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Happy Friday friends,
I’m a little worked up this week, so I might as well brace you for it up front.
I spent a considerable number of years of my life studying the particular discipline of canon law, and several more learning to practice it with any proficiency.
When I have been asked to teach it as a sacred science, the first and most important thing I try to impart to students is that canon law isn’t some Catholic cosplay at legislation. The Church is a true society, has real laws, and those laws are to be treated with seriousness.
The Church is a society, a divinely constituted one, with members and rights and obligations and a hierarchy. Some of that society’s laws come from God — actually God — and some are exercises of legitimate authority constituted by Him. When some laws are not followed, sacraments don’t happen.
Not every law or decree issued by human authority in the life and history or the Church is done well, sometimes they are even done badly. But law in the Church is always a serious business, to be treated seriously, because the stakes are often high — eternally so in some cases.
Unfortunately, as I look across the sweep of Church affairs right now, I see a lot of unserious people making unserious arguments on deeply serious issues. All of them, it seems to me, converge on the office and ministry and authority of the pope which, I have increasingly come to believe, is under attack from several different sides at once.
I don’t think this is evidence of some conspiracy against the papacy — for a start I don’t rate most of these people highly enough to credit them with that kind of coordinated thought and action.
Rather, I think we are approaching a kind of fever pitch in a crisis of papal authority, and how it is exercised and understood, which has been slowly incubating since the abdication of Benedict XVI. I’m still only partially through outlining for myself the roots of this, and the accelerating factors which have contributed to its growth. So I am a long way from articulating a holistic diagnosis and possible treatment.
What I will say, for the moment, is I am deeply grateful that we have in Pope Leo a canonist who, from what I can see so far, seems to have put competence, coherence, and clarity at the heart of his governing vision for the Church.
I’m praying for him in that work, because I have a suspicion that a crisis point is coming somewhere, sometime soon.
Anyway, for now, here’s the news.
The News
Top story this week has been the announcement by the Society of St. Pius X that it intends to proceed with the illicit consecration of bishops later this year without a papal mandate.
You can read the whole report here.
Meanwhile, we’ve been getting a lot of requests from readers about the SSPX announcement, what could happen next, and what the canonical implications of it are.
I have some thoughts of my own, but we’ll get to those in a minute.
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The Archdiocese of New York has charged in a legal filing that its insurance company set up a fraudulent website and a fake victims’ advocacy group to pressure the archdiocese into drop a major lawsuit over coverage for sexual abuse claims.
The archdiocese said that the Chubb insurance company, with whom it has been in protracted litigation of coverage for sex abuse liability, should be held liable for fraud over the deceptive website.
According to the motion, Chubb began in 2023 “fraudulently posing as a victims’ rights organization known as the ‘Church Accountability Project’ and attempting to undermine and weaken the [archdiocesan] defense in an attempt to elevate Chubb’s own financial interests (and leverage in the dispute).”
I know, right? Read the whole thing.
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A former Norbertine brother in New Mexico has been indicted for allegedly stealing $2 million of abbey money while serving as the community’s treasurer and overseeing a construction project.
James Joseph Owens, 68, was arrested Jan. 23. He has been charged with eight counts of wire fraud, 23 counts of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, and one count of tax evasion.
Prosecutors say Owens stole more than $2 million of abbey money, which he used to fund personal investments and the purchase of a house outside of Albuquerque, among other things.
He has entered a plea of not guilty.
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The number of adults joining the Catholic Church in the Netherlands rose by almost 40% in 2024.
According to data from the Catholic Institute for Ecclesiastical Statistics, the figures, which include both adults who received baptism and adults baptized in other Christian communities who were received into the Catholic Church, indicate the Netherlands is one of a growing number of European countries seeing a significant rise in new adult Catholics.
The trend is most pronounced in France, but has also been observed in Belgium and the U.K.
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Two Venezuelan cardinals and an archbishop have called on the Catholic Church to demand the release of all political prisoners, an end to repression of free speech, and respect for the results of Venezuela’s disputed 2024 presidential election.
