Walk humbly, college politics, and the value of sledging
The Friday Pillar Post
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Happy Friday, friends,
Humility, they say, comes with age. And, I would add, when it comes it’s wearing rubber gloves.
This truth was borne upon me this week as I went for my more-or-less triennial physical exam, which yielded mixed results.
It involved meeting my new doctor, my third in as many recent visits — the local practice can’t seem to hold on to them.
I liked her at sight, she being a well-upholstered lady who 10 years ago I would have considered to be of advanced years but I now would call “early middle age.”
For sure, I thought, she wouldn’t hector me about my diet like that earnest young stick figure who preceded her, and wouldn’t be as unreasonable about my (much-reduced) smoking habits as the sneaker-wearing gym bro before her.
Like I say, mixed results.
Since my last visit I have apparently crossed some demographic Rubicons and now merit far more scrutiny than I did before.
As a result, blood samples are now taken from me at the level of what I’d call “sacrificial giving,” to be scoured for something called “PSAs.” And my cholesterol levels are no longer treated as amusing trivia.
The doctor did inject a touch of humor by remarking that conducting my inaugural prostate exam would be “a little much for a first date” and could wait until next time, though I stopped laughing when I noticed her nail extensions, I can tell you.
There is, at a basic human level, something humbling, not to say humiliating, to being stood naked on a stool and picked over for signs of defect and weakness, while receiving a critical assessment of your lifestyle and reminders about your own mortality.
And, having as I do a young child, I can no longer meet these subjects with cavalier attempts at gallows humor. I left the doctor’s office if not penitent, exactly, then at least reflective.
The feeling of having your frailty fully put in front of you, and in front of another, is instructive, though, and is a good spiritual as much as physical discipline. It is true that I so often consider as trivial things which are in fact serious — mortal even. And it is useful to be reminded that, exposed in the unforgiving fluorescent light of a proper examination, there is little about myself worth boasting of.
Walking humbly is not a natural posture for me, but it should be. I expect it will become more so after that exam.
Anyway, here’s the news.
The News
Congo’s bishops this week tried to bring together divided politicians to discuss how to end a resurgent conflict in the east of the country.
Our new Kinshasa-based correspondent Antoine Lokongo reports this week that, following a Feb. 3 meeting with President Félix Tshisekedi, the bishops are now meeting leaders and stakeholders of various kinds across the DRC, following the occupation of the eastern city of Goma by Rwandan troops backing a Tutsi rebel movement known as M23.
Fr. José Mpundu, a Kinshasa priest, told The Pillar that he at least does “not expect from this ‘international community’ any salvation, any liberation,” and said the Church needed to help rally the country in the face of invasion.
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Fr. Michael Wojciechowski is a Polish missionary priest working in South Africa where he has a very unusual assignment: the bishops’ conference has tasked him with “addressing the growing presence of ancestral veneration in the country.”
His experiences are… striking.
But there’s also a lot — and a lot more — of out-and-out witchcraft and encounters with the demonic.
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Are bishops’ conference presidents getting younger? Looking across a range of recent election results, it certainly seems that is the trend.
As Luke Coppen noted in his Look Closer analysis this week, there are a few reasons why this might be — and of course, a few outliers pointing in the other direction.
It’s an interesting question, either way. Read the whole thing.
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An Argentine court has rejected an appeal by Bishop Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta against his conviction for aggravated sexual assault of two seminarians.
Writing in her dismissal of the appeal, Judge Virginia Solórzano rounded on Zanchetta’s lawyers’ argument that he was a victim of “gender bias” and that the things he was accused of doing to the seminarians were only construed as sexual because the bishop is gay.
The bishop was convicted of the serial abuse of the seminarians in his former Diocese of Orán in 2022 and sentenced to four and a half years in prison — though he was let out of jail on “health grounds” a few months later and moved into a retired priests’ home in the diocese, theoretically under house arrest.
Of course, Zanchetta isn’t currently in the house, or even in the country. He’s been in Rome since November to receive “medical treatment,” presumably for the same “health reasons” that triggered his resignation in 2017 — after the Vatican received several different credible accusations about the bishop’s sexual predations on his own seminarians.
One hopes the bishop is recovering well, of course. And he is known for making remarkable recoveries.
He bounced back strongly in 2017: after accepting his early resignation on health grounds, Pope Francis found Zanchetta fit enough to merit a specially created job in the curia, which kept him in Rome throughout much of the bishop’s subsequent trial, until his conviction.
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Of course, Zanchetta’s Roman holidays notwithstanding, Pope Francis has always stressed that you can find saints working there, too. Among their number we could soon count Cardinal Bernardin Gantin.
The cardinal, who died in 2008, served as the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops from 1984 to 1998, and the cause for his beatification was officially endorsed by the Episcopal Conference of Lazio — a regional bishops’ institution covering Rome and surrounding areas — when it met last month.
The bishops declared they were in favor of Gantin’s cause, though their statement offered no rationale for their decision. But their vote clearly indicates they believe Gantin led an exceptionally holy life.
So who was he, and what makes him so obviously holy? Read all about it.
College politics
Attentive readers may recall that I wrote about the college’s need for a new dean here last week, and flagged reports that the pope was moving to stall an election after the lapse of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re’s term in January.
Now, we have been told, Francis hasn’t just softly stalled that election from taking place by not handing Re formal notice that his term is over but actually extended it indefinitely weeks before it expired — though it is not clear if anyone, Re included, was informed of that at the time.
Indeed, from what I gather, the ranking cardinal bishops (whose only real job is to elect the dean) were all due to vote last month, so presumably no one told them.
It’s still anyone’s guess why Francis is delaying an election which he changed the law to require in the first place — until 2019, the dean was elected for life, but the pope was adamant at the time that the burdens of office require more periodic changes of incumbent. Re is currently 91 years old.
