Happy Friday friends,
And a happy feast of St. Joseph the Worker.
For a lot of families, this is peak sacramental season, full of First Communions and Confirmations — we’re packing the car and heading off this afternoon to be there for one of our godchildren’s big day tomorrow.
While I am keenly aware I ought to do and say something, I’m always slightly on the horns about how best to emphasize the importance of a First Communion to a godchild.
Obviously, you want to impress upon them the solemnity and cosmic significance of what they are now partaking — and celebrate their arrival at the Lord’s table. But I am leery of trying to give them too much theology about it all, tempting as I know it is to explain to children the metaphysical niceties of accidental nature vs. true substance and transubstantiation.
In fact, First Communions are one of the occasions on which I am reminded most powerfully of Christ’s exhortation that we become more like little children.
There is, at least for me, a strong urge to overcomplicate and hyper-rationalize the Eucharist. It can sometimes feel a bit like I measure my disposition to receive the sacrament by my intellectual focus and appreciation for it; that if I think hard enough about what I am receiving the significance of it will necessarily effect some kind of conversion on my part.
Of course, the Eucharist isn’t a puzzle to be solved, it is a physical point of contact with God, a tangible ingestion of grace, an encounter with the reality of Christ’s sacrifice and the power of his resurrection.
The good it can do me is in proportion to my understanding of how much I need it, rather than what it “is” in Aristotelian terms. That’s the thing I have to figure out how to say, with faith, to my godchild this weekend, and to myself first.
Anyway, here’s the news.
The News
The Vatican’s financial watchdog announced Thursday that it saw an increase in suspicious activity reports in 2025.
The Supervisory and Financial Information Authority’s latest annual report, published April 30, detailed 78 reports of suspicious activities in 2025, 73 of which came from the Institute for the Works of Religion, or IOR, the only financial institution under its direct supervision.
The supervisory authority, known by its Italian acronym ASIF, attributed the rise in suspicious activity reports in 2025 partly to improved procedures at the IOR, following a “targeted inspection of reporting activities.”
It also cited “activities related to the extraordinary events affecting the Catholic Church and the Holy See in 2025,” possibly linked to the Jubilee Year and papal transition.
Coincidental with the report’s release, the bank’s outgoing president Jean Baptiste de Franssu, who stepped down as president of the IOR’s board of superintendence earlier this month, gave an interview to a French publication in which he recalled being surprised when he arrived in the Vatican:
“I didn’t expect such a lack of professionalism, such disregard for the rules, and such a thirst for power among so many people,” he recalled.
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Two days before the Kansas City Royals unveiled plans for a new ballpark, the team’s owner called the local bishop, Bishop James Vann Johnston.
There had been some changes to the proposed stadium’s location, he was told. The church tower of Our Lady of Sorrows, a historic Kansas City parish, would now sit about a hundred yards from home plate.
The bishop talked to The Pillar this week about how the Royals’ ownership has been working with the diocese on the future of the parish, and how he plans to make the faith part of the game day experience.
Read the whole conversation here.
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As the Society of St. Pius X continues preparations to consecrate several bishops without a papal mandate, leaders within the group have begun preparing the ground for the seemingly inevitable canonical consequences.
But as they do so, the society’s leadership and supporters have repeatedly complained that Pope Leo has refused to grant an audience to their superior, Fr. David Pagliarani.
The narrative being spun is that if Leo won’t even hear the society out, how can the pope expect some kind of reconciliation and hope to avoid the illicit consecrations in July.
In an analysis this week, I took a look at that narrative and concluded that actually Leo’s refusal to meet with Pagliarani is probably a supreme act of pastoral charity for the SSPX superior — and that the pope is doing his best to give the society as much time as possible to reconsider its position and threat towards the Church.
Simply put, Pagliarani has been explicitly clear that he and the society “cannot find agreement on doctrine” with the Vatican, which is a passive aggressive way of saying they dissent from authoritative Church teaching, and that they intend to consecrate bishops with or without the pope’s permission.
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The German bishops released this week a new national framework for priestly formation that introduces significant changes to the selection and formation of candidates for the priesthood.
The 203-page document, known as the Ratio Nationalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis, replaces guidelines issued in 2003 and was approved by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Clergy in March.
Read all about what’s changing for priestly formation in Germany right here.
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Everyone is talking about the bumper rise in adults who entered the Church this Easter, by some estimates an increase of nearly 40 percent.
But, as Jose Manuel de Urquidi wrote in a column this week, not everyone is necessarily asking the right kind of questions to help us understand how this happened.
This is a fascinating unpacking of what the data does and doesn’t tell us about the now-famous quiet revival, and an interesting look at the competing theories for what is driving it. But most importantly, it’s a great diagnosis of what we don’t know because we haven’t yet asked.
The law of attraction
I have been thinking about the story out of Kansas City, and the bishop’s obvious enthusiasm for the church’s potential for evangelization a lot this week.
It’s to be seen how the diocese will make the most of the site, and what practical means it will deploy to spread the Gospel to the crowds, but the upside here is self explanatory. If there is an American demographic more primed to hear about beauty, order, creation, fallenness, sacrifice and redemption than baseball fans, I cannot imagine who it would be.
Of course, the “how” of spreading the Gospel is something that parishes and dioceses are always considering. I am myself a big believer in the “retail” approach — personal to person, in the flesh, cor ad cor and all that.
But as with all issues of human communication, I am both aware and somewhat resigned to the reality that in the era of online everything and social media as the center of gravity of public impressions, it is certainly the case that you can’t ignore the digital space.
My observation would be that — and I think this has been borne out in political practice, too — you can seed the ground for people’s impressions and preconceptions incredibly effectively via the online world. But, in the end, individual interpersonal contact remains the most potent and most lasting form of communication.
Most people can never quite remember where they read that thing that first comes to mind when you broach a subject with them, but they rarely forget a conversation with someone who actually looked into their eyes and spoke to them about the reality of their lives.
For this reason, I remain somewhat lukewarm about the whole “online evangelization” thing. This isn’t to say that good people aren’t doing good work — they surely are. For all their sincere efforts and real successes, though, I am just not sold that the Church’s digital presence is, in the round, able to achieve a net good.
The reason for this is a combination of ancient and modern, let me explain.