Happy Friday friends,
We have reached a juncture in the parenting journey here in our house.
We have been trying to raise our daughter to walk in two worlds, respecting the social customs of our local community and, at the same time, teaching her proper (English) manners and speech.
Silly people with little experience of the wider world call this kind of cultural bilingualism “code switching” and treat it as something between an affectation and a parlor trick. But the simple reality is that manners and social expectations really are different in different places and among different people. Being able to keep comfortable company among all sorts is a valuable life skill.
Anyway, we’ve hit upon a major linguistic dividing line this week. As any parent knows, the first question a child learns to ask, ad nauseum, is “Why?” It’s a reasonable inquiry, and one I try to answer as patiently as I can because, while very often you run into the issue of the irreducible complexity of life, establishing motivation for action is a real part of forming character and behavior.
But the second most common question a kid asks is the simple “what,” the instinctive verbal shorthand for, variously, “What is it you want of me” and “What did you say?”
Around our house, “what” is a question asked frequently without issue, because in British usage it isn’t just acceptable, it is the preferred formulation when you’ve not heard your interlocutor fully.
But this week, the child informed us that you “don’t say what, [you] say pardon.” I have no idea where she picked it up. JD and Michelle assure me it isn’t as common an American usage, so I can’t think where she heard it, but my wife and I were horrified.
Back in the UK, saying “Pardon me?” instead of “What?” is a very nasty little class indicator, smacking of pretentious and striving bourgeois affectation. Honest, working class people and the unapologetically posh alike use “what” without a second thought. Hyacinth Bucket and her ilk say “pardon,” so we obviously don’t want our child visiting the mother country and reeking of the thrusting middle-classes. She’d be shunned on all sides.
On the other hand, I don’t want to correct the kid too hard, lest it turn out that some well meaning adult has told her this, and might again tell her. For all I know this is a soft cultural expectation in her school. Your trans-Atlantic mileage may vary on “what” vs. “pardon,” but a four-year-old correcting the usage of an adult is rude across all classes and time zones.
Thus far, we’ve opted to steer her towards the more neutral “sorry?” or the casual “come again?” We’ll see where it goes.
Here’s the news.
The News
An appeals court in Hong Kong has rejected an appeal from Cardinal Joseph Zen against his 2022 conviction for failing to properly register a humanitarian relief fund of which he served as a trustee.
Zen and several other former trustees were convicted over their connections to the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which offered support for those “arrested, injured, or affected” by the 2019 civil rights demonstrations in the province.
Zen and the other appellants have said they will fight on to the supreme court. You can read the whole story here.
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Sticking with China for a moment, this week also saw another episcopal appointment for a mainland diocese. It was the latest in a steady drumbeat of diocesan appointments under the terms of the Vatican-China deal.
I am increasingly focused on the situation in China, in part because the deal seems to be working so well, procedurally. For years, the utter dysfunction of the process — and the manifest bad faith of the Chinese — was its own story. But now that the deal is “working,” at least on its own terms, we can start to have a serious think about what it is enabling.
In an analysis this week I took a look at the situation facing the Church in China, and the kind of Cold War atmosphere that is brewing around over and underground Catholics, clergy and laity. It seems to me that if the Vatican-China deal is “working,” it has to be asked for whom — and towards what?
From what I hear, both Beijing and Rome seem to be betting pretty hard against each other in the long term. The real question is can the status quo hold long enough for one side to see a payoff?
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Amid a growing tide of debate about the use of generative AI in the Church, a New Jersey bishop rescinded last week what was believed to be the first endorsement by a prelate for a book composed almost entirely by AI.
The New Jersey clinical therapist billed as the book’s author told The Pillar that he “collaborated” with AI to produce the book, and said that his text should not be regarded as “AI slop” because he developed the text in a “highly interactive” process.
The book gained attention from Catholics after a publisher’s press release initially touted an endorsement from Bishop David O’Connell for “Chatting with the Bible.” But the publisher told The Pillar that its press release was “erroneous,” and caused by a miscommunication.
Questions surrounding the book come as the Church continues to debate the place of AI in ecclesial life, and as Pope Leo calls for ongoing reflection on the spiritual and ethical implications of a society making increasing use of the technology.
