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Happy Friday friends,
I got to do a fun thing yesterday.
Our pastor had the idea to bring back the tradition of walking the entirety of our parish’s borders, blessing them and praying for those within them along with those able to join for any or all of the procession.
Our family showed up to walk and pray along our corner of the map, we live quite near the line, the exact contours of which I became intensely interested in the moment our daughter was born and I suddenly became deeply invested in preferential access to the parish school.
Apart from the spiritual dimension, which is real enough, as an exercise in popular piety, I was all for it. A great, soft, stifling barrier to evangelization is the cabining of Catholics within the literal and metaphorical walls of the parish church and the gradual sense of “othering” which that fosters.
Who are those people, and what do they get up to in there?
It’s not nothing to have identifiable parishioners out and about, plainly visible to everyone else, if for no other reason than when we’re spotted again at the liquor store or BBQ spot it seeds the impression that we are around, animating the wider community, already part of the fabric of daily life.
This, in turn, takes some of the “weirdo factor” away when it comes to actual efforts to evangelize.
Oh him, sure I’ll give him two minutes.
I mention this because a not infrequent criticism you see of public prayer processions is that they are “triumphalist” and not evangelizing. This is an assessment often assumed by people with no actual experience of either public processions or front line, face-to-face evangelizing.
But for me, the important part of the procession yesterday was the reminder that I owe a duty of prayer to my neighbors and an obligation to love them as myself.
This isn’t idle sentimentality. Sure, some of my neighbors, most of them, I get on great with. But I can think of the odd house I fantasize semi-regularly about seeing a moving van in front of. The one with the “Be Kind” sign and a flag with an image of The Very Hungry Caterpillar over the motto “EAT THE RICH” comes to mind.
What have I done to witness the love of Christ to them? That was something to think about as I walked the parish border yesterday.
Here’s the news.
The News
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith reiterated Wednesday that if the Society of St. Pius X carries out plans to illicitly consecrate bishops in July, those involved will commit an act of schism and be subject to the canonical penalty of excommunication.
The statement, signed by the dicastery’s prefect Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez, stated that “This act will constitute ‘a schismatic act’ and ‘formal adherence to the schism constitutes a grave offence against God and entails the excommunication established under Church law.’”
While the canonical crimes and consequences of the SSPX’s planned episcopal consecrations have already been made clear, and explained for those directly involved — some Catholics have asked what the effects will be for the priests and laypeople who have joined the SSPX, or who regularly attend its liturgies.
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The Vatican press office has clarified that an award given to the Iranian ambassador to the Holy See is not an exclusive honor, but a customary award routinely given to ambassadors after two years of service.
The clarification came after several Iranian outlets reported May 12 that Pope Leo XIV had granted the Vatican’s highest diplomatic honor to the Iranian ambassador, prompting social media criticism of the pope and bids by some to spin it as a political commentary on the U.S. conflict with Iran.
So, what is the award the Iranian ambassador received? Where does it rank among Vatican diplomatic honors? Does it say anything about the pope’s stance on political issues?
You can read the whole story here.
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In a possible first in Poland, an archbishop has invited priests to apply to lead vacant parishes by submitting a résumé and a proposed pastoral program tailored to the needs of the respective parish.
The new approach is a marked departure from the traditional Polish model, in which priest assignments are made by the bishop with input from the diocesan curia but no formal application process.
The archbishop has said that the change was inspired by practices in U.S. dioceses, but what exactly is the new practice, and how similar is it to some U.S. models?
The Pillar explains it all right here.
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When a country has been engulfed by civil war for five years, it’s surprising to hear a cardinal describe the local Church as “incredibly flourishing.” But that is exactly what Burma’s Cardinal Charles Bo did during a recent trip to Australia.
The cardinal noted that the Missionaries of St. Paul, a religious institute he founded in 1990, now has 140 sisters, seven brothers, and 10 priests. And the national seminary, located in the former capital, Yangon, has more than 200 students, up from around 150 seminarians almost 20 years ago.
So, what is the overall state of the Church in Myanmar? And what might explain its continued fruitfulness amid very harsh conditions?
