The ‘humble, hidden event,’ and wishin’ for a commission
The Tuesday Pillar Post
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Hey everybody,
The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.
And she conceived by the Holy Spirit.
Today’s the Solemnity of the Annunciation, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
Pope Benedict XVI talked about the Annunciation as a “a humble, hidden event.”
“No one saw it, no one except Mary knew of it — but at the same time it was crucial to the history of humanity,” Benedict taught.
“When the Virgin said her ‘yes’ to the angel's announcement, Jesus was conceived, and with him began the new era of history, that was to be ratified in Easter as the ‘new and eternal Covenant.’”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the “humble, hidden event” of the Annunciation, and the “humble, hidden events” of our own spiritual lives.
Most of my spiritual life, for better or worse, takes place in hiddenness.
Any sense of a call I’ve ever had from God has come in interiority — in prayer — with no one else seeing it, no one else knowing about it, no witnesses in the vicinity.
Temptation also comes in the solitude of our interior lives: the battle for whether we will or won’t succumb to some beckoning sinfulness is a kind of hidden event, too.
In fact, very little of our virtue is seen by anyone but him, and very little of our vice, too. The merits or failings of our spiritual lives are known mostly to the Lord.
It seems to me there’s a freedom in that: The Lord knows who we are, for better or worse. The Lord knows how he’s moving in our lives, and whether we’re responding as he calls.
The Lord knows — and the Lord alone usually knows — whether we deny ourselves, whether we take up a cross, whether we turn away from sin and hold fast to the Gospel.
Which means that we can speak honestly to him, as we are, and nothing will be a surprise to him.
In the confessional, or in temptation, or in the quiet moments of humble hiddenness — the Lord already knows what we’re about. In that reality, the only thing that makes sense is to speak to him as we really are, and to ask of him as we really need.
There is no point in putting on appearances with the one who knows us better than we know ourselves.
The Blessed Mother received the Lord’s angel as she was, and set off the most important moments in human history. Whatever our place is in the drama of salvation history, surely it begins with listening as she did.
The news
To remedy the situation, something unusual happened: apostolic nuncio Archbishop Christophe Pierre told the congregation that he had written his own decree authorizing the archbishop’s installation. And, don’t worry, he told people, “it’s all legal.”
Usually, it’s a requirement that for a bishop to take possession of his see, he must show the diocesan college of consultors his apostolic letter of appointment from the pope. So we were surprised when Pierre said there was another path, and that it was authorized by canon law.
Meanwhile, it’s possible that the issue could come up again next month, at the installation of Archbishop Robert Casey in Cincinnati. But after that, it likely won’t. The episcopal nomination pipeline for the U.S. ground to a halt during the pope’s long hospitalization, and it’s not clear when things will pick back up again — especially as sources tell us that there is ongoing disagreement between Pierre and the country’s cardinals over who should hold sway on the selection of metropolitan archbishops.
But there are presently 19 U.S. bishops serving past the customary retirement age of 75, and many of them are eager to see the process get back underway of finding and naming their successors.
The archbishop, who spent 10 years as president of the Polish bishops’ conference, has been frequently at the center of controversy in Europe, with Gądecki criticizing directly the German “synodal path,” and urging Pope Francis to put a stop to it. At the same time, the bishop has been broadly criticized for seeming to drag his feet amid an abuse crisis that saw Polish Catholics rapidly disaffiliating in recent years.
For better or worse, Gądecki has been a major force in the Church across Europe. So what legacy does he leave?
Luke Coppen asks just that question. Read it here.
But the bishops are insisting that the Congolese government sit down at a table and talk with rebel leaders to bring an end to the fighting, and that idea is not popular in Congo — in fact, ruling political forces have accused the bishops of treason for themselves talking with the rebel leaders.
Achieving peace in the country will not be easy — and the bishops may have the best chance at brokering any kind of end to the crisis.
