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Happy Friday, friends,
And a very happy feast of St. Camillus de Lellis to you. Camillus was the founder of the Camillian order in service to the sick.
Born in the Kingdom of Naples in 1550, the future saint appears to have been raised mostly by his father, who was himself a professional soldier serving, as best I can tell, if not the highest bidder then at least more than one master.
Camillus followed him into the family business and developed a penchant for what is often described as “riotous living,” and who doesn’t fancy a bit of that now and again?
But by the time his regiment disbanded, Camillus was carrying a chronic leg wound and a serious gambling problem. In the end, he sought casual work as a laborer in a Franciscan friary where he experienced his conversion.
Eventually traveling to Rome for treatment, he took on work at the hospital to pay for his own stay.
From there, he discovered both his vocation and that of the order he was to found, caring for the ill and dying who were often neglected and abused by those charged with their care — to the point where, I read, he took special care to avoid the accidental burials alive which were not uncommon at the time.
Under the spiritual direction of St. Philip Neri, he was ordained a priest by Thomas Goldwell, the last recusant bishop to escape Bloody Queen Bess of England.
Camillus and his companions slowly grew and spread their order throughout Italy, serving the sick in places and ways others simply would not — like going on to ships in quarantine with plague.
From this sort of dedication grew the “fourth vow” of the Camillians, in addition to poverty, chastity, and obedience — to serve the sick and injured at the risk of their own lives.
Indeed, members of the order were wearing their distinctive red cross while ministering to the wounded on battlefields centuries before it was adopted by a certain Swiss-based agency.
That is, as they say, pretty badass.
Here’s the news.
The News
A priest who was jailed in Vatican City for possession and distribution of child pornography has returned to work in the Holy See’s diplomatic service.
Fr. Carlo Alberto Capella, formerly a high-ranking diplomat in the apostolic nunciature in Washington, D.C., was in 2018 sentenced to five years in prison by a Vatican City court for “possession and distribution of child pornography with the aggravating circumstance of its large quantity.”
After serving his sentence in a cell in the barracks of the Vatican gendarmerie, he has remained in Vatican City, The Pillar has confirmed, and was allowed to resume work in the second section of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, the diplomatic department — first without an official title or role, but now with a formal senior designation.
Speaking to officials who have been working next to Capella since his release, it’s clear that he was brought back into the office as a private act of “mercy,” with colleagues stressing he hadn’t been laicized and effectively had nowhere else to go.
But they were equally clear that giving him an official job title and listing in the diplomatic service’s register was not the deal, and no one is sure how or why that has happened now.
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Pope Leo XIV and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem have strongly condemned the shelling yesterday of the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza by an IDF tank, killing three and injuring many more.
While the Israeli government has said that the firing on the Gaza parish on July 17 was not deliberate, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa has expressed doubts.
The Israeli foreign ministry said in a statement that “Israel never targets churches or religious sites and regrets any harm to a religious site or to uninvolved civilians,” and that “the IDF is examining this incident, the circumstances of which are still unclear, and the results of the investigation will be published transparently.”
The cardinal’s own statement said that “What we know for sure is that a tank, the IDF says by mistake, but we are not sure about this, they hit the church directly.”
As we reported yesterday, sources close to the Patriarchate chancery told The Pillar that they have not ruled out the shelling of the church as an act of deliberate retaliation for a joint statement and West Bank visit by Pizzaballa and other Christian leaders this week in which they accused the Israeli authorities of facilitating settler attacks on local Christians.
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Poland’s government formally complained to the Vatican on Tuesday over two bishops’ comments on migration, plunging Polish Church-state relations to their lowest level for years.
Poland’s ambassador to the Holy See delivered a diplomatic note July 15 to the Vatican Secretariat of State’s head of protocol expressing “deep outrage” at recent comments by retired bishops Antoni Długosz and Wiesław Mering, which the government claims violated the 1993 concordat, which governs relations between Poland and the Holy See.
What did the bishops say?
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Two men from Bulgaria were given jail sentences this week for helping to launder 61 million euros (around $67 million) from a Catholic charitable organization in Luxembourg to bank accounts in Spain.
Caritas Luxembourg may have lost the 61 million euros due to “fake president fraud,” in which a fraudster impersonates a senior figure in a corporation and demands an urgent payment from an employee to an account they control. The money was transferred from the charity to foreign bank accounts worldwide in installments of less than 500,000 euros between February and July of 2024.
Perverse mercy
Following on from last week’s coverage of the decision of an archbishop in France to appoint the convicted rapist of a 16-year-old as chancellor, this week we reported that the Vatican’s Secretariat of State has been employing, since 2023, a priest convicted (and jailed) for the possession and distribution of child pornography.
It would be cathartic for me to write — and perhaps for some of you to read — a furious, caustic tirade about how this is possible, after Spotlight, after the Pennsylvania grand jury, after the McCarrick Report, after Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela and Vos estis, after the creation of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, and after more than two decades and three popes’ promises of “zero tolerance.”
But instead I am going to try to be thoughtful about this, to be upfront about my own preconceived ideas, and to consider if maybe I am the crazy person here. Because I am very definitely beginning to feel like I am.
I want you all to walk through this with me and please, tell me what you think.