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There is no shortage of data, analysis, and commentary on the fraught world of dating for Generation Z.
Financial instability, the ubiquity of social media and smart phones, and unprecedented levels of “social anxiety” were all amplified by the experience of COVID lockdowns, leading a generation to report frankly terrifying levels of romantic disengagement and disinterest.
But in a long feature this week, Jack Figge took a deep dive in the Catholic corner of Gen Z to find out how they are coping — or not — and managing to forge authentic human partnerships.
Read the whole thing right here.
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The Vatican welcomed this week the election of a new head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, one of the 14 universally recognized self-governing Eastern Orthodox Churches.
Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, said in a May 11 message that he learned with great joy of Shio III’s election as the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia.
But what is the Georgian Orthodox Church? Who is Shio III, and what does his election mean for Catholic-Orthodox ties?
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The Israeli government has declined to renew the visa of a Catholic priest in the West Bank, who was responsible for youth ministry among the region’s Christian community.
According to sources close to the situation, Fr. Louis Salman was interrogated by Israeli officials in late April, and soon after informed by Church leaders that he would need to leave the country for his safety. Salman was then notified officially that his visa would not be renewed, and that he should leave the country before Monday, May 11.
No official reason was given for the decision.
Hundreds gathered at his parish in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, for a farewell Mass on Sunday before the priest left for his native Jordan.
Salman is known for being a very committed and energetic pastor, local Catholics told The Pillar.
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Pope Leo XIV has named a new apostolic administrator to oversee Australia’s ordinariate for groups of former Anglicans, amid questions about its long-term future.
The Vatican announced May 11 that the pope had named Bishop Steven Lopes, the head of North America’s Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, as apostolic administrator of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross.
Observers had expected a leadership transition at the Australian ordinariate since March, when Leo XIV named its previous apostolic administrator, Bishop Anthony Randazzo, as prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Legislative Texts.
But the appointment of an administrator on the other side of the world raised some eyebrows, and some questions.
Bishop Lopes discussed the significance of his nomination in an interview with The Pillar, and you can read that whole conversation right here.
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Extra omnes
Cardinal Fernendez’s statement regarding the upcoming SSPX episcopal consecrations is, as I hope our explainer makes clear, kind of a big deal.
It’s not “new news” to say that if bishops are consecrated without a papal mandate then the ones doing and receiving the consecrating will be automatically excommunicated, both for the specific crime of illicit consecration and for schism — we’ve known that for months, and Rome has been commendably upfront about the cause and effect there.
It seems to me that the real news of the Fernandez statement, which is exactly four sentences long, comes entirely in its use of two words and a citation. The consecrations will be, the cardinal explained, an act of schism and excommunicate those who participate. But also, he said, “formal adherence” to the same act will also constitute schism and carry the excommunication.
What constitutes “formal adherence” to an act performed by someone else is the sort of canonical legal argumentation I just go nuts for. Parsing out exactly when a person’s actions can be taken as legally probative of an internal disposition is my canonical happy place, my Mastermind specialist subject. When I read that phrase in Fernandez’s statement I got the same twitchy fidget Tolkien nerds get when someone mentions elves.
I was all set for a big row with m’colleague about imputability and external manifestations of assent. But then I checked the citations from the cardinal’s comment and it rather shot my fox — there’s no real room for debate on this one, at least to a large degree.
In issuing his warning about “formal adherence” coming with an excommunication, Fernandez cited a 1996 legal brief from the then-Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, now ranked as a dicastery, the function of which is to clarify and interpret doubtful areas and applications of canon law.
According to the PCLT, who were asked about the exact same issue — the SSPX, schism, and who is excommunicated — there’s a sufficient enough grey area around the fringes of “formal adherence” to make it a case-by-case matter as regards lay people who attended their liturgies on a non-exclusive basis. But, they said, there’s no such ambiguity for clerics who participate in SSPX liturgies — “their ministerial activity within the schismatic movement is a more than evident sign that there is therefore a formal adherence.”
That’s the headline here: If these consecrations go ahead, as far as the Vatican is concerned all SSPX bishops, priests, and deacons are adhering to a schismatic act by continuing to function in the society and are excommunicated.
