You guys, cat and mouse, and dressing for Mass
The Friday Pillar Post
Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Happy Friday friends,
Before we get started on the news, I just wanted to say a quick something about yesterday’s feast of Christ the Eternal High Priest.
For various reasons, a good portion of my closest friends are priests, and for various other reasons, I spend a good portion of my professional life talking to priests, here in my home diocese and around the country and the world.
I know and love men serving God’s people the best they can in suburban parishes, in city churches surrounded by stark divides of affluence and deprivation, and out in the missionary fields on every continent.
As such, I hear a lot of their daily joys and frustrations in ministry, and end up with what feels like a reasonable rolling sample survey of what sustains them and what makes them suffer.
Now, I don’t claim any special insight into living a vocation I don’t have. And no matter how ringside your seat, you can never truly understand what it is really like on the other side of the ropes. So I don’t pretend to have any useful insights or wisdom to impart to our clerical readers, though I would of course recommend they read Pope Leo’s sincerely affectionate words from his meeting with his own diocesan priests yesterday.
What I would like to say to all our priest Pillar-readers-in-a-good-way is this: thank you. Thank you, personally.
The paradox of the sacramental priesthood is that the priest becomes a conduit for the immediate channeling of the Divine saving love through the sacraments.
He, the priest, the man, recedes to allow the faithful to encounter Christ the High Priest in the confessional and in the Eucharist. But in doing so, we can come to see through our pastors a little, as men, as we look past them to Christ.
One of the saddest things I have heard in a while came from a bishop, after celebrating the funeral of a dear priest friend of mine who died last month. Remarking on the packed assembly, he said it moved him deeply because he’d seen so many empty churches for priestly funerals.
The people, he said, trust, love, and depend upon their pastors for years as ministers of the sacraments. But once they retire, either for age or health, they — the men who served so faithfully — fade from memory in favor of the next guy.
So, this weekend, remember your priest. Thank him, please. Let him know that you love him as a father for you but also as a brother with you. Take him to a baseball game, buy him a hat, invite him over for a barbeque. Make fun of him in a gently personal way, just to let him know he’s known.
I say this to myself, too. For all the priest friends I have, I’ve done precious little to show my appreciation and affection for my own local pastor over the seven years we’ve lived where we do, and now he is on his way to his next assignment.
I’ve no idea if he’s a Pillar reader, but I wish now I had told him sooner how much my wife and I prized the gloriously deadpan sense of humor with which he inflected his homilies and had invited him over for a martini or two.
I’m sorry for that failure, Father. We’ll miss you, and we will remember you.
OK, here’s the news.
The News
The new head of the Jesuits in the Czech Republic has announced an investigation into a community connected to the country’s Aletti Center, linked to the disgraced artist Fr. Marko Rupnik.
Fr. Pavel Bačo SJ, who took office in late May, has dismissed the director of the Olomouc Aletti Center and launched an investigation into the publishing house affiliated with it, according to a statement from the province this week.
The Czech center lists “its affiliation with the centre in Rome” as being one of its sources of inspiration.
The original Centro Aletti, in Rome, was founded in 1991 and run by the Jesuits. It has been steeped in controversy in recent years in connection with Marko Rupnik, the disgraced priest and former Jesuit who lived at the center and served as its director.
Rupnik, a well-known mosaic artist, has been accused of serial spiritual and sexual abuse, including through overtly sacrilegious sexual acts connected to the creation of his art.
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Archbishop Wojciech Polak, the Polish bishops’ point man on abuse, will no longer oversee the creation of an independent commission examining the Church’s handling of abuse cases.
The change is significant because Polak, the Primate of Poland, is a prominent figure in the fight against clerical abuse, holding the post of delegate of the child protection office of the Polish bishops’ conference since 2019.
The announcement is also notable as it comes against the background of tensions among Polish bishops over the commission’s parameters. Polak favored a broader scope than some of his episcopal colleagues.
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The Vatican this week announced the appointment of a new auxiliary bishop for the Chinese mainland Archdiocese of Fuzhou.
This is a highly significant appointment, both for the people involved and because of the way in which it came about. We’ll talk more about both of those in a moment.
For a start, read the whole story here.
And for a chaser, consider that this morning the Chinese Foreign Ministry is praising Leo’s handling of the appointment — that’s the appointment of an underground bishop, to serve in an archdiocese.
Something very interesting is happening.
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Of course, China is only one of the diplomatic live wires Pope Leo has to decide how to handle as he begins to shape his pontificate.
But from China to Ukraine and Russia, to Latin America, to Israel and Gaza (and from last night Iran) and not forgetting President Donald Trump, Pope Leo faces a diplomatic scene more volatile and more violent than any of his recent predecessors have had to deal with.
