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Happy Friday friends,
I’ve spent the week consumed, inter alia, with what I am self-diagnosing as middle class status anxiety.
For the last many years, we have lived in a rented house which our landlords are now disposed to sell. We started down the path to buying the place, because we have enjoyed living here, we’re well settled in the area. It’s where our daughter goes to school, the local liquor store staff know us by sight.
So far, though, the mechanics of actually purchasing a house for vast sums of money I do not have — and frankly I question my ability to ever repay — have been uncomfortable. They have certainly involved allowing a bank to perform the kind of searching review of my life choices which I fear awaits me at the final judgement.
There came a moment where, upon calculating what 6.15% interest would mean to me over the next several decades, I wanted to walk away from the whole process. Perhaps by running naked screaming into the night.
I’m a big enough man to admit that what stopped me from running was the realization that I’d rather pay the money than try to get a dozen or more institutional bureaucracies to acknowledge a change in our address.
So I have stuck with it. It is probably going to happen. And it is probably for the best.
But, now that I almost own the place, I’ve started seeing it in a new light. After seven years of quiet satisfaction with our house I now find myself looking around and thinking “what a dump.”
There’s nothing wrong with it structurally, of course. We’ve made sure of that. And the paint’s fine. But the yard… my God the yard.
For seven years I’ve contented myself with tending the verge and buzzing the “lawn” so short you can hardly tell it’s a drunken patchwork of clover and dandelion. After all, it wasn’t my land so it hardly behoved me to sow where another would one day reap.
Now, though, I recoil in horror looking out my front window. What band of carnies have been living here? I can feel something buried in my DNA stirring to life. A deep seated need has seized me to cultivate vistas of immaculate, useless grass — and defend it with chemical weapons.
I’ve composed a post-closing punch list for my first weekend as an eventual “homeowner,” as they say in suburbia, and it involves pulling up at least one shrub and knocking down and paving over a flower bed running the length of the driveway, which I suddenly find I have quietly hated for more than half a decade.
I have big plans, none of which I can afford to begin, let alone bring to fruition. But I am choosing to embrace my ambitions for the place. After all, it seems I am going to be here for at least the next few decades.
Here’s the news.
The News
A confidential audit report in APSA, issued in 2021, concluded that the Holy See’s asset manager had effectively no risk assessment or compliance capacity, and that its governing structure was dangerously inexpert and clerically centralized.
The audit was carried out on papal orders by the Vatican’s internal financial watchdog ASIF, which normally isn’t allowed to look into the goings on at APSA — indeed, absent extraordinary papal intervention, no one is.
The report’s findings matter because shortly after reading it, Pope Francis ordered APSA to turn over all its asset management and banking functions to the IOR — an order Pope Leo repealed earlier this month.
So, what’s going on at APSA? Read the whole story here.
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The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors released its second annual global child protection report Thursday, underlining the need for reparations, sanctions for abusers, and clear communication when bishops resign after mishandling cases.
You can read Luke’s excellent digest of the key points here.
One thing I would like to highlight, because it is a drum I have been banging for nearly a decade now is this:
The report highlights “the importance of clearly communicating the reasons for [a bishop’s] resignation or removal, and issuing a public statement when these reasons are related to the abuse of minors or vulnerable adults, negligence, or less serious actions that nonetheless may have led to such a decision.”
As the report notes, the Vatican used to do this as a matter of course, but it stopped suddenly 10 years ago.
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A new study by The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America has highlighted sharp differences in the outlook and experiences of older and younger clergy in this country.
The 2025 National Study of Catholic Priests, the results of which were released Oct. 14, found that younger clergy were more likely to describe themselves as theologically orthodox and politically moderate, to think access to the Traditional Latin Mass should be a priority, to feel lonely, and to believe they are expected to do too many things beyond their priestly calling.
Younger priests were also less likely to think that synodality should be prioritized and less concerned about the question of women’s influence in the Church than their older peers, according to the study.
This is a fascinating x-ray of the clergy in America. Read all about it right here.
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Bishops in the Australian state of Victoria urged Catholics this week to oppose a bill that would liberalize euthanasia and assisted suicide laws.
