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Happy Friday friends,
This is a cause for celebration, to be sure.
Newman’s writings have formed the intellectual foundation of some of the best Catholic minds I know. He was, without a doubt, a man of ideas, a teacher, a great explainer.
I do not claim to be a great mind, nor to have been particularly formed intellectually by Newman’s writings, though I respect him a great deal. And the occasion of his beatification by Pope Benedict XVI in London was a profound moment of joy for me and many other Catholics in England — one we’ll not soon forget.
What I have always admired about him most is the tremendous personal courage it took for Newman to embrace the Catholic faith and Church.
The price of the courage of Newman’s own convictions was social and professional ostracization and ridicule.
The temptation is to praise a man of iron will and steadfast conviction, willing to face down the whole of his own personal world, unshakable in his knowledge of what is right.
But I rather think of Newman as a man who needed, who knew he needed, who received, and who understood the immense consolation of the proximity of Christ in the Eucharist.
Here’s the news.
The News
As I mentioned on Tuesday, JD has been away from the office this week for more reasons than one, so there was no newsletter on Tuesday. As such, we have a lot to get through, more than normal, so here goes:
Before JD fell ill, he spoke to a lot of people in the pope’s former diocese of Chiclayo in Peru, to get a sense of the man who became Leo XIV.
But he also asked the people he met what they would tell their old bishop, now that he’s charged with running the universal Church.
Here’s what they would like to tell him.
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In 2016, Cardinal George Pell, then the prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, wrote to the Vatican’s auditor general instructing him to conduct an “urgent and immediate” investigation into “potentially illegal” banking transactions by APSA, the Holy See’s sovereign asset manager and paymaster.
The cardinal said he had discovered a means by which APSA could alter financial records to “shield the true identity of owner/source of funds” in the SWIFT system, which records international banking transactions, and examples of it being done.
As we reported, the significance of the memo and what Pell found to the Vatican’s international credibility as a financial jurisdiction is immediate and immense.
You can read the whole story here.
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The Vatican’s former auditor general, Libero Milone, is seeking an audience with Pope Leo XIV and leave to appeal to the Vatican City state’s supreme court as he continues to press his case that he was unlawfully forced from office in 2017.
Milone told journalists on Wednesday that he wants to see the pope, “but the pope needs to speak to me, not because I am clever or anything [but] because he is surrounded by people who will never tell him what actually happened.”
“The pope, who seems to be a very serious person, who seems to want to be successful, needs to know the truth” about what goes on in the Vatican’s financial institutions, according to Milone, who was forced to resign from office under threat of criminal prosecution for “spying on the private financial affairs” of senior curial officials like Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who arranged his ouster.
At the press conference, Milone was also asked (not by me) about the report we’d published the day before on Cardinal Pell’s letter regarding APSA, which he confirmed.
You can read the whole story here.
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A court in Illinois has dropped battery charges against Fr. Carlos Martins, a prominent priest accused of inappropriate conduct toward a student during a relic tour at a parish in Joliet last November.
In a statement, Martins’ attorney said the order is “exactly the result we were expecting.”
“What he was charged with was simply absurd,” the attorney said. “This was a case that never should have been brought forward.”
In January, a misdemeanor battery charge was filed against Martins at the Will County Courthouse in Joliet. The charge could have resulted in one year in jail if the priest had been found guilty.
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The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has criticized the passage of a bill effectively ending the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced a U-turn on the legislation.
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said in a video message this week that the law’s passage had “created dangerous social tensions, undermining public trust in the authorities and shaking the confidence of our international partners.”
Protesters took to the streets of the capital, Kyiv, and other cities July 22, demanding that Zelenskyy veto the bill. The president signed the bill into law, arguing that the change would remove “Russian influence” from the nation’s anti-corruption infrastructure.
So what’s going on? Read all about it here.
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The Vatican’s doctrinal office has issued a mixed opinion on alleged Marian apparitions that have occurred in Southern Italy, allowing private acts of devotion but no public worship at the site.
After examining the alleged apparitions at Mount St. Onofrio, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith determined that “there are several positive aspects and signs of the action of the Holy Spirit in the midst of this alleged supernatural phenomenon,” but that there is also the potential for confusion or risks that may require doctrinal clarification.
It’s the most recent in a series of mixed verdicts on supposed apparitions since the DDF issued new guidelines for evaluating them last year.
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The July 25 arrest of two nuns in India has become headline news in India and sparked a national political debate.
The nuns, Sr. Vandana Francis and Sr. Preeti Mary, had travelled from the south of the country, arriving at Durg railway station in Chhattisgarh state from Agra, a city in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
There they met three young women, Christians, all aged over 18, who were reportedly due to be employed by the sisters. And for this, it looks like, they were arrested by the Government Railway Police and charged with human trafficking. They are still in police custody.
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On a Sunday in late July, two dozen bikers pulled up in front of the entrance to the controversial federal immigration center in Southern Florida, Alligator Alcatraz.
As Jack Figge reported for us, they looked like typical bikers: t-shirts and leather vests, beards and shades. You could be forgiven for thinking they were looking for trouble.
Instead they started praying, led by their leader, the Archbishop of Miami — who also happens to be the worldwide chaplain for an apostolate known as Knights on Bikes, a grassroots movement of priests, deacons, and lay men who love Christ, the Church, and motorcycles.
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Earlier this month, Bishop Fredrik Hansen took up his new post as Bishop of Oslo.
A 46-year-old former Vatican diplomat and seminary professor, he succeeded Bishop Bernt Eidsvig, who led the diocese for two transformational decades in which the Catholic population dramatically expanded, driven by immigration.
Hansen’s own life has seen its own share of rapid changes. Up to the age of 20, he was a high church Lutheran. His reception into the Catholic Church coincided with a call to the priesthood.
He spoke with The Pillar this week about what comes next for him and his new diocese.
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“The priesthood is about falling in love. It’s not the only way to fall in love, but becoming a priest, and remaining a priest, means falling in love with the Lord Jesus over and over again.”
That is how Archbishop John Wilson of Southwark put it in his Pillar column this week, in which he reflects on his 30th anniversary of ordination.
It is an insightful and obviously very personal mediation on what it is to be a priest.
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A new international survey has found that interest in religion, and Catholicism in particular, is rising among young people across cultures.
The “Footprints: Young People, Faith, and Religious Experience” project, led by the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross with researchers from other eight universities around the world, ran a survey of almost 5,000 people between the ages of 18 and 29 from eight different countries, presenting its findings last week.
While anecdotal evidence suggested that the Gen Z seemed to be more religious than preceding generations, the survey aimed to address the question of religious practice empirically.
“We thought we’d find that there was a growing interest in religion in this age group, but some findings were surprising,” the project’s director told us.
So what did the survey find? Read all about it here.
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In response
Following our report earlier this week on a 2016 letter from Cardinal George Pell regarding financial transaction records at APSA, the Holy See’s sovereign asset manager, I received an email from the Holy See Press Office.
The sala stampa read our Pell-APSA story and wrote to me to “note in the interest of truth and accurate information, that the text contains numerous serious inaccuracies and inferences regarding the systems and procedures used within the Holy See. These claims are completely unfounded.”
“We respectfully but firmly request an immediate correction, with the same prominence as the aforementioned article.”
Obviously, I disagree with the Vatican’s characterization of our reporting — as we shall discuss — but I place an equal weight on the interests of truth and accurate information.
And since this section of this newsletter was where I first discussed the substance of this story last week, I reprint here, in full, the Vatican’s concerns and my own responses, which I of course sent to the sala stampa directly as soon as I heard from them.