António Grosso of Coração Silenciado (Silenced Heart), an association for survivors of abuse, described the bishops’ attitude as “unspeakable,” but said the decision to reduce recommended compensation payments

“There was a Compensation Determination Commission, which included judges,” he told The Pillar. “Words have meaning. ‘determination’ means determination. But as it turns out, the commission determined something and then someone came along later and decided differently.”

The Pillar reported this week that the Portuguese bishops’ conference cut the proposed compensation packages by about 50%, which in many cases amounted to tens of thousands of euros.

The bishops did not disclose their decision publicly, or to the victims, only confirming it after news of the decision was reported by The Pillar.

According to Grosso, the decision not to disclose a vote to cut compensation by the bishops’ conference in February was characteristic of a lack of transparency.

“That has bothered us for a long time,” he said. “This whole process is based on a report on our lives. That report was what the Compensation Determination Commission worked on, and it is what the bishops read, and they clearly considered that the facts described didn’t merit the [recommended] compensation, so they made the cuts. But throughout the whole process, we were never allowed to read what was written in those reports and what led them to those conclusions.”

The bishops’ conference has defended its decision, saying this week that the new amounts align with Portuguese jurisprudence and with compensations awarded by other European countries such as France and Germany.

Grosso is himself a survivor of sexual abuse, he told The Pillar. He received a Church compensation package for a case of abuse he says was perpetrated by a priest in the minor seminary he attended as a child. The priest is now deceased.

On Thursday the Portuguese Victim Support Association (APAV), a secular organization which defends the rights of victims – not exclusively victims of sexual abuse – issued a statement lamenting the bishops’ decisions and the way the process was conducted.

APAV’s Carla Ferreira, criticized “the cuts to compensation decided by the Church, ignoring a technical report issued by the Compensation Determination Commission.”

“This commission was composed of seven legal experts, possessed specific technical expertise, and had established a set of compensation amounts that the Church said it would not pay and therefore decided to reduce,” she said in the statement. “Therefore, we regret the way in which this technical opinion was disregarded.”

“If there was a limit to the money available, they should have made that clear to the commission beforehand,” she added.

The organization also criticized that victims will be required to pay tax on any funds received. Although that has to do with the tax law, which the Church naturally does not control, Carla Ferreira says that the bishops’ conference still could have taken measures to address the issue in the final award amounts:

“The Church has shown no regard for the impact of taxation, nor does it appear that there was any attempt to coordinate with the Portuguese government to potentially find an exemption,” she said.

‘I should have realized what I was getting into’

Manuela Fernandes made her first confession in 1968. “The priest asked me if I had bad thoughts. I had no idea what he meant, so he showed me. Physically. That was my introduction to sexuality. I was eight years old,” she told The Pillar.

When the Portuguese bishops formed an independent commission to study the extent of clerical sexual abuse in Portugal, Fernandes got in touch and told her story.

“I never thought of asking for compensation, but when I saw some of the bishops, and even the President of the Republic, belittle the problem I realized that money is all they really care about. So when the Church announced this program for requesting compensation I applied,” she said. “I should have realized what I was getting into.”

“I am the victim here. But I was forced to meet on the Church’s terms, in places the Church appointed, with people who worked for the Church. I felt like someone who was robbed and was being judged in the thief’s own home, by his employees,” she told The Pillar.

Manuela’s alledged abuser left the priesthood decades ago.

One of Manuela’s complaints has to do with a receipt that victims are required to sign in order to obtain their compensations. The receipt includes commitments not to sue for future compensation, whether through the legal system or extrajudicial means. Victims say this release is rekindling old traumas by preventing them from seeking justice, with many calling the liability release a kind of gag order.

In an open letter to the Portuguese bishops published in the website “Sete Margens”, one victim, who used a pseudonym said: “You’ve put a price on my pain, but it comes with silencing clauses. I’m only entitled to ‘reparation’ if I surrender my voice. As if, after everything that’s been done to me, I were still expected to silently accept what’s being imposed… As if silence were part of the reparation. It isn’t. Silence was part of the violence. And it continues to hurt when it is demanded again.”

One woman who asked not to be named, who claims she was raped by a priest when she was a novice in religious life, echoed these sentiments.

In 2023 she received a letter from the bishop of the priest she claims abused her, informing her that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith had decided not to lift the statute of limitations to prosecute her alleged abuser after “taking into account that there have been no other allegations against the accused priest,” and “the fragile psychological state of the alleged victim, which makes it inadvisable to subject her to the vicissitudes of legal proceedings.”

The Pillar confirmed the authenticity of the document, which includes recommendations from the bishop that the priest pray the Rosary every day for victims, cut down on his time spent on social media, and travel less.

The alleged abuser remains a priest in good standing in the diocese. The former novice received one of the highest compensations awarded by the process, around 40,000 euros. But, she said, she is aware that because she can’t now file a claim against her alleged abuser, he is unlikely to face any kind of personal consequence for his actions.

Peace over justice

The Pillar spoke to one of many women who claim to have been subjected to indecent behavior by Canon Fernando Sousa e Silva, a priest in Joane, in the Archdiocese of Braga, where she grew up.

“He would make us lie with our head on his lap when we went to confession, and he sometimes masturbated in front of us as well,” she alleged.

While the woman received compensation, some claimants connected to the priest did not, seemingly because the details of their specific situation did not meet the legal framework of sexual abuse.

But the woman said does not regret her decision not to ask for compensation.

“I preferred peace to justice,” she told The Pillar.

Last Wednesday evening, as the Church was under the firestorm of criticism over its handling of the compensation cases, the Archdiocese of Braga published a statement saying that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith had decided not to lift the canonical statute of limitations in the case of Canon Fernando Sousa e Silva, who at 93 is now free to exercise his ministry again despite the numerous allegations against him.

“It’s a ridiculous situation, but what can I say? I’ll just have to check when he is celebrating Mass so that I can avoid going to Church on those days,” said the alleged victim.

Another alleged abuse victim told The Pillar he was abused at 13. His faith and commitment to the Church remained unphased, he told The Pillar, and when he was already married, he confided to his bishop about what had happened.

“I didn’t want to make waves or cause a scandal. I just wanted to make sure that they didn’t let him do this to anyone else,” he said. “The bishop listened very attentively, and was very kind. But nothing changed. Later I told his successor. He was also very friendly, and told me about other problems he had with that priest, but again, nothing was done.”

The victim told his story to the Independent Commission, and when the compensation process began, he tried to get in touch, but says he was never contacted after filling out an online contact form.

“I didn’t do it for the compensation,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that the situation was not forgotten. After all these years I get the feeling that it was precisely because I always made it clear that I didn’t want to make a fuss that the Church didn’t act. They always told me how they regretted what had happened to me, but what is that worth if they didn’t take any concrete action?”

The priest who allegedly abused him was given a post in the diocesan ecclesiastical court at one point, but since the arrival of a third bishop in the diocese he is currently listed as not having any assignment.

According to the bishops’ conference, 95 people applied for financial compensation, of whom 78 were considered initially eligible. Eleven of those claims were later rejected, and 66 cases approved for compensation.

Fifty-seven have had compensation already awarded, and nine others are pending analysis. One case was still awaiting a judicial decision by the Holy See when the bishops issued their statement.

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It’s the second Tuesday of Easter, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.

Look, I know what you want me to write about. And I’ll get there. But we’re going to do first things first today, and maybe that’s all in God’s providence.

So let me tell you that today is the feast of Blessed Peter Gonzalez.

Peter — who is sometimes called Elmo — was born into a noble Spanish family in 1190, which means he was just nine years younger than St. Francis.

But Peter’s young life was even more privileged than that of Francis.

Peter was well-educated, raised for leadership, taught horsemanship and swordplay and culture and languages. He spent a couple of years sowing wild oats, as rich young men sometimes do. And then his uncle — a powerful and connected Spanish bishop — told Peter to settle down, get ordained, and become a canon in the cushy cathedral of Palencia.

He was too young to be a cathedral canon, but his uncle pulled some strings, aiming to set Peter up for a life of comfortable ecclesial nobility. His uncle hung benefices around his neck, and aimed to get him a gig in a royal or noble court.

Peter wasn’t a very good priest, but he didn’t seem especially to care about priesting, either.

He was confident, vain, and prideful. He lived for himself.

And then one day, Peter was riding into Palencia on a magnificent (expensive) horse. The horse stumbled in the street, and Peter — for all his vanity — fell right off that horse, into the mud of a medieval city street. Don’t forget, people emptied chamber pots into those streets. And there was Peter in the muck.

Here’s the worst part. Peter’s own people — the Palencia crowds who worshipped at the cathedral, where Peter was supposed to be their priest — laughed at him. Not one of them helped him up.

Peter got up alone, humiliated and dirty, and walked into the cathedral rectory.

And then for a reason I can’t give you — a reason that only was grace — Peter withdrew to a hermitage, a kind of retreat house outside the city. I think maybe he was just embarrassed at the public humiliation.

He was Peter freakin’ Gonzalez, and he’d been laughed at like a fool.

Somehow God worked through that. Whatever his plans were, Peter stayed away for a year. He learned to pray. I think he went to confession (though I have a lot of questions about how confession worked in 12th century Spain.)

He came back a different man. Like another rich young man was once advised to do, Peter sold everything he had. I’ll bet he gave the money to the poor. And to follow after Jesus, he became a Dominican friar.

Peter was a priest already, a nobleman, educated and accomplished, but he started in the novitiate, and he learned the contemplative and missionary patterns of religious life.

But becoming a Dominican then was not the kind of thing a noble family hoped for their son. And Peter’s family tried to convince him to leave. But as I read it, he turned that around for them: “If you love me,” he’d tell his kinsmen and family members, “follow me!”

I don’t think anybody did.

Providence has its own logic. I don’t know what might have become of Peter-the-rich-young-man, whose uncle wanted to find him a place at court. But Peter-the-friar found himself in exactly that place.

See, Peter became the confessor in the court of King Ferdinand III of Castile, who himself became a saint.

Peter reformed the court; he made regular Mass a thing, and he tried to enforce public morality among the decadent courtiers who spent time around the king. When King Ferdinand went to battle, Peter went with, and he advocated that the Castilian troops refrain from pillaging cities, and that they treat their prisoners-of-war humanely.

For Peter, the trouble was this: Ferdinand was impressed with Peter. The king liked Peter; he gave him honors and an easy life.

Peter realized that his old sins — pride and vanity, especially — were creeping in. He was tempted to flattery and worldy supplication. Peter didn’t want to stay that close to power, if it would cost him his soul.

So Peter left court to become a circuit rider, traveling between shepherd camps in the hills to offer Mass and hear confessions. He started going to see their family members living in port cities, and became a kind of chaplain to Spanish and Portuguese sailors and seamen.

He died in his 50s, on April 14, 1246, in a city near the sea, living a very different life than the one into which he had been born.

Take from Peter’s story what you will. But I’ll tell you this. He put a lot aside to follow Jesus Christ. And he was so appreciated by those sailors, they kept telling his story, about the man who came to their ships and heard their confessions, and taught them to pray. On the docks and on ship decks, they called him their saint, long before he was beatified in the 1740s.

And I suspect he’s interceding now for those of us tempted to pride, to vanity, to taking comfort in office, and power, and the trappings which go with it.

May he intercede for each of us in need of conversion.

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The news

Last week, you’ll recall, a whole fracas emerged in the media about whether Cardinal Christophe Pierre had received some penumbra of a threat from U.S. Pentagon officials who were said to have made reference in the nuncio’s presence to the “Avignon papacy.”

If such reference occurred, reporting suggested, it could have been taken as a veiled suggestion that the U.S. would act coercively against the Holy See or the Roman Pontiff.

But catching all that requires some solid historical basis on why popes went to Avignon in the first place. So we here at The Pillar decided to fill you in.

If you’re wondering, here’s the info.

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The Peruvian bishops’ conference announced last week that its secretary general, Bishop Antonio Santarsiero, has temporarily stepped down from his position while an investigation is conducted following the emergence of abuse allegations against him.

The bishop is accused of sexually abusing several victims, including a minor.

And given that all this is happening in Pope Leo’s adopted home country, how things proceed will say a lot about the pontiff’s plan for episcopal accountability and due process.

Read up.

This Easter, transform how you accompany others on their journey to Christ. During the St. Paul Center’s Easter Challenge, receive weekly reflections from Dr. Jeff Morrow, Fr. Boniface Hicks, and the Mercedarian Sisters on how Jesus’ patient presence on the road to Emmaus shapes the way we accompany others today.

The Archdiocese of Chicago and the Chicago public school district are in a public disagreement over federal special education funds, which have been discontinued for Chicago Catholic schools for the remainder of the school year.

The archdiocese says that Catholic school students with learning differences — which can range from mild to quite significant —will see reading and math interventions cut in archdiocesan schools this year for as many as 800 students.

