have now been made public conceal a wide variety of stories. Some of them genuinely collaborated with the Communist regime, passing on confidential information about members of the community and others. On their behalf, we ask the victims and their families for forgiveness.”
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Archbishop Joseph Li Shan of Beijing and Cardinal Stephen Chow of Hong Kong defended the controversial policy of sinicization at a conference in Rome yesterday, comparing it to the practice of synodality in the Latin Church.
The policy of sinicization has been a controversial aspect of the Vatican’s 2018 agreement with the Chinese government, which paved the way for unity between the state-sponsored and schismatic Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and the underground Church and allowed the state to vet and propose candidates for episcopal office on the mainland.
The policy requires the Church, including bishops and priests, to recognize and accept the supremacy of state authority and Communist Party dogma over the Church’s hierarchy and teachings.
In his speech Thursday, Li said that “just as the most recent Synod of Bishops promoted ‘walking together,’ the affairs of the Church in China are entirely managed jointly by Chinese clergy, women religious and the faithful, and all of the Church’s holy works are flourishing.”
“The Church in China, which was once constrained by colonial forms, has an especially unforgettable experience of this. This is precisely the meaning of the sinicization of the Church that we propose today,” he said, calling it “not an external add-on to the Catholic Church, as if it were optional, something one could do or not do; rather, it is intrinsic to the Church’s catholicity.”
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The head of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church has dissolved a controversial tribunal established to discipline priests accused of defying orders related to the introduction of a new “uniform” liturgy, after the Vatican’s supreme court suspended the tribunal’s proceedings.
Major Archbishop Raphael Thattil signed a decree approving the dissolution of the Special Tribunal for the Archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamaly, a jurisdiction in Kerala, southern India, that is the epicenter of a decades-long liturgical dispute within the Syro-Malabar Church.
The special tribunal was created amid rising tensions between Church authorities and members of the archeparchy over attempts to introduce a new form of the Syro-Malabar Eucharistic liturgy, which is known as the Holy Qurbana.
Most priests and lay people in the Ernakulam-Angamaly archeparchy favored the Holy Qurbana celebrated facing the congregation, a local custom adopted more than 50 years earlier.
Members of the archeparchy fiercely resisted a Vatican-backed effort to introduce the uniform liturgy, in which the priest faces the people during the Liturgy of the Word, turns toward the altar for the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and faces the people again after Communion.
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The Archdiocese of Turin filed on Saturday a complaint of fraud against a 25-year old Egyptian man who pretended for months to be a Coptic Catholic priest.
The man, who claimed to be named Salam Faragalla, served in three different Turin churches for four months, after presenting forged documents which claimed he was a Catholic priest in good standing, studying engineering at a local university.
Faragalla presented himself in June 2026 as a priest of the Coptic Catholic Church, saying that he had moved to Turin for engineering studies at the city’s Polytechnic University. He was assigned by the archdiocese to the Santa Rosa of Lima Parish as a parochial vicar where he started ministering to the local community.
The story raises some real questions about diocesan processes and due diligence, putting it mildly.
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Leaders at the campus ministry organization FOCUS told The Pillar that recent reports about a house purchased by the organization for its former CEO do not accurately reflect the circumstances of the purchase, and responded to recent criticisms of its missionary and workplace culture.
The organization has come under criticism for alleged instances of sexism, for its evangelizing methodology, allegations of unfair labor practices, and allegedly insufficient supervision of its founder and former CEO.
FOCUS leaders told The Pillar that the organization is committed to learning from the experience of missionaries and participants and improving its ministry, and is discussing internally new approaches to doing so.
OK, as John McCain used to say, let’s have some straight talk. This is one of those reports I am especially proud of us publishing and I will tell you for why.
If you even remotely orbit the American Catholic world, you know that FOCUS is a big deal and people have big feelings about it. You also know that the organization has been the subject of a lot, but a lot, of sotto voce criticism and rumour for a while now.
What we did is we simply put that criticism to the organization’s leaders, asked them for their response, and when necessary asked to see the paperwork to back up what they told us. Now, full disclosure, I do not have big feelings about FOCUS. In fact, I would describe myself as perfectly agnostic about the place.
But what I can tell you is that since we published this story, we’ve had people writing in to tell us — yell at us, in some cases — that our story is either clearly a hit job on the great people who work there, or the worst kind of cover-up for a clearly sinister operation.
That’s the reaction I want to our news, because that is what real journalism gets you.
You can read the whole thing right here.
And if you like reporting that doesn’t serve a side or cater to a viewpoint, the best way to say so is to pay for it.
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Two statements published this week by the current and former head of the German bishops’ conference show a stark difference in approaches to Rome.
While the current conference chairman stressed the need for “full communion with the Holy Father and in fidelity to the Magisterium” in the bishops’ push for reform, his immediate predecessor took aim at Leo XIV personally, calling the pope’s engagement with the German reforming plan in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis “inadequate and, in terms of its potential implications, deeply problematic.”
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And finally, a sentence from the Roman Rota has been making the rounds this week after it was published in redacted form in an academic journal.
The sentence is a big deal because it is an excoriating rejection by the Vatican court of the practice of publishing lists of clergy “credibly accused” of “substantiated allegations” despite no legal process, not actual finding of guilt, and no recognizable right of defence.
Rome, through various departments, has been condemning these lists for years, though scant attention has been paid by most dioceses and religious orders in North America. the question now, though, is if a wave of lawsuits might finally get the attention of bishops.
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Canonical bull
Those anarchic weirdos at PETA have once again tried to fling themselves onto the Vatican’s radar, like bugs on the windscreen of an 18 wheeler.
We’ve covered before the militant vegans’ strange obsession with getting the Holy See to accept personal responsibility for bullfighting. And their tragic little practice of diving in front of the popemobile at every available opportunity has proven about as effective and endearing as their billboard campaign comparing milk drinking to child abuse.
While you or I might think it is not a winning strategy to hurl yourself across prayerful families at papal audiences, to vault the barricades and charge the Bishop of Rome in matching t-shirts, I suppose we should remember that these are the same people who think cheese is a war crime. So it’s possible the lack of animal proteins does something to the cognitive-evaluative process.
To their credit, though, the PETAists have now decided to try a different tack, and lawyer up.
I read this week that they have retained a Rome-based canonist to take their money and bring a case to the Vatican.