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Happy Friday friends,
I would like to open this newsletter with a vote of praise for m’colleague, JD Flynn. He is, in many ways, one of the more considerate men I have ever met. When he sets his mind on something, he’s going to steamroller you into doing it with him, but he is going to do his absolute best to make it as painless an experience as possible.
Case in point: While he knows I am a bit hesitant in front of crowds, JD publicly committed us to doing half a dozen Pillar Podcast Live Shows this year.
When the time came to plan the first one, I tried placing all sorts of unreasonable conditions on the idea: I’d want to do it in Chicago, my and the pope’s hometown, where the last time JD turned up the cops detained him on archdiocesan instructions.
He was fine with that.
It would have to be on a proper feast day so people could have fun, even if it is Lent, said I. How about the Feast of St. Joseph, he said.
Then I started going for broke, demanding that we do it only in the oldest, dive-iest, purest baseball boozehall I could find, and only if it was explicitly a Cubs bar near Wrigley — Pope Leo’s White Sox allegiance notwithstanding.
And I’d want a free hand to make special Pillar and pope themed baseball gear for the night, since the date happens to be a big birthday and a week before Opening Day.
And he’d have to drink Malört.
The guy just kept saying yes, so now it’s happening. And I am both deeply excited and anxious, as usual.
So if you are within driving (or flying) distance of Wrigley Field next month, JD and I will be at the Nisei Lounge at 3439 N Sheffield Ave on March 19, the Feast of St. Joseph, starting at 7pm for a VERY SPECIAL BIRTHDAY LIVE SHOW.
It is going to be a great night. I know this, because every time we have done these live shows — in St. Paul, Baltimore, Indianapolis, DC and Rome — I have arrived a gibbering nervous wreck, but had the time of my life.
Pillar people, you people, are special. I mean it. And it’s special when we get together.
It’s not about what we agree on. If you spend half a minute reading the comments sections under our articles you can see we don’t all of us agree on anything in particular.
But we all share an idea of what it is to be thoughtful Catholics, concerned about the life of the Church, and a desire to live the faith with sincerity. But most of all, Pillar people all share a desire to seek and see the image of Christ in the other. Starting from there, you can have a pretty great night together, wherever we are coming from.
And, as Pope Leo has reminded us so often, there’s no substitute for the real, the authentically human. So we’re going to be there, together.
See you in Chicago.
Here’s the news.
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The News
An outspoken abortion advocate will not assume the directorship of an academic institute at the University of Notre Dame, following widespread condemnation of the appointment by students, university donors, and bishops.
Susan Ostermann, a researcher and professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, had been announced as the incoming director of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies within the Keough School, and was due to assume the role in July.
However, in an email to faculty Feb. 26, the dean of the Keough School said that Ostermann had “decided not to move forward as director” of the institute, following widespread criticism of her appointment.
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Adults preparing to join the Catholic Church at Easter gathered at cathedrals across the world last weekend for the Rite of Election, a crucial stage in the initiation process in which they publicly manifest their desire to become Catholics.
The ceremony’s public nature offers a rare opportunity to gauge how many adults are seeking to become Catholics in each diocese in a given year although, unfortunately, only a small proportion of the world’s dioceses publish statistics.
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Earlier this week we covered the transfer of the bishop of the Ivory Coast’s Diocese of Man to become an auxiliary position in another diocese.
Bishop Gaspard Béby Gnéba, 63, was moved out of the diocese following a nearly two year Vatican investigation and intervention, after the bishop issued a pastoral letter telling local Catholics that they needed to report to him if their priests were living double lives, had secret families, or were stealing from the Church.
If people kept silent and looked away from these sins, the bishop said, they would themselves be guilty of “sinful complicity.” His clergy went bonkers, and two years later the bishop is gone.
The Vatican has, of course, given no public explanation for the demotion-by-transfer of Bishop Gnéba. But as I discussed in an analysis this week, his case highlights the real and ongoing issue of clericalism in the Church — and the problem with the argument that Church leaders are somehow entitled to private lives of pervasive sin, if that’s what they’re into.
As I argued in the analysis, this isn’t about holding clerics to some higher moral standard than the rest of us, and expecting priests to be without sin, or deserving of having their moral lapses held up for public approbrium. Far from it.