But there are very different accounts of how things got to this point. The archdiocese says that Catholic schools are being treated wrongly, that the situation could raise constitutional questions, and that it’s considering the prospect of litigation.

But the school district told us that Catholic school administrators were warned repeatedly they were spending their allocated funds too quickly, and that the pot would be empty before school was out for summer.

If you ask me, it’s part of the ordinary vocation of a Catholic school to provide necessary academic support for students with learning differences and disabilities. That’s not optional or an add-on, it’s a matter of justice, and it’s part of what it means for Catholics to be open to life.

So the discontinuation of services is a big deal — one which ruptures the covenant at the heart of Catholic education between students, parents, and educators.

In other words, this is a mission-critical issue for the Archdiocese of Chicago, and one which it likely aims to resolve as quickly as possible.

But is it a matter of administrative negligence, or is this a case of religious discrimination? Well, in Chicago, that depends on who you ask.

Here’s our report.

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Ok, I’ll write about Trump et al a bit below, but we do have some coverage of the national situation for you.

First, Edgar Beltran brings you a round up of international Church and state reactions to the emerging tension between President Trump and Pope Leo.

Next, Ed Condon brings you his analysis of the president’s effort to engage the pontiff as political figure.

I’ll bring you my thoughts in a minute.

But first, news of a different kind of electoral politics.

The bishops of the Chaldean Catholic Church announced April 12 that Archbishop Emil Nona has been elected Patriarch of Baghdad, leader of the Chaldean Catholic Church, taking the regnal name Paul III.

I had hopes to attend Nona’s first regnal Masses in Baghdad soon, but Mrs. Flynn asked me to wait on visiting Iraq until things cool down with its neighbor Iran. That’s a fair request, I think.

In any case, Nona — a close friend of prominent Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda — was among the most likely candidates if Warda himself was not elected or did not accept the patriarchal office.

But Nona is a significant figure in his own right. He was the Archeparch of Mosul in 2014, and forced in exile as ISIS took control of the area and Christians fled or were killed, leaving no flock in his archdiocese.

Nona said then that he had lost his archdiocese. He himself landed in Australia, and was appointed eventually to lead the Chaldean diaspora there. He is, by the account of Aussies who know him, a man of deep faith and good humor.

But he’s got a lot to deal with. The Chaldean Church is recovering from an extremely tumultuous period under the leadership of Cardinal Louis Sako, the prior patriarch, which culminated in Sako’s alleged cover-up of the financial and moral scandal involving Bishop Emmanual Shaleta, who is accused of taking hundreds of thousands from his own diocese.

Shaleta is now facing criminal charges. But Nona has some big decisions to make, which we’ll report on in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, his election is making waves for Chaldeans around the world.

One senior cleric put it this way: “It’s like we woke up, and the entire Church had changed.”

Stay tuned.

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Matters of morality

This has been a month for American Catholics.

After the brouhaha last week over Cardinal Pierre’s January meeting at the Pentagon, we saw on Sunday night President Trump post on social media a tweetstorm attack of criticism against Pope Leo, and then double down in rather wide-ranging comments to a reporter, which centered around the idea that the president is “not a fan” of the pontiff.

Those comments have prompted a wide range of responses. Outrage. Confusion (over the thread of logic running through the president’s remarks). Frustration. Disappointment.

To me, they were unsurprising. President Trump has a tendency to call out figures with whom he disagrees, and he disagrees with Pope Leo on the justice of the Iran war.

Sure, the president articulated that while also calling Pope Leo “soft on crime,” and taking credit for his papal election, but the post and comments struck me as basically Trump being Trump.

This is the guy people picked to be the president. Now, some are asking questions about his mental capacity, while others call him heroic, and some point out that whatever you get with Trump is, to them, better than what we might have gotten if he hadn’t won the ‘24 election.

In America — and according to the Church, for that matter — everyone has the right to make his own prudential judgment on such matters. So here we are.

Now, more troubling for me is the AI-generated picture Trump posted online, the one that shows him as a kind of divine physician, clad in something he might lifted from the set of “The Chosen” and holding some kind of light beam, while placing his healing hand on the forehead of a guy who looks a lot like John Stewart.

The flag waved behind him, while a supplicant prayed, a nurse stood by, and Charlie Sheen looked on piously in a camouflage cap.

There was also a random guy with a white beard and a ball cap (perhaps Moses or Elijah? Should we build a star-spangled tent for him?).

The picture struck most people, including me, as a Trumpish bit of blasphemy, in which POTUS shared some AI-created and trippy Trump/Christ mashup featuring a bald eagle, a Statue of Liberty/King Triton/St. Michael hybrid, and a couple of F-35s just for good measure.

After some pushback, Trump deleted the picture, and then asked us to believe that he had posted it because he thought it depicted him as a doctor — at which point Trump reminded the American public that he does actually “make people a lot better” by his largesse as president.

I read a great report the other day about how Kim Il Sung used some lessons from American Protestantism to create a three-generation religious cult of personality, and, well, suffice it to say, I think at least one necessary component is being willing to declaim your healing powers at every available opportunity, even when you’re supposed to be making excuses for a Jesus picture that your Jesus-loving supporters ain’t gonna like.

Anyway, all of that is what it is.

Trump is gonna Trump.

Trump is gonna Trump. You can no more expect otherwise than you can expect Italians to queue up politely and orderly for Holy Communion, or Ed Condon to accept the innovation of quartz watches, designated hitters, or the novelty of ballplayers wearing leather “mitts” on their catching hands.

And because Trump is gonna Trump, I’m also skeptical that this whole situation was some strategic play on the president’s part meant to achieve some particular political outcome, or that it will have a dramatic effect on the president’s electoral base, even the Catholics. Voters who support Trump have decided the benefits of the president outweigh his peculiarities, and they seem, to me at least, fairly resolute in that conclusion.

So because Trump is always gonna Trump, I’m far more interested in the situation of Vice President JD Vance.

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The Archdiocese of Chicago says the city’s public school system abruptly cut off federal funding for the services without warning, while officials with Chicago Public Schools say the archdiocese made the decision to cut services internally, after receiving repeated warnings that it was running through its allotted federal funds too quickly.

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For decades, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) has helped fund special education services for students with disabilities.

Under the law, local public school districts receive funding for student services. The school districts must give a proportionate share of that funding to private schools enrolling students with special needs.

The Archdiocese of Chicago said in a statement Friday that CPS had abruptly informed it that a number of support services would be discontinued, beginning April 13.

More than 800 students with a wide range of disabilities and learning differences in archdiocesan schools will be affected by the loss of support services, the archdiocese said. Discontinued services include support in math, reading, and writing.

“Inexplicably, CPS appears to have terminated IDEA services only in Catholic schools,” the archdiocese said. “We are not aware of any other non-public school system or individual school, religious or secular, whose IDEA services have been terminated.”

“It is not clear why Catholic schools are being treated differently, but our schools and our students have the right to be treated equally under the law. Any attempt by a government entity to unfavorably single out one religious group raises serious constitutional concerns.”

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Chicago Public Schools rejected the archdiocese’s characterization of the situation.

CPS said in a statement that its officials “repeatedly alerted Catholic school administrators that their spending trajectory was outpacing the funding allocation; they were on track to exhaust their allocated share of federal funds before the end of the school year.”

As a result, “the archdiocese made the decision to wind down academic interventions and retain focus on social work, speech, and other services,” CPS said.

“Any claim that the District has remained unresponsive or uncooperative is patently false and ignores months of direct consultation.”

A CPS official told The Pillar on Tuesday that the public school system has provided monthly budget updates to non-public school affiliates that receive federal IDEA funding.

Those budget updates have been provided to the Archdiocese of Chicago and other non-public school affiliates each month since September, the official said, with the most recent budget update given March 24.

The IDEA funds given to non-public institutions “are subject to reduction or termination once the allocated federal funds are exhausted, the official said.

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The Archdiocese of Chicago did not respond to The Pillar’s request for comment.

However, the archdiocese said in its statement that it only received notification about services ending “during the Holy Week holiday.”

“As recently as March 25, CPS informed the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office of Catholic Schools that services would be provided through the end of the year,” the archdiocese said.

The archdiocesan statement suggested that CPS may have mismanaged its funds.

“Under the IDEA, it is the responsibility of CPS to properly manage the funds supplied by the federal government. CPS assured us on March 25 that this program was fully funded through the end of the school year. CPS’ sudden claim two weeks later that it has no funds and must terminate the program raises serious questions about whether these federal funds have been properly managed,” the archdiocese said.

The Archdiocese of Chicago said its attempts to contact the CPS superintendent have gone unanswered. The archdiocese said it would consider legal action if the funding is not restored.

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CPS, for its part, reiterated the claim that the cut in services was a decision made by the archdiocese, after repeated budget alerts from the public school system.

“[T]he Archdiocese—exercising its independent authority—made the internal decision to reallocate their remaining funds. This meant ceasing contracted classroom instruction (via Catapult Learning, Chicago Home Tutor, and United Stand) in order to prioritize social work and speech services,” CPS said in its statement.

The Chicago Public School system said that the problem reflects a broader shortage of federal funds for special education services, combined with an increase in students who need the services.

Data has shown a significant national increase in post-pandemic diagnoses of learning differences and disabilities in school-aged children. Almost 8.2 million children in the United States were eligible for special education services in 2024, an increase of more than 900,000 since 2019.

“Federal IDEA funding has not increased for several years and this year related Title funds dropped by nearly $10 million for non-public affiliates,” CPS said in its statement.

“This drop in funding has been combined with an ongoing surge in students with disabilities across systems. The number of students requiring special education services among the non-public affiliates, primarily the Chicago Archdiocese, has grown by 200–300 every month.”

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President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, May 23, 2025. Credit: Evan Vucci/AP

In response to a question from a reporter on Sunday, then amplified in a post on social media, Trump described the pope as “WEAK”, and “terrible at Foreign Policy” [sic] while insisting that Leo was elected “only” as a consequence of the Trump presidency.

Trump had been asked about increasingly direct appeals for peace by the pope over the military strikes carried out by the United States and Israel against Iran and Lebanon. In response, the president called Leo “a very liberal person, and he’s a man that doesn’t believe in stopping crime,” declaring that “I’m not a fan of Pope Leo.”

Trump also claimed Leo “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have nuclear weapons” and “thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela.”

In response, both Church and government leaders from around the world have issued statements condemning the rhetorical attack on the pope by the American president.

Donald Trump has a lengthy record of provocative public statements and personal attacks on world leaders, and with the Vatican under Leo emerging as a consistent and increasingly strident critic of the war in Iran, there was, at least for some observers, a sense of inevitably to the president’s denunciation of the first American pope.

For his part, Leo has appeared unfazed, chuckling when asked about Trump’s comments and saying simply that he thought “very little” of the affair. “I think people who read will be able to draw their own conclusions.”

“I’m not a politician,” said Leo. “I’m not going to enter into a debate with him, my message has always been the same: to promote peace. And I say this for all the leaders of the world, not just him. Let us try to end wars and promote peace and reconciliation.”

If a vituperative outburst from the president was always a likely possibility, so too was the pope’s unwillingness to be drawn into an explicit war of words.

More curious, though, might be the president’s chosen lines of criticism aimed at Leo, and what they might suggest about Trump’s understanding of American Catholicism in the current American political context, and what he hopes to achieve by attacking Leo.

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The immediate context of Trump’s comments on Leo was, of course, the pope’s repeated criticisms of the war in Iran, with Leo having called on Catholics and people of good will on Saturday during a prayer vigil to help “break the demonic cycle of evil” and place themselves “at the service of the Kingdom of God. A Kingdom in which there is no sword, no drone, no vengeance, no trivialization of evil, no unjust profit, but only dignity, understanding and forgiveness.”

Condemning the “delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive,” Leo lamented that “even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death,” with the pope having previously pushed back on claims by Trump administration officials that God was supposedly on the American side of the conflict, and directly challenged as “unacceptable” threats by the president of civilizational death in Iran.

In response, Trump said on Sunday that Leo supposedly thought it was “OK” for Iran to possess nuclear weapons, and linked previous papal concern over military action to abduct and detain Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro as proof the pope is “weak” on crime because of the Maduro regime’s role in narcotics trafficking.

Interestingly, and unexpectedly, Trump also made repeated references to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions on religious worship, and suggested they were a more pressing concern for American Catholics, and a better issue for the pope to focus on, while also touting his alleged handling of the economy.

At first glance, Trump’s choice of topics might seem a somewhat bizarre grab bag of issues, only loosely connected among themselves and even less so in direct response to the pope’s various remarks in favor of peace and military de-escalation.

But another reading of the president’s salvo against Leo is that it is a calculated political move aimed at shoring up domestic support for the administration across a variety of policy issues, in the face of an overseas military conflict widely seen as at odds with the isolationist tendencies of his own supporters.

Across all three of his presidential election campaigns, Trump has defined himself and his political appeal as adversarial — engaging in personal attacks on political opponents like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden as a means of crystalizing a range of policy issues into a personal binary.

Ahead of a mid-term election later this year, and in the absence of a clear national political opponent to campaign against, it is possible Trump has determined that the first American pope is the only figure of sufficient stature to define himself against.

And although Pope Leo has made it clear he is not a politician, it could be that Donald Trump has decided that is what he needs the pope to be.

While offensive to many, and baffling to others, it may prove an effective strategy, at least among some American Catholics and voters.

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It is worth recalling that since the beginning of Trump’s second term in office, the Catholic hierarchy in the United States has been unusually unified and robust in its engagement with the White House.

In the early months of last year, the U.S. bishops’ conference was forced to sue the administration over the cancellation of refugee resettlement contracts administered by Catholic agencies, leaving the USCCB millions of dollars out of pocket. The White House, including through the Catholic vice president, JD Vance, accused the USCCB of using the resettlement of “illegal immigrants” to pad its “bottom line.”

At their November plenary meeting, the bishops passed unanimously a joint statement denouncing the administration’s campaign of immigration enforcement actions in cities across the country, with Pope Leo weighing in to support them and — while stressing that the Church affirms the right of nations to control and police their borders — decrying violations of human rights and due process.

Along the way, the Trump administration’s support for IVF treatments and mail-order abortion drugs, coupled with the removal of a Republican Party commitment to ending abortion, has seen institutional pro-life support bleed away from the administration.

Since the new year, the administration has also faced both the unpopularity of foreign military interventions — again opposed by Church authorities including Pope Leo — resulting in a now-famous and famously contentious meeting between the apostolic nuncio and the Pentagon.

At the same time, Democratic leadership has — as is expected of the opposition party — opposed the Trump administration, but without producing a single figure around whom opposition can rally, or with whom they can identify, and remained internally divided over controversial and unpopular social issues like transgenderism.

From a certain perspective, then, the American Catholic hierarchy united behind Pope Leo has emerged, in the eyes of some at least, as a kind of credible political opposition voice almost by default — with a special significance given to the words of the pope since senior administration figures like Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are public Catholics.

If this perspective is shared by Trump, and the directness with which he attacked Pope Leo on Sunday suggests at least that it might be, the terms of Trump’s outburst appear less spontaneous and perhaps more calculated at trying to force a crack between populist Catholic voters and the Church’s hierarchy, while placing Trump in his preferred position of a battle of public personalities.

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Shortly after posting his denunciation of the pope on social media, and with condemnations already pouring in, Trump appeared to deploy another of his preferred tactics in upping the stakes, posting an AI image of himself as Jesus — since deleted.

For many — most especially for many Catholics — the response online was outrage and offense, by no means unfamiliar reactions to Trump political messaging. There was, too, predictably, a move to rally around Trump from among his most committed supporters, including a section of Evangelical Christianity which is itself reflexively hostile to both the Catholic Church and the figure of the pope.

But, at the same time, conciliatory efforts by some Catholics may also help along a bid by the White House to refocus MAGA-minded Catholics. Few would have predicted that among the first major figures to qualify their criticism of Trump’s anti-Leo salvo would be a prominent American bishop.

Writing on twitter.com on Monday morning, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester called Trump’s statements about the pope “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful.”

“It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life,” said Barron, while allowing that “in regard to the concrete application of those principles, people of good will can and do disagree,” and expressing his hope that Catholics in the administration like Vance and Rubio press for real dialogue with the Vatican.

From there, though, Barron’s statement appeared to pivot sharply to praising Trump’s record, saying “I am very grateful for the many ways that the Trump administration has reached out to Catholics and other people of faith. It has been a high honor to serve on the Religious Liberty Commission. No President in my lifetime has shown a greater dedication to defending our first liberty.”

“All that said,” Barron concluded, “I think the President owes the Pope an apology.”

It is worth noting that no other U.S. bishop made any similar qualification in decrying Trump’s attack on Pope Leo, including the USCCB president Archbishop Paul Coakley. But Barron’s formulation did appear to engage most closely with some of Trump’s claims in his attack on the pope — for example appearing to affirm the president’s claim to being a champion of religious freedom in the context of pandemic restrictions.

That avenue of response is likely to be taken up, albeit with different cadences, by prominent Catholics within and around the administration in the coming days, as they seek to create a distinction between the president’s “regrettable” rhetoric and while claiming Catholic bona fides for his policies.

In doing so, it seems highly likely that they would also seek to contextualize serious and substantive concerns and criticisms by the pope of administrative action — like the conflict in Iran — as part of a mutual exchange between Leo and Trump, as though they were equal participants in a performative public clash of personalities, rather than a one-sided salvo from Trump.

If that narrative could be successfully advanced, it could serve to blunt the force of the Church’s urgent moral concerns, expressed either by the Vatican or the American bishops’ conference, and turn the pope into a usual political strawman for the midterm elections.

Such a Trump political strategy could, in turn, could be further helped along if some senior U.S. clerics, like the three cardinals who recently granted an interview to 60 Minutes, allow themselves to become presented as overtly partisan voices in American politics, rather than apolitical champions of the Gospel.

How equipped the hierarchy is to anticipate all of this, and avoid being turned into a political foil to the White House, remains to be seen.

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Trump’s comments have earned widespread criticism from political leaders and Catholic bishops, with Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the U.S. bishops’ conference, saying Sunday night he was “disheartened that the president chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father.”

In a Truth Social post on April 12, President Donald Trump said that “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

“He talks about ‘fear’ of the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services,” Trump added.

The president then criticized the pope’s stance on the war on Iran and the U.S. operation in Venezuela.

“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country,” Trump wrote.

Trump also said the pope should be thankful for him because he was elected because “he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

“Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!,” he added.

At a press gaggle Sunday night, the president doubled down on that post.

“I don’t think [Pope Leo’s] doing a very good job. He likes crime, I guess. … he hit us … Think of it. He’s worried about fear. What about the fear when the ministers and the priests and the — all of those great people that were arrested during Covid, and in many cases they’re outside 10 feet apart, and they were arrested, so… we don’t like a pope that’s gonna say that it’s ok to have a nuclear weapon. We don’t want a pope that says crime is ok in our cities. I don’t like it,” Trump told a reporter.

“I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo. He’s a very liberal person, and he’s a man that doesn’t believe in stopping crime. He’s a man that doesn’t think that we should be toying with a country that wants a nuclear weapon so they can blow up the world. So I’m not a fan of Pope Leo.”

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For his part, the pope was asked about Trump’s post during his Monday morning flight to Algeria, the first leg of a 10-day trip to Africa.

Pope Leo told reporters: “I am not a politician, and I do not want to enter into a debate with [Trump]. I do not think the message of the Gospel should be abused as some are doing. I continue to speak strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, dialogue, and multilateralism among states to find solutions to problems.”

“I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do,” he added.

Several Church officials in the U.S. and Italy have criticized Trump’s comments.

Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, president of the USCCB, said in a statement Sunday night: “I am disheartened that the president chose to write such disparaging words about the Holy Father. Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.”

Meanwhile, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester struck a different tone.

Barron said that “the statements made by President Trump on Truth Social regarding the pope were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful. They don’t contribute at all to a constructive conversation,” adding that he “would warmly recommend that serious Catholics within the Trump administration–Secretary Rubio, Vice President Vance, Ambassador Brian Burch, and others–might meet with Vatican officials so that a real dialogue can take place.”

Barron also took the occasion to thank the Trump administration for reaching out “to Catholics and other people of faith. It has been a high honor to serve on the Religious Liberty Commission. No President in my lifetime has shown a greater dedication to defending our first liberty.

“All that said, I think the President owes the Pope an apology,” he concluded.

Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington also published a statement saying that “Along with Archbishop Coakley, President of the USCCB, and my brother bishops, I was disheartened by recent comments from President Trump concerning Pope Leo XIV and the Church.”

“I pray that civility and respect are fully restored as together, with God’s grace, we work for peace and harmony among all people. May we also be united in our prayer for the end of war and violence so that Christ’s peace reigns throughout the world and in our hearts.”

The undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, Fr. Antonio Spadaro SJ, also wrote on twitter.com criticizing Trump’s comments.

“When political power turns against a moral voice, it is often because it cannot contain it… The Pope… cannot be reduced to the grammar of force, security, or national interest.”

“In this sense, the attack is a declaration of impotence. Unable to absorb that voice, power tries to delegitimize it. Yet in doing so, it implicitly acknowledges its weight. If Leo were irrelevant, he would not deserve a word. Instead, he is invoked, named, opposed—a sign that his words matter,” Spadaro added.

Meanwhile, Cardinal Baldo Reina, cardinal vicar of Rome, published a statement saying that “uniting ourselves to the feelings of the people of God in the Diocese of Rome, I also express my solidarity and confirm my absolute support for our bishop, Pope Leo XIV, who is facing puzzling attacks against his magistery of peace.”

“The Gospel of the Beatitudes is the substance of the mission of the Church, and no one and nothing, bewitched by the illusory echo of arrogance, can become an obstacle to that proclamation,” the cardinal added.

International and American politicians also criticized Trump for his comments on the pope.

Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini — widely considered to lead the most conservative faction of Italy’s right-leaning government coalition — wrote Monday that “If anyone is working hard on the issue of peace and conflict resolution, it’s Pope Leo. Attacking the pope, a symbol of peace and a spiritual guide for billions of Catholics, doesn’t seem like a useful or intelligent thing to do.”

“It has been centuries since such a blatant act of aggression against the Roman Pontiff was seen,” said Italy’s former center-left Prime Minister Matteo ​Renzi.

The left-leaning mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, said that “Rome supports Pope Leo. Donald Trump’s attacks on his elevated spiritual magisterium and on his commitment to peace are unacceptable and wound sensitivities and consciences. The city of Rome, uniquely bound to its Bishop, firmly reaffirms the values of respect, dialogue, and peace.”

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said on twitter.com “On Orthodox Easter, President Trump attacked the Pope because the Pope is rightly against Trump’s war in Iran and then he posted this picture of himself as if he is replacing Jesus.”

“This comes after last week’s post of his evil tirade on Easter and then threatening to kill an entire civilization. I completely denounce this and I’m praying against it!!!,” the former representative added.

House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said on twitter.com that “Donald Trump shamefully attacked His Holiness Pope Leo XIV. People of faith will never worship a wannabe King. We worship an almighty GOD.”

Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) added: “As a Catholic, I find it abhorrent that the President of the United States would publicly attack the Successor of St. Peter. Donald Trump is flailing. His war in Iran has led to the death and injury of American servicemembers and the death of Iranian children.”

“He will attack anyone or anything to try to protect himself, even the Church that millions of Americans find faith and comfort in every day. The American people deserve a president who understands the consequences of his words and takes responsibility for his actions,” the senator concluded.

Iran’s president Maround Perezhkian also posted on twitter.com saying that he condemned “the insult to [Pope Leo] on behalf of the great nation of Iran, and declare that the desecration of Jesus, the prophet of peace and brotherhood, is not acceptable to any free person. I wish you glory by Allah.”

Meanwhile, Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez said that “while some fill the war with war, Leo XIV sows peace with courage. It will be an honor to receive him in Spain in a few weeks.

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The conference said in a statement that it “is making every necessary effort to clarify the complaint, acting according to the established protocols and civil and canonical legislation in force.”

The statement also said that “possible affected persons can go to the recognized listening channels, according to the provisions of the motu proprio Vos estis lux mundi.”

Spanish website InfoVaticana recently published an article accusing Santarsiero, the Italian-born 74-year-old bishop of Huacho, of sexually abusing several victims, including a minor.

The website said it had access to a notarized letter sent to the apostolic nunciature in Peru on March 31 recounting several instances of sexual and psychological abuse allegedly perpetrated by Santarsiero. The alleged victims had already filed complaints against Santarsiero in 2024 and 2025, the article said.

One of the complaints was reportedly made by a layman from a rural town near Huacho, who said Santarsiero started abusing him when he was still underage after he entered the diocese’s minor seminary.

The complaint reportedly said that the abuse continued for years and included prolonged hugs and genital touching, while Santarsiero allegedly pressured the man to stay silent by promising a scholarship and employment in the diocese.

According to InfoVaticana, a priest who worked as Santarsiero’s secretary has also accused the bishop of “sexually explicit conduct,” psychological manipulation, and retaliation when he resisted his advances.

The priest claims to have sent a report to then-prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, Cardinal Robert Prevost in November 2024, and then again in December 2025 to Prevost after he had been elected pope, but says he did not receive a response, InfoVaticana said.

Asked by InfoVaticana to respond to the allegations, Santarsiero said that he had never before heard of the accusations against him and had never been officially notified of them.

