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A June 22 statement from the Vatican outlined the detailed structure of the June 26-27 consistory.

The Holy See Press Office also released a note confirming that cardinals attending the meeting have been asked to maintain strict confidentiality and refrain from speaking to the media during the meeting, in order to “maintain a climate of fraternal dialogue.”

The note said that journalists will not be allowed inside the Paul VI Hall during the sessions. But the Vatican also announced that it will take the unusual step of broadcasting the pope’s introductory and concluding remarks live. Additionally, each session will begin with a meditation by a cardinal, which will also be released to the press after each session ends, along with a summary of the discussion.

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During the first extraordinary consistory of Leo’s pontificate, the pope’s speeches were made public only after they had been delivered. The meditations that preceded the discussions on synodality and evangelization, as well as two meditations on topics that were ultimately not discussed – the liturgy and the reform of the curia – were not officially published, but were later leaked to the press.

This consistory will follow the same methodology as January’s consistory. Instead of following the traditional structure used by most recent popes, in which consistories functioned as an open forum where cardinals could address the entire College of Cardinals, the cardinals will be divided into smaller groups for most of the consistory, following the “conversation in the Spirit” methodology used during the Synod on Synodality.

Nine of these smaller groups will be composed of cardinal electors serving as ordinaries, including retired ones, and 11 groups will consist of curial cardinals and non-electors.

Each group will have a chairman to moderate the discussion, and a secretary, who will collect contributions and draft a final report on the discussions in the group.

After a 10-minute introduction on the topic of each session, each cardinal in the group will be allowed to make a three-minute intervention on the topic. Then, there will be a second round of two-minute interventions to discuss the proposals that were introduced in the first round, and the cardinals will afterwards draft the report with the secretary.

At the end of each session, the groups of cardinals serving as diocesan ordinaries will each present a three-minute report, while only some of the groups composed of curial cardinals and cardinals over voting age will present their conclusions after the sessions.

Each of the three first sessions will begin with a biblical meditation. The first session on June 26 will open with a meditation by Cardinal Grzegorz Ryś, archbishop of Krakow, entitled “In what world are we called to proclaim the Gospel?”

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During the first session the cardinals will discuss two questions: “What sufferings, tensions and questions are most forcefully affecting the peoples and ecclesial communities entrusted to your care today?” and “What signs of hope, of fidelity to the Gospel, and of possible reconciliation are important to bring to common listening?”

The second session on June 26 will focus on “The culture of power and the civilisation of love,” with an introduction by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, on paragraphs 182-192 of Chapter V of Magnifica humanitas.

The cardinals will be asked to discuss two questions: “How do the tensions, divisions and conflicts that are sweeping across the world today affect the life of our Churches and our peoples?” and “What languages, attitudes and practices can help build reconciliation, coexistence and peace?”

June 27 will begin with Holy Mass at 7:30 a.m. presided by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals. Afterwards, the third session will start with an introduction by Cardinal Stephen Brislin, Archbishop of Johannesburg, called “Building for Good: The Construction Sites of Our Time” based on the introduction and conclusion of Magnifica humanitas.

During the session, the cardinals will consider three questions: 1) “What are the divisions in your contexts today that make it more difficult to build the common good?” 2) “What expectations and questions are emerging from the people and communities that the Church is called to listen to—and to whom we may not be listening enough?” 3) “What forms of support, guidance, or initiatives from the local Churches and the universal Church could most effectively support the effort to build the common good?”

The final session will be different. It will start with an introduction by Cardinal Mario Grech on the 2027-2028 Synodal Assemblies, followed by a period of open Q&A by the cardinals, after which cardinals will be able to provide three-minute free interventions to the College of Cardinals, before Pope Leo’s final address.

Afterward, the cardinals will sing the Te Deum and dine with Pope Leo in the Paul VI Hall. The consistory will officially close two days later, on June 29, with Mass for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, during which new metropolitan archbishops receive the pallium.

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Today I want to tell you about Blessed Sister Rani Maria Vattalil.

She lived in India, was a Syro-Malabar Catholic, and entered religious life with her cousin in the early 1970s, when they were young women.

Her religious community was a local movement of Franciscan sisters, primarily a teaching order.

But Sister Rani didn’t become a teacher. She lived instead in rural dioceses in northern and central India, organizing and overseeing the local Caritas agencies. She was especially committed to providing aid and education opportunities for the Adivasi, a network of tribal groups in India, making up less than 10% of the country’s population, whose ancestors represent ancient cultures on the subcontinent, and who, despite being outside the country’s caste system, have been the victims of discrimination across India.

She lived in the Diocese of Indore from 1992 until 1995. There, she realized how many poor people were being exploited by a cartel of money lenders who would trap people in a mountain of debt, by shifting interest rates and payment dates to leave them cash-strapped, borrowing, and mortgaging land owned by their families for centuries.