The bill would also lift the so-called gag clause, which currently prohibits physicians from initiating discussions about VAD with patients, and require conscientious objectors to provide government-approved information about the practice.
The bishops issued an urgent pastoral letter in response to the bill. Read all about it here.
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A South African archbishop has defended a joint pastoral letter issued by bishops in the country’s KwaZulu-Natal province that urged priests not to engage in traditional African healing practices.
In their joint pastoral letter, eight bishops cautioned priests against syncretism, which they defined as “the blending of Catholic beliefs and practices with traditional African practices, especially ubungoma in ways that contradict the Gospel.”
Ubungoma is a Zulu term referring to traditional healing and divination practices of the Nguni people, a cultural group native to Southern Africa. The letter generated considerable pushback in the region, with secular newspapers weighing in against the bishops.
Archbishop Siegfried Mandlenkosi Jwara said this week that the bishops were seeking “to address priests who engage in the practice of ubungoma in the Church/in parishes, and by doing so generate confusion among the faithful, as well as commit liturgical or pastoral abuses.”
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The Vatican’s former auditor general Libero Milone has launched his final legal appeal to have his lawsuit for wrongful dismissal heard in a Vatican City court.
Milone’s last appeal is to the city state’s Court of Cassation which, as I noted in an analysis this week, used to be composed of judges from the Church’s supreme canonical court. Now, following a 2023 reform by Pope Francis, none — that’s zero — of the cardinal judges have any legal background, civil or canonical, and none of them even has a law degree.
So, what are Milone’s chances, and what happens next?
You can read the whole analysis here.
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A priest in Spain has denied media reports claiming that he was convicted in a hate crimes trial which stems from comments made during a 2017 streaming broadcast on radical Islam.
“We’re still awaiting a court ruling. It will take at least a month or two,” Fr. Custodio Ballester of the Archdiocese of Barcelona told The Pillar October 16.
Ballester faced the possibility of three years in prison and a €3,000 fine if found guilty on hate crimes charges. But he denied claims, published in several English-language publications, that he was found guilty earlier this month.
The charges against Ballester stemmed from a 2017 broadcast about radical Islam in Catalonia, on a show called La Ratonera (The Mouse Trap), produced by Alerta Digital.
During the broadcast, Ballester called jihadism a “predatory stain” and said that “radical jihadism and violent Islam want to destroy Europe and the Western civilization.” Ballester told The Pillar that his comments were made in the context of a discussion on radical Islam, not against Muslims in general, and were subsequently taken out of context by the prosecutor.
“I don’t have a single Islamophobic bone in me,” he said.
You may have noticed I was using the past tense describing this case. That’s because this morning, as I was writing this newsletter, the priest was actually acquitted.
Which is, just to be clear, the opposite of being found guilty, which is what was reported in a few places.
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History matters
We carried a long report this week on a 2021 audit of the structures and processes at APSA, the Holy See’s asset manager.
The report is four years old, but this is very much news for a couple of reasons.
The first is, obviously, that the report — which was politely phrased but rather shocking in its conclusions — immediately preceded the decision by Pope Francis to strip APSA of its investment and account management functions and hand them over to the IOR, Vatican City’s commercial bank.
The second reason is that APSA, by all accounts, never complied with this order. It just flat out refused to transfer the assets and the investments.
Whatever the law technically was for the last three years, it was functionally a dead letter.
And the third reason is that Pope Leo just repealed this order earlier this month — despite no evidence of anything having changed at APSA in the interim.
On the contrary, as one senior Vatican financial official put it to me this week, APSA’s internal account management is so poorly separated that there are basically no lines drawn between its own money and profits and those of its clients — various Vatican departments.
Similarly, the official pointed out to me, when APSA declares it made 60 million euros in profit last year, you simply cannot tell from the annual report if APSA made the profit, if its clients made the profit, if APSA made the profits for it clients, or if it made them from those clients.
I was similarly told that there have been specific instances in recent years of client-dicasteries’ assets on deposit being used by APSA to fund its own activities.
Borrowing from Peter to pay … Peter’s banker, and without his permission, it seems.