“Therefore, it is not possible for me to respond to these accusations. I can’t respond to them precisely without concrete information,” Santarsiero said.

“Nevertheless, I strongly deny the conduct attributed to me, the accusations of sexual abuse and psychological mistreatment you indicate, as they contradict my trajectory and principles as priest and bishop.”

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Santarsiero is the latest in a series of Peruvian bishops to have been accused of misconduct or cover-up in recent years.

The Pillar broke the news in June 2025 that the Archdiocese of Lima was accused of mishandling an investigation into Fr. Nilton Zárate Rengifo, who had been accused of harassing a religious sister, solicitation in the confessional, and attempted absolution of an accomplice in a sexual sin, but had not been subject to a formal canonical process.

After the allegations against Zárate broke, the priest sent a letter to Lima’s Cardinal Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio formally requesting his dismissal from the clerical state.

In 2020, Castillo appointed Fr. Luis Sarmiento as rector of the archdiocesan seminary, despite the fact that he had in 2018 been dismissed as a formator, because of a pattern of inappropriate behavior with seminarians.

About a year after his 2020 return to the seminary as rector, Sarmiento was accused of sexual misconduct by a number of seminarians. Instead of opening a canonical investigation against the rector, Castillo opted to dismiss the seminarians who came forward with the allegations, keeping Sarmiento in his post until 2023.

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Spanish outlet El País reported in January 2025 that Castillo’s predecessor in the Peruvian capital, Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, was the subject of a Vatican-imposed penal precept restricting his ministry following accusations of sexual abuse dating back to the early 1980s, first raised in 2018.

Cipriani originally claimed in a January 2025 statement that the precept was imposed only verbally, but he later admitted that he did receive — and sign — written notice of a penal precept which imposed formal restrictions on his public ministry and living arrangements in 2019, shortly after his resignation was accepted at the age of 75.

However, Cipriani claims that Pope Francis verbally lifted the restrictions on his ministry in a Feb. 4, 2020 private audience that was not recorded in the Vatican’s daily bulletin. Francis reappointed Cipriani as a member of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints the following year.

Cipriani has previously said that his freedom to continue in public ministry was obvious, and that he had engaged in “extensive pastoral activity” in the years after his 2020 papal audience, including “preaching spiritual retreats, administering sacraments, etc.”

In September 2025, Bishop Ciro Quispe López of the Territorial Prelature of Juli resigned after an apostolic visitation in his diocese, which investigated allegations of corruption and misconduct against him.

Several media reports claimed that Quispe had a number of female romantic partners, including religious sisters and novices. The bishop was also accused of stealing $25,000 intended for a UN-funded social program in the city of Juli.

Additional allegations include awarding inflated contracts from the prelature to some of his romantic partners, including an architect hired for several diocesan projects.

According to local media reports, Quispe is also said to have removed furniture from a diocesan retreat center and transferred it to a chicken barbecue restaurant he owned in another city.

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On a rocky outcrop on the river’s left bank stands a Gothic building that is one of the most important papal edifices outside of Rome. It is the Palace of the Popes, where seven successive French pontiffs resided during the 14th century.

This was the headquarters of the Avignon Papacy, a phenomenon that became an unlikely talking point this week.

It began with a report on a January meeting between Pentagon staff and the then-nuncio Cardinal Christophe Pierre.

“As tensions escalated, one U.S. official went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority,” it said.

Subsequent reports cast doubt on whether the Avignon Papacy was actually mentioned. Nevertheless, the news cycle left Catholics around the world struggling to remember what, exactly, the Avignon Papacy was.

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The beginning

The Catholic Encyclopedia says bluntly that at the start of the 14th century, Avignon was “a town of no great importance.” But that was about to change.

The trigger was the death of Pope Benedict XI in 1304 in Perugia, then located in the Papal States. The cardinals were summoned to the city to elect a successor. There were only 19 living cardinals at the time; only 15 of them made it to the conclave.

As the cardinals were divided into pro- and anti-French factions, they struggled to agree on a candidate. It took them almost a year to reach a decision. They opted for a non-cardinal: Raymond de Got, the archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the name Pope Clement V.

The cardinals asked the French pope to join them in Perugia and then travel to Rome for his coronation. He declined, ordering them instead to join him in Lyon, for a ceremony attended by Philip IV of France, known as “the Iron King” because of his inflexibility.

The event in Lyon was not exactly auspicious. As Pope Clement processed through the city, a wall collapsed, knocking him off his horse, damaging the papal tiara, and killing his brother and an elderly cardinal.

Clement V’s pontificate had an unsettled start. He moved from Bordeaux to Poitiers to Toulouse, before arriving in 1309 at a Dominican priory in Avignon, which at the time belonged to the King of Naples as Count of Provence, but lay within the borders of the Kingdom of France.

This was the start of the Avignon papacy.

The middle

Misfortune stalked Clement V even after his death in 1314. According to one account, as his body lay in state in a church, lightning struck, setting fire to his body and burning it to a crisp.

The conclave to elect his successor was agonizingly long, because by now there were three factions among the cardinals: Italian, Gascon (southwestern France), and Provençal (southeastern France). The Italians wanted to return the papacy to Rome, the Gascons to retain privileges they had acquired under Pope Clement, and the Provençal group to block the ambitions of the other two groups.

After much strife, a compromise candidate emerged in 1316: Jacques Duèze, a small, thin, and serious Frenchman who took the name John XXII.

The second Avignon pope was followed in 1334 by a third: Benedict XII, who began building the grand papal palace in the city.

Benedict XII was in turn succeeded in 1342 by Clement VI, whose reign coincided with the arrival of the Black Death, a pandemic that would kill up to 50 million people. Despite the austere times, Clement spent extravagantly, expanding the palace with a new grand chapel, and commissioning lavish frescoes with hunting and fishing scenes for the older rooms. In 1348, he bought the city of Avignon from Joanna I of Naples for 80,000 florins.

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The fifth Avignon pope was Innocent VI, who ruled for a decade, from 1352 to 1362, catching some flak from St. Bridget of Sweden for his harsh treatment of the Spiritual Franciscans, a movement committed to strict poverty.

Innocent VI was followed in 1362 by Urban V, the only Avignon pope to be recognized as blessed. Urban succeeded in traveling to Rome in 1367, becoming the first pope to reach his own diocese in 60 years. But he fell ill and died on his return to Avignon.

The end

The seventh and last Avignon pope was Gregory XI, who was elected in 1370. He was the recipient of letters from St. Catherine of Siena, berating him for his hesitation in returning the papacy to Rome.

“Be manly and not fearful,” she wrote in one letter. “Answer God who is calling you to take possession of the place of the glorious shepherd, St. Peter, who you represent. Restore to Holy Church the heart of burning charity which she has lost: she is all pale because iniquitous men have drained her blood. Come, Father!”

In 1377, Gregory packed up and left for the Eternal City. He died not long after he arrived and was succeeded by an Italian pope, Urban VI. The Catholic Church then experienced the disaster known as the Western Schism, where churchmen living in Rome and Avignon simultaneously claimed to be rightful popes.

The era of the antipopes would only end in 1417, with the election of Pope Martin V as the sole, universally recognized pope.

No Frenchman has been elected pope since Gregory XI. The papal palace at Avignon was sacked during the French Revolution, used as a barracks and prison under Napoleon, and converted into a museum in 1906.

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Happy Friday friends, and a very happy Easter to you all.

I love the octave, the idea of eight days being a single liturgical moment, so great is the feast of the Resurrection’s power and significance that it cannot be contained.

I love, too, the idea of a week — an entire season of 50 days, even — of compulsory feasting.

Feasting and fasting are things I find equally hard to keep to as physical disciplines. I’m hardwired to my daily groove and it takes more effort than I am, to my shame, usually willing to make to force myself into a deliberately out-of-the-normal rhythm of life for any extended period.

But, as an internal disposition, I find it easier by far to live in the headspace of Lent than Easter, defaulting more to self-examination and reproach, as opposed to gratitude and joy.

It is no light command to feast long and to linger in the moment of grace. We all have different pulls on us, I suppose. For some, it’s a disordered sense of humility, or even unworthiness, a discomfort with looking the resurrected Christ full in the face and saying “He is risen for me.”

For others, myself included, there is always a nagging voice that says “get back to work,” lest some unarticulated thing happen — the work dries up, the house falls over, or whatever else it may be.

At the root of all of this is a discomfort, a very human discomfort, with the superabundance of God’s gratuitous love: How can we possibly spend 50 days feasting, how can anyone justify that? And justification is the operative word, I suppose.

My greatest temptation is to self-justification, and like all terrible temptations it cuts all sorts of ways, leading me to try to mitigate my own sins as much as allow myself only as much joy as I think I have earned.

Of course, this time of feasting is not justified by me but by Him. To demur is, really, to decline my invitation to join Christ. How then can one refuse — and if I do, what is any of this for?

So, I say again, happy Easter. Whatever is going on with you, please, I hope you’ll make space for joy. I certainly will, because I need it, and because it is our Christian duty.

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Here’s the news — and fair warning we have a very lot of it this week, so get comfortable.

The News

Pope Leo XIV will make his first trip to Africa next week, visiting Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, and Cameroon from April 13 to April 23.

The Algerian leg of the trip — a papal first — is of some special significance, since Leo is expected to visit Annaba, the site of the former city of Hippo, where Saint Augustine served as a bishop.

Ahead of the papal trip, Edgar Beltran spoke this week with Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, secretary of the section of first evangelization and new particular churches of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization.

Born in Nigeria and ordained a priest in 1984, Nwachukwu entered the Vatican diplomatic corps in 1994, serving in nunciatures around the world – including in Algeria for several years – and in the Secretariat of State. His is, as you might expect, a fascinating perspective.

Read the whole conversation here.

—

Also ahead of the papal trip to Africa next week, it is worth recalling that Christians in Nigeria once again celebrated Holy Week and Easter against the backdrop of violence.

We have a round up of what we know about this year’s Holy Week and Easter attacks, and I would encourage you to read it, if for no other reason than to pray for our brothers and sisters living through constant and bloody persecution.

That story is here.

—

Pentagon and Vatican officials have insisted that a January meeting with the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio and the Department of Defense was a constructive and frank conversation and that no threats were made or implied by U.S. officials against the Vatican.

According to an article this week in the Free Press, defense officials were “enraged” by a speech made by Pope Leo XIV to the Vatican diplomatic corps earlier that month which was interpreted as a “hostile message directed at Trump’s policies.”

Citing Pentagon and Vatican sources briefed about the meeting, the article claimed “one U.S. official went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.”

The Pillar spoke to senior officials, both in the Pentagon and the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, and while no one recalled anyone saying anything about Avignon, it is fair to say there were still varied impressions of the meeting — some called it “cordial,” others “tense” and “aggressive.”

But both sides agreed there was a robust discussion of real issues.

Read all about it here.

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The bishops of the Chaldean Catholic Church began meeting in Rome on Thursday, with the aim of electing the next patriarch of their Eastern Catholic Church.

The Chaldean Church was rocked last month by the announcement that Pope Leo had accepted the unexpected resignation of Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, who had been the Chaldean Church’s leader since February 2013 and was expected to continue for the foreseeable future.

In an analysis this week, JD took a look at the current make up of the Eastern Church’s governing synod and who the main candidates are to replace Sako — and as he notes, this isn’t a straightforward calculus.

There are real questions of history, culture, and even geography at play here, as much as theology, liturgy, and ecclesiology.

Read the whole thing.

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Archbishop Richard Moth was formally installed as the new Archbishop of Westminster earlier this year, becoming at the same time the de facto leader of the Church in England and Wales.

This week, ​​fresh from presiding at his first Triduum as archbishop, he spoke with Luke Coppen, and discussed whether there are signs of a “quiet revival” in English Catholicism, what he makes of Belgian Bishop Bonny’s plan to ordain married men, and if England’s diocesan boundaries will be redrawn.

This is a fascinating conversation, with some bonus watch chat in there too. Don’t miss it.

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In and amidst all the back and forth and controversy over who said what to whom when the nuncio went to the Pentagon, one thing is clear: what the American pope has to say matters a great deal to the American government.

And, while it is known that Leo will not be returning to the U.S. this year, either for the 250th anniversary celebrations or the beatification of Fulton Sheen, the question now is — when will Pope Leo come home?

In an analysis this week, I took a look at some of the factors, but stateside and in the Vatican, which will weigh in the balance. But most of all, I concluded, it comes down to what kind of pope Leo wants to be, what his vision for his home country is, and where he sees himself in all of it.

I’m not sold on the received wisdom that a pope cannot and should not be an active voice in the public affairs of his homeland — and I can think of some fairly obvious recent examples to the contrary.

You can read the whole thing.

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Since Pope Leo was elected last year, 14 cardinals have turned 80, aging out of eligibility to participate in the next papal conclave.