So, what might he be thinking? And what are his options?
Read Edgar’s whole analysis here.
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Pope Leo has, as we are seeing, a tall order to fill in meeting the demands of the historical moment. And his choice of name famously harkens back to some of the greatest leaders and most inspirational teachers the papacy has produced.
That’s tough company to keep for a pope, and a high bar of expectation to clear.
So, out of charity for Leo XIV, and in the interests of a rounded perspective, historian Bronwen McShea had a look at some of the less great Leos of the papal past in her first outing as a columnist here at The Pillar.
Some of these lesser Leos were definitely not great. And it is good to remember the Church, including the papacy, is made up of sinners as well as saints.
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The Vatican’s Institute for the Works of Religion — “the Vatican bank,” if you must — reported another significant year of profit for 2024.
According to the bank’s 2024 annual report, released June 11, the IOR recorded a net profit of 32.8 million euros (almost $38 million), an increase from 30.6 million euros ($35 million) in 2023.
“It is important to note that as there is no lender of last resort in the Vatican to deal with possible short-term market crises and, as there are no deposit guarantee laws, IOR has adopted a prudent dividend policy,” he wrote in the report. “This provides IOR with an adequate level of capital to ensure that its operations are sustainable, and its clients protected.”
You don’t have to be Jamie Dimon to read between the lines here. The IOR is doing fine, but they are expecting some very heavy financial weather in the Vatican and are battening down the hatches.
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England’s Cardinal Vincent Nichols took part last month in what he described as his “first and last conclave” — having received the red hat from Pope Francis in 2014, he will celebrate his 80th birthday Nov. 8.
Strictly speaking, his resignation was formally accepted by Francis nunc pro tunc four years ago, when Nichols reached the nominal retirement age of 75. But the coming months are expected to see Pope Leo make his decision on who will replace him.
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The National Eucharistic Pilgrimage is continuing its way across the south west of the country and, this week, made one stop in particular, with the local bishop and two priest chaplains bringing the monstrance into a prison yard.
“I would guess that the presumption of the pilgrims is that this is about what we are bringing to them,” the bishop told Jack before they went in. “But I predict that what's going to happen is what the prisoners give to the pilgrims.”
Read all about what they found inside right here.
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Cat and mouse
The news of Bishop Joseph Lin Yuntuan’s appointment as auxiliary of the Archdiocese of Fuzhou got a lot of write ups this week — more of them and faster than any recent Chinese episcopal nomination I can remember, including the sede vacate moves made prior to the conclave.
Most of the coverage I saw slanted something like this: there’s a new bishop in China, the Vatican announced it, and it’s the first time this has happened under Pope Leo (all true); ergo, the news is that Leo has chosen to continue along with the Vatican-China deal, despite Beijing’s unilateral treatment of the episcopal appointment process. Meh, I mean, kind of, I guess?
Sure, this was the first such announcement under Leo and, yes, I guess it does show he’s continuing with the Vatican-China deal, though I know of no one in China or the Vatican who ever considered it a live possibility the pope would just walk away from the deal in the first weeks of his pontificate.
What was interesting about this appointment was that Bishop Lin comes from the underground Church, and — so far as Rome was concerned — served for years as a priest as apostolic administrator of the diocese to which he is now an auxiliary bishop.
Since his episcopal consecration in 2017 (one year before the Vatican-China deal was agreed) he’s been without any publicly acknowledged assignment, at least according to his official Vatican resumé — let the reader infer what they may.
What is more interesting is that this underground bishop was named for the diocese in response to a request from the local archbishop, who came to office in January, and Lin’s appointment process effectively started in Rome, with Chinese state authorities agreeing to the pope’s pick — a complete reversal of how the Vatican-China deal has been operating for the last several years.
What is even more interesting is that it was the local archbishop, Joseph Cai Bingrui, who went to bat for Lin with party officials and got them to agree to his appointment. Cai is himself a bishop out of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, not the underground.
That dynamic is interesting as hell, because while no one disputes that Beijing has pretty much done what it likes for the last few years, redrawing the diocesan map of the mainland and moving bishops at will, in this case they deferred to the new pope. Or as one local cleric put it to me: “The cat let the mouse eat the grain this time.”
Is this a kind of courtesy gesture from the Chinese to the new pope? Is this the Vatican getting serious about controlling the appointment of bishops? Is it the beginning of a reset in how the Vatican-China deal is implemented, or just a honeymoon while the CCP get the measure of the new pope? We’ll have to wait to find out.
But something this situation does illustrate well is how mistaken it is to read events in China superficially. Because in doing so you miss everything. Here’s what I mean: