Obadiah, the crux of the matter, and Bible Bees

The Tuesday Pillar Post

Pillar subscribers can listen to JD read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR

Hey everybody,

Eastern Catholic Churches celebrate today the holy prophet Obadiah, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.

Obadiah, who lived in the 6th century B.C., authored the shortest text included as a book of the Old Testament, a warning to the Edomite kingdom that a betrayal of Jerusalem during Nebuchadnezzar’s siege would lead to its destruction. 

The prophecy of Obadiah is fewer than 500 words. You could read the whole thing on your morning coffee break. Without too much work, you could probably memorize it, if you wanted to say that you have an entire scriptural book committed to memory (assuming you’re not this girl, Anastasia Brown, who has memorized 15 books of the Bible, including the Psalms).

Actually, that’s what I want to mention before I get to the news. I had intended to write something about Obadiah’s actual prophecies, but then I stumbled into the YouTube above, and that took me down some rabbit holes, and I thought I’d make a plug for something important to me.

Memorizing scripture. 

A lot of readers know that I grew up mostly in a small evangelicalish reformed Protestant Church in New Jersey. I was baptized a Catholic, but my “church home” was Garwood Presbyterian Church, a congregation of a few dozen multigenerational families who were close knit, committed disciples, and deeply, as it were, “immersed in the Word.”

This means I grew up memorizing Scripture. From first grade on, as I recall, I had a weekly Scripture verse to be recited from memory, which became a weekly chapter or more as I got older. And in our house, as was the model for most of our community, punishments — (“consequences” in the vernacular of modern parenting) — mostly involved hand-copying long texts of Scripture, or writing the same verses over and over again for particularly egregious offenses.

I had a method for writing the same verse multiple times which involved holding several pencils at the same time, but I usually got caught.

Knowing that stuff made a difference in how I saw the world, in what I thought about myself, and about God, and about who to become. I was just a kid, but there was something that made all the difference for me about being encouraged to take up the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

But I should tell you the truth. When I began practicing the Divine and Catholic Faith in earnest, I put away Scriptural memorization. It just wasn’t a part of Catholic culture, probably because of the  counter-Reformation, which is why Pope St. John Paul II had to say in 1979 that “a certain memorization of the words of Jesus, of important Bible passages … is a real need” in the Church. 

I still find it a good spiritual discipline during Advent and Lent to hand copy a book of Scripture in front of the Blessed Sacrament, but I don’t regularly commit the Word of God to my mind, let alone to my heart. 

Most of the Scripture I memorized in childhood, I’ve since forgotten. I’m probably now depressingly ignorant of scriptural allusions in literature and conversation, and there are some Biblical stories I once knew in sparkling detail, that have in recent decades become just rough contours, if even that. Anyone who has listened to Sunday School is aware of my limitations in this department. 

When my kids ask me a Bible question, more than half the time I get nervous about giving an answer. I wonder why they can’t just ask me about canon law like good Catholic children.

But I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.

There are Catholics, mostly those with a good habit of praying the Liturgy of the Hours, who have swaths of the Psalms memorized, and who can call to them to mind and heart — who find them, as did the Lord on the cross, fitting and available expressions of their own spiritual experiences. That’s what Psalms are there for, by the way. 

And for myself, I am glad for the little pieces of Sacred Scripture I do still have memorized, because they come to me sometimes when I need them, as encouragement, or exhortation, a source of hope, or a source of mission, even. 

In other words, I find those bits of Scripture printed on my brain to be “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness,” as St. Paul says in Second Timothy. 

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Last week in Orlando, more than 350 kids competed in the National Bible Bee, a scripture memorization competition of considerable difficulty. 

You might look at it, and think the whole thing — with its America’s Got Talent aesthetic, dramatically performative recitations, and goofy evangelical vibe — is a bit kooky, at the very least.

Some of you will — rightly — take issue with the spiritual lessons taught by turning the Living Word into fodder for a contest, especially one promising big prize money — as much as $50k in some cases.