Even more curiously, the Vatican also announced that a week later, the pope had also “extended” the term of the subdean, Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, 81, who was widely expected to be a shoe-in to replace Re at the next vote.
The thing is, although Francis changed the law to make the dean’s term of office 5 years, he made no such change to the office of subdean — so he formally moved to “extend” Sandri’s term as subdean even though it was already an indefinite appointment.
There’s no word on how long Francis now expects or intends to allow Re to continue in office, or what, if anything, would move him to allow the cardinal bishops to elect a new dean.
Though I gather from friends in Rome the nonagenarian isn’t struggling under the weight of office and was even making noises about standing for re-election — in which case he’d almost certainly be returned, making Francis’ decision to leave him in the job on an ad hoc basis, in derogation from his own newly minted law, even weirder.
Also yesterday, the Vatican announced that the pope had promoted Cardinal Robert Prevost of the Dicastery for Bishops to the rank of cardinal bishop — that, too, is a little curious.
There has been, of course, an open suburbicarian titular see since the death of the previous dean, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, in 2022.
But if Francis was concerned with matters of form and precedence, I would have expected him to assign the see to one of the “unattached” cardinal bishops whom he promoted in 2018 and 2020 by special motu proprio — most obviously Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the senior cardinal bishop without a suburbicarian title.
On the other hand, if the pope were concerned with adding fresh blood to the order of cardinal bishops (seven out of the now eleven potential candidates for dean are over 80 and ineligible for the dean’s most important functions during a conclave) I’d expect him to promote other senior curial cardinals along with Prevost, as he’s done previously.
Instead, Cardinal Prevost is now numbered among the top-tier cardinals but not joined by Cardinal Lazarus You Heung-sik of the Dicastery for Clergy (previously senior to Prevost), or Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Cardinal Claudio Gugerotti at the Dicastery for Eastern Churches — all offices Francis has previously moved to include among the order of cardinal bishops.
None of this makes any sense, either in terms of legality or formality.
But the mystery of why Francis is moving to extend the term of a 91-year-old who could easily just be reelected in line with the pope’s own law, while making a strangely selective promotion to the order of cardinal bishops is not accidental, I am sure.
Even if I don’t yet know what to make of it.
In the meantime, what the pope has done is turn a lifetime role, elected by one’s peers, into one which effectively serves at his pleasure, which isn’t very collegial.
And he’s done so in a way which sidesteps his own legal reforms on the first occasion they would have been used, which isn’t exactly consistent.
Or is it?
The value of sledging
This weekend is the Super Bowl (Superbowl? whatever), and I gather it’s the Kansas City Chiefs versus the Philadelphia Eagles.
The bishops of the two cities have engaged in a friendly bet, with KC’s Bishop James V. Johnston betting some local BBQ against an unspecified number of “Philly cheesesteaks” put up by Archbishop Nelson Pérez, alongside a $500 donation for the winner’s local Catholic Charities.
This is a longstanding American episcopal tradition for championship games, and it’s something JD has been railing against for years. While I cannot pretend it’s ever really risen to my notice before, now that I look right at it, it is incredibly lame.
BBQ vs cheesesteaks? It’s all so twee. Maybe that is how things are with American football, but you don’t get this kind of saccharine nonsense in a proper man’s game, like cricket.
I’d be much more interested — as I suspect would many of their local faithful — if a couple of bishops got into some good old-fashioned trash talk and turned up to the game in full warpaint, instead of stressing all this good clean fun and no hard feelings nonsense.
How much more entertaining would it be if, for example, Bishop Johnston just came out and said “I wouldn’t eat a cheesesteak if it cured cancer, and anyway a sock full of batteries is a better avatar of the spirit of Philadelphia.”
And who wouldn’t enjoy it if Archbishop Pérez responded by, hypothetically, countering that “Kansas City is a place so irremediably dull that even Kansas isn’t interested in claiming half of it.”
And for anyone upset by the very notion, I’d point out this kind of good-natured back and forth could be put to a good cause.
Every penny for local Catholic charities surely helps, and I suppose there are few dioceses left in the country where the bishop can afford to wager more than $500 without checking with a bankruptcy judge. But if the bishops made this a game-day blood feud, they could encourage pledges from die-hard local Catholic fans, making the stakes real money, and keeping the boys off the infernal betting apps in the process.
Of course, the idea of bishops trading barbs like this will strike some readers as terribly unseemly, though I would suggest this might be more a reflex of American cultural puritanism, rather than Catholic piety.
Take the example of the late Cardinal George Pell, who was almost as knowledgeable about and committed to the far superior game of cricket as he was of the practice of the faith. Pell was also a master of trash talk, or “sledging” as it is called in cricket.
Indeed, the first time I was ever contacted by a Catholic news outlet for comment was back in 2006 when I was asked, as the captain of a local Catholic cricket team in London, to respond to the cardinal’s comments ahead of a big England vs Australia match.
Pell asserted that “although you should never kick a man when he’s down, with the English cricket team I would be tempted to add the rider — metaphorically speaking, of course — ‘unless he looks like getting up.’”
Solid banter from the cardinal. And though my response appearing next to his words in print remained the closest I ever came to talking directly to the great man, we could both agree that a little edgy chat is part of what makes sports fun and interesting for the spectators.
I offer this lesson from Cardinal Pell, and from cricket, merely as a suggestion to any bishops looking to up the ante ahead of a big game.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
I'm noticing a pattern...
Catholic news media: "Pope institutes reforms to bring greater clarity and transparency to curial functions."
(Wait for a bit...)
Pillar: "Why did the Pope just break his own laws and ignore his own procedures?"
Everyone else: *crickets*
Ed, you seem to have left out the winner of said cricket match.... I wonder why....