In fact, the number of cardinal electors around the world has fallen to 121, just one above the limit set by norms promulgated by Pope St. John Paul II for the election of a pope. And several more cardinals are set to age out of their conclave voting rights in the next few months.

All this being said, at some point Leo is going to name his first slate of new red hats, and Edgar Beltran took a look at who Leo might be thinking of, and what kind of cardinal he’ll be looking for.

Read the whole analysis here.

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An Indian bishop has expressed relief after 10 members of a religious congregation were released after being briefly detained at a railway station in response to an allegation of human trafficking.

The detentions occurred April 7, when a group from the Sisters of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary entered Indore Junction railway station in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

The party consisted of two sisters and eight candidates, who are discerning their vocation within the Syro-Malabar religious congregation. The candidates were scheduled to take a train from Indore to the eastern Indian state of Odisha, to spend a vacation with their families. Police detained the party as soon as it arrived at the station, having received an allegation of human trafficking of the candidates.

The incident mirrors a similar arrest made in July last year against religious sisters in a train station, though in that case a mob of Hindu nationalists were also involved.

Thankfully this case resolved quickly and without further incident, though it highlights the kind of legal harassment Catholics face in some parts of the country.

Read the whole story.

—

The president of the Portuguese bishops’ conference confirmed this week that “significant cuts” were made to the recommendations from an independent commission for financial compensation packages to victims of clerical sexual abuse.

On Tuesday The Pillar broke the news that the Portuguese bishops’ conference voted in a February closed-door meeting to make cuts to the amounts proposed by an independent Compensation Determination Commission, which had been formed in 2024 by the bishops’ conference.

But until news reporting was published April 7 on the subject, the bishops’ conference had declined to confirm the cuts, telling The Pillar earlier this month only that “the final amounts attributed were defined in accordance with the procedural regulation, which allowed for a distinction between the technical report and the final decision” and “taking into consideration” the work of the CDC.

Read all about it here.

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Listening to Leo

Ok, so we all know the thing we have to talk about this week, so let’s just get right to it.

The Free Press reported that sometime in January, reportedly after and in direct response to the pope’s annual address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, the apostolic nuncio here in Washington, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, was summoned to the Pentagon for a meeting with a junior minister, where he was given a severe dressing down.

Reportedly, during the meeting, some even more junior staffer got a bit excited while trying to impress upon the nuncio how really really really big the American military is and brought up the Avignon papacy as an example of what could happen if the Holy See didn’t get on side.

Taken purely on its own terms, I found the Free Press story almost too entertaining to be believed.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the cut of Vatican diplomats — and Cardinal Pierre in particular — would know this kind of hyperbolic nonsense isn’t going to get you anywhere, and leave him only with the impression that you are not serious people.

The reported Avignon papacy reference and implied threat I found downright comical. What, exactly, was meant to be the threat implied? Delta Force is going to spirit Leo away in the night and make him prisoner of a puppet-state Vatican on Martha’s Vineyard?

If there is one diplomatic power in the world immune to implied military force or economic sanction, it’s the Holy See. And the more you attempt to browbeat or threaten the pope, the more moral authority you give him.

As you might expect, both the Pentagon and the Vatican have issued statements denying any such thing happened and, having spoken to quite a few people with pretty direct knowledge of the meeting, no one could corroborate the whole Avignon papacy thing — nor could they say for sure something wasn’t said, in some kind of innocent context.

I’m not, therefore, in a position to say it did or didn’t happen. I would say, though, that I do not believe this story came from the Vatican side of things.

If there is one class of person I am willing to claim I understand, it is curial civil servants. And while I would obviously never claim they don’t leak, they don’t tend to leak stories which make everyone involved look faintly ridiculous, or bring down a ton of scrutiny and pressure on their office to confirm or deny awkward details from the secular press.

And they absolutely don’t try to conduct state-to-state relations through press briefings.

If you ask me, the Avignon anecdote — real or invented — seems like the kind of embellishment you might get from a junior government staffer getting a bit big for his tan shoes and too-tight suit and playing fast and loose with his narration for a reporter. That’s just my gut check.

But, it is now a matter of public record that Cardinal Pierre did go to the Pentagon in January, and did meet with the undersecretary of defense, Elbridge Colby. From there, though, “recollections may vary” as the late Queen Elizabeth used to put it.

So, having talked with some people, here’s what I know and what I think.

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The trip will mark the first time Algeria has received a papal visit. Cameroon and Angola were last visited by a pope in 2009, when Pope Benedict XVI visited, while Equatorial Guinea was last visited by Saint John Paul II in 1982.

The Algerian leg of the trip will be of particular significance, as the pope is expected to visit Annaba, the site of the former city of Hippo, where Saint Augustine served as a bishop.

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The Pillar spoke about the significance of the pope’s first trip to Africa with Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu, secretary of the section of first evangelization and new particular churches of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization.

Born in Ntigha, Nigeria and ordained a priest in 1984, Nwachukwu entered the Vatican diplomatic corps in 1994, serving in nunciatures around the world – including in Algeria for several years – and in the Secretariat of State.

In 2012, he was appointed as apostolic nuncio to Nicaragua, a position he held until 2017, when he was made the apostolic nuncio to the English Caribbean, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles. In 2021, he became the Holy See’s Permanent Observer to the UN in Geneva, Switzerland, and has held his current office in the Dicastery for Evangelization since 2023.

The interview was edited for clarity and length.

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Why do you think the pope chose these specific countries for his first trip?

Our dicastery is not directly involved in the planning of the pope’s visit or in the decision concerning the countries the pope will visit. But the interesting thing is that all the countries that he is going to visit are territories under the jurisdiction of this dicastery. So, I can’t tell you why the pope chose them but I can tell you that they’re in a way representative of the entire continent.

In these countries you have four or five of the major languages spoken throughout the African continent. English and French are spoken in Cameroon, Portuguese in Angola, Spanish in Equatorial Guinea, and Arabic in Algeria. So, from the linguistic point of view, all these countries represent the entire African continent.

From the cultural point of view, you could also say that the pope is more or less covering a large part of the continent. Algeria is in the Maghreb, Northern Africa. Cameroon sits at a very strategic position, the meeting point between the Western and Eastern central parts of Africa. Further south, you have Angola, and Equatorial Guinea represents insular Africa, because the capital, Malabo, is on an island.

So we have all these elements making these countries representative, in a way, of the whole of Africa.

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You mention the linguistic and cultural diversity of these countries, but there also seems to be quite a bit of diversity with regards to the local Church. How would you describe the Church in these countries?

I served as the secretary of the apostolic nunciature to Algeria between 1999 to 2002, during a very difficult time for Algeria and especially for the Church in Algeria, due to the extremists who were trying to take power in the country, a civil war that ultimately ended in 2002. This is the time in which the now-beatified Trappist monks of Tibhire were martyred. The Bishop of Oran was also killed, two Spanish sisters were killed leaving Mass. It was a difficult time.

But thanks to God, the Algerian authorities were able gradually to take control, especially with the arrival of President Bouteflika, who then brought back order step-by-step. I am very happy today when I hear of the peace and the calm and the friendliness of the Algerian people these times. When I was there, it was a challenging period, not just for the Church, but also for Algerians in general, even for diplomats.

Algeria is almost 100% Muslim, with a very small Christian minority, but some of these communities have been there for a long time, and most of them are welcome in the midst of the broader Muslim communities. So, their mission is often a mission of presence and of charity. They’re there to show that Christianity still exists in this country.

We don’t have proselytism, it is not allowed in the country. What we have is a presence of witnessing, whereby if people want to embrace what makes you live in a particular way, that then is a choice of every individual. So it is an evangelization based on witnessing.

The Church in Cameroon is vibrant. It’s a majority Christian country, with slightly more Catholics than Protestants but with also a significant number of Muslims.

And then, Angola and Equatorial Guinea, for their colonial pasts with the Portuguese and the Spanish, they’re traditionally Catholic countries in which the Church is growing, developing, and vibrant. Vocational growth in Angola and Cameroon is particularly strong. In Equatorial Guinea, a little less, but it’s also a very small country.

Then, Algeria is an interesting case. We don’t have many vocations. We have some Indigenous Algerian vocations, we’ve even had local bishops, but what’s interesting is that we have some cases of Algerian priests who grew up in Spain or France and became priests there. And even if they grow up outside, they remain with their Algerian roots.

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These countries are widely considered authoritarian regimes, and there have been individual requests from activists, and even clergy, for the pope to cancel or postpone these trips in protest. Do you think this is advisable?

If the pope had to cancel trips because of the type of government, then I think the pope would not visit any country in the world, because there is no single country, whether it is in Europe, in the West, or anywhere, that has a perfect system.

If the pope were to cancel trips because of political sins, the pope also should cancel trips to countries that have unethical laws. The pope is a pastor and is the pastor of all sinners. The pope is going there to bring the message of Christ, and that is the message of love, the message of peace, the message of the common good, and the message that supports human life and dignity. Nobody is immune or is to be excluded from this message.

On the contrary, Jesus said in Matthew 9:13, “I have not come to the righteous but the sinners.” So, countries with problematic regimes are the ones that need the visit of the pope the most. We’ve seen time and time again how the presence of the pope has helped to improve the situation of the Church or of the society as a whole in a country. So maybe Pope Leo’s visits will open a small space so that the people can breathe some fresh air.

The pope is a universal pastor. How would you interpret the pope going to Algeria? The pope is Augustinian, he loves his Augustinian tradition, so he’s going to Annaba, what used to be Hippo, to visit where Saint Augustine was a bishop. Anybody would expect that of him. For him, this is going back to the source, going back to the fountain to allow yourself to be refreshed and to draw inspiration. So, for a person that is so profoundly Augustinian in his formation and spirituality, returning to Hippo is something of a particular spiritual significance.

I was just thinking of the pope’s homily at the Chrism Mass. He said that every Christian is invited to mission, and then he went on to speak about the three elements of the mission: detachment, dialogue, and sacrifice. And these are elements that every Christian needs in living out the mission of Jesus Christ.

And I think that the pope will be carrying that with him wherever he goes. He’ll be carrying it with him when he goes to Cameroon. He carries it with him when he goes to Angola. He carries it with him when he goes to Equatorial Guinea because Christians need the pope to remind us of what we are supposed to be missionaries of Jesus Christ.

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In several of these African countries, a lot of young people are migrating because of poverty or political persecution. What is the pope’s message of hope in this circumstance?

Just look at his personal life. He grew up in Chicago, became a mathematician, then was sent as a missionary to the jungle in Peru, then back to the U.S., then superior in Rome, then again bishop in Peru. The world is our home. That is the message to young people. Nothing and nobody should discourage you. So, watching the pope himself and seeing what the pope has been able to do despite moving around so much. Do not be hindered by particularly adverse situations.

We are able to harbor and grow talents in every place in the world, it doesn’t matter if the situation in our country is difficult. We can still grow in faith and in virtue. And then with due labor, working hard, trusting Jesus Christ, we’re going to be able to change our lives and transform our society.

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The Algeria part of the trip has a significant interreligious dimension, because it’s the sole Muslim country of the trip. Why does this dimension matter?

A major element in Algeria is the relationship between the Muslims and our minority Christian community. One thing the Church has to do constantly is to work on the relationship between the Muslim majority and the Christian minority.

The pope’s presence is essential to this end. There will be gestures and words that will favor, that will strengthen religious dialogue in the country. When I was in Algeria, our relationship with the government was good, it was easy for us to dialogue with them often and to present our concerns. That hasn’t changed much, especially now that there is less tension than there was 24 years ago when I left Algeria.

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What are the main challenges that the Church faces in these countries?

The major challenge for the Church in Algeria is having a space to exist and operate as a Christian community. The greatest danger of being a minority is being forgotten in the presence of a crushing majority. That could be a danger in a place like Algeria, that many Algerians might forget that this minority group here is different and should be respected in its difference and should not simply be glossed over or crushed.

That is a major challenge for a Christian community as a minority: The challenge of finding a calm space and environment to exist and to operate.

Now, the Church in Cameroon exists in an interreligious and ecumenical space, while in Angola and Equatorial Guinea as the majority religion. So the challenges of the Church are the challenges of the wider society: poverty, security, bad governance, corruption.

These are challenges that these countries have to confront politically and socially. People in politics and in the wider society in these countries profess themselves as Christians and as Catholics. This means that the problems and challenges of these people are also the challenges of the Church.

The thing is that while political parties and social groups quite often operate with different platforms, we Christians operate with a common platform, Jesus Christ, the word of God.

So we need a common meeting ground in trying to heal our ills. A big problem in these countries is the problem of discrimination along ethnic lines and tribal lines. This bears the seed of a lack of trust, which then brings violence and insecurity, and when you have violence and insecurity, society cannot progress.