You can also be sure, given its association with the Duggar family, that memorizing Bible verses for “the bee” is no guarantor of good conduct.

So I’m not offering here an endorsement of the National Bible Bee, though I admit I’d love to attend it, and especially to cover it as a journalist.  

But here’s a girl who has more Scripture memorized than most Catholics I know, probably myself included, at least at the present time.​​

If the Word of God “does not return void,” as Isiaiah the prophet says, then I’ve got to hope, at least, that Scripture read, memorized, and recited does something of value for the soul. 

It did for Jesus, and for the Jewish people, and it has for Christians for 2,000 years. 

And I know it already has for me, though it’s been a long time.

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Here’s an irony. A lot of practicing Catholics, and almost all Pillar readers, could quote St. Jerome to tell you that “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” 

But I’ll bet 75% of people who know that quote don’t know 10 substantial pieces of actual Scripture by heart — and again, myself included. I’m not indicting anyone here — it’s just not our culture to open the Holy Writ and say it quietly to ourselves until we know it.

But Jerome’s right: Ignorance of Scripture really is ignorance of Christ. 

So I think I’m going to try to memorize Obadiah. It’s just slightly longer than the Gettysburg Address, and, better than Lincoln, it’s divinely inspired. 

I’m not sure what prophecies of an Edomite downfall will do for my soul, but I sincerely hope it will be something. And I’m already sure that memorizing the entire corpus of a minor prophet is a better use of time than scrolling around on twitter.com — and would probably be my most impressive party trick, at the very least.

Let me know in the comments if you want to join me.

Or as old Obadiah would say: 

“Thus says the Lord God concerning Edom:
We have heard tidings from the Lord,
    and a messenger has been sent among the nations:
‘Rise up! let us rise against her for battle!’”

One verse down, 20 to go.

The news

(Please forgive us for a relatively light news weekend. Ed and I spent Friday digging out, just a bit, from our time at the USCCB last week, and Edgar’s on his annual retreat. That’s left The Pillar newsroom a bit thin the past few days, with a few sick days sprinkled in there for our team to boot!)

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First, there’s been a lot of social media brouhaha in recent days about the Vatican’s recognition of adaptations to the Mass for Indigenous communities in a southern Mexican diocese.

If you want to read the straight dope, read it here, with concrete sources and no social media hysteria, from the estimable Luke Coppen. 

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Next, as Donald Trump prepares his incoming administration, he’ll need eventually to appoint a U.S. ambassador to the Holy See. 

That might seem like a small post, but on any number of issues, a diplomatic relationship between the U.S. and the Apostolic See actually matters — including the Ukraine-Russia war, a matter of stated top importance to both Pope Francis and Trump.

So who might be the next U.S. ambassador at the Vatican? Michelle La Rosa floats some interesting — and very plausible —- possibilities.

Read a thoughtful analysis, here.

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Disgraced former sostituto Cardinal Angelo Becciu engaged in a public media spat last week, with the cardinal claiming he is the victim of a “political agenda” not a legal process — and trying to downplay his own personal responsibility for his actions, in a strategy that may well pit him personally against Francis.

At the same time, the cardinal has made a case against the authority of the office he once held — that of sostituto, a top-ranking Secretariat of State post which functions effectively as the pope’s chief of staff.

Becciu’s real argument seems to be that the office act so fully acts with Francis’ own authority — generally or specifically — that any effort to hold him to account legally is an attempt to indict the pope personally.  

In fact, that has long been Becciu’s argument: that anything he did which might appear to be illegal was done on papal authority, and by virtue of that fact, could simply not be illegal.

But does that argument actually hold water? Is it an accurate accounting of the sostituto’s role? Is Becciu arguing that the job itself is a danger to the rule of law in the Vatican?

Read Ed Condon’s analysis, right here.