Cardinals Baltazar Porras and Diego Padrón, and retired Archbishop Ovidio Pérez Morales published a letter Jan. 31 urging the Church to speak boldly amid the country’s ongoing political uncertainty.
The letter was released just before the Venezuelan bishops gathered for their plenary assembly this week, and the timing suggests an effort to influence discussions among them, after a month of institutional prudence following the Jan. 3 capture of former dictator Nicolás Maduro.
So what did the letter say?
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Catholic patients won’t receive the last rites in a west of Ireland hospital if they die after 9 p.m.
The University Hospital Galway is the primary major acute hospital serving the west of Ireland, an area with higher levels of practicing Catholics than the east of the country. For years it has had a 24/7 chaplaincy service, with two priests from the local diocese providing spiritual care to Catholic patients.
Now, local media have accused the hospital of a policy of a “de-prioritization” of pastoral care, and, as Luke Coppen reported, part of the hospital’s new policy is that chaplains work only from 9am - 9pm.
I’m not kidding.
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Legal Groundhog Day
This week saw the reopening of arguments in the Vatican financial scandal trail, now being heard at appeal in the city state.
I will be honest, I have been somewhat on the horns about how to cover this week’s trial events, not because I do not find them fascinating — I certainly do.
And definitely not because there isn’t a lot riding on the outcome of this appeal. Through the narrow lens of my professional focus, this is the first story I started covering as a journalist more than a decade ago. As far as I am concerned, everything is at stake: the Vatican’s judicial and financial integrity, basic concepts of justice, and, of course, hundreds of millions of euros.
And the burning but usually unspoken question at the real heart of this case is: Can a cardinal of the Catholic Church actually face justice for criminal actions in office — and do real time when convicted? If the answer turns out to be “no,” I’m not sure there’s an explanation for that other than “because clericalism.”
Anyway, back to the dilemma about how to approach this week’s hearings.
The issue for me is that the court heard, again, the arguments from the defense concerning a now famous set of four rescripts issued by Pope Francis in 2019 and 2020, which essentially authorized the investigation into the Secretariat of State’s London property fiasco and led to the trial and conviction of Cardinal Angelo Becciu and others.
Defense lawyers again argued this week that these rescripts were somehow illegal secret laws which violated the right to due process for the defendants.
Now, I don’t dispute the right of defense lawyers to make what they see as the best case possible for their clients — and I am neither irritated nor surprised if the best argument open to them is, to any informed eyes, legally nonsensical, spurious, and bordering on obvious bad faith.
But what absolutely baffles me is that no one seems to be offering the obvious critique of this nonsense “secret laws” characterization of what Francis did.
For three years I have been writing some iteration of an analysis explaining, over and over, answering this bizarre characterization of what Pope Francis did, which was technically and legally, not only correct and coherent, but normal in the context of any well-functioning justice system.
Yet every time the court meets, it’s judicial groundhog day, again.
At a certain point I start to wonder if maybe I am the crazy one. Except I am not crazy. The law is the law, but there seems to be an acute shortage in Vatican City — most especially in the Office of the Promoter of Justice — of people capable, qualified, or willing to explain what the law is.
At this point, though, the issue has become much broader, and more fundamental. Notwithstanding everything I said above, the Vatican financial trial has actually become a concerted legal assault on the office of the papacy and its relationship to the city state.
What is being argued, unopposed from what I can see, is that the pope should be the pope everywhere — except in Vatican City.
Let’s start with basic principles: the four rescripts are not “secret laws.” In fact, as any first year canon law student would tell you, no rescript is a law at all, rescripts are a species of canonical executive orders, which we call singular administrative acts, and in this case they were duly issued by the chief executive.
The difference between a “law” and an “executive order” (or singular administrative act, in canonical parlance) is, as any lawyer should be able to tell you, very real. A law, qua legislation, has to be promulgated to have force. An executive order only has to be communicated to the people it concerns. Yet this obvious point seems lost on everyone talking about the Vatican City trial — and on many of its participants.
In terms of content, the rescripts functioned as search warrants, and granted very narrow legal permissions to do one thing outside of the normal Vatican City legal process: to eliminate updates of the investigation to the normal chain of command, because those people were the focus of the investigation.
