Where to look, real justice, and quality control
The Friday Pillar Post
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Happy Friday friends,
After four actual, literal, solid weeks of rain, it’s summer where I am. At last.
It’s our daughter’s first proper summer, in the sense that she can now talk and make her wishes known and situate what is happening in the context of what she did yesterday and last week, and expects to do tomorrow, rather than living entirely in a rolling 5-minute window of awareness, like some kind of brown-eyed goldfish.
As a still-new-to-this father, the summer creates a lot of internal tensions for me. I want to teach her everything — how to throw a ball, swim, climb trees, smash a lightning bug with a wiffle ball bat — and I want to teach it all to her right now.
I also want to steer her away from forming bad or vicious habits which, while carrying no moral responsibility for a three year old, I know will become a burden for her later in life, like the temptation to put ketchup on a hot dog.
But I also know that she’s usually less interested in what I want to teach her than she is in what I am doing myself.
There is, I am discovering, so much I imagined to be instinctive that it turns out children have to be shown before they can even conceive. My daughter watched a garden sprinkler with total confusion for fully 10 minutes until I ran through the thing a few times myself.
I think of all this in the context of trying to instill the faith in the kid, especially around Corpus Christi. She understands all too well that at Mass seemingly everyone but her is eating “bread” and drinking something. And she sees and can even parrot along to the consecration, so she has some grasp of this being a liturgy.
She wants in, and it’s my job to get her ready, in due course. But how do I start?
Now, sure, I need to explain to her, as best you can to a three year old, what the Eucharistic species are. And there is something to be said for a child being more open to accepting that this is Christ’s body and blood than many adults.
But catechetics for toddlers is only one part, arguably the lesser part, of the instruction I need to give her. How do I model receiving Communion for her, I have started asking myself more and more. Does my reception rise above outward shows of respect and solemnity? Do I display any actual signs of having communed with Christ in the sacrament?
Am I changed by this weekly encounter? I think I am, but it isn’t if not visible, or at least at some level intuitable, to my daughter, what does that say to her?
In the end, I suppose I am groping slowly to what I assume all other Catholic parents know already. That Christ’s presence in the sacrament, his coming to meet me in my flesh, is him laying down the pattern of intimate, quiet, patient self-giving love, which in turn can give me the grace to mirror it to my daughter.
I guess what I am learning is the best way to teach my daughter is to look less at her and more at Christ, and trust she’ll follow my gaze.
Here’s the news.
The News
Pillar editor-in-chief JD Flynn went on vacation this week, which is a thing we do now, I was surprised to learn.
As such, there was no Tuesday newsletter, so we have a week’s worth of coverage to catch up on, so we’re going to get through this as rapid fire as we can.
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Two committees at the US conference of bishops are considering a proposal and draft text for a new document which would commit the bishops to updated and more concrete responses to clerical sexual abuse — both pastorally and legally.
The text, proposed by Archbishop Shawn McKnight, would account for practical lessons learned and changes to the law since the issuing of the Dallas Charter in 2002. And it contains a lot of new provisions and language for responding to alleged victims of abuse, protecting whistleblowers, communicating decisions, and protecting the due process rights of priests.
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Two Polish bishops broke ranks Tuesday after the bishops’ conference announced changes to plans to establish a national independent abuse commission.
The two distanced themselves June 17 from the decision to overhaul the team leading the project, made at the bishops’ plenary meeting in Katowice last week.
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Bishop Christopher Saunders pleaded guilty of several criminal firearms offenses this week. The former leader of the Australian Diocese of Broome is also standing trial on dozens of charges of sexual abuse of minors.
Catch up on what has happened here.
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Staying in Australia for a moment, Pope Leo made his first major episcopal appointment for the country this week, naming Bishop Shane Mackinley as the next Archbishop of Brisbane.
Mackinley will succeed Archbishop Mark Coleridge, who has been a loud voice in the Australian Church for several years. So, what do local Catholics make of Coleridge’s departure, and what should we expect from his successor?
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The Cuban bishops’ conference has released a pastoral letter calling on Cubans “to do something to save Cuba and restore our hope.”
The letter calls directly for the “structural social, economic, and political changes that Cuba needs.” This is as strong a public statement as anyone can remember the bishops of Cuba making in a very long time.
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Last weekend, the Archbishop of Detroit issued new norms for the final implementation of Traditionis custodes in the archdiocese.
As in other places, the Detroit norms have generated considerable criticism and pushback from Catholics attached to the extraordinary form of the liturgy, and include various restrictions on the ordinary form of the Mass, too.
In an analysis this week, I considered the criticism of bishops pushing ahead with implementing Traditionis custodes and asked if Pope Leo can afford to wait before making his own mind on the issue known.