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Pope Leo XIV accepted Wednesday another early resignation of a German diocesan bishop, who cited the toll of office as a reason for stepping down.
The pope accepted the resignation of Bishop Heinrich Timmerevers of Dresden-Meissen, eastern Germany, almost a year before the bishop reached the typical retirement age of 75. The bishop said that “the many challenges and responsibilities of this office have taken an enormous toll on me.”
Timmerevers’ departure came exactly two weeks after the resignation of 66-year-old Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann of Speyer. Wiesemann cited “psychological strain” to explain why he resigned almost 10 years early. And they are by no means the first bishops to go early in Germany in recent years.
A real pattern is emerging. Read all about it here.
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A six-year dispute between the Spanish Diocese of Barbastro-Monzón and Opus Dei over a Marian image at the shrine of Torreciudad has escalated again, after almost a year of relative silence.
The local bishop has threatened, for the second time, to resign if the dispute is not resolved in his favor. This is a strange story, with the bishop basically insisting that Pope Francis quietly promised him he would get his way, and appearing to reject the settlement ordered by the Francis-appointed Vatican mediator.
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And finally, a judge ruled in favor of Cardinal Marc Ouellet in a civil defamation lawsuit this week against a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a class-action suit.
In a 52-page judgment issued Aug. 31, Quebec Superior Court Justice Martin Castonguay ordered Ouellet’s accuser to pay the cardinal CA$100,000 (around $72,100) in damages.
Ouellet — who served as prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, advising the pope on the selection of the world’s bishops from 2010 until he retired in 2023 — has said he will donate the money to organizations combating the sexual abuse of Canada’s Indigenous population.
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One China
Two things happened in China this week which merit considerable attention as data points in the broader picture. Both the installation of a new mainland bishop and the rejection of an appeal by Cardinal Joseph Zen in Hong Kong might strike casual observers as relatively minor news stories, and to a degree they are.
The consecration of Bishop Paul Liu Honggang is, taken entirely on its own, something close to business as usual, in as much as the Vatican-China deal now seems to be working as intended — at least at the procedural level. Cardinal Zen’s court defeat was, to any reasonable person, simply the arrival of the inevitable.
But both these stories float on the surface of increasingly murky waters for the Church in China. In fact, that I am referring to them both as “China” stories is itself something of an indication of how far things have gone in recent years. It was not so long ago that I would have considered conflating the situation in Hong Kong with that of the mainland to be an unpardonable journalistic over-simplification. Not so much these days.
When assessing the full arc of the last eight years, I don’t think it has been widely enough appreciated how crucial the timing has been. When the Vatican announced its strictly diplomatic accord with the Beijing government in September 2018, many — myself included — raised strong concerns. And I don’t think many of us would revisit those concerns much with the benefit of hindsight.
But one thing which I recall wondering at the time was how the Vatican-China deal for mainland episcopal appointments could or would shape the Church there, and how this would interrelate with the Diocese of Hong Kong, which did not come under the terms of the deal.
While it would be wrong to describe me as optimistic, I was at least curious to see how a prominent diocese — one traditionally led by a cardinal — in visible and full communion with Rome might prove an interesting influence on the mainland as a new more stable episcopate emerged.
A series of events which I did not see coming, and I think in fairness few could have seen, were the sudden death of Bishop Michael Yeung in 2019, the attempt to pass legislation in Hong Kong allowing for the extradition of political “criminals” to the mainland, and then the massive political demonstrations and campaigns of civil disobedience which followed — leading to an even more draconian crackdown on all civil liberties in the territory.
All of this happened in barely 18 months, almost immediately after the Vatican-China deal came into force.
After that, we had several abortive attempts by Rome to appoint a new bishop for Hong Kong, before the emergence of now-Cardinal Stephen Chow in 2021, just days after Zen was arrested on national security charges of “colluding with foreign powers.”
Far from Hong Kong modeling an independent, socially integrated episcopate to the rest of the country, it has instead begun more and more to resemble the mainland, in line with the rest of the special administrative region, which has seen the fundamental civil liberties enshrined in its Basic Law eroded almost beyond recognition.
Obviously, that makes Cardinal Chow’s position even more important, though from the outside he seems to have set himself the special task of solidifying closer relations between his diocese and the Church on the mainland.