It’s clear to me that this is something that the SSPX clergy have been expecting and not so much working to avoid as gearing up for. SSPX leaders like Bishop Fellay have been warning society attendees for months that they — all of them, the people — soon face dire punitive action from Rome.
As the Vatican’s legal position makes clear, this ain’t exactly so. What it boils down to is if any lay people attached to the SSPX want to go associate themselves with a schism and excommunicate themselves, well, go nuts guys, but it’s a case-by-case choice. But there’s no such grey area for the clergy.
That is, I would submit, refreshingly clear, canonically speaking. And exceptionally prudent from a pastoral governance perspective.
Ever since Benedict XVI revoked the excommunications of the previous round of illicitly consecrated SSPX bishops, the society has benefited from a kind of canonical limbo. They aren’t exactly in perfect communion with the Church but they aren’t explicitly cut off, either.
Benedict, perennial softy that he was, always imagined that with enough patient dialogue at the theological level and enough liturgical latitude through measures like Summorum pontificum, they’d eventually find a way to square all the circles.
Things changed under Francis, who simultaneously revoked Summorum and replaced it with the draconian and punitive Traditionis custodes while giving SSPX priests a ton of practical pastoral credibility and license by granting them faculties to hear confessions and witness marriages with canonical validity.
The result was a lot of liturgically traditionally minded Catholics were essentially incentivized to affiliate themselves with SSPX churches, while the society itself was encouraged to walk and quack like a kind of global TLM ordinariate, far enough away from true communion with Rome to do what it liked but just tethered enough to claim the name Catholic.
My own read of this was that it wasn’t accidental — those around Francis with the biggest stake in Traditionis seemed, to me, to have decided that anyone who liked the old liturgy was immediately suspect, and probably secret schismatic and definitely outside the bounds of todos, todos, todos.
Shipping “those people” out of parishes and into SSPX churches was a feature, not a bug, for a lot of Traditionis’ most ardent cheerleaders, and I found that deeply, deeply unpleasant on a personal level and downright abusive on a pastoral one.
It’s always been my suspicion that some people around Rome harbored the quiet plan that, eventually, a final conflict between the Vatican and the SSPX would arrive and the cord between the two would be severed entirely with mutual anathemas and expressions of regret, of course, but quiet satisfaction. I’m glad they seem to have failed.
Instead — this is just my read of it — Pope Leo seems to be gearing up for a completely different kind of showdown and an opposite result.
The pope has, as we have reported, let it be known that Traditionis can and will be dispensed for any bishop who sees a pastoral need and asks for it to be. And he has urged the “generous inclusion” of those attached to the old Mass in diocesan life.
At the same time, via Cardinal Fernandez’s DDF, he’s drawing a deep ecclesiological line in the sand with the SSPX leadership — as he is with the German bishops. There is not going to be any more circular negotiations on non-negotiables like the Second Vatican Council, Tradition, and ecclesiastical authority.
Assuming the society’s leadership carries through with their plans, Catholics who have felt drawn (or pushed) towards SSPX churches over the last decade are going to be asked a question, and offered a choice:
What do they believe the Church is — the divinely instituted means of salvation, founded on the rock of St. Peter and guaranteed by Christ, or, as the SSPX superior has claimed, a place where the necessary means of salvation can no longer be received?
Depending on your answer, the choice is clear.
I expect that most people who’ve found themselves in the SSPX orbit will find the consecrations in July and what happens next to be a sobering moment, and they will decide that no, actually, they aren’t going to follow some rogue shepherds into schism and will instead find the pope standing at the door of the sheepfold ready to welcome them in.
As for the rest?
What Leo wants, he’s been clear since his election, is unity — but not German style federalism and unity of branding, and not SSPX unity of agreement to disagree and the freedom to reject this or that teaching, reform, papal pronouncement and so on. My sense is that Leo doesn’t do a unity of moods and vibes, of opt-ins and cop-outs.
Leo, it seems to me, wants and expects full, authentic unity in faith, sacraments, and governance. And as a canon lawyer he’s comfortable reminding people that anything else is schism.