Rani started running programs explaining the scheme, and explaining that government grants could create lending co-ops (and possibly trigger audits into local lenders) — so short-term, high-interest, adjustable rate loans were not necessary.

This, as you can imagine, ticked some people off.

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Sister Rani rode city buses, and intercity buses in the area. On Feb. 25, 1995, she went to the bus stop, to take a ride to the city of Indore, ahead of a longer trip. Sister Rani was with two sisters. The three of them were told their trip had been cancelled.

But as they walked back, a bus actually drove down the street. The driver told the sisters his was the bus to Indore. Sister Rani boarded it. She told her sisters goodbye, loaded her bag, and went to sit.

But things were weird. While the sisters usually sat in the front of the bus — and she’d stowed her bag there — she was told by a steward to sit in the back.

The bus was packed — there were about 50 people on board.

Some of them had nefarious aims. They had been contracted to kill the meddling nun.

Some facts are not entirely clear. It’s not certain how many people were involved in the scheme, or why the bus was switched before she was killed. It’s not even entirely clear how much money changed hands.

Here’s what is known: At a certain point, the bus stopped. Several men started taunting the nun, accusing her of proselytizing poor people — of taking advantage of them.

A man named Samunder Singh got out of the bus at its stop, and broke a coconut against a rock, seemingly as a kind of offering to Hindu gods. He boarded the bus again, and offered pieces of the coconut to other passengers.

He offered a piece to Sister Rani. She put her hand out, and he pulled the coconut away. He drew a knife, and began stabbing her. As people screamed, the driver stopped the bus.

Sister Rani — several passengers testified — cried out to Jesus, calling his name again and again.

Singh dragged her from the stopped bus. He stabbed her more than 40 times, reports say. Some passengers ran away. Others were paralyzed with fear inside the bus.

Her body was left abandoned on the side of the road. Singh had fled. Some priests gathered her body and took it to the bishop’s house, where it was eventually laid in state.

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There’s more.

Samunder Singh went to prison for Sister Rani’s murder.

There, a priest started visiting him.

After years, Singh repented. He apologized to the sisters, and said he was spending his life trying to do some penance.

In 2010, he told a reporter that “I accept full responsibility for my heinous murder of Sister Rani Maria. I cannot say that I was instigated, because my own hands stabbed her repeatedly and for this, I will regret my actions till the day I die.”

“In my own small way, I try to follow her example, helping those who are less fortunate than me, like Tribal Christians and all those who are marginalized.”

I don’t know if it was hard for most sisters to forgive. But Sister Selmy Paul most have found it most difficult. Sister Rani was her natural sister; Sister Selmy Paul had followed her into religious life.

But Sister Selmy Paul knew she was called to forgive. Eventually, she began visiting Singh in prison. She decided the Lord wanted her to treat her sister’s killer like her own brother. That meant, she decided, trying to get him out of prison.

So Sister Selmy Paul and some priests began asking the prison for Singh’s parole. In August 2006, when he had spent 11 years in prison, Samunder Singh was released. Sister Rami’s family was there to meet him. They welcomed him like a brother.

He went home to his village, doing farm work. While he did not become a Christian, he began visiting every year the spot where Sister Rani was killed, to pray for her.

No doubt, she was also praying for him.

She was beatified Nov. 2, 2017. Singh lives just 10 miles from where she was beatified. I don’t know if he attended the Mass.

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The news

The Vatican’s liturgy office announced Tuesday that it has rejected the German bishops’ request to authorize lay preaching at Masses.

A letter published on the subject indicates a continued Vatican effort to rein in on issues central to the German’s synodal way.

Here’s the story.

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The bishops of the United States consecrated the country this month to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. That got us curious how often those kinds of consecrations take place, and which bishops have done them before.

Luke Coppen dug in to find out. Both the history, and the present reality, are pretty interesting.

So read up.

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The bishop of Oslo, Norway consecrated on Saturday a shrine to Mary, the mother of persecuted Christians.

Bishop Fredrik Hansen told The Pillar that a “much greater focus needs to be directed both toward the plight of persecuted Christians and toward our shared obligation to pray for and support them.”

So he dedicated a shrine to call for those prayers, and he talked with The Pillar about what he hopes will come of it. Read all about it.

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Pope Leo will host a consistory later this week, a meeting of the College of Cardinals, aiming to have some broad and open-ended discussions about the life of the Church.

Astute readers will recall frequent mention during the Francis papacy of a considerable slowdown of cardinatial consistories, as Pope Francis preferred other modes of consultation — chief among them being the “key of synodality,” as it were.