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Finally, Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral will reopen in a few short weeks, after much of it was destroyed by a devastating 2019 fire. 

The rededication festivities are set to be big.

So what will they look like? And what will the cathedral itself look like after five years of work? 

The Pillar reports.

Wait, what?

Allow me a lengthy analytical excursus on a topic of real and serious importance to the life of the Church, if you don’t mind. It’s a topic we’ve been talking about a lot, but that’s because it really and truly matters.

A couple of weeks ago, Ed asked in a Friday Pillar Post why the case of Ariel Alberto Principi seemed not to have gotten much news coverage at all, outside of The Pillar, and a few cursory mentions from a few other outfits. 

Here are the facts: In June 2023, an Argentine priest, Ariel Alberto Principi, was found guilty in a canonical court of sexually abusing minors. In April 2024, a court of “second instance” — an appeals canonical court — confirmed that verdict. 

Principi was laicized.

Until he wasn’t. 

In September of this year, the Vatican’s Secretariat of State made an unheard-of-intervention, telling Principi’s bishop that there had been a kind of tertiary “extraordinary” Vatican process, which found that Principi was guilty only of “recklessness,” and not of child abuse, despite the two convictions he’d already had in canonical court.

Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra, sostituto at the Secretariat of State and the pope’s chief of staff, signed an order for Príncipi’s reinstatement in the clerical state, albeit with Vatican-ordered “limited ministry.”

The Secretariat of State doesn’t have the legal authority in canon law — which governs the Church — to overturn a judicial decision laicizing a priest. So Archbishop John Kennedy, who oversees such cases at the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, sent Principi’s bishop a note, saying that the Secretary of State’s order was null, and the priest remained laicized.

All of this is a very big deal. 

A priest convicted of child abuse restored to ministry, by a legally unqualified Vatican official close to the pope, acting on a supposedly secret process. An official of the Vatican calling out the illegal actions of a higher-ranking official than he, to defend the Church’s judiciary.

For anyone who cares about the rule of law in the Church — anyone who thinks the Church should be reforming its approach to abuse cases by implementing standardized and intelligible legal processes — this is a sequence of events worth noting. From all appearances, it is another indication that the pope’s promise of accountable and transparent procedures has not yet been realized, at least when it comes to people with powerful friends.

In late October, after we at The Pillar  had been covering this for a few weeks, Vatican News published an interview with a ranking canonical official in the Vatican, who suggested that maybe all of this was normal, because maybe Peña Parra was just acting as a kind of information courier for a process at the Apostolic Signatura, a Vatican court. But if the Signatura did get involved, it only did so by a papal mandate, and its only role would be to recommend to the pope whether to extend a kind of merciful clemency, despite the legal convictions. And we can reasonably conclude, for a series of concrete reasons, that even that didn’t happen.

Since that interview, there has been basically no media coverage of the Principi case. We’ve wondered why. Maybe the story is too complicated? Maybe there aren’t a lot of canon lawyers willing to speak on the record? 

Or maybe nobody wants to jump into a story that seems to implicate an official commonly regarded as the pontiff’s curial right hand? Maybe nobody in the Vatican press corps wants to burn a source diving into that?

This week, long-time Vatican columnist John Allen wrote a kind of analysis on the topic, which left me speechless.

Allen took a couple of paragraphs to explain that this case wasn’t about a Vatican “turf war,” or “internal politics.” I’m not aware of anyone who actually framed it that way — but I’ll get to that in a minute. 

First, though, let me mention the thrust of Allen’s argument: That maybe Peña Parra’s intervention was justified because “it’s not entirely clear how guilty Principi is.”

See, Allen was given access to some of the case’s documents, and he explained that the gist of allegations against Principi is that the priest laid his hands upon the genitalia of young people, especially those struggling with homosexuality, under the pretense of praying for them, sometimes in “private settings” — with no one else around. 

In that context, two canonical courts found, the priest “proceeded to grope and molest” teenagers he’d manipulated into praying with him.