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Amid widespread secularization and dropping Mass attendance, some Spanish parishes and dioceses are hailing the success of various new movements in bringing people back to the Church.
But, as Fionn Shiner reported this week, some question the long-term effectiveness of these programs — with some worried they are offering quick fixes of spirituality and a chance to meet people, rather than instilling faith.
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On the question of how you measure the growth of spiritual fruits, Jack Figge this week took a look at the legacy of the Eucharistic Revival.
The initiative – sparked in part by a Pew poll showing that fewer than 35% of Catholics believe in the True Presence of the Eucharist – aimed to rekindle devotion to the Eucharist among Catholics in the United States.
So, did it work — and how do you measure a revival’s success? Find out here.
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Despite a growing number of women being drawn to it, the vocation of consecrated virginity is still something of a hidden vocation in the Church, with few knowing well the history, still less the current period of renewal it is undergoing.
As Erin Kinsella wrote for us this week, this extends to bishops, too, who are supposed to have primary responsibility for fostering vocations.
Erin surveyed the ecclesiastical landscape following a 2018 Vatican instruction on consecrated virginity and concluded there is a real disparity between dioceses over formation, discernment, and even acknowledgment of what is one of the earliest charisms of the Church.
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This year is the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second Vatican Council, and its final (and possibly most controversial) text Guadium et Spes, the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world.
“Like it or not, and regardless of the status of Gaudium et Spes, those issues have to be addressed. And the task of negotiating these disputes will fall on the shoulders of Pope Leo XIV.”
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In his own column this week, Daniel Lipinski considers the virtue of hope, and how one finds it and witnesses it in a world which prizes winning as the only and ultimate end.
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Last weekend, the Archdiocese of Chicago hosted a Mass to celebrate and give thanks for the election of Pope Leo, an actual native son of the archdiocese.
The liturgy was held at the White Sox’s baseball stadium — this season it’s formally named (I think) Walmart Park, or something.
The Pillar was there for the event, with Susie Pinto bringing you the reactions of the people inside the ballpark (which hasn’t been that full in years), and Jack Figge checking out the tailgaters.
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By the way, I hope you have all been enjoying Starting 7, Luke’s daily morning news round-up. Just a reminder that from today we are reverting back to normal, so if you want to keep receiving it, you have to become a paying subscriber to The Pillar.
I say this in total sincerity, Starting 7 is worth the $8 a month all on its own.
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Justice, in full measure
As we reported this week, the USCCB is considering a new document from Archbishop McKnight in which the bishops would recommit themselves morally and practically to the best ways of handling instances of clerical sexual abuse.
As it has been explained to me, this is very much not a replacement for the Dallas Charter of 2002 which, for all its problems (and there are many), remains a landmark document for the conference, but something new. And, from what I can see, something new is needed.
Archbishop McKnight’s proposal notes the need to take into account nearly a quarter of a century of changed, strengthened and renewed instructions and canon law which have come into the Church since 2002.
And, I think it is more than fair to say, there have also been some “learning moments” over the last two decades, the lessons of which have not been entirely absorbed into diocesan practice — or in some cases not at all.
The McKnight proposal makes a serious and impassioned plea for bishops to dedicate themselves to recognizing the nearly incalculable gravity of any instance of abuse, and the need to not just “deal with the problem” but fully engage with the people who have been so brutally wounded.
His proposal for adopting more widely practices of restorative justice and seeing more intentionally to the spiritual as well as practical needs of survivors is, I think inarguably, worthy of serious consideration.
But McKnight’s proposal also touches on important questions of transparency and due process for accused clerics. And while, for obvious reasons, these tend to take a back seat to immediate concern for victims, I would suggest they are every bit as urgently needed and ultimately as important for solidifying a truly strong and secure ecclesiastical culture against abuse.
I know from my own canonical experience that, in some dioceses, priests accused of a crime of abuse are often given virtually no information about their alleged crime, no opportunity to review or challenge the accusations or submit evidence, or have access to legal representation prior to a review board issuing its assessment of whether the charge is “credible” and “substantiated.”
In one case not many years ago, a priest friend of mine found himself the subject of what seemed to me to be a very vague accusation, yet he was immediately forced to resign as pastor by the bishop and was packed off to a religious house to await further developments.
When he was eventually summoned to the chancery to appear before the review board, the first occasion anyone would actually tell him what he was alleged to have done, he asked me to come along as a canon lawyer to explain things to him and help him understand what was happening.
I flew in on the morning of the meeting, but when we arrived at the chancery he was told he was not allowed to have a canon lawyer present, and if he insisted on my being there the meeting would be canceled and he’d be deemed “uncooperative” in the process.