Happy Friday friends,
One of the stories we have been tracking over the past few years is a movement in Europe, mostly centered in the Low Countries, in which Catholics have been suing the Church to erase their names from baptismal registers.
As Luke noted in Starting Seven yesterday — and if you aren’t getting Starting Seven, I pity you — the advocate general at the European Court of Justice issued an opinion stating that everyone has “in principle, the right to have his or her personal data erased from the baptismal register where the controller fails to demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which override the interests, rights, and freedoms of the data subject.”
I find the whole case fascinating.
Now, on the one hand, I tend to skew in favor of telling institutions, usually companies and government agencies, to get my good name out of their filthy databases. But baptismal registers aren’t mailing lists, they are historical records of fact. Indeed, a great deal of European history would be lost to us, at the purely factual level, were it not for the meticulous sacramental record-keeping of your average parish.
It’s somehow emblematic of our age that people want to erase their own identity — and to be clear, baptism at the most basic level imparts a character and forever changes our identity — while Europe as a culture is struggling to wipe clean its own history.
I think this is a big part of the context in which we should assess Leo’s recent visit to France.
I have seen a lot of commentary touting (as good or bad, depending on the writer’s point of view) signs of a Christian revival across the West. And, indeed, I think there are some reasons to be optimistic that there is a rich harvest awaiting what workers the Church can summon to bring it in.
To better assist the laborers, I think we should understand, as best we can, what is fermenting away at the bottom of the culture. This is, to invoke a JPIIism, about memory and identity. Europe, and indeed the West, is butting up hard against the limits of democracy as a vehicle for values and the problem of evil. Bound up with this struggle is an existential question of who we are, as peoples and individuals, and what we are called to be.
The baptismal records case is at the core of this, and ought to be at the core of our evangelizing efforts. Why does it matter if a person long defected from the faith and ardently opposed to it has their name recorded in a book in a backroom somewhere in a parish they haven’t darkened the doorstep of in decades? Because their name is in another, entirely indelible book elsewhere, too. And what is written there, and upon their very essence at the time of their baptism, is that, as Benedict XVI put it, they are — individually — the result of a thought of God. They are willed, they are loved, they are necessary.
That is who we, each one of us, are. And I have always found this is the first, and most profound truth to be announced in the evangelization — and often the one hardest to believe.
Here’s the news.
The News
Vatican peace envoy Cardinal Matteo Zuppi visited Ukrainian prisoners of war during his Sept. 28-30 trip to Moscow.
The visit followed Zuppi’s meeting in July with Russian soldiers held at a facility in Ukraine’s western Lviv region. Zuppi said later that he had “been able to speak personally with some of them to check on their conditions.”
Zuppi’s three-day program in Moscow featured meetings with senior Russian officials, including presidential aide Yury Ushakov, human rights ombudswoman Yana Lantratova, and children’s rights ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova. The latter’s somewhat benign title belies her responsibility for the tens of thousands of children kidnapped from Ukraine and dispersed around Russia.
Wherever these talks are headed, and whatever they may achieve (or not) practically, it is a real story that the Vatican is able to have them, and it is just about possible that in the event of a serious cease fire negotiation emerging, the Holy See might be the only diplomatic broker able to sell the Russians on the basic human rights of those captured soldiers and missing kids.
—
This week, a meeting was meant to happen in Lebanon. All the bishops of the synod of the Syriac Catholic Church were invited to vote on the proposed removal of their patriarch, Ignatius Youssef III Younan.
That meeting, the first to be called under the norms of a new law issued by Pope Leo just weeks ago, was denounced as unlawful by the patriarch — and he has some good grounds for arguing that it is. At the moment, the whole event is a kind of Schrodinger’s Synod, we aren’t exactly sure if it went ahead, in what form, who came, and what if anything was decided or voted upon.
We will be bringing you the full story on that as soon as we have it, and we are working hard to get it. The reason we are working so hard to get it is that, as I wrote in an analysis this week, the entire bid to remove Youssef has become something of a perfect storm over Pope Leo’s desk.
On the one hand, the patriarch is making a very public case that he is the target of a malicious and personal palace coup, blessed by the Vatican’s prefect for Eastern Churches.
On the other, Vatican officials have noted serious dysfunctions at the top of more than one Eastern Church for several years now, and allowing the new papal law to fail or be openly discredited at its first use would be a… sub-optimal outcome for Rome.
Sooner or later, the pope is going to have to get personally involved, I argued, and none of his choices looks especially edifying to me. And he is going to have to make his inevitable intervention with every patriarch in the Orthodox Churches looking on and pricing up exactly what all this says about how the Bishop of Rome really sees the role of a patriarch.