Allen’s analysis, written in the Year of Our Lord 2024, questioned whether all that groping and manipulation really amounted to “abuse” in the first place. 

In fact, Allen argued — contrary to the patterns in dozens of cases — that Principi’s habit of praying in front of other people might prove his innocence. Abuse experts will tell you that acting wrongly, with brazen confidence in the plain sight of others, is a common manipulative tactic of abusers — one utilized by Theodore McCarrick himself, in fact. 

And Allen didn’t address that tactile prayer sessions for “sexual healing” or “sexual deliverance” have been a predictable mechanism for clerical sexual abuse, playing as they do on issues of deep shame, which makes it less likely that victims will come forward.  

But if Principi’s activity didn’t really seem to Peña Parra like actual abuse, Allen suggested, well then the archbishop might have just engaged in the case — with no canonical authority to do so, at all — because he had a “different opinion” than the two courts which convicted the priest, and the DDF official who upheld their ruling. 

I am for canonical justice coming through due process. It is important in a canonical trial to establish the intent of the accused. But after a person is convicted once, any presumption of innocence goes away — all the more so when you’ve got substantially conforming sentences from two courts. 

And regardless, it’s an indictment of our legal system if ranking administrative officials with “differences of opinion” can swoop in at their convenience, no explanation given, to unwind judicial processes with which they have “differences of opinion.” 

That’s why we have the courts, actually. That’s why they do the trials. It’s commonly regarded as the best shot at a fair, unbiased, objective assessment of what happened, and what the consequence should be. And when a convicted person thinks the court has been unfair — that’s why we have appeals. Principi, notably, seems not to have made an appeal to the DDF itself, in accord with the ordinary process. 

This case does not amount to a simple “difference of opinion” among equally competent officials, because the law is clear: Barring some high degree of transparency that would explain things very differently, the sostituto — Peña Parra — has no legal authority to just pop over and superimpose his opinion over the whole of the Church’s court system. And the pope seems to know that, which is why he hasn’t fired Archbishop Kennedy, who put the kibosh on Peña Parra’s intervention.

Here’s what I think is happening. Allen’s analytical argument strikes me as exactly what officials in the Secretariat of State would say if the pressure were on, and their backs felt a bit against the wall. 

First, that up-front framing about a turf war is a very Vatican way to think about things — and a very Vatican defense against a charge no one has actually made. It is also basically the reductive politicization of a critical legal issue, confusing critical questions about who-has-competence-to-do-what with petty curial bologna about whose department is “more important.” 

At stake is whether the rule of law actually matters in the Church, not the petty question of whose office gets a seat closer to the head of the pontiff’s table. 

Second, it’s in the interest of Peña Parra and his team to ignore the issues of legal authority and administrative competence — the serious governance issues at the actual heart of the case — and frame the thing as just a matter of two different approaches to the same problem.

Third, it is, troublingly, reflective of lingering Vatican attitudes to waffle about whether the spiritualized groping of vulnerable teenagers really amounts to “abuse,” and reflective of lingering curial clericalism to equate laicization, Principi’s penalty, with the “death penalty” — as Allen’s analysis did.

I can assure you, readers, that no father of any child harmed by a priest will ever equate the prospect of swift execution with the punishment of “no longer being a cleric.”

And excommunication, not laicization, is consistently regarded by the law as the Church’s most serious and severe sanction.

I suspect we’ve got in Allen’s analysis basically a snapshot of Peña Parra’s defense, floated at Crux for public consideration. And that’s fine — Peña Parra has every right to defend himself. But the problem is that it comes under the guise of a journalistic analysis, which should, in principle, be aiming for a kind of objective assessment of the situation. And this wasn’t that.

To me, it’s worth mentioning that I started reading John Allen decades ago, and that he’s been long-regarded by American ecclesiastical officials as a trustworthy Vaticanist.

But his approach to the Principi case is not lacking precedent.