Our Congolese correspondent Antoine Lokongo, breaks things down.
Ed and JD are going to Rome this December, for an unforgettable Pillar Pilgrimage. You should come too. It’ll be historic, and it’ll be a lot of fun. Check it out.
The theologian, Bénedicte Lemmelijn, was at the center of controversy during a tumultuous papal visit to Belgium in September, when academic leaders in the country including Lemmelijn criticized the Church’s doctrine on sexual morality and its doctrinal stance on the prospect of ordaining women to the priesthood.
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There are few subjects more controversial and divisive in American public life right now than vaccines — and Catholic schools are not spared the controversy.
Other parents say that understanding Catholic school decision-making is difficult. And since both the NCEA and the dioceses we approached declined comment, it’s hard to account for the factors that contribute to navigating tricky waters for Catholic school administrators.
But the issue is not going away, and Catholic schools will likely face increased pressure to clarify their policies.
To understand the lay of the land, Michelle La Rosa took the lead on some great reporting.
Fr. Pawel’s keepers?
He pled guilty in November to wire fraud, and is now facing the prospect of a very long incarceration.
But the friar told a judge this month that he should be sentenced to fewer than three years in prison, because, he said, his criminal activity was the consequence of abuse he had reportedly suffered as a young person.
Soon after our reporting last week, the government’s sentencing memo became available, which provided considerably more detail about the extent of the friar’s criminal activity.
According to prosecutors, Bielecki’s fraudulent activity was relentless. One couple gave the priest $10,000 to help him buy an ambulance in Lebanon, after he told them about the “desperate needs of the people.”
But once the check cleared, the priest almost immediately scheduled plastic surgery at a New York liposuction clinic, while writing to his victim to explain that he was now hoping to raise enough money for a generator.
While waiting for his liposuction, he wrote a string of lies to the woman who unwittingly paid for it: “The ambulance is ok to go. I already did a few villages with medical help. People were crying. Almost a year we could not reach out to them. We did not have ambulance, and thanks to you we have it now. :)”
A few days after the liposuction she didn’t know about, he emailed to say (falsely) that he was in Lebanon, visiting villages and performing surgery. He was actually shopping at New York department stores.
There were hundreds of victims like that, writing Bielecki checks, and hearing stories of his heroics in the Middle East.
But I found most interesting the prosecutors’ argument that the priest created elaborate schemes to trick his provincial superiors, too.
“Bielecki—who also used the names ‘Pawel Bielecki,’ ‘Paul HRH Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,’ ‘Dr. Phaakon Sonderburg-Glucksburg,’ ‘Father Paul,’ ‘Father Kowal,’ ‘Paul Haakon Harald Bielecki (House of Glucksburg),’ and ‘Paul Son Altessehaakon Harald Bielecki (House of Glucksburg),’ among others, in his scheme—constructed an elaborate false backstory about his work conducting advanced medical research,” prosecutors explained.
“Specifically, Bielecki repeatedly represented to the province and others that he was conducting advanced, confidential scientific research on behalf of the United Nations and DARPA, a research and development agency within the United States Department of Defense.”
The priest created web domains and email addresses, to loop his provincial into a bunch of email chains which appeared to verify that Fr. Pawel was indeed working for the UN. When his superior requested in 2022 to meet with Bielecki’s UN boss, the priest created a bunch of aliases, very quickly, to concoct a story about why the in-person meeting wouldn’t be possible.
The emails “successfully derailed the provincial ministry’s inquiry,” prosecutors said.
Most interesting, “Bielecki even went so far as to submit tax documents to the province for the 2020-2022 tax years, purporting to reflect income from the UN for [his] work.”
Talk about committing to a bit.
And after he created those emailed addresses, he did another thing: he listed the phony people and their phony email addresses as references, and he used that get himself two (real) full-time jobs: One as as HR director for “the United States branch of a mid-size international bank,” and one as the HR director and Title IX coordinator for “a Manhattan-based nursing college.”
