Happy Friday friends,
Earlier this week was the feast of St. Edward, King of England, known as the Confessor, as opposed to his uncle, also king, also named Edward, but known as the Martyr.
For reasons I doubt need explaining, I have a particular devotion to St. Edward. This year his feast fell on a travel day, so I wasn’t able to make it to Mass, which I otherwise ordinarily do, supplying a small relic of the king which is in my keeping to go on the altar.
When I worked in Westminster, I used to walk across the square to pray at his tomb every year. It was a small silly pleasure of mine to enjoy barging past the queues of tourists and, when challenged by the berobed ticket collector, announce loudly that I was a Christian there to pray at the tomb of the saint and isn’t simony a sin, even in the Church of England?
This is, if you are ever there, something to try. All these churches cannot, in good conscience or policy, charge members of the faithful to come in and pray. And if you announce that as your intention, they will let you in. But they will assign some beadle or warder or verger or prebendery or whatever to shadow you and make sure you don’t look at any of the celebrity tombs or take a picture of the ceiling or anything.
It always felt like a still, small act of pious defiance kneeling to pray at St. Edward’s tomb on his feast day, with some officious human spud in a gown lurking over my shoulder incredulously. On one occasion, there was a positive cluck of exasperation when I took out a rosary.
But apart from kinship of name, I find Edward a saint easy and reassuring to talk to. Despite the popular cult of his piety, which sprang up almost as soon as his death, his actual historical life was not obviously saintly, at least for the most of it. He was known to repudiate his wife, Edith Godwin, from time to time and send her packing to the nunnery. And on at least one occasion he had his faithful retainers bring him, literally, the head of a troublesome Welsh prince. On top of all this, Edward famously failed at one of the most basic duties of a king, to provide — by heir or otherwise — for the orderly and peaceful transition of power on his death.
The three-way fight with double invasions (the last foreign forces to set foot on the island) that ensued on Edward’s death, what we now refer to as 1066 and all that, were possibly the most determinative events in British history. For good or ill, historians can debate. I try to stay neutral, having a surname which came across with the Conquerer, was set to pacify the Welsh, and ended up in Ireland in the 1100s.
But back to St. Edward, I find his example deeply reassuring. He was a man who spent much of his youth in exile, dispossessed, possibly betrayed by his own mother, and wondering — I have to assume — what God had in mind for him.
His reign as king was mostly peaceful, give or take the odd head in a basket, but no one could call it a success by any metric that matters. In spite of this, Edward was popularly known as someone who cared. He cared about and for his people, not just in an ephemeral or rhetorical way, but in practical works of personal charity and royal policy.
He sought God, he prayed for wisdom and discernment, and even if he left behind a mess of millennial significance, his intention was to do God’s will with the role that was given him. That intention gave birth to the cult of his sainthood. And that cult has inspired pilgrimages, devotions, prayers, acts of charity, and a public witness to and celebration of holiness.
Reading historical biographies of the king — I’d recommend Tom License’s “Edward the Confessor,” if you’re shopping — it’s hard to argue that his saintly legacy wasn’t a great deal more than the sum of its parts.
As someone who has very little idea how best to lay my own life and works at the feet of the cross, I find that deeply reassuring.
Anyway, here’s the news.
The News
The top story this week is, obviously, the announcement of Pope Leo’s diagnosis of lung cancer, following a successful surgery to remove a growth which is being described as early stage and well-localized.
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Leading on from that, Leo is, of course, due to undertake a major international trip to South America in the next few weeks.
The official program is that the trip — which includes Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru — is still on. Though the expectation is mounting that some changes to the schedule are going to have to be made to accommodate the pope’s ongoing recovery.
Edgar has the full story here.
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Back in Rome, there is plenty else on the pope’s desk vying for his attention. Not least the ultimate resolution of the meeting on Amoris laetitia, the ending of which he had to miss to undergo surgery.
The meeting, famously, is not producing a final document or list of resolutions or proposals. Rather, it will only generate a working document summary of what was discussed. But even that is on hold until the pope has his chance to weigh in on it.
It will be interesting to see how the conversations are ultimately summed up. Officially, and you can read our report here, there were “different accents but no clashes” during the meeting.