—
The USCCB announced earlier this month the creation of a Task Force on Preserving Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, headed by Bishop Oscar Cantu, whose diocese includes the Silicon Valley region.
Cantu spoke with The Pillar this week about the new task force, its goals, and how he approaches the question of boundaries for AI use within the Church.
For myself, I remain most interested to see what kind of standards the bishops are willing to articulate for Church institutions themselves, when it comes to AI. After all, it’s one thing to speak in lofty, general terms to the world at large about something you ultimately have no practical power over. It’s something else to set real limits on what you will or won’t tolerate in your own house, so to speak.
Here’s a bit of what Cantu had to say about that:
“We may get to a point where the bishops decide to provide some national policy. We’re not there yet. Usually we start with some best practices and some guidelines. That’s what we’ve done here in my diocese so far… basic things, like no confidential information should go into an AI model. So that means for schools, no student records; for parishes, no sacramental records, personnel files, donor information, certainly not using deep fakes or voice cloning for clergy or anyone else for that matter. And also admitting when we use AI to develop a flyer or a document — that kind of transparency.”
That might seem a bit on the hands-off side of policymaking to some, but I’d just note that an actual standard of absolute transparency on the use of AI for producing any documents would likely be fiercely resisted in a lot of Church offices. That alone should tell us something about how far behind the game we already are.
Read the whole conversation here.
—
German bishops’ conference chairman Bishop Heiner Wilmer said this week that he hoped the Vatican would respond to a request to approve a new national body known as the synodal conference by the end of 2026.
“There is currently no news regarding the synodal conference,” he told press on the opening day of the bishops’ plenary meeting in Fulda. “We are waiting for the recognitio for the draft statutes. I have mentioned this before, and I hope you will receive a response by the end of this year.”
For the Germans, no news is not good news, and there are signs the natives are getting restless. So what’s at stake, and what might Rome do?
Luke Coppen takes a closer look right here.
—
This year marks the 800th anniversary of St. Francis of Assissi. It’s been celebrated around the world with pilgrimages and paeans of praise for the poverello who, despite our joyful celebration of more contemporary saints, seems to have lost none of his power to inspire.
But what is it, exactly, that makes St. Francis such an enduring example of faith and a perennial prophet of our times — whatever times we may be living in?
Edgar Beltran talked about this with Cardinal Jaime Spengler OFM, president of CELAM and Archbishop of Porto Alegre. According to the cardinal, Francis is “a saint of the 13th century, but he’s also a human archetype, and that’s why he remains alive”.
“Marking this moment of anthropological crises that we’re experiencing, I believe, is an opportunity to bring to the center of the debate the importance of the human being. Francis of Assisi is a profoundly human saint, and certainly what he passed down to us as the promotion of the work of care – of the human person and of creation – remains more than current: it’s a pressing demand.”
Read the whole conversation here.
—
When the Vatican’s synod on synodality concluded in 2024 one of the many commissions it begat was one to suggest changes to the Code of Canon Law, occasioned by the Church’s (far from universal) experience of universal synodality.
This commission’s final report came out this week, and JD has a serious and important analysis about what to make of its proposals — some of which would upend the entire underpinning of the Church’s ecclesiology as expressed by Vatican Council II.
This is, as JD notes, a very anti-Vatican II world view being put forward, for those with the canonical eyes to read. And he explains why some of the names attached to it mean it ought to be taken far more seriously than some of the other fever-dream monographs which have been produced in the post synodal wash-up period.
—
For myself, I was drawn to a particularly eye-catching proposal from the commission. They want to insert a paragraph into canon 749, which currently reads thusly:
§1. By virtue of his office, the Supreme Pontiff possesses infallibility in teaching when as the supreme pastor and teacher of all the Christian faithful, who strengthens his brothers and sisters in the faith, he proclaims by definitive act that a doctrine of faith or morals is to be held.
§2. The college of bishops also possesses infallibility in teaching when the bishops gathered together in an ecumenical council exercise the magisterium as teachers and judges of faith and morals who declare for the universal Church that a doctrine of faith or morals is to be held definitively; or when dispersed throughout the world but preserving the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter and teaching authentically together with the Roman Pontiff matters of faith or morals, they agree that a particular proposition is to be held definitively.
§3. No doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident.
The commission wants to insert a new paragraph at the top of the canon, effectively displacing the description of the papal teaching office down to para 2, and so on.
