The love that burns, the moral of the message, and against golf resorts
The Friday Pillar Post
Happy Friday friends,
The bishops of the United States yesterday consecrated the country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
I think there can be a tendency to give events like these only a passing and even slightly patronizing notice. How many times has the country been consecrated to one or other title of Christ and Our Lady over the years? Isn’t it just a bit of liturgical re-branding, really?
I get that way of looking at things. But it’s a mistake.
We, our country, us as a people, need these moments. We need to be constantly rededicating ourselves to God, constantly returning to Him, begging Him to conform us in mind, heart, and soul, to His Son.
I find the Sacred Heart to be an especially apt manifestation of the divine love for this country at this time. Amid the pageantry of the 250th anniversary of American independence, there is — or should be — a desire to recollect, and if necessary relitigate, what this country is, and who we as a people are.
Most especially, what animates us, defines us, and lends us purpose?
There is much in our history to encourage and inspire. But there is also just as much that should prompt us toward conversion.
That is not, at its root, an intellectual endeavor, nor a labor first and primarily of politics. The true fulfillment of human freedom, and its ultimate purpose and expression, is love — the consuming, fiery love of Christ for us which is held out to us in the image of the Sacred Heart and which can, if we draw close to it, set us alight in turn.
If there is a truth which we can all hold to be self-evident of America today, it is the desperate need for love, this love, which can be brought only by those who first receive it from its source and willingly bear it to our neighbor.
Here’s the news.
The News
We’ve been in Orlando this week for the USCCB’s annual June meeting. And it kicked off with a true changing of the guard.
The conference opened its public sessions on Wednesday by sending a message of loyal greeting and thanks to the first American pope, and then heard from Archbishop Paul Coakley, taking his first term at the helm as the new conference president, and then from the new apostolic nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia.
You can read our report on those addresses right here.
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For myself, Caccia’s address was the real point of interest. Indeed, the nuncio’s speech was an almost perfect study in contrast — of style and substance — with his recently departed predecessor, Cardinal Christophe Pierre.
I think the U.S. bishops are being offered a very different kind of relationship with the nunciature than they have been used to. And from what I have heard from bishops here this week, they really like what they see so far.
You can read my analysis of that here.
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For us, the main story of this meeting has been the process to update the text of the Dallas Charter, the bishops’ moral commitment on combating the abuse of minors and dedicating themselves to creating a culture of prevention.
The bishops discussed revisions to that document this week, with the chair of the conference’s committee on child protection — who also helmed a revision working group — saying that drafters followed the instructions of consulted bishops to keep the scope of the document very narrowly defined.
As we have been covering, this self-imposed narrowness has been contentious among experts and groups consulted on the document, with bishop-drafters receiving feedback that a revision to the charter should take up a broader rethinking.
That was Wednesday.
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On Thursday, the bishops got the chance to discuss amendments proposed to the revised charter text, though the actual amendments themselves were not released to the press.
In the course of that debate Archbishop McKnight proposed delaying the vote until the bishops met in November, and there was a conversation from the floor and podium about that, and the merits of more consultation among groups like diocesan review boards, before the bishops voted overwhelmingly to carry on as planned.
You can read all about who said what, and how the vote went here.
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The bishops this week also offered their consultative vote in favor of advancing the local causes of two prospective saints.
One was a Slovenian priest who built up the Church in northeastern Minnesota in the early 20th century. The other was a 21st-century New York businessman who helped inspire several nations to consecrate themselves to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
And yet, as Luke Coppen explained this week, Msgr. Joseph Buh and John Rick Miller arguably share at least one trait: an exceptional zeal that prompted those around them to wonder if they were in the presence of a saint.
Here’s a brief look at their lives.
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Catholic colleges and universities are failing to fulfill their mission, and the bishops have an important role to play in correcting the problem, the provost of Dartmouth College told the bishops this week.
Santiago Schnell, who is also a renowned mathematical biologist, spoke to the bishops Wednesday, offering them his reflections on the state of Catholic higher education 25 years after the conference implemented Pope John Paul II’s apostolic constitution on education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae.
You can read all about that right here.
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Getting out of Orlando, as national squads begin to arrive in the U.S., Canada and Mexico for the 2026 World Cup, the Iraqi national team is already making headlines.
Two of the team’s members – a player and the team photographer – were held and questioned at the Chicago airport for several hours before being released.
But as Felipe D’Avillez reports this week, Iraq’s team is noteworthy for another reason as well: Among the 26 players on the roster are four Christians. That means 15% of the team is Christian, in a country where Christians currently account for less than 1% of the population.
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Moving to the other side of the world entirely, you probably have never heard of the Diocese of St. Clement at Saratov, though it covers a territory larger than Texas and California combined. But the bishop there thinks it’s the most beautiful diocese on the planet.
It isn’t without its complications though, since it covers most of southern Russia. And Bishop Clemens Pickel has a lot on his plate, serving his second term as president of the bishops’ conference of Russia.
Luke Coppen had a long talk with him this week about his jobs, his ministry, and how he got there.
Read the whole thing right here.
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The Moral of the Message
The bishops this week debated briefly a proposal to delay voting on updates for the Dallas Charter until the bishops meet next in November.
You can, and I would recommend you do, read our coverage of the charter revision process, and the back and forth which led up to the vote not to delay.
It’s an interesting x-ray of how things move through the conference at the committee and assembly levels, but for me the issue of the charter specifically is sui generis — though it is not my sense that this was widely appreciated among the bishops in Orlando. And that is a shame.
Earlier this week, ahead of the bishops’ meeting, I wrote an analysis asking what the charter is for, exactly, nearly 25 years on from its initial adoption. It was, at least in my mind, an open question when I asked it. And I was interested to hear the committee’s thinking on it this week.
For myself, the last few days have crystalized something for me which I think I had felt without being able to articulate perfectly.
I think the most important thing to understand is that the Dallas Charter is purely a set of moral commitments by the bishops, a statement of principles and values and priorities. It has no binding force, in a technical or legal sense, and its scope is whatever the bishops want it to be.
If the scope of the charter is narrowly to deal with the clerical abuse of minors, as has been exhaustively reiterated during this review phase, it should be understood clearly that this is only because the bishops wish to keep it so.
Equally, the point and purpose of the revision process is itself only and exactly what the bishops wish it to be. And that, to me, is where it seems there has been a disconnect this week.
There has been considerable concern from victims’ advocates, survivors themselves, canonists, and more local interests like the priests of dioceses, that the revision of the charter has been very narrow, largely behind closed doors, and apparently aimed at keeping changes to the minimum necessary.
As observations, I think those have been proven to be accurate. The question has become: should this be concerning, and to whom?
For sure, these observations are of concern to the survivors, their advocates, canonists and clergy. I know this because they tell me so. The bishops, at least going on the votes and what was said this week do not, it seems clear, share those concerns.
When a motion to delay the approval of the charter updates was proposed and debated briefly on Thursday, Bishop Barry Knestout, the conference committee chair, noted that the idea seemed superfluous.
Even if, as some bishops requested, extra months were devoted to allowing bishops in their dioceses to consult with and hear from their local review boards, meet with survivors, and consult with other experts, he said, he could not foresee any especially substantial changes to the proposed revisions coming from that.
That, to me, was the crux of the misapprehension among the conference about what the point of the Dallas Charter is — what good it can do — a quarter of a century on from its adoption.