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Hey everybody,
It’s still Easter, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
At the end of this week, the Church will celebrate the anniversary of Pope Leo XIV’s election to the papacy, after a two-day conclave that began May 7, 2025.
There’s plenty of analysis about the pope’s first year, and plenty more coming. In the meantime, pray for the pope. His is not an easy task, and — contrary to popular opinion — the pope is an ordinary human being, not endowed with superpowers, as he gets used to what must be the most surreal life transition on planet Earth.
I once asked a newly retiring bishop if he’d return to his hometown after the installation of his successor, and he was frank: “I’m 75 years old,” he said. “All my doctors are here. At my age, those are some of the most important relationships in my life. So I’m staying here.”
It was a pragmatic reminder of the unique situation of septuagenarians in the Church’s life. Most guys I know at 70 have wrapped up their careers or are getting ready to. They’re figuring out what the day will look like without the office or shop floor. They’re easing into long put-off hobbies. They’re trying to decide what to do about the sudden increase of ear hair which seems to sprout in the eighth decade of life.
But imagine that you’re 70, and you’ve got five more years of leading a diocese or a dicastery ahead of you, in which you’re expected to take the helm in a changing world, and to do it well.
More to the point, imagine that you’re 70, and suddenly you take a new name, your brothers swear allegiance and obedience to you, you’ve got new charisms of unity and infallibility, and people talk about the fact that you could easily stay in that new job for 20 years, or more.
Accepting the papal office is a call to a kind of martyrdom. Not every pope has accepted that call generously — plenty in history have chosen their own paths instead.
But Leo, after a robust missionary life around the globe, and a few years of hard labor in a Vatican dicastery, seems to have accepted that the last chapter of his life will see him poured out like a libation for the salvation of souls.
I wouldn’t wish it on anyone — even while I know that once God calls, it’s the particular path which might lead him to salvation.
As I say, pray for the pope. He needs it.
The news
The Vatican has not responded to a Vos estis lux mundi whistleblower complaint from the Diocese of Baton Rouge, more than 60 days after the report was initially filed.
While the norms of Vos estis require the Dicastery for Bishops to respond within 30 days of receiving a complaint, an allegation that Bishop Michael Duca mishandled a case in the Baton Rouge diocese has to date gotten no response from Vatican officials.
The complaint alleges that Duca discouraged a whistleblower from calling the police after a priest reportedly admitted to sexual activity with minors, and that the diocese did not follow its own policy while addressing allegations of the priest’s misconduct.
The bishop is alleged to have told a Catholic concerned about the priest: “You don’t need to call law enforcement. You’re just going to muddy the waters.”
A whistleblower in the case says he’s been told that the Archdiocese of New Orleans, which would be responsible for investigating the case, has gotten no direction from the Dicastery for Bishops.
Meanwhile, the diocese has not responded to The Pillar’s reporting on the subject, but the diocesan vicar general, who is named in the Vos estis complaint, has been appointed administrator of the parish where the accused priest had been pastor.
The situation is a test case for the Dicastery for Bishops absent its former prefect, Cardinal Robert Prevost, who has now a new position in the life of the Church.
It is also an interesting test case for new U.S. nuncio Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, who arrives in post this week — while former nuncio Cardinal Christophe Pierre was famously unresponsive to requests for information about Vos estis cases, Caccia may soon be in the position to decide whether his term in the U.S. will be marked by the kind of transparency that Vos estis was meant to assure.
The letter’s publication is remarkable, it comes after German bishops have moved forward with implementing the ritual, in apparent defiance of the correction given by the Vatican.
The Pillar was the first to report in October 2025 that the DDF had sent the letter to German bishops, while bishops in that country were insisting that they had “consulted” with the Vatican on their plans for the ritual blessing.
So what does all of this mean:
— That the Vatican has been clear to the German bishops for several years about their intended plans.
— That the method of intervention has been one of subsidiarity: Identifying problems in the German plans, and expecting the German bishops to address them.
— That the issue has clearly escalated now, and Cardinal Victor Fernandez at the DDF, under the leadership of Leo, has decided to bring public clarity to the controversy. That could portend a new way of doing things, and one worth attention.
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Pope Leo XIV accepted Saturday the resignation of the Italian archbishop who has served as the de facto leader of Russia’s Catholic community for almost 20 years.
The resignation of Archbishop Paolo Pezzi gained some real attention, because the bishop is only 65 years old.
It also puts a spotlight on the fascinating history of Catholicism in Russia.
Luke Coppen explains it all — with the startling Coppen clarity you’ve come to expect.
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The Missionaries of St. John the Baptist were once a public association of the faithful, entrusted with the administration of a parish in Kentucky. As it happened, they owned the parish church and the property on which it stands.
At that time, the group decided to build a new grotto on the land — a decision which triggered a legal fight with neighbors, who said the area wasn’t zoned for a grotto. That fight has gotten complicated enough that it may well end up at the U.S. Supreme Court.
But in the meantime, the association was suppressed, after Covington’s bishop decided the group “consistently disparaged” the Church’s current Roman missal. But in an unusual twist, the suppressed group continued to license its property for use of the parish church.