And talking to bishops as the meeting came to a close, the general sense is that it was a fairly uncontentious affair — yes, some diametrically opposite approaches to different issues were aired, but since there were no votes to cast and no resolutions to approve, this wasn’t a someone-has-to-win-someone-has-to-lose zero sum synodal contest.
We do know from Bishop Wilmer of Germany that the specific issue of admitting the divorced and civilly remarried to Communion was raised by some. My expectation is that there’s at most a 50/50 chance that makes it into the “final” working document. And if it does, it will be alluded to, rather than drawn out explicitly as a point of argument.
My absolute expectation is that if Leo decides to write something on the family and the evangelization himself — and why call the meeting if he isn’t at least thinking about it — he won’t mention it at all.
And in not mentioning it, he’ll be staring deep into the eyes of bishops like Wilmer and mouthing “drop it.”
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Also on Leo’s desk is the ongoing question of curial appointments and personnel moves.
The pope made a very interesting move this week in sending Archbishop Viola from being Secretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship to become Archoriest of St. Peter’s.
It’s an interesting move because Viola is, by all accounts, highly effective and very much “of a mind” when it comes to liturgical and theological schools of thought.
As such, I’d have expected Leo to move him to a rather more senior position - prefect of a dicastery - if he considered the archbishop a fellow traveler on the road the pope’s marked out for his pontificate. Though, if he doesn’t much sympathize with the archbishop’s opinions, I’d have expected him to be moved somewhere a little less visible than the mother basilica of the Latin Church.
All in all, it’s a move that doesn’t quite make sense whichever way you look at it. And, talking to friends in Rome, there are some working theories about what it means.
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An English bishop has published a report recommending the merger of three dioceses into one.
Even more interestingly, in my opinion, is that he engaged in a serious, deep and wide consultation on the idea and found overwhelming support for it among local Catholics.
Bishop Marcus Stock has led, under various titles, the Dioceses of Hallam, Middlesbrough and Leeds for several years. And he found a remarkable consensus for the merger proposal, and lots of practical benefits.
You can read all about the report here.
What jumps out at me most about it, though, is how much effort the bishop went to to actually talk to everyone involved. It’s an interesting example in how to broach a sensitive and complicated proposal with transparency and openness. It can be done!
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A bishop ordered this week the closure of Catholic institutions and the withdrawal of pastoral workers from a town in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, following a wave of arson attacks on Church properties.
Bishop William Avenya of Gboko said in an Oct. 12 pastoral letter that he was taking the step in response to “a systemic pattern of hostility and destruction directed at Church-owned properties” in Ihugh, Benue state. The letter did not identify those responsible for the attacks.
Ihugh is the hometown of Fr. Hyacinth Alia, a priest of the Diocese of Gboko who was suspended by Avenya before running successfully for governor of Benue State in 2023. So that’s… a data point.
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It’s all different now
It would be a stretch to say I have been freaking out about the health of our Holy Father, though not by much. Even since his remarkable decision to address his health and pending surgery at the end of the Sunday Angelus, I have been fearing the worst and a diagnosis of lung cancer isn’t far off that, as far as I am concerned.
To be sure — and thanks be to God — Leo’s surgery seems to have gone well, he is recovering “normally,” whatever that means, exactly, and his doctors seem confident they caught things in good time. One hopes, and I pray, that we have many more years of this Leonine pontificate to come, with the pope in full and fine fettle as he leads the Church.
But within hours of his diagnosis being confirmed, I heard from cardinals concerned about what this might mean, and when and if we might face the prospect of another conclave.
Let me be absolutely clear, I think that is vastly premature.
I get the temptation to panic. I really do. We just went through a long period of having an ailing pontiff followed by a conclave, and with a (relatively) young pope who famously rides horses and plays tennis, and we were all expecting, and looking forward to, a long period of “normal life” around the papacy.
But Leo is up and around and by all accounts doing well. Moreover, he has sent a new standard for papal medical transparency and self-disclosure, so my guess is we won’t just know when it’s time to worry, he’ll tell us himself.
That having been said, and even expecting the best, it is a simple reality that Leo’s pontificate is now in a very different phase. And I have to wonder how the pope will adjust in response.