Who can solve this issue? Politicians can’t do it because they pursue party interests and personal interests. Will the military do it? The military has good things. Our societies need discipline, but the military quickly succumbs to using harsh-handedness.

People often say we need to go back to traditional culture societies, but that won’t heal divisions, it might increase them, because there’s no common vision. The reliable common ground is Jesus Christ, the Incarnate word of God, and Scripture, both for Catholics and Protestants.

If we focus on Jesus Christ and take the person and the message of Jesus Christ seriously, then we can find solutions and healing for our African societies.

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You’ve said in the past that people in the African Church suffer from the “syndrome of the baby in the crib”: The Church is growing in these countries, it is important socially, but at the same time it’s immature. Do you think the papal trip can help?

The pope’s visit can bring attention to what is already there. The Church in Africa has grown. And the only thing is that we have to help the people also to come to an adult mentality as a Church. I’ve spoken about helping our people, African Catholics, to come out of the crib mentality.

The African Church was birthed through Western missionaries. So we grew up being spoon-fed by the Western missionaries that brought us almost everything. They brought subsidies, they brought financial help, education, hospitals. We received everything from them. Gradually, the churches in Africa got accustomed to being at the receiving end, like a child that is in the crib, being pampered and cuddled by their elders in the West.

Sometimes that mentality has remained there. We’re used to turning to the West for everything we need. We ask for financial help and support for everything, forgetting that now we are grown up and as adults, we have to start rolling up our sleeves and trying to find the resources to survive and flourish in Africa.

We need to have an adult mentality if we’re to come out of the crib. If you’re in the crib, you’ll be treated as a baby. When a baby gets in the middle of a conversation, the adults there try to hush up the baby. The baby’s voice is not seen as a contribution, but as a distraction. And they try to stop it by giving the baby some milk to keep it quiet and good while the adults are discussing.

Now, the African Church has to come out of that crib if it is to be taken into consideration in the discussions, if its voice is to be taken into consideration as the voice of a grown-up.

At the same time, we have to avoid arrogance. We have the responsibility of being grateful. I cannot stress this enough. We wouldn’t have the African Church of today that we have if we didn’t have those heroes of our faith, those missionaries that left the comforts of their homes.

The African Church is now supposed to see itself, recognize itself, show itself as an adult Church, bringing fruits into the wider family of the universal Church. And I’m sure that the visit of Pope Leo XIV is going to spread universal light on this dimension of the now-adult Church in Africa.

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I’m Luke Coppen and I aim to guide you each weekday morning to the most interesting Catholic news and comment.

There will be no Starting Seven next week because of a vacation. It returns on Monday, April 20.

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The comments came in response to an April 6 report from the Free Press, suggesting that Pierre had been summoned to the Pentagon for a dressing down, reportedly in response to a speech on world peace by Pope Leo XIV.

“Under Secretary Colby’s meeting with Cardinal Pierre was a productive, cordial meeting, and a chance for real dialogue on serious issues. They had an honest and respectful conversation. Reporting about threats or disrespect is false and scurrilous,” a senior defense department official speaking on background told The Pillar on Thursday.

Meanwhile, a Vatican official described the meeting as “tense” at times, characterizing some exchanges as “aggressive,” but confirmed that there was “no question of anyone threatening anyone,” despite suggestion in recent media reports.

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The Free Press published April 6 a report stating that the Defense Department’s policy undersecretary Elbridge Colby had “summoned” the Holy See’s ambassador to the U.S., Cardinal Christophe Pierre, to the Pentagon.

According to the Free Press, defense officials were “enraged” by a speech made by Pope Leo XIV to the Vatican diplomatic corps earlier that month which was interpreted as a “hostile message directed at Trump’s policies.”

Citing Pentagon and Vatican sources briefed about the meeting, the article claimed “one U.S. official went so far as to invoke the Avignon Papacy, the period in the 1300s when the French Crown leveraged its military power to dominate the papal authority.”

Pentagon officials were, according to the Free Press, upset over a speech delivered by the pope to diplomats accredited to the Holy See, in which he criticized “a diplomacy based on force” – interpreted by the Pentagon officials as a direct criticism of U.S. policy.

Since becoming the first pope from the United States last year, Pope Leo has spoken out repeatedly against the use of violence in foreign policy, in remarks that have sometimes been seen as a direct commentary on U.S. military action, including recently in Venezuela and Iran.

“The reports of the meeting with Cardinal Pierre and his staff were wildly distorted and grossly exaggerated,” a senior Pentagon official speaking on background told The Pillar.

“The purpose of the meeting was a good faith effort to engage with the Vatican on a variety of foreign policy matters. It was an attempt to engage seriously and respectfully with the Holy See’s position on matters relevant to the Department of War.”

“The meeting discussed issues on Latin America, NATO, Europe issues, and Africa,” the official said. “In the context of the pope and senior Church officials talking about these issues, we decided to reach out to the nuncio to understand the Church’s perspective directly. The Pentagon deals with ambassadors all the time, so while it might be a relative first with the Vatican’s ambassador, it isn’t unusual from the department’s perspective.”

Pentagon sources also told The Pillar that in addition to specific issues, U.S. officials also wished to discuss the concept of just war and the nature and scope of legitimate military action.

That conversation, a senior Pentagon official told The Pillar, was “a frank exchange of ideas,” and “was very respectful.”

“There were somewhat different perspectives, but definitely no hostility or even hint of an attempt at coercion. That’s frankly just absurd and a calumny,” the official said.

Senior officials at the Holy See’s Secretariat of State in the Vatican also confirmed to The Pillar that the meeting took place, and that the discussion focused on public speeches and statements by Pope Leo about war and peace in the light of U.S. military action and priorities, but offered a different assessment of the meeting’s tone.

One senior official in Rome described the conversation as being “tense” at times and suggested that U.S. officials had been “aggressive” and “bullying” at points, but insisted that the conversation had been mutually forthright, with Cardinal Pierre “making himself heard, too.”

“There was no question of anybody threatening anyone,” the Vatican official said. No one at the Vatican Secretariat of State contacted by The Pillar could recall or confirm any reference to the Avignon papacy during the conversation.

In a response to the Free Press article published on twitter.com on April 9, the U.S. Department of Defense said that “recent reporting of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.”

The department confirmed that the meeting had taken place between Pierre and Colby and their respective staffs on Jan. 22, 2026, but said that the meeting was “substantive, respectful, and professional.”

“During the cordial meeting, they discussed a range of topics, including issues of morality in foreign policy, the logic of the U.S. National Security Strategy, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and other topics. Cardinal Pierre expressed his appreciation for the outreach and both sides looked forward to continued open and respectful dialogue,” the department said.

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The United States ambassador to the Holy See, Brian Burch, also released a statement Thursday, saying on social media that he had spoken with Cardinal Pierre, who now lives in Rome.

According to Burch, Pierre “​​confirmed that recent media characterizations of his meeting with Colby are ‘fabrications’ that were ‘just invented.’”

“I was likewise not surprised when His Eminence acknowledged there were no threats of any kind in the meeting. ‘It was a frank and cordial meeting that took place two months ago.’ Threat of Avignon? ‘None,’” said Burch.

Pope Leo accepted Cardinal Pierre’s resignation in March, after the cardinal turned 80, appointing in his place Archbishop Gabriele Giordano Caccia, who had been serving as the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations.

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The Archbishop of Westminster — the diocese covering North London and its environs — had mentioned that he was looking forward to consuming the dairy product on Easter Sunday, after giving it up for Lent.

“Blue, hard, or soft?” the interviewer probed.

He replied: “Oh, all three.”

Moth told The Pillar in an April 9 interview conducted on Zoom that he found the sudden media interest in his fondness for cheese “a bit bizarre.”

But perhaps it is a useful reminder, less than two months into his tenure at Westminster, that he is now a national figure facing a level of scrutiny normally reserved for politicians and celebrities.

Moth, who previously served as Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, spoke to The Pillar from Archbishop’s House, Westminster, a grand but somewhat dilapidated residence attached to Westminster Cathedral, the mother church of Catholics in England and Wales.

Fresh from presiding at his first Holy Triduum at the cathedral, he discussed whether there are signs of a revival in English Catholicism, what he makes of Belgian Bishop Bonny’s plan to ordain married men, and if England’s diocesan boundaries will be redrawn.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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What was it like to preside at the Triduum for the first time as the Archbishop of Westminster?

They were wonderful celebrations. The music here at Westminster is exceptionally fine. There were very, very big numbers of people. On Good Friday and Easter Sunday morning, the congregation was out into the piazza outside. A few hundred people were outside the doors because not everybody could get in.

At the Vigil, we had eight baptisms, I think, and eight receptions, and another two on top of that for confirmation. So that made for 18 confirmations.

It was a lovely celebration of the Triduum.

Did you get the feeling you were speaking to the nation as well in some way with your homilies?

To an extent. A number of people picked up on some of the things I said in the homily on Easter night, where I mentioned the fact that we’re living in a world that’s conflicted and at war, arising from greed and a misuse of power.

One or two people coming out of Mass on Easter Day thanked me for that and said they hoped that people might be listening beyond Westminster. So there is a sense now that people are a little bit more interested in what I’m saying than they might’ve been when I was in Arundel and Brighton.

You consistently expressed skepticism about the notion that there is a ‘quiet revival’ of Christianity in Britain.

What did you think when you heard that the study that launched the ‘quiet revival’ debate had been withdrawn because of methodological problems?

I think “skeptical” is a bit strong. I would say “cautious.” My caution arises because a statistician would not say that one or two years of increased baptism numbers is a revival. A statistician would say, “Well, let’s wait five or 10 years and look back and see what’s been happening.”

You can do all sorts of things with statistics. They can be read in all sorts of different ways. Regardless of whether the data that was used was as accurate as it might have been, we are seeing increased numbers of people coming for baptism.

At our Rite of Election here in the cathedral this year at Westminster, there were 790 people — and that wasn’t from every parish in the diocese — preparing for baptism and confirmation.

In my old diocese of Arundel and Brighton, they had to have two Rites of Election this year. In fact, we realized last year we should have done that because we were a bit too full. And the story around the country is that we are seeing increases in numbers.

I’m just a bit cautious about getting too excited, because I go back to what I said at the beginning: a statistician will say, “Well, let’s give this a bit longer before we decide it’s a revival.” That’s where I’m at with this. If this continues for another two, three, four, or five years, then certainly we’ll have seen something.

What do you think is the significance of the rise in adult baptisms?

Some people see it as the spark that’s going to light a spiritual revival in Britain. Others see it as just a hangover from COVID times, when people couldn’t so easily come into the Church.

Where do you come down on that?

I suspect in some parishes there will be some catch-up post-COVID. But we’re a few years on now from the COVID pandemic, and one would imagine that most of that catch-up would’ve been achieved within the first two years. Most people’s RCIA programs, for instance, are about six to nine months. This far on now, one would think that the catch-up had happened.

This is anecdotal, but one hears and experiences many cases of young people coming to parish priests and saying, “I’ve started reading the Bible. What do I do next?”

Now, what is causing that? Some might say that, well, the world’s in a bit of a pickle. Are people turning to faith because of that? That may be the case. Ultimately, the voice of faith would say that perhaps the promptings of the Holy Spirit are being heard afresh.

I do sense that people are looking at the world we’re in, with all the pressures on people, and saying, “Surely there is more to it than this.” I think that’s a major issue.

I think it’s a combination of those things. I wouldn’t put it down to one cause. That would be too simplistic.

Adult baptisms are the growth area for the Church in this country and in other countries as well. But if we look at other sacraments, there’s less good news.

The total number of baptisms has been falling for a long time. First communions, confirmations, and Catholic marriages are all down year on year. It almost feels at this stage that it is inevitable that these sacraments will continue to fall.

As a bishop, do you look at this and think, ‘It’s a megatrend. I can’t really do anything about it’?

No, again, I think you have to be careful about just looking at the numbers. Taking the baptism figures, the fact is that the demographic is falling. There are fewer children being born, therefore there will be fewer baptisms.

This is just my personal experience, but in my last diocese, confirmation numbers last year went over a thousand. That was an increase, and that wasn’t as a result of COVID lag by that time.

I don’t know what the situation is in Westminster of those numbers. I haven’t learned those yet. But our confirmations are taking place between now and the summer, so we’ll know more later in the year.

If I can just say a word about marriage numbers in this country, I think there’s something very interesting about this. It’s that parishes prepare a lot of couples for marriage who are going to be marrying overseas. When you look sometimes at the statistics of marriages taking place, that does not represent the number of couples being prepared.

The number of marriages has come down, that is true, but it’s not as dramatic as that bald figure would suggest.

It’s common to hear Catholics in England these days saying that bishops are basically managers of decline, that their task is to manage the decline as efficiently as possible, close a parish here, merge a parish there.