It is about recognizing that some patterns of behavior — like stably living a double life with a secret family — aren’t just sinful, they are criminal, constituted as specific delicts by the Code of Canon Law.
How you should address a person you see falling into sin is one thing, and it can be complicated and sensitive. But surely we can all agree turning a blind eye to systematic criminal conduct is not good or healthy, and that reporting it to the proper authorities is the right thing to do?
The lesson of Bishop Gnéba seems to be not.
I find that shocking. For me this is simple: is or isn’t the Church a coherent society of laws to which its members, and especially leaders, are accountable? Because if not, we should stop cosplaying like it is and rethink what this means for our entire conception of ecclesiastical authority.
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It wouldn’t be Lent without some obligatory coverage of Friday fried fish, would it?
But, rather than give you a warmed-over listicle of the “best” penitential awful fast food sandwiches from the major chains, our own Jack Figge has instead scoured the country to find out what the secret sauce is behind the country’s most successful parish fish fries.
St. John the Baptist Parish in Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, for example, sees an average attendance of 1,200 people per night – in a town of 1,100 people.
Admit it, you have questions. Read the whole story here.
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In a long-awaited move, Pope Leo XIV this week appointed four new auxiliary bishops for the Diocese of Rome.
All four were previously serving as pastors of parishes in the diocese, and the announcement possibly puts an end to a tumultuous period in the pope’s diocese, which began in 2024 with Pope Francis dismissing six auxiliary bishops in just over a year and abolishing one of the diocese’s five pastoral sectors.
As Edgar Beltran reports, since his election, Leo has moved cautiously to regain the trust of his diocesan clergy, many of whom had grown strained in their relationship with Pope Francis during the previous pontificate.
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The German bishops have elected a new chairman of their conference, Bishop Heiner Wilmer, who gave his first public address as chairman this week.
His opening words were “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of goodwill,” which is about as strong a start as you could ask for.
But who is Wilmer, where does he come from, and what can we expect from him at the head of the most obstreperous epicopal conference in the Church?
Luke Coppen has a full profile of him right here.
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Pope Leo accepted the resignation this week of the apostolic nuncio to the Netherlands, Archbishop Jean-Marie Speich, who turned 70 years old last June.
Nuncios do technically have the right to retire at 70, but Speich’s resignation is curious — not least because he only accepted the position in April, and it seems pretty unlikely he was appointed without the expectation of him putting in a five year term.
There’s no suggestion he is in poor health, and some local sources have suggested the nuncio, as the last scion of his aristocratic family, has asked to be allowed to return to France to tend to the estate, which would be unusually recherché.
Others have suggested that he has asked to leave service early pending the eventual outcome of the trial of Fr. Marko Rupnik, as Speich previously served as nuncio in Rupnik’s native Slovenia at the time the disgraced religious artist was looking for a bishop to incardinate him following his expulsion from the Jesuits. According to some, Speich told Rupnik’s new bishop that taking him in was an “excellent” idea.
The golden (dome) rule
The news that Susan Ostermann will not be assuming the directorship of the Liu Institute within the Keogh School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame is, for me, an unexpectedly fascinating good news story.
Like most people, and nearly everyone who didn’t actually go to Notre Dame, I tend to think the place benefits/suffers from a kind of relentless self-promotion/external scrutiny that borders on the wearisome.
Let me say again — I like Notre Dame. For reasons of personal and family history, I have a surprisingly deep well of affection for the place. But I’m just not sure a usually-good-but-never-exactly-great football programme justifies the kind of totemic status the place has in the American cultural landscape is all.
As such, when judging the true significance of a Notre Dame story, I apply an informal rule to test it objectively: would I consider this news if it happened at a nationally significant Catholic university that doesn’t play Division I football, like Georgetown or CUA? The answer is often “no.”
In the case of Ostermann’s appointment to lead an institute within the university, I was, like all people of good faith, disheartened by the facts, incredulous at the decision, and the wider significance seems prima facie obvious.
Yesterday’s news, then, was significant, and to my mind it unquestionably is a national Catholic news story. Though ultimately not for the reasons I expected when the story started.
It’s not just that Ostermann’s promotion has been derailed, it’s the details that have emerged about how that appointment came to be and then not be that really make this something important.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say this tells us something new and pretty damn significant about the fluid dynamics of the American Catholic landscape. And it’s well worth unpacking.