This whole thing is unreal. It should be a movie, and if no one else does, I will write the screen play.
But it’s also tragic. Of course, I don’t know if Bielecki was actually abused, as he began claiming when it was time for his sentencing memo. And his credibility is harmed enough right now that it would be hard for anyone to believe him on first pass, especially when his claim is connected directly to an appeal for a light prison sentence.
But if he was harmed, that’s indeed a tragedy.
If he wasn’t, and if he is instrumentalizing the real abuse of actual victims to provide a cover for himself, that’s a (galling) tragedy of a different magnitude.
And whatever is true about the province is also tragic.
Now, on the one hand, eventual suspicions in the province were what led to a police report, Bielecki’s arrest, and his pending prison sentence.
On the other hand, it’s hard to understand a functional religious community in which a member could defraud 350 victims over eight years, claiming to be in Lebanon, and to be a doctor, and to be of royal blood, and to work at DARPA, and no one would get wind of it for that long, or notice that something was up.
The idea of religious life is that brothers or sisters hold each other accountable to holiness — it is remarkable to think of a religious community in which a member could live as Bielecki did for eight years before things caught up to him.
And, while prosecutors insist that the Capuchins were Bielecki’s victims, the question all of this raises is about mechanisms of supervision and support — and fraternity, really — in ecclesiastical life.
Suppose Bielecki’s actions really were — as he claims in court — the result of a mental health crisis caused by childhood trauma. Well, that means that a member of the Capuchin Province of St. Mary was in a profound mental health crisis for eight years and not one member of the community intervened.
And if one can skirt by like that in religious life, for at least eight years, think how much more easily a diocesan priest in crisis could slip through the cracks. Then ask yourself why priests leave ministry, or escalate risky behavior until it’s criminal, or find themselves addicted to alcohol, or stealing, or porn.
My point here isn’t primarily about disciplinary norms or penal sanctions or criminal consequences. I’ve written about that before.
My point right now is about human concern for one another, and the tragedy of an ecclesiastical environment in which a person can spin out for eight years while going either unnoticed, or where people don’t intervene because they decide it’s not their place.
Maybe there were extenuating circumstances in the case of the Capuchins of New York. But the broader point is clear: Ecclesiastical reform isn’t only about a policy change, or better screening, or a more reliably functional ecclesial judiciary.
Those things matter.
But even more fundamentally important is a renewal of Christian solidarity — a kind of love, actually — in which each of us has the courage to be his brother’s keeper.
A commonwealth commission?
I traveled this weekend to Shelby County, Kentucky, where I had been invited to be the charity auctioneer at a Catholic school fundraising gala.
I was glad to go because I like Catholic schools, and auctioneering has become a side- hustle-hobby for me, and because the gala was held at a restaurant founded by Colonel Sanders — yes, that Colonel Sanders — after he sold KFC to some private equity bros in 1964, who in turn sold it to a booze company, which was bought by a tobacco company, which sold KFC to a soda company.
While there have been a few bumps along the way, that path is the American small business owner’s road to success, I guess, and it happened for the Colonel.
Anyway, I had hoped that if I was down in Kentucky, in the Colonel’s own restaurant, carrying on in my usual auctioneer fashion, that someone might come up and see fit to declare me a Kentucky Colonel, which would just about fulfill a lifelong dream.
Besides the thrill of being a colonel in itself, I’ve got to imagine that branding myself as “Colonel JD,” and possibly donning a white flannel suit, would be good for my little auctioneering side-hustle.
I am, for what it’s worth, a Nebraska Admiral — a civic honor bestowed on me by Nebraska’s governor some years ago, which placed me on the same honorary level — at least in the Cornhusker State — as Elizabeth II, David Letterman, and Sir Edmund Hillary.
I am glad to be an admiral of the nation’s only triple landlocked state, and I don’t take my responsibilities to the state’s ceremonial navy lightly.