I don’t accept that at all. I don’t think we’re managing decline. It is the case that we have a few less priests knocking around than we used to.

As I’ve said many times, pretty much everybody alive now was born and grew up in a time when, because of a significant increase in vocations post Second World War, we had almost more priests than we’d ever had before. And that’s all we’ve ever known.

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Judith Champ, who died just recently, wrote about the fact that we are going back probably to a proportion of priests to people that we would’ve had 100 years ago. That’s not necessarily a bad proportion; it’s just a different one. It’s not what any of us know or are used to, but it does mean that we must carry out our mission slightly differently. And that’s where I see an opportunity.

So for me, it’s not about managing decline. It’s about saying, “OK, we may need to deploy our clergy slightly differently.” But also, I think this is an invitation to engage everybody in the Church’s mission. That’s the bit that I find really very positive.

The synodal journey that Pope Francis asked us to engage in is a help to that, because that’s not about doctrine, it’s about the way we do our business. It’s about having relationships, having conversations, talking to one another so that we can discern the way forward together. And then with priests, religious, deacons, lay faithful, married, single, consecrated, we can all see where our gifts and talents lie for the mission that the Lord has called us to carry out. That, to me, is the moment of excitement that we’ve got now.

I do think that the synodal pathway is opening up potentially new possibilities for that greater engagement in the mission on behalf of everybody. I don’t think it’s about managing decline. I think it’s about engaging in the mission in new ways.

Two new Westminster priests were ordained in 2025. The forecast is just one priestly ordination in 2026 and one in 2027.

What are the implications of that for the diocese?

It does present challenges. We’re blessed in Westminster, as many other dioceses are, to have assistance from religious congregations — some of those, not all of them, from overseas.

We’ve got big parishes in this diocese run by Jesuits and Dominicans. They’re not necessarily people coming from Africa or the subcontinent, but we have those too, and they’re a blessing because we’ve got a multicultural Church here. Having priests from India, Africa, and elsewhere helps in a way to respond to the multicultural nature of the Church in this country. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that we need to increasingly foster vocations from those who are, if I may use the term, homegrown.

I remember when I was vocations director in Southwark [a diocese covering South London and surrounding areas], we had our first homegrown African seminary student. That was a really good step forward for the diocese when that first happened, because it meant that the community that some years back had come to us from another part of the world were in a place where they were solidly rooted enough to produce their own vocations. There definitely is a challenge there, to greater prayer, greater openness to vocation.

If we’re able to help our priests to focus on the purpose of our ordination — preaching the Gospel, celebrating the sacraments, visiting the sick, chaplaincy to hospitals, all the things we were ordained to do — and the more we can lift other bits of what is often deemed the present priestly burden away from priests, I think in time we will see the vocation will become more attractive, because men thinking about priesthood won’t be seeing chaps stuck behind their desks all day.

That’s part of this business of everybody taking their part in the mission of the Church, because in time that will free priests to carry out the vocation for which the Lord called us in the first place.

Belgium’s Bishop Johan Bonny has said he cannot attract candidates to the celibate priesthood, so he intends to ordain married men in his diocese by 2028.

Would you consider following Bishop Bonny’s lead in the Westminster diocese?

Simple answer: no. I think the celibate priesthood is a great gift to the Church.

We live in a society where people tend not to do something for life. We see this in the nursing profession, for instance, that people will go into nursing for a while and then do something else. The traditional vocational roles in the world are not seeing people doing them for life, and yet we are asking people to do something for life. That’s the challenge.

I think if you said to somebody, “Will you be obedient to a bishop for five years, or be celibate for five years, or say the Divine Office for five years?” they’d say: “Yeah, I’ll give that a go.”

If you say to them, “Will you do it for life?” then that’s a big ask. And it’s countercultural. But there’s nothing wrong with being countercultural. In fact, I think we’re at a moment where those countercultural signs of the Gospel become more and more important, because it speaks to us of the ways of Christ. It speaks to us of the ways of the kingdom of heaven ultimately.

That’s something that we need to proclaim. All of our vocations in the Church — the priesthood, diaconate, religious life, marriage, the consecration of single women — they’re a different facet of the love of God.

You can’t really come at those from a purely pragmatic position. I think that’s something that is really key to the Church’s mission, that the world is not simply about pragmatism, it’s about the kingdom of God. That’s a different way of looking at things. I think we move away from that position a bit at our peril.

Is there anything we can learn from the Anglican Church when it comes to priestly vocations?

The Church of England ordains both married men and women, yet it too is experiencing a clergy shortage. There were 591 ordinands in 2020, but only 370 in 2024.

The model of Anglican ministry is quite different to our own in the way it’s lived out. It’s quite a different approach to the way the ministerial life is lived. So you’re not quite comparing like with like.

The other thing is that the Anglican Church is open in a way that our model of priesthood wouldn’t find so easy to the non-stipendiary approach. That’s never been our model. We have it in a sense with the permanent diaconate, but for the life of the priest, I think that would be quite difficult.

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Do you think England will have fewer dioceses in future? Leeds, Middlesbrough, and Hallam dioceses seem like they could be joined in some way.

What I can say is that there will probably — and I underline the word “probably” — be discussions about diocesan boundaries into the future. Where I sit at the moment, I’m not sure I can see much more space for very much change, actually.

I think we’ve got to be careful that dioceses don’t get too huge. And it’s not just about the size of your boundary. Some of it is to do with shifts in population. That’s certainly been the case in Middlesbrough, for instance, where the great industry of Middlesbrough and Hull is not what it was. There’s a bit of depopulation in that part of the world. All those kinds of things have to be brought into the picture.

It’s not just about geographical size, but geographical size can mean you end up with something so huge, it becomes a bit difficult for a bishop to get around. It’s quite a complex issue, diocesan boundaries.

When I was vicar general in Southwark, in the early 1990s, Archbishop Bowen investigated with the Holy See the possibility of creating a new diocese for Kent. The Holy See said they didn’t think this was the right thing to do.

Because I’d been involved in all of the process, I could very much see both sides. But I think on balance, the Holy See’s decision was the right one, in terms of the sources of priestly vocations across the Southwark diocese as it was then and is now.

Would you permit me a question about your watch? A colleague thinks you have a CWC British Military G10 quartz watch, with a NATO strap with a regimental stripe.

Is he right?

It is. It has a Royal Army Chaplains’ Department strap.

The reason for it is very simple. It’s that I have a Tissot watch, a rather snazzy one, but to get the battery replaced, you have to send it to Switzerland, and that takes three months. I got impatient about that, and I went out and bought one of these. You can change the battery yourself.

And my Chaplains’ Department strap: of course I had a commission in the Chaplains’ Department [he served as Bishop of the Forces from 2009 to 2015]. You can get watches for every regiment in the British Army, and for the Royal Navy and the Air Force.

So it’s purely practical, but they are good watches and they don’t weigh very much. You hardly notice you’ve got it on your wrist.

We’ve mentioned the military, and I feel it would be remiss not to ask you about the Middle East.

Things are changing so fast there, but I wondered if you had any position on where we are today with the conflict.

I think you’re right in saying it’s all shifting sands. It’s moving so quickly at the moment and we’re getting different messages within each day almost. I mean, if you look at yesterday’s news, it was talk of a ceasefire. By the end of the day, the ceasefire looked very, very wobbly. There are so many question marks at the moment.

For me, I would go back to the words I used in the Easter homily, that where you see anywhere in the world, from whatever place it’s coming, a misguided use of power, we end up with problems and conflicts. If you look through history, conflicts invariably arise from that issue. I think we’re seeing that now. Pope Leo has spoken very clearly about this, and I really do believe that that’s the situation that we’re in.

Whenever we have conflict, it’s the most vulnerable who suffer the most, whether that be the young, the elderly, those who can’t move somewhere else. All the struggles that we have, it’s all from the misguided use of power ultimately.

The impact of this present situation in Iran on the wider world, because of the price of oil and all the rest of it, seems to be very far reaching. The cost of things is rising. Availability of some basic products will get difficult. One hopes we don’t end up with the kind of situation we had in COVID, where people start panic-buying things.

Fuel prices have gone up, and that, again, impacts most on those who can afford it less. So the impact is wide ranging, and that’s deeply sad. One just wonders whether some of those things are thought about when conflicts are entered into.

What is your daily routine as Archbishop of Westminster?

It’s pretty much the same as it has been for a long while. I get up at five, because that gives me some decent amount of time for prayer before the day gets going. If I’ve not got an engagement, I’ll celebrate Mass first thing in the morning, in the chapel here in the house, with my private secretary if he’s around.

Then the day starts: meetings, interviews by Zoom, correspondence, working with the secretary. I’ve a fairly full diary. In Arundel and Brighton, it worked out about 900 engagements a year. It’s going to be the same or a little more here.

What would you say is one of your strengths and one of your weaknesses?

I’ve often said to people: “The Lord has given me few gifts, but one of them is stamina.” I’m fairly fit. I’m blessed with relatively good health.

Weaknesses? There are too many to number, I guess.

What would be a standout one?

[As the archbishop thinks, his press secretary, sitting off-screen, suggests “a fondness for cheese.”]

No… Some would say I can be slow to act. I think sometimes that’s because I try to consider everything before I do. The good side of that, in fairness, I think, is an effort on my part to be fair and considered. But sometimes I could probably move a bit more quickly than I do.

I’m also not in the least bit fond of emails and social media. I’m a bit old-fashioned. I must get better at that.

Is that because of a bad experience?

No, it’s just not my thing. I prefer the conversation with the real person. I think it’s more fruitful in the end, even though it’s slower.

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Atlanta puts in a bid to host World Youth Day in 2030. The traditionalist Chartres pilgrimage will likely have record participation this year.

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With the diplomatic distance between Rome and Washington widening over the war in Iran, what hopes there might have been for an early papal visit to the United States seem all but extinguished.

But despite the rising tensions and hardening fault lines between the Trump Administration and the Church hierarchy, and the notable example of his predecessor Pope Francis, who eschewed a papal visit to his native Argentina, for many Church watchers it remains unthinkable that Leo will simply never come home again.

The question, then, would seem to be not if, but when Leo might come to America — and the answer may depend on what kind of pope he ultimately chooses to become.

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After the election of Cardinal Robert Prevost as the first American Bishop of Rome just under a year ago, initial hopes — if not realistic expectations — were high that he would visit the U.S. within the first 18 months of his pontificate.

But those hopes ebbed steadily amid ever increasing political concerns, with the Trump Administration launching deeply controversial immigration enforcement actions in American cities, broadly opposed by the American bishops.

Despite overtures from some sections of American episcopal leadership and indeed the administration itself, other senior voices in the hierarchy were set against an early American trip for the pope — most notably Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the outgoing apostolic nuncio, and Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, now effectively the senior serving American cardinal.

As the body of U.S. bishops formed a united front behind Leo in opposition what they called abuses of human rights and dignity in the administration’s campaign of mass arrests, detentions, and deportations, any serious discussion of a papal visit to coincide with the American 250th anniversary celebrations ended, the rescheduling of the beatification of Fulton Sheen for this September notwithstanding.

In recent weeks, the fault lines between the American pope and bishops and the administration have only deepened, following the military conflict with Iran, in which the president has threatened a war of “civilizational extinction” and the targeting of civilian infrastructure.

“This is truly not acceptable,” Leo said on Tuesday, when asked about Donald Trump’s threat that “a whole civilization will die” in Iran if his terms for ending the conflict were not met. “Here there are certainly questions of international law, but even more than this a question of morality for the good of people,” Leo said, having previously challenged on Palm Sunday the U.S. defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s claim that God was somehow on the administration’s side in the conflict.

God, Leo said, “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them,” going on to quote Isaiah saying “even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.”

Added to the pope’s words have been strong statements from USCCB president Archbishop Paul Coakley, who said the president’s threat “cannot be morally justified,” and his predecessor as conference leader and serving head of the Archdiocese of the U.S. Military Services, Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who has repeatedly questioned the morality of threatened U.S. military actions in recent months.

The response from the White House has, in turn, generally avoided direct criticism of the pope in public, while making its strong displeasure known in other, idiosyncratic ways.

One recent report said that Cardinal Pierre was earlier this year summoned to a meeting with a junior minister at the Pentagon for a supposed dressing down that allegedly involved a staffer bringing up the Avignon papacy in some kind of veiled threat.

While all this may make the prospect of a papal visit seem almost laughably unlikely, at least in the short term, it would be a mistake to write it off completely, however.

For all the strength of his statements against U.S. military rhetoric, Leo has been equally swift to weigh in on positive moves for peace, immediately welcoming an admittedly still-embryonic ceasefire “with satisfaction and as a sign of deep hope.”

And however bombastic the White House might be in meeting criticism, it has similarly shown itself willing to change direction and tone on a dime in the face of even the smallest sign of encouragement or progress. And it is no secret around Washington that the administration would welcome a papal visit — perhaps to the point where that enthusiasm is itself a complication.

