First things first: On Thursday, March 19, The Pillar Podcast has a very special live birthday episode at the Nisei Lounge, in Chicago, Illinois. It’s going to be a LOT of fun — especially if you’re there. We’ll start around 7:30 or 8:00. Be there.
Top of the morning to you, everybody:
It’s the feast of St. Patrick, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post. I’ll get to that in a minute.
But first, I’d like to ask for your prayers.
After a battle with cancer, my friend Gina Barthel died this morning.
Gina was a nurse, one of the funniest of the people I know, and a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ.
She was also a survivor of clerical sexual abuse.
In fact, I met her first in 2019, during the height of the McCarrick scandal and everything which came after it.
She reached out to me because she wanted to share her story. But most important, Gina said then, she wanted to share with other survivors a message that was hard won for her: That people hurt in the Church could find healing in the Church.
And as bishops faced consistent criticism and mistrust in those months after McCarrick, Gina wanted to talk with me about a bishop who had — she said — patiently and gently helped her find a place in Christ’s Church.
Gina wasn’t saccharine about any of that. She didn’t suggest it was easy, or that she had all the answers. She was open about reality: Sometimes she could barely cross the threshold of a church; other times, she could hardly be anywhere else.
But there was always an extraordinary gift of faith in Gina’s life. And while her sense of a place in the Church sometimes wavered, her faith in Jesus Christ never did. She wanted always to be in front of Christ in the Eucharist. She was usually encouraging me to be there too.
Gina taught me a lot: about what it means to suffer, what it means to be courageous, what it means to love Christ, and what it means to be a friend.
And she was one of the first people to show me, in her witness and vulnerability, how profoundly important it is that the Church lives in integrity as God calls her — how profoundly important it is that the Church take soberly and seriously the reality that every single soul is an icon of God’s image, and must be treated with reverence, and awe, and tenderness, and integrity.
She was a courageous witness to suffering and to healing.
And she was my friend. The last time we talked was on the phone, just a few weeks ago. Gina knew the end was coming, and she took a vacation. I called her during that trip, and while I meant to encourage her, she turned the conversation quickly, so that she was soon giving me advice — in her typical style, a blend of wit, and plain chastisement, and, as she often said, “not a lot of bullshit.”
There was not a lot of bullshit in her life. And those who know her were much the richer for that.
I’d be grateful if you’d pray for her.
And I’d like you to take a minute for some wisdom from her:
“I fully appreciate, understand and recognize why there are people who have been wounded by the Church who will never step foot in the Catholic Church again. And I think God has tremendous mercy for all of those souls, and Jesus weeps for them. I mean, I often picture Jesus just weeping for all of us who have been wounded so deeply. And he, you know, he longs for us to be united to him and to be united to his Church.
I feel spiritually homeless, which is uncomfortable and lonely because we were created to be part of a faith community. Yet, even in the midst of that loneliness, I have come to learn that I always have a home in the Sacred Eucharistic Heart of Jesus. That’s where my soul finds joy, peace, and rest. It is a terrible tragedy that any member of the Body of Christ does not feel welcome, safe, or wanted in their faith community. We as a Church need to do better to make our parishes safe places for survivors of trauma.
But I think by God’s grace, it’s possible. And I know other survivors who are practicing Catholics and who are joyful practicing Catholics.
In the end, Jesus always wins. When we get to heaven, he is going to say to each one of us, whether bishop, priest, parish staff member or a lay person in the pew, ‘What have you done for the least of these?’ My prayer is that we will all be able to say, ‘I fought as hard as I could. I didn’t cower in fear or pride. I didn’t remain silent. I didn’t look the other way. I faced their painful reality and never abandoned or rejected one of your precious little ones.’”
May Gina Barthel rest in peace. I’m a better man for having known her.
The news
The big news out of the Vatican this morning is a report claiming that the sprawling financial trial that convicted Cardinal Angelo Becciu has been “overturned,” and that judges have ordered a “new trial.”
But … we’re not so sure that’s the right way to put things, or that it reflects the reality of a complicated legal decision.
At The Pillar this morning, we’ve been on the phone this morning with sources and experts close to the trial, and we’ve just now gotten our hands on the relevant documents.
We are in the middle of giving them a thorough reading, to bring you clear reporting on what’s happened — and what comes next.
Until then, I’d urge a little restraint. We’ll aim to bring you the full story as soon as possible.
But with several high profile cases being heard at appeal this year, Leo’s first address to the city state judicial apparatus comes at an especially interesting time.