This is the journalist who told the McCarrick Report commissioners that he didn’t investigate rumors about the disgraced cardinal because he didn’t want to burn sources, and told them that he’s in the business of “sell[ing] news” by “building up” in the public eye his curial sources as “titans of the earth” — and using a lot of  “smoke and mirrors” to do so.

Later, ahead of Cardinal Becciu’s indictment and conviction for a raft of financial crimes, Allen took pains to explain that cardinal probably didn’t think he did anything wrong, that his situation was perhaps “scandal … but no sin,” even amid mounting evidence, later confirmed in court, that Becciu was spying on colleagues, canceling accountability measures, and pushing out the auditor hired to clean things out. 

That record casts doubt on an analysis which denies abuse claims, confirmed in court, in order to aid the defense of a ranking curial official close to the pope. 

Here’s the thing: The Principi case deserves more investigation, more reporting, and more analysis. The case says a lot about the state of the ecclesiastical reforms Pope Francis promised in 2018. Accountability matters. Clarity matters. A straight accounting of the facts makes a difference. 

In another story, Crux said this week that Vatican reform efforts “have failed.” And in the McCarrick report itself, Allen urged a “hard look” at the question of why journalists “didn’t pursue” the McCarrick stories they might have written. 

It should now be asked whether — even with reform efforts reportedly “failing” — much has changed for the Catholic press on that front. If not, we might well have hit upon a crux of the problem.

Kate is great

If you would, offer a prayer this week for my wife Kate, who celebrated a birthday yesterday.

Kate and I have been married almost 19 years, and have been a “couple,” if you will, for more than half our lives. 

To say I married up would be an understatement.

Mrs. Flynn is a woman of exceptional grace, wit, poise, and steely determination. God has dealt our family more than a few unexpected cards over the years, and at each turn, I’ve grown more impressed with the character and outlook of my wife. She goes, in a manner of speaking, from cross to cross, blessing the people in her life.

It’s no little wonder that Kate knows a gaggle of young moms who look to her for guidance, encouragement, and practical help. It’s no surprise that she’s helped turn a Catholic special ed apostolate into a recognized national leader, or that she’s done much the same at our own parish school. 

In fact, if you know her, the only real surprise is that I ever got a girl like this to call me back — after a first date at which I, predictably, forgot my wallet, after taking a lactose intolerant girl to an ice cream shop!

I am deeply blessed in my marriage. That isn’t to say that it hasn’t been hard. Marriage is, by its very design, hard. It’s meant to be that way. What I’m saying is that rather that I’m blessed because the woman struggling beside me knows what the struggle is for — and isn’t afraid to challenge me (sometimes quite practically!) toward holiness. 

If you have had any issues with your Pillar subscription, you know that Kate is the person who can solve them, with charity and aplomb.

And if you’re interested, and if this fits your own family’s needs, I wanted to share something with you.

Pillar readers know that Ed and I will be leading a pilgrimage to Rome late next year, at your request — with details to come very soon.

But Kate and I are exploring a kind of a trip too — leading a family pilgrimage to Rome for the Vatican’s Jubilee for People with Disabilities, in late April. We’re working with a pilgrimage apostolate to keep the cost as low as possible, and to design an itinerary that’s tailor-made for families which include people with disabilities, exceptionalities, and challenges. 

We’re doing it because we think every family should have a chance to pray together in unity with the heart of the Church. It’s not a money-maker for us or anything like that, it’s just part of our family apostolate for other families like ours. 

Right now, we’re in the can-we-get-enough-families-to-keep-it-affordable stage of exploring this. But things will happen with it pretty quickly. And if that seems of interest to your family, fill out this form so we can start getting you details, asap.    

You’ll love traveling with my wife. She’s pretty great.

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In the meantime, please be assured of our prayers here at The Pillar, and please pray for us. We need it.

Yours in Christ,

JD Flynn
editor-in-chief
The Pillar