Find me a serious “legal scholar” in any other jurisdiction who will tell you this is “facism,” as was argued in Vatican court this week. I bet you can’t. On the contrary, it’s a basic mechanism for holding those in high office to account.
And, I have come to understand, this is the real crux of the Becciu case: whether curial cardinals are above the law in the Vatican.
Amongst all the argumentation around the search warrants, (let’s call them what they are), is always a common refrain — that Pope Francis “interfered with the trial” and therefore sabotaged the credibility of its process and the convictions that resulted.
The problem with that mantra is that it simply isn’t true.
Francis — and Lord knows I am not shy of criticizing the legal coherence and canonical basis of many things he did — never interfered in the trial process. On the contrary, he scrupulously avoided getting involved, even when figures like Cardinal Becciu made outrageous claims about him in open court.
Francis cleared the way for the trial to take place at all, and that is the real substance of the criticism against him.
And even then, the furore over the rescripts is mostly a proxy for simmering resentment over a bigger Pope Francis legal reform, instituted in the months before charges were filed against Becciu, stripping away a centuries old legal privilege of special process and making Vatican cardinals ordinary citizens in city state criminal cases. That is the real locus of grievance against Francis, and the catalyst for a wider — and thus far unopposed — assault on the governing authority of the papacy in Vatican City.
And Becciu’s case has been taken as horrifyingly instructive by generations of senior curial officials with arguably criminal records in office, past and present, who look on his conviction and pending prison sentence with undisguised horror.
The idea that the pope having ultimate authority in the city state is somehow “fascism” and an untenable governing structure in the modern world, makes a lot more sense, motivationally if not legally, if you continue the line of argument to its logical question: Who should be in charge?
Vatican City does have real, clearly defined, and stably delegated branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial. But the pope remains the unifying authority at the top, by both legal, logical, and theological necessity.
Someone has to be able to parse conflicts between the branches, serve as their source of legitimacy, and provide the ultimate mechanism for their accountability. Vatican City has no stable polis, no means of electing, appointing, or removing those in the most senior positions — and even if it did, the notion that the governance of the civil jurisdiction of Vatican City can be neatly parsed out from the ecclesiastical operations of the curia is demonstrably fanciful, as the Becciu trial makes clear.
The idea that the pope cannot, or should not, occupy the ultimate sovereign position in the Vatican is a paper thin cover for arguing that Vatican officials should ultimately answer to no one.
This philosophy of clerical administrative immunity isn’t as outlandish or uncommon as you might suppose. I have myself known diocesan and even parish officials — and I should stress they are outliers, not the norm, but my point is they exist — who think of themselves as responsible for serving the institution, around and against the bishop or pastor when they deem it necessary.
This essentially Soviet mentality of bureaucratic permanence and supremacy is toxic as a mode of governance. As ecclesiology, it embodies the worst notions of clericalism, and undermines our basic theology of the Petrine office.
And that is what’s on trial in Vatican City right now.
The supreme law
As we mentioned above, we have had some coverage this week of the developing situation between the Vatican and the SSPX, following the announcement that the society intends to illicitly consecrate bishops later this year.
It is, I think, a tellingly frank interview.
It is also, as our explainer noted, an in-terms recapitulation of the same rationale and understanding of Tradition which St. John Paul II defined as schismatic in 1988.
Pagliarani says a lot of things which sound deferential to the Church and her fundamental ecclesiology but which, when you actually listen to the words and not the respectful tone in which they are couched, seem pretty stark to me.
For example, asked about the announced consecrations without a papal mandate, he says “since this decision clearly concerns the supreme authority of the Church, it was deemed necessary first that we approach the Holy See—which we did—and wait for a reasonable period for a response. This was not a decision that we could take without concretely manifesting our recognition of the authority of the Holy Father.”
OK, but for all the verbiage of recognizing the authority of the pope, in the same breath Pagliarani confirms this “recognition of authority” comes in the form of consciously and explicitly refusing to submit to it.
That’s about as close to a dictionary definition of schism as I think you can find.