What might his words mean for the major cases currently before a court in the Vatican?
Ed Condon breaks down some ongoing cases.
While Ouellet has filed suit for defamation against a woman he claims falsely accused him, two witnesses in the case raised new allegations of sexual misconduct by the cardinal, including the claim that he once shoved his hand down a woman’s shirt without her consent.
Ouellet emphatically denied any sexual misconduct, and characterized one incident as a “clumsy mistake” on his part.
Here’s the latest on the lawsuit, and the allegations against Ouellet.
Seitz spoke with The Pillar about his pastoral message and its intent.
This Easter, transform how you accompany others on their journey to Christ. During the St. Paul Center’s Easter Challenge, receive weekly reflections from Dr. Jeff Morrow, Fr. Boniface Hicks, and the Mercedarian Sisters on how Jesus’ patient presence on the road to Emmaus shapes the way we accompany others today.
The number of Catholics formally disaffiliating from the Church in Germany has fallen for the third year in a row.
Meanwhile, the percentage of self-identified Catholics attending Mass has risen for the fourth consecutive year, but only amid an overall trend of institutional disaffiliation.
While some bishops have said this is welcome news in Germany, the numbers bear close examination.
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The International Theological Commission this month issued a new text, Quo vadis, humanitas?, which is meant to examine Christian anthropology in face of profound and ongoing technological change.
We put together a brief readers’ guide for you, because this document is worth checking out.
There is, indeed, a lot to read in this text, which is expected to align with some of the ideas in Pope Leo’s first encyclical, due out some time after Easter.
But meanwhile, read this text. Things like this are important:
“Historical consciousness is a fundamental factor in the construction of identity, both of the individual and of a people, understood in their differences but also in their connection. Human beings are historical and cultural subjects, capable of transforming nature, cultivating their humanity and giving meaning to history. The notion of history as a temporal process moving towards a promised and hoped-for future is a precious legacy of Judaism and Christianity.
In the light of revelation, Christian theology has reflected on the anthropological and salvific meaning of personal time and the history of humanity. Historical consciousness is a constitutive element of the Christian faith, which encounters the God who brings salvation within the historical journey of a people.
For this reason, revelation also shows the mysterious and indelible value of the present, understood as a privileged and unrepeatable moment of the anticipation of eternity in time. At the same time, it becomes a critique of various reductionisms concerning time, the present and memory, as well as eschatology.”
And:
“It is necessary to recover the origin and ultimate goal of history, as they can be experienced in the present, in order to understand their true meaning. The encounter between human time and God’s eternity in Jesus Christ freely offers a meaning of history that corresponds deeply to the expectations of the human experience of time, without detracting from the intersection of the three dimensions of past experience, present initiative and future expectation, in the horizon of eternity that qualifies them.”
Florida go bragh?
St. Patrick is the apostle of Ireland, the evangelist who was kidnapped, enslaved, and — as he was forced to herd sheep — became a mystic, and then converted a country.
Patrick’s missionary story often gets lost in the myths about snakes and shamrocks. But consider his courage: At 16, the guy was kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery. He escaped six years later, in his early 20s, and had a dangerous journey home. Instead of staying there, he went back to the land where he was a slave, to live as a mystic-missionary, to baptize tribes, ordain priests, and build churches and monasteries.
Along the way he had both desolations and consolations. He had real visions from God, he saw miracles worked, and he also suffered setback, sickness, and shame — for all he did, Patrick was insecure for most of his life that he didn’t have a more formal and rigorous education.
His story is really very cool. And he was a real man, of real flesh and blood, who was converted to Christ and lived for the Gospel. It’s fitting and good that we celebrate his life.
But about his celebration, I learned something cool this week.
If you’re a big St. Patrick’s Day guy, like I am, you probably hear all the time that Irish-Americans overdo it, and that St. Patrick’s Day wasn’t really that big of a deal in Ireland, until it was imported for tourists — and that somehow this makes our celebration an inauthentic bit of Celtic cosplay.
Well, first, St. Patrick’s Day is a feast of the Church, set to commemorate the great saint’s death in 461, which means you can celebrate it as much as you like.
But the naysayers are actually right: St. Patrick’s Day really is a uniquely American holiday in some ways. And we can be pretty damn proud of that.
In fact, if you want to understand the origins of our beer-swilling, song-singing, parade-whistling, blarney-talking holiday, you’ve got to look to the only place where it all makes sense: Florida.