That adds some interesting complication to the ongoing legal fight over the grotto.
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However, while the Church in the country is expanding, its demographics also reflect the rapid aging of the general population in the East Asian nation.
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The bishops spoke out after a Muslim representative body in the country said that church leaders are sowing division over religion in the country.
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Fr. Kimes looks at an important, though mostly unheralded anniversary — 25 years ago last week, Pope St. John Paul II promulgated Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela, an apostolic letter on grave canonical crimes which changed everything.
“SST was, and remains, the single most important piece of legislation in the life of the Church in the 21st century. That no one remembers or celebrates its birthday is unfortunate but understandable. It was released with no fanfare, and, in all honesty, it was completely inadequate for the challenges it would immediately face — as was the Church,” wrote Fr. Kimes.
“However, both it, and the Church, changed in response to the crisis that followed.”
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Finally in the news, the Vatican released this morning some study reports, from Synod on Synodality commissions — one working on “synodal discernment” of doctrinal and ethical issues, and another working on the selection of bishops.
We’ll have a full readers’ guide today on the theological discernment report. But I wanted to take a moment to consider the recommendations of the synodal study group on the selection of bishops.
The report says the study group’s goal was to make proposals for a better discernment of diocesan bishops, in part by better understanding the situation of vacant sees.
The heart of the proposal is to create in each diocese “a Committee for the Provision of the Local Church” at the time when acute succession planning is underway.
The committee is to include two diocesan priests elected by the presbyteral council, along with “two consecrated men/women and two laypersons elected by the Diocesan Pastoral Council, along with the Diocesan Administrator or Apostolic Administrator, if present.”
After taking an oath of confidentiality, committee members begin communicating with the apostolic nuncio “to clarify the state of the diocese, the profile of the new Pastor, and to receive opinions on possible candidates.”
The nuncio “relies on the committee,” the synod proposal suggests, to understand the diocese and its needs.
If you ask me, this rather misses the mark, representing a Potemkin kind of consultation that’s unlikely to actually be helpful. In that sense, it seems to embody all the worst criticisms of synodality itself.
Diocesan priests in the group might themselves be actually well represented — they’ll be chosen by their peers — at least those on the presbyteral council. And since the presbyteral council includes elected presbyters, there is at least a chance that the views of the majority of the presbyterate might get through.
But as to laity and religious — they’d be chosen by a group itself usually hand-selected by the bishop, the diocesan pastoral council. In other words, diocesan insiders — those in good standing with the incumbent diocesan bishop — would be tasked with choosing some folks to present the state of the diocese to the nuncio. The nuncio would be enjoined to rely on them.
Hand-chosen insiders choosing other insiders to report on the state of the diocese does not strike me as an especially likely way to get anything but an affirmation of the status quo.
It does not strike me as a way to hear anything other than an assemblage of mutually reinforcing perspectives — the bishop gives a report on the state of the diocese, which would likely be buoyed by a report from the laypeople in his circle, regardless of what anyone outside that orbit has to say.
Synodality is supposed to be an invitation to the conversation to voices well outside the center — in the places Pope Francis liked to call the “existential peripheries.”
Of course that consultation is much harder — it involves more labor, more filtering, more discernment, more compilation — and it involves the possibility that reports will say something no one wants to hear.
But isn’t that the point? To reflect on reality, instead of offering platitudes of praise to the Church’s leadership cadre, straight from the Church’s donor and influencer class?
If we believe disciples and prophets — and maybe saints — can exist well outside the ambit of the chancery’s orbit, isn’t the point of synodality to invite those people into the Church’s real discernment?
Achieving real synodality is messier, but it least aims at something worthwhile. The proposal floated by the synod study group seems content to replace clericalism with “insiderism” and call that a win. Curiously, that’s the criticism that the synodal processes of the past few years have also faced.
And really, is that all the Lord is asking in synodality’s “new paradigms?”
Now, the synodal study group’s synodal proposal on synodal discernment of synodal bishops is just a proposal, of course.
But it sounds to me like the plan is to put a new label on an old wineskin, and call it a new way of being Church.
We are a bagel people
I’m from New Jersey. The part of New Jersey where dads commute into “the city” each morning, and it’s not uncommon to take the train into Manhattan for a Broadway play, or a good meal, or — if you’ve got terrifically bad taste in professional sports — a Knicks or Rangers game.
We’re not New Yorkers, and we take pride in that. We maintain that north central New Jersey (my childhood home is eleven miles from the Goethals Bridge to Staten Island) has a unique and superior culture, that can only be partially understood by “Jersey Shore” — which was actually a show mostly about New Yorkers coming down the shore to cavort, spray tan, and get arrested.
I’m from the part of New Jersey in which I recognize the streets from outdoor scenes of “The Sopranos,” and in which I’ve known a few dads who are the spitting image of Silvio Dante.
New Jersey is, as I put it to Ed recently, the actual incarnation of its own stereotypes, and I’m ok with that.
I’m also ok living now many states away, where the collective blood pressure is quite a few degrees lower, and where almost no one spends three figures monthly on hair gel.