That’s a healthy reminder to get, from time to time.
Playing God
One of the perils of deflecting decisions on to Providence is that the Lord has a habit of providing. I have been reminded of this of late by my wife and daughter.
For years, I have closed off conversation about getting a pet for two linked reasons.
The first is that getting a pet means, as far as we are all concerned, getting a dog. I like dogs. I grew up with dogs. My family are dog people. And getting a dog means getting a large dog.
Dogs ought to be large, or at least solidly medium sized — a springer spaniel is, I would argue, the minimum acceptable size, though I’d make allowances for specialist working breeds like basset hounds.
Small dogs, intentionally bred for low energy and competitive ugliness, like French bulldogs are, to my mind, offenses against nature; Darwinian abuses created to serve as living scatter cushions. They are worse than cats, who at least serve a function in pest control and have the dignity to revile the people who anthropomorphize them.
So if we were to get a dog it would be a large one. And if you get a dog, even one you raise and train yourself, there are going to be teething pains as it settles in. Floor boards are going to get scratched, skirting boards are going to get chewed, screen doors are going to get clawed up.
Which brings us to the second reason I have refused talk of dog acquisition: these are things you want to avoid in rented houses. So my standard response to any dog chat has been that we can get a dog if God gave us a house of our own.
As many of you will recall, to my surprise, last year God did, in fact, through a kind of administrative miracle I still don’t entirely follow, allow us to buy the house we’ve been renting. So that particular promise has been “resurfaced” as people say nowadays. Most recently, yesterday.
As I was doing the school run, my daughter addressed me saying how she “should like a dog, please, daddy. Quite a big dog, really. When shall we get it?”
Now, nothing short circuits my cognitive-evaluative-votive process like my four-year-old aping the grammar and cadence of a well-educated English woman, so I was kind of impressed with myself I was able to defer, rather than say “we’re going right now darling,” and start googling breeders on my phone.
Instead, I told her she could have a dog when she was six.
Now, here I thought I was on safe ground, since the kid is a famously unreliable witness of her own age, rarely giving the correct answer when asked and showing almost no grasp of the concept of time, despite my efforts to get her to take an interest in wrist watches.
Imagine my surprise when she chirped back “Alright daddy. I am four and soon I will be five. Then I will be six.” My wife reported that she was similarly vocal about her advancing age when picked up at the end of the day, dammit.
Just goes to show you what a kid will do when properly motivated, I guess. So I’m getting a dog, and have little more than a year to prepare for it.
It’s not the end of the world, of course. Like I said, we are dog people and I genuinely like dogs. But is it weird that I feel a sense of anticipated responsibility about it all? I mean let’s not kid ourselves, I’d be getting it for my daughter, and my wife would borrow it for walks every now and then, but it would be my dog.
I’ll be the one giving it the runaround twice a day, training it to know its place and it will be my desk the thing comes sniffing and wagging to when it wants something.
If I am honest, I don’t really want the burden of raising and domesticating a brute beast from birth to death, committing to providing for its every true need, and to patiently tolerating its endless lapses, mistakes, and base instincts while serving as its existential lodestar, source of validation and ultimate consolation.
That’s the sort of nonsense God has to deal with from me, and it’s no picnic let me tell you.
But perhaps I am looking at this wrong. Maybe reluctant dog ownership can be a kind of gratuitous act of penance, a daily call to patience and a renunciation of selfishness?
And there’s something to this “man’s best friend” thing. I mean, a dog doesn’t mind comfortable silences, won’t take offence at my poorly judged jokes, and is unlikely to dispute my superior opinions on canonical penal law.
Oh who am I kidding. I’ll buy the bloody thing and serve it up to the little girl in a hat box with a bow on it because, in the end, there’s nothing I won’t give my child if she asks me the right way. I learned that from somewhere, too.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
Thank you for teaching us the delightfully English idiom "shot my fox". I'm definitely using that one from now on... with all due respect to foxes
Giving a Vatican award to the Iranian ambassador especially at this moment is an act of absolute stupidity. period,full stop. And the explanation given is pitiful.