Pax, French clericalism, and American iconography
The Friday Pillar Post
Pillar paid subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Happy Friday friends,
And a happy feast of St. Benedict to you all.
I am back after having taken last week off, though unfortunately this season’s edition of covid meant we had to turn around and come home after only a day away.
I‘d been looking forward to this particular vacation for a while, and I nursed a certain sense of undirected injustice as we drove home early, that we’d been cheated of something we had coming to us, as a family.
Of course, that’s nonsense. No one, including Himself, made us sick, or timed it to blot out our family vacation. In fact, the person I should have been resentful of, really, is myself. It’s my choice to defer time with my family, immediate and extended, and place all expectations of quiet into a single, narrow window around the Fourth of July.
No one makes me do that.
Getting back to today’s feast, it is easy for me to adopt a disordered version of the saint’s great motto of ora et labora — and in truth I have a tendency to treat prayer as work as often as not. There’s a deep Pelagian streak in my nature, a goodish part of it rooted in regret of an adolescence in which I consciously and systematically shirked both working and praying at every opportunity.
But, of course, while work and prayer are the great tools for disciplining nature and inclination with humility and service, they are not themselves the means of effecting my own redemption.
Nor are they, as any Benedictine would tell you, actually a fair representation of the order’s true motto; no monastery I have ever visited had ora et labora over the door as you enter. All of them have had the word PAX, which is somehow greeting and goal and promise all at once.
Benedict sought peace when he first shunned the city, and it was peace he wanted to foster with his rule. And it is peace I constantly shove to one side, and try to turn into a vacation project instead of turning my daily life towards its pursuit.
Yet, of course, peace was what Christ gave to and left with his disciples after the resurrection, and a life at peace — not of ease or security — is, in the end, the reward of the saintly.
If I find I have no peace, and make no space for it 51 weeks of the year, I can hardly expect to find it in any given seven days, no matter where I go or how healthy everyone stays.
I’m going to try to keep hold of that thought, because there are some things we are going to talk about in a moment that leave me feeling… unpeaceful.
But before we get there, just a housekeeping note: Tuesday’s newsletter will be going out on Wednesday next week, so don’t panic when it’s 24 hours late, don’t adjust your set, stay tuned as normal.
Alright, here’s the news.
The News
The Archbishop of Toulouse made headlines this week over his appointment of a priest convicted of raping a 16-year-old boy to the position of archdiocesan chancellor.
But in 2006, Spina was convicted of the 1993 rape of a 16-year-old boy, a student where the priest was serving as chaplain, and was sentenced to five years in prison.
The archbishop told French media that the appointment was meant as an “act of mercy” for the priest, and that the position is mostly administrative.
In response to media reports (like The Pillar’s) highlighting the legal requirement in canon law that chancellors be “of unimpaired reputation and above all suspicion,” the archbishop said — and again this is a quote — “I think we can say that of Fr. Spina today, if we believe, as Christian faith and simple humanity invite us to do, that a person’s conversion is possible.”
Psychiatric experts at Fr. Spina’s criminal trial testified that the priest had “paranoid, narcissistic and perverse dispositions,” no sense of his own responsibility for the crimes, and was at risk of committing similar crimes in the future.
As JD noted in an analysis yesterday, regardless of the public outcry over his judgment, there is only one person competent to assess and overrule the Toulouse archbishop’s somewhat controversial conception of “mercy” — Pope Leo XIV.
JD argues that the appointment of Fr. Spina threatens to become the case by which the new pope’s approach to safeguarding is measured — without intervention, Spina could become a symbol of papal inaction, as did men like Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta and Fr. Marko Rupnik during the Francis papacy.
Such a symbol, according to JD, would be greatly discouraging for those abuse survivors and advocates who are hoping for a change in tone from the Apostolic Palace in the Leonine papacy.
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When catastrophic flash flooding hit central Texas last week, San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller learned there was a family reunification center a little more than an hour away.
He didn’t know what he would find. Or what he would do or say when he got there. But he wanted to be with the people there.
This week, he spoke to Michelle La Rosa about what he encountered there — the shock, the pain, the sorrow, the uncertainty. “It was very intense. Very intense,” he said.