But we’ve covered all this before. I am more interested right now in talking about something else Pagliarani said, something which I hear a lot as a justification for the SSPX’s weird self-definition as being both truly part of the Church and yet free to act against the Church’s authority.
“It is a fact that, in an ordinary parish, the faithful no longer find the means necessary to ensure their eternal salvation,” says Pagliarani.
Let that sink in. According to this man, because of the Church, the vast majority of practicing Catholics do not have access to the necessary means to ensure their salvation. This is not, in my opinion, a “spicy take,” or bold critique of the post-Counciliar liturgy, it’s a libel against the Church as the sacrament of salvation and an explicit incitement for Catholics to doubt the Church’s saving power.
And it sure sounds like the heresy of Donatism.
At the same time, Pagliarani has the gall to claim that “In no way does the Society claim to take the place of the Church or to assume her mission,” while making clear it is going to do exactly that by consecrating bishops on its own authority so it can continue its work with “a filial spirit.”
But where Pagliarani really gets my goat is when he starts playing canon lawyer.
“The very law of the Church provides for it,” he says. “In the spirit of ecclesiastical law, which is the juridical expression of this charity, the good of souls comes before everything else. It truly represents the law of laws, to which all others are subordinate and against which no ecclesiastical law can prevail.”
“The axiom ‘suprema lex, salus animarum’ — the supreme law is the salvation of souls — is a classic maxim of canonical tradition which is explicitly taken up by the final canon of the 1983 code. In the present state of necessity, it is upon this highest principle that the entire legitimacy of our apostolate and of our mission towards the souls who turn to us depends.”
Now, sorry, this isn’t just a wrong reading of that maxim and that canon, it’s wickedly so.
What the principle of salus animarum suprema lex means is that the whole rationale for the Church is the salvation of souls, and that this rationale is served by her right ordering — by divine institution — in communion under the hierarchy as a society with laws.
This isn’t my reading of it, to be clear, it’s what St. John Paul II said about it, in the apostolic constitution promulgating the code in 1983.
Its inclusion in the Code of Canon Law, in the final canon, is not accidental. But nor is its context: the maxim appears in the section of the code treating the forced transfer of an otherwise unwilling pastor. The instruction it gives is that ultimately our own judgements have to yield to the authority of the Church, because it is the Church who possesses the promises of Christ and the mission and mandate to save souls.
What salus animarum isn’t is a permission slip to deny or defy the Church because of one’s own private judgement about what is needed to save souls. And to be clear, Pagliarani is by no means the first to misapply it in this way.
In fact, in an illustration of ecclesiastical horseshoe theory, it’s exactly the rationale you normally hear from priests who, for example, want to offer marriage blessings to same-sex couples, or bishops who insist that the distribution of Communion to those in manifest states of grave sin isn’t imperilling their souls — indeed, that it’s somehow salutary.
I would even point out that this perverse inversion of salus animarum was a crucial part of the prevailing ecclesiastical mindset which caused the sexual abuse crisis in this country.
For decades in this country, bishops looked at clear cases of proven abusers and decided that, yes, the law of the Church was clear on what was to be done and by what process, but “the salvation of souls” demanded something else entirely.
The good of the “salvation of souls” was the rationale —explicitly invoked — for covering up abuse, so as not to scandalize the faithful. The “salvation of souls” was the reason given — on paper, in files I have read — for not prosecuting abusers but instead sending them to touchy-feely “treatment centers” before returning them to ministry to abuse again.
What the horrific, heretical inversion of salus animarum suprama lex always proves in the end is that once you allow yourself to step outside the Church’s laws and teachings, nothing is guaranteed, anything can be rationalized, and terrible things always happen.
There’s a Latin maxim for that, too, by the way.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
Excellent analysis of the SSPX/Pagliarani drama. You just got yourself a paid subscription from me. Thank you, Ed.
Oh man, flipping canon tables in the Temple courtyard Ed is my new favorite Ed! 👏🏽
That last bit was excellently explained and really solidified my impressions and understanding of how protestant the whole SSpx leadership truly is. 😒