But the title doesn’t do much for the auctioneering mystique, especially because the last time anyone heard of the Nebraska Admirals was back in 2010, when Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh announced in his country that he had been given the honor.
It turned out he had, as the Nebraska governor’s office processed his nomination without much research, or apparently any at all.
In fairness, Siri had only just been released in February 2010, so unless the Nebraska statehouse staff were early adopters, some intern would have needed to go all the way to a computer, sit down, and type out his name, to find out whether they were conferring a ceremonial admiralty on a seriously despotic strongman.
But the real problem for Nebraska’s navy emerged when an audit from the Omaha World-Herald discovered Jammeh wasn’t the only sub-Saharan dictator with the title: It turned out that Teodoro Mbasogo, who is still the (fraudulently elected) president of Equatorial Guinea, had also been granted a Nebraska admiralty.
Both men were using the American honorific to bolster the credibility of their despotic regimes back at home.
On behalf of all Nebraska’s admirals, please let me say we don’t condone that kind of thing.
But while we admirals happily stand up against the actual-factual war criminals granted duplicitously our rank, we still can’t claim the same cultural cachet as a Kentucky Colonel.
Nor can those who have been honored as Arkansas Travelers, or (Indiana’s) Sagamores of the Wabash, or Ohio and/or Rhode Island Commodores, or anyone inducted into South Carolina’s Order of the Palmetto.
The fact is that only one honorary title in America has international brand recognition — even a brand worth major litigation over — and it belongs to those storied colonels of the Bluegrass State, whose forerunner was Daniel Boone himself.
Except the state’s most famous colonel is moving away.
While KFC has long been headquartered in Louisville, Yum! Brands moved The Colonel’s HQ down to suburban Dallas last month, for a bunch of silly reasons that add up to “Texas has no state income tax.” Colonel Sanders is going to have to become a Texas Ranger or something.
This is a blow for Ole Kentuck’s colonel corps, to be sure. Someone will have to stand up as the face of the colonels worldwide. And if Kentucky Colonel Brian Cranston doesn’t want to do it, well, I hope the cadre of colonels will consider me. I’d be glad to join, is what I’m saying, and I’m willing to take command of the colonels if that’s what the Kentucky Commonwealth needs from me.
I’ll even get a string tie that looks like a tiny body.
And maybe there’s some kind of colonel-group-text I can get on, where we plan out our coloneling maneuvers. On the other hand, most colonels probably know a group text isn’t a secure enough medium for something like that.
To make all this happen, I just need a current colonel (or any Kentuckian of good will) to nominate me for a commission. I’ll serve with honor. That’s the colonel’s guarantee.
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While I was down in Kentucky, I also visited the Bulleit distillery. But because I went on Sunday morning (shortly after Mass), the laws of Shelby County prohibited me from actually buying or sampling any booze.
I could have purchased a Bulleit bourbon lapel pin, though. And that really made me think. Which is actually in worse taste — having a nip of some local spirits on the Lord’s Day, or declaring for all the world your woefully disordered life priorities, by affixing to your lapel a miniature of your favorite bottle of rotgut?
I don’t mind the blue laws, I guess. In fact, I think they’re the vestige of a society with much to be commended. I do mind that anyone would think it a good idea to buy that lapel pin.
Once I’m a colonel, I’ll rectify this, if I can. I’m still not clear on what powers we actually have.
Anyway, please be assured of our prayers, and please pray for us. We need it.
Yours in Christ,
Admiral JD Flynn
editor-in-chief
The Pillar
Are we going to talk about the very cool Pillar jacket our good admiral is wearing?
JD, I would be honored to nominate you as a Kentucky Colonel. Email me if you're interested as that form includes more information about you than I'm comfortable assuming. And I do hope you will consider returning to Louisville in your capacity as speaker, auctioneer, journalist, and party curiosity to support my Catholic school of choice!