He also spoke about the ongoing search and rescue efforts, and what the archdiocese is doing to help provide practical and pastoral care for those affected.
Read the whole story here, and please pray for the families involved.
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The Vatican’s doctrinal office gave the green light Wednesday to devotion associated with alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Slovakia.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published July 9 a letter from its prefect, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, approving a declaration of nihil obstat for the Marian devotion connected with Mount Zvir, located in northern Slovakia, close to the Polish border.
The letter marked the doctrine office’s first ruling on an alleged apparition since Pope Leo XIV’s election.
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The Internal Revenue Service this week conceded in a court filing that a rule blocking churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates was neither neutral nor generally applicable.
The move essentially ends a 70 year federal gag on religious bodies from wading too directly into partisan politics without risking their tax-exempt status.
IRS policy notwithstanding, one way or the other, the Church tends to keep itself above the partisan fray. In fact, for their part, the U.S. bishops said Tuesday that the Church’s political engagement will remain unchanged by the decision.
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On Monday, the General Secretariat of the Synod released a document offering guidance to Catholics on the latest stage of the global synodal process, launched by Pope Francis in 2021.
The almost 10,000-word document is written in the customarily impenetrable jargon of synodalese, fluency in which often appears to be one of the criteria for being allowed to participate meaningfully in the synod at all.
I do not know how many Pillar readers have patience left to work through the secretariat’s latest missive on our “new way of being Church,” but for those who would like a working English translation, we have one for you here.
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An episcopal appointment this week to a small Dutch diocese might have an outsized influence in the future of the Netherlands’ episcopal map.
Pope Leo XIV appointed on July 7 Msgr. Ronald Cornelissen, a priest of the Archdiocese of Utrecht, as the new Bishop of Groningen-Leeuwarden.
Cornelissen, a close collaborator of Cardinal Wim Eijk of Utrecht, will now take the helm of the smallest diocese in the Netherlands — a diocese that has for years faced the prospect of merger or even suppression.
But local Catholics are seeing the move as just the first step in what is to come for the bishop, the local Church, and the diocesan map of the Netherlands.
The Lamp magazine presents a symposium on Pope Francis’s life and legacy in our latest issue. Featuring contributions by Christopher Beha, Leah Libresco Sargeant, Matthew Walther, Michael Hanby, Massimo Faggioli, Zena Hitz, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Pink, Edward Feser, and many more. Start reading now!
Now that’s what I call clericalism
Clericalism is a funny word. It is, in a way, like “synodality,” in as much as no one ever really used the term until the last 10 years or so, and its meaning is as fluid as it is contentious.
During the height of the 2018 scandals surrounding McCarrick, the Pennsylvania grand jury report and the Chilean bishops scandals, some sought to frame the crisis as primarily one of “clericalism,” rather than of sexual predation.
The real issue, it was argued in some quarters, was a reflexive culture of deference, omerta, and preferential option for clergy among the hierarchy, which minimized, excused, and even covered up crimes at the expense of justice and of victims.
To my mind, that was certainly and manifestly part of the problem. Though I felt it was at times deployed with a kind of myopia which appeared to deliberately ignore the issue of self-perpetuating cultures and networks of criminal sexual activity.
But pure clericalism did exist in those days, and clearly it still does. Witness the furore this week over the Archbishop of Toulouse’s decision to appoint a priest convicted of raping a 16 year-old boy to the office of chancellor of the archdiocese.
In response to what I would have thought was utterly predictable outrage, the archbishop defended the appointment yesterday, saying Fr. Dominique Spina was the right man for the job, and his appointment was an act of “mercy.”
Noting that canon law requires that chancellors be “of unimpaired reputation and above all suspicion,” the archbishop opined that “I think we can say that of Fr. Spina today, if we believe, as Christian faith and simple humanity invite us to do, that a person’s conversion is possible.”
To recap: a priest tried and convicted and imprisoned for several years for grooming and raping a schoolboy whom he was meant to be caring for as chaplain is, to the archbishop’s mind, of “unimpaired reputation and above all suspicion.”
I don’t know where to start here. But there are some things which need to be pointed out.