But I miss a few things, and among them is the bagels.
Bagels in New Jersey are an ordinary and underappreciated part of life. Every town has a local bagel shop or two, usually owned by a local family, and offering dozens of varieties hot and fresh each morning.
New York and Connecticut do passable bagels, but the best bagel in each of those places would be only a mediocre bagel in my part of New Jersey.
Our bagels are nothing like what you can get at Einstein’s or Panera. The crust on a real bagel is crispy, the inside dense and chewy.
They’re uniquely good in New Jersey, people say, because of soft tap water with a low mineral content, which contributes to elasticity of the dough, along with the lengthy process of long-proofing, kettle boiling, and then baking on wooden boards in high temperature ovens.
But New Jersey bagels are also good because of the culture — Eastern European Jewish families who came to our state brought with them the experience of bagel baking spanning centuries, and with that experience the wisdom of what to do, and what not to do.
Proper bagels are not eaten toasted, but rather (in the morning) piled high with salted butter or cream cheese. They should be sliced in half for the filling horizontally, but ought not to be halved vertically, as that leaves quartered pieces more likely to fall apart.
And proper bagels are ubiquitous. Dads run out to the bagel store on weekend mornings, and come home with a dozen or so in a paper bag, to be eaten casually at the table while reading the paper. The bag’s top must be properly rolled after a bagel is retrieved, to avoid premature staling.
At most large public high schools, bagel sales — hosted by the school’s clubs and sports teams — are a near daily occurrence, and probably the most important contributor to ensuring teenagers have some semblance of a balanced breakfast, usually for only a buck or two.
Bagels matter where I’m from. But you only appreciate that after you’ve left, and you’ve sampled the round bread which passes for a bagel at America’s chain restaurants.
After a while, if you’re from where I’m from and then live somewhere else, you begin to spend an inordinate amount of time considering how bagels (and with them leisure) can be the basis of culture.
Which is why I was excited a few weeks ago to read in some national newspaper (I can’t remember which) a trend story about the frequency with which tri-state area bakers have begun opening legit bagel shops in other parts of the country, to appeal to regional ex-pats like me.
I’ve read that some such shops have gone so far as to ship New Jersey’s tap water across the country, and to buy supplies from tri-state area vendors, leaving nothing to chance in the quest for authenticity.
That sort of thing usually strikes me as too precious by half, but in this case — with the effort meant to appeal to my own regional taste and nostalgia — I had no complaints.
So I was especially delighted to learn that one such shop had opened just two miles from my Colorado home, in a strip mall containing my children’s preferred chik-fil-a, and the Apple Store I visit with disturbing regularity, every time I break my MacBook on some reporting excursion.
It was not actually a storefront, this bagel shop, but a food truck, plastered with signs promising bagel authenticity, and parked in a few leased spots of the parking lot, where the manager told me it’s expected to remain permanently.
That might be optimistic. At least if the business model depends on customers who have previously tasted a bagel.
I pulled up last week to the bagel truck and ordered a buttered poppy seed — what should be a standard order for any self-respecting bagel vendor. The manager first expressed bewilderment, before explaining that a poppy seed bagel wasn’t an option.
Upon further enquiry, I learned that poppy seed wasn’t sold out, it just wasn’t on the menu, even while “cheddar” and other bagel heresies were widely available.
I could get a sesame seed bagel, I learned, though I caused a stir when I explained that I didn’t want it toasted — I was apparently the first person in the shop’s history to order a bagel the right way.
And I compounded the kitchen’s anxiety when I said that I did want it buttered. The butter, it was explained, was kept cold, and thus was unspreadable on a cold bagel.
I accepted the situation, and tried to conceal my disappointment, asking if I could cancel my order — until an enterprising kitchen worker told me he could take care of the bagel.
And just a few minutes later, he served me something I could not have predicted — an untoasted sesame seed bagel which had been dipped into melted butter, and was then oozing from the paper wrapping and across the counter.
I had almost no sense of what I was looking at; I was both dismayed and befuddled, perhaps even scandalized. And I realized in that moment I would have no Proustian satisfaction that day.
Since the bagel wasn’t hot, the man explained, he’d decided the butter should be.
I give full points for effort and creativity on that one. But I settled for cream cheese and returned the sopping mess.
And I learned a valuable lesson: You can import all the tap water you want, but you can’t manufacture a culture without the people who’ve been formed in it.
Here in Colorado, I’ll stick with green chile breakfast burritos. I advise you do the same. We already know how to make them.
Please be assured of our prayers, and please pray for us. We need it.
Yours in Christ,
JD Flynn
editor-in-chief
The Pillar
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*weeps gluten-free tears*
"New York and Connecticut do passable bagels, but the best bagel in each of those places would be only a mediocre bagel in my part of New Jersey."
Fighting words.
That said, I will agree that all bagels (and pizza) outside of the New York/New Jersey axis are pale imitations. And you are correct about not toasting. That's what you do to frozen or other bagels to mask that they taste terrible.
I miss getting bagels from New York City stands. $1 for a bagel loaded with so much cream cheese it is more accurate to say you were getting cream cheese with a bagel around it.