There are some obvious potential parallels to consider with the forthcoming royal visit of King Charles III of the U.K. Trump has been unsparing and characteristically colorful in his criticism of Great Britain during the current Iran conflict, but this has neither derailed the planned state visit by the king, nor dimmed the reception he is expected to receive.

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Pulling against this, though, are a number of complicating factors.

Unlike Pope Leo, as a constitutional monarch Charles has not been a protagonist in the back and forth between Trump and the UK government and can therefore be treated as above the fray of even strained diplomatic relations.

Also, some of the Trump administration’s most prominent members, including the Vice President and Secretary of State, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, are themselves Catholics, making it difficult for the Vatican to engage with them solely as agents of a foreign government, and not public exemplars of American Catholicism, for good or ill.

The most sensible conclusion to draw out of this might be simply to wait out the current difficulties with the Trump administration altogether, and delay any serious consideration of a papal visit until after the next presidential inauguration in 2029.

The prospect of Atlanta playing host to the 2030 World Youth Day offers a medium term potential event which would make an ideal centerpiece to an American tour for Leo, in as much as it would provide an advance context for the trip totally outside of the domestic political calendar or international diplomatic events.

Given the Holy See’s institutional preference for well-managed, easily contextualized, and drama-free papal trips, this is probably the most appealing, and therefore likely scheduling for an eventual Leonine homecoming.

However, there are some possible factors which could still push for an earlier visit.

One, which might seem unlikely but should not be discounted, is the potential influence of Cardinal Cupich, understood to have been one of the most quietly adamant and influential voices against Leo visiting the U.S. this year.

By all accounts, Cupich has expressed concern that the White House could try to make political hay of a visit by Pope Leo, turning it into a series of presidential photo ops — or worse turning on the pope and making his trip the focus of partisan criticism or even protest.

On the other hand, Cupich recently turned 77 years old. Delaying a papal visit until after the next election and inauguration would mean pushing it past his 79th birthday — and his 80th if the decision was made to wait until World Youth Day 2030.

However cautious the cardinal is — perhaps justifiably so — about protecting a papal visit from presidential political entanglements, the Archbishop of Chicago is also known to relish the idea of hosting Leo in his hometown diocese.

It’s obviously an open question how much further past the nominal episcopal retirement age Cupich will continue to serve, though most predict he will continue at least through the next year. But as his eventual retirement approaches, might the cardinal warm to the idea of helping to host a pre-election visit, rather than risk watching a later one from the sidelines? It is at least a possibility worth weighing.

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Of course, the most important unknown factor in the timing of any trip to the United States is Leo himself and what he may choose to do.

So far, just about a year into his pontificate, Leo has opted for a very measured approach to questions about his home country and global diplomatic developments — neither opting for ambiguous silence nor over-the-top or constant interventions.

Instead, the pope has kept his comments to narrow treatments of specific issues and rhetoric, rather than opting for the kind of sweeping denunciations of the administration and its policies that could box the Vatican in as events develop.

But just because Leo has begun his time as pope in a measured manner doesn’t necessarily mean he intends to remain an occasional or peripheral voice on global or American affairs.

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Similarly, while the decision was taken to decline an invitation to visit the U.S. for the 250th anniversary celebrations, and all signs so far point to a sensitivity to the political climate, that could as easily signify the pope is biding his time, rather than shying away from a possibly contentious trip.

The received wisdom is that an American pope above all others would want to avoid too close an engagement in domestic affairs, or becoming a kind of pole or polarizing figure in the national discourse. This is the received wisdom for a reason; it is certainly the most small-c conservative approach and the one least likely to generate controversy or contribute to an acceleration of events beyond the foreseeable or controllable.

But we shouldn’t exclude entirely that, as he settles into the Petrine office, Pope Leo might decide to take a more direct role in the national cultural conversation — and should he choose to do so, it wouldn’t be without precedent.

Shortly after his election in 1978, Pope St. John Paul II made what turned out to be an epochal return to his home country of Poland, with a trip in June of 1979 — the first of nine — widely credited with historical hindsight in setting off a chain of events which eventually led to the country’s throwing off of Communist rule.

To be sure, the situation in the United States today is not the same as Poland in the late 1970s, but the wider point is still there to be made: it is not out of the question for a pope to have a strong moral vision for his homeland or to play a central role in driving events.

Indeed, Pope Leo may decide that he has a somewhat unique position in the global politics of the 2020s, being perhaps the only world leader immune to virtually any economic or military pressures which could be brought to bear by the White House and the only one with the luxury of being able to model a kind of reserved statesmanship in the face of often outlandish social media statements from the president.

Leo, unlike the presidents of European or other North and South American countries, isn’t obliged by the pressures of office or the realities of realpolitik to take seriously or engage directly with every news cycle coming out of Washington. But, as the American pope, when he does choose to intervene, he can do so directly and in a cadence attuned to American ears unlike any other world leader.

As such, Leo has the potential to become one of the most influential voices in American affairs. The question, then, is how much he wants to say. His first visit to America as pope will almost certainly be timed to accommodate that, more than anything else.

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I’m Luke Coppen and I aim to guide you each weekday morning to the most interesting Catholic news and comment.

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But while the Chaldean episcopate gathers to elect a leader at a time of acute crisis for their Church, predicting the outcome of their meeting requires a longer look into the history and culture of the Chaldean Catholic Church.

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The Chaldean Catholic Church was rocked last month by the surprising announcement that Pope Leo had accepted the unexpected resignation of Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako, who had been the Chaldean Church’s leader since February 2013.

The cardinal’s resignation was a surprise because he had sometimes indicated a plan to remain in post until he was 80 years old, if he could, or at least to perdure for the foreseeable.

But it came on the same day that Pope Leo accepted the resignation of Bishop Emanuel Shaleta, a Chaldean bishop based in San Diego, who was charged with 16 counts of embezzlement and money laundering in early March, after investigative reporting from The Pillar showed that Shaleta was accused of taking hundreds of thousands from parish coffers, and attempting to cover it up by moving around money from a parish poor fund.

The same Pillar reporting indicated that Sako had been attempting to forestall Shaleta’s removal as diocesan bishop after a confidential Vatican-ordered investigation, or to see the bishop transferred to a ranking Chaldean Catholic post in Baghdad.

Sako had a long friendship with Shaleta, had taken a risk by appointing him to the San Diego eparchy, and after all that, stood accused publicly last month of attempting to paper over serious financial misconduct.

Under those circumstances, it is perhaps little surprise that Leo decided to accept the cardinal’s suddenly-tendered resignation — and, in fact, the decision was widely understood as a sign of Leo’s commitment to ensuring good governance in the life of the Church.

But the Shaleta affair is not the first unusual marker in Sako’s personal file.

In 2024, the patriarch threatened with serious ecclesiastical sanction five Chaldean bishops who did not attend a governing synodal assembly of the Chaldean Church, declining to attend largely with a vote of no confidence in Sako’s leadership.

Sako had accused one of those prelates, Archbishop Bashar Warda, of conspiring with an Iranian-funded militia leader, Rayan al-Kildani, a charge which Warda has denied.

Before that, the patriarch took a self-imposed exile of some nine months outside his eparchial see in Baghdad, over a dispute with Iraq’s president concerning a civic decree recognizing his authority. Sources in the Chaldean Church say the dispute was broadly interpreted, with at least some senior sources accusing Sako of trumping up the dispute to elevate his own profile.

More recently, Sako was involved in the most unusual dispute of his ecclesiastical career, when the cardinal denied giving a post-conclave interview on an Arabic-language Catholic television network, suggesting instead that the Iran-backed militia Babylon Brigade was in some way responsible for a fabricated television interview, in which Sako did not actually participate.

The cardinal’s denial left numerous questions unanswered.

Those controversies were the headline points of a tenure as patriarch marked by quieter controversies. But Sako’s term as patriarch was especially concerning to Chaldeans who felt that the prelate introduced liturgical changes which “Latinized” the Chaldean liturgical patrimony, and that his theological approach tended toward a “flexibility” at odds with the prevailing approach in the Chaldean Catholic Church.

His March 10 resignation, therefore, has been taken by many Chaldeans as an opportunity for a fresh start in their Church sui iuris, a reset after more than a decade of controversy and disagreement.

But how most Chaldeans take the resignation of Sako is not the question at hand. When 16 Chaldean bishops gather in Rome this week, the question will be how they perceive both the present and the future of their Church.

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By most accounts, there are two emerging frontrunners among the bishops, representing very different possibilities.

The first — and the one most known to Westerners and Latin Catholics — is Warda, the Archbishop of Erbil, who has become well-known in U.S. Catholic circles because of his close relationship with the Knights of Columbus, and his frequent speeches and interviews in the U.S.

Warda was the de facto leader of the bishops who in 2024 opposed Sako’s synodal gathering, and has often been seen as a pole opposite Sako’s in the Chaldean landscape. The reality is more complex, as Warda has obviously had real friction with the patriarch, and at the same time, spoken well of him in public, and urged ecclesiastical commitment and docility to the Church’s hierarchy.

Even in an interview with The Pillar last month, as Warda delineated challenges faced by the Chaldean Catholic Church, the archbishop studiously avoided mention of leadership or leadership challenges among the Chaldeans.

Instead, he mentioned other “undeniable” challenges: “migration, building the faith, the struggle to preserve our identity, and the need to balance our Church between the homeland and those in diaspora. With each new conflict that arises, these challenges only intensify. People begin to lose hope for the future, and more families are contemplating leaving the country, a reality we’re witnessing here in Erbil.”

“Yet, amidst the difficulties, there are real opportunities before us,” the archbishop added.

“Our young people hold immense potential, and our educational and healthcare institutions offer more than just services; they stand as beacons of hope and investment for tomorrow. We are called to shift from barely surviving to truly engaging in our mission: a Church that educates, supports, walks alongside its people, and fosters genuine opportunities for a better life.”

Still, Warda’s election would widely be seen as a break from the Sako era, and a focus for the Chaldean Church on the combination of evangelization and regional leadership for which Warda himself has become known.

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But Warda’s election as patriarch is far from certain.

In fact, sources say, his odds are about even with those of Bishop Basilio Yaldo, 55, who is an auxiliary bishop of Baghdad, and was a principal deputy of Sako.

Sources tell The Pillar that Sako has lobbied in recent weeks for Basilio’s election, and that lobbying has been effective among at least a few Chaldean bishops who were supportive of Sako’s direction in the Church.

And Basilio has another corner of support, too. He is from the northern Iraqi town of Tel Keppe, on the Nineveh Plain, in relatively close proximity to Kurdistan. Tel Keppe is an important and influential historically Christian stronghold in Iraq, which has been a center of Chaldean cultural identity for centuries. That pedigree gives Basilio a certain gravitas within the Chaldean community — where the village of one’s family is an important reality — and the support of some influential Chaldeans.

Basilio is, in short, seen in some corners as a stable hand at the tiller, a bishop with the leadership experience and gravitas to steer the Chaldean Catholic Church — making him something like the continuity candidate in the race.

While Warda can likely count support from at least half the Chaldean episcopate, Basilio might be able to muster the same.

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There are two circumstances by which another bishop might be elected to lead as patriarch of the Chaldean Church.

The first is if the bishops deadlock in their support between Warda and Basilio. The second is if Warda decides he does not want to be patriarch, as he has reportedly sometimes told friends and supporters. The archbishop is only 56 years old, and is widely seen as an emerging leader in his church.

But he has been a diocesan bishop for more than 15 years, and during that time, has lived through the occupation of ISIS in his territory, an extraordinary exile of his people, and a constantly unstable economy. Few could blame Warda if he decided he would like a quieter call than the mandate to be Chaldean patriarch.

In either of those scenarios, though, it’s Warda who is most likely to play kingmaker: either by suggesting a compromise candidate, if support is divided, or by supporting another bishop, if he has wide support but decides against the position.

In either case, one bishop who could emerge is Archbishop Emil Nona, who led the Archdiocese of Mosul, Iraq, until he was forced by ISIS occupation into exile, and then appointed by Pope Francis to lead the Chaldean Church in Australia and New Zealand.

Nona, who said that ministering during the ISIS occupation was “the best time of my life,” is widely regarded as a visionary and evangelical leader, with experience among the Chaldean Church’s growing diaspora community around the world. As Christians have left Iraq in scores in recent years, that experience might be seen as valuable among the Chaldean episcopate.

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There are more than 600,000 Chaldean Catholics around the world, preserving an ancient liturgical and spiritual patrimony — and attempting to live it as Christians today, both in Iraq, and further afield.

Their next leader will face real challenges, including the challenge of rebuilding trust and confidence amid the end of the Sako era. As they select the man most competent to those challenges, they’ll aim to draw from the lessons of their history, and the prospects of their future.

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