The proposed new canon would begin with this article: “The entire body of the Christian faithful, having received the anointing from the Spirit, cannot err in matters of faith, and it manifests this characteristic through the supernatural sense of faith of the whole people when, from the bishops down to the last of the lay faithful, its universal consent in matters of faith and morals is demonstrated.”
There’s a few things to note here. The first is that the proposed placement of the new para — above the teaching office of the Rome Pontiff, not below that of the entire college of bishops — is significant and obviously disordered. The canon currently broadens as it descends, the revision would invert the pyramid.
That isn’t accidental. Neither is the omission of the office of the Roman Pontiff or communion with him in the text of the proposed paragraph, which instead simply states “the bishops.”
The import — I won’t directly allege “intent” — of this is to place an amorphous and unstructured “sense of all the faithful” above the specific and named authority of the pope personally and the hierarchy of the college of bishops as a whole.
It also, by limiting the reference to just “the bishops,” clears a linguistic and logical path to articulate a kind of infallible but local sensus fidei which can trump the universal supreme authority or Rome. Such a kind of articulation has already been floated along the German synodal way and at the Synod on the Amazon not many years ago.
And, I would just note, you know this is intended to be phrased and used and eventually asserted locally as an inerrant corrective to the universal authority of the Holy See, because it has no other conceivable purpose.
To define the teaching authority of a situation in which all the whole Church, everywhere, “down to the last of the lay faithful” agree on anything is necessarily redundant in theory, since it includes all levels of the established teaching office of the Church, including the infallible office of the Roman Pontiff and the college of bishops in communion with him. In practice, it is manifestly pointless at the universal level, since, as polling data never tires of reminding us, global Catholics are by no means unanimous in supporting almost any point of doctrine, even core sacramental teachings.
I don’t expect any such paragraph ever to be included in any revision to the Code of Canon Law by Leo XIV, who as a canonist will read it for what it is without hesitation.
But it is also, I’d argue, the key to understanding the mindset behind the rest of the committee’s proposals. That, too, I hope Leo will see and reject wholesale.
Sophia’s pitch
I got an interesting pitch from a new potential freelancer this week.
Sophia, and I will only use the first name she gave me, emailed me to offer a story — one she promised she’d researched deeply — on the history of the Vatican’s standoff with the SSPX.
Key to her pitch was a massive piece of alleged canonical malpractice by the Vatican back in 1988, which she summed up this way:
“The decree of 1 July 1988 cites canon 1382 as the penalty for the Econe consecrations [which triggered the initial SSPX schism]. In the 1983 Code, 1382 is profanation of the Eucharistic species; consecrating a bishop without a pontifical mandate is 1387. It was not the consecration canon in 1917 either (there it concerned school visitation). The Society’s own 1988 canonical study repeated the same 1382 citation, so the error sits in both sides’ record of the rupture.”
Sophia offered me the story, which she said she had in full, ready and waiting to go, at very reasonable terms. Interestingly, she didn’t even want a byline, necessarily. If I wanted to just buy her research and cover it myself as our own story, that was fine by her.
She’d picked her pitch well, of course. If you want to get my attention, point out a hidden-in-plain sight canonical issue at the heart of a major and ongoing news story in the life of the Church. As any diligent editor would, I got right back to her — I had some questions about the scope of the story and our window to acquire it.
For a start, I asked how many other outlets she’d pitched, and was she offering it on an exclusive basis? Nothing makes you feel like a mug faster than realizing after the fact you’ve purchased a reheated “scoop” already sold elsewhere.
“Yes,” she confirmed, “I offered the same brief to a small number of Catholic outlets. I won’t pretend the findings themselves are private; they are checkable at the sources I cite, which is the point. What is not elsewhere is the brief as written work. If you take it, I will not sell it to anyone else and will not publish it.” So far, so standard.
And she was thoughtful enough to make the point that “[my] piece on why Leo will not meet the Society, and your excommunication explainer, sit closest to the canonical detail I have been checking,” and since “the finding I pitched is a canon-citation question, you were the obvious name.”
One always likes a bit of flattery.
I went back and forth a bit more with Sophia about the import of her finding and the potential ramifications for the legal texts involved. Typos in law have real consequences, after all.
And to her credit, Sophia wasn’t looking to sensationalize her findings, either: “If what you want is ‘the 1988 excommunication was invalid,’ this is not that story and I will not dress it up as one,” she told me. “If what you want is a source-checked account of a canon citation that was wrong in both codes, repeated by both sides, and never corrected, with the primary texts attached, that is exactly what it is.”
Good for her sticking to her guns. I hate it when people try to sensationalize news to gin up clicks.
But I was, in all of it, yanking her chain. I never had any intention of ever buying this story. For a couple of reasons.