With Leo returning to the modus consistorius, Ed Condon suggests some things which can be gleaned about the pontiff’s governing style, and what might come when cardinals get talking.

Here’s that analysis.

Catholics gather around the Altar to enter into communion with the Living God, but sadly many believe “Church” is separate from “the rest of life.” Bishop Thomas Paprocki joins the ICC for this FREE ONLINE EVENT on how the Eucharist should transform our lives outside the walls of the Church.

Seven years ago this month, a new set of norms came into effect in the Church’s life — Pope Francis’ landmark episcopal accountability project, Vos estis lux mundi.

It’s hard to say much about how Vos estis has worked — despite the policy’s intended goal of greater transparency, U.S. VELM investigations have taken place under a deep cone of silence, with even their existence mostly going unacknowledged. That means only two kinds of outcomes are publicly known for the VELM investigations that have been uncovered — a very small number of episcopal resignations, and otherwise, seemingly no conclusion, and no consequence.

It seems that a binary has developed: Either a Vos estis will see a bishop lose his office, or it will have no consequence at all.

But what if there were more options available to bishop-investigators and to the Vatican? What if, like most of canon law, there were graduated options available at the end of Vos estis probes, to be doled out according to the gravity of the situation?

Might that increase episcopal accountability, and public trust?

I ask those questions in this analysis.

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Fr. Estevan Wetzel is the director of prison ministry and restorative justice in the Diocese of Phoenix, Arizona.

He recently ministered to Catholic death row inmate Leroy McGill and celebrated Mass for him on the morning of his execution. It was, Wetzel said, a “weird” and solemn experience — both similar and unlike what he had done previously as a priest.

Wetzel talked with The Pillar about accompanying a condemned man to his execution — and how to find the Lord in that experience.

It was, I think, an important conversation. Read it here.

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A paradigm shift

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia told a reporter last month that he played a major role in the 2017 dismantling of the JPII Institute for Marriage and Family in Rome, and its reestablishment as a new institute with a focus on “marriage and family sciences,” rather than “marital morality.”

Paglia said that he aimed to bring about a “paradigm shift,” (partially influenced by Paglia’s zeal for robotics, he seemed to say), which would move away from the institution’s “moralistic emphasis,” in favor of “a theology and pastoral care capable of engaging—dialectically and dialogically, not just apologetically and conflictually—with a new humanistic sensibility.”

The archbishop said the heart of his changes at the JPII was to “question … the essentialist and ahistorical paradigm that had supported all sexual and family moral theology developed to date.”

That’s a word salad, but if you cut through, the meaning is clear — Paglia argued that the basis of the Church’s moral theology was, as it pertains to matters of sexual morality, philosophically flawed.

It’s a bold claim. And a claim unpacked in a recent essay, very much worth reading, by Monsignor Livio Melina, a former professor at the JPII Institute.

For myself, I’d offer two observations.

The first is on Paglia’s claim that the JPII Institute offered before its reconstitution a kind of “armchair theology” that was divorced entirely from people’s ordinary experiences of marriage and family life. I see no evidence of that.

Look, it is obvious the interpreters and promoters of John Paul II’s “theology of the body” have at times gone off the rails, and that online discussions about any topic touching on marriage and family can become very weird, very quickly.

But it’s also obvious, at least to me, that the family is actually the school of charity. There is a tendency among “paradigm shifters” to suggest that questions about sexual and medical morality — family questions — are somehow divorced from big social questions about caring for the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, or even “caring for our common home,” as it were.

I just don’t see that, at least in a family that’s pursuing Christian discipleship. Such a family will be inevitably a school of virtue — a place where self-sacrifice, forgiveness and reconciliation, inclusion, charity, and concern for the common good is learned. Such a family, in my experience, becomes the place where the prospect of widening the gift of love becomes possible.

Truth be told, the family, like the parish beyond it, is the most common locus of the Christian life — and it’s obvious to those living it that family life is the place from which any hope for a broad sense of the “human family” is fostered by actual real-life experience of actual parents and actual brothers and sisters.

So questions about how families ought to live in fidelity to Christian revelation are not questions of “armchair theology.” Getting things right in the little picture of the home is the first step in “the Christian animation of the temporal order,” as Christifideles laici puts it.

There are two possible dangers of which to be aware.

One is the kind of divorce that has been made by Paglia and his ilk, which seems to bifurcate the life of the family, and even the intimate life of the husband and wife, from broader social concerns — rather than understanding them as an essentially unified realities.

The other is a danger for families — the danger of seeing the family as a kind of end in itself, and family comfort and security as a kind of primary end of the Gospel, fostering a kind of insularity in family life that fails to see the family’s call to surrender those things in service to the mandate of the Gospel. In short, the failure to see that the fundamental vocation together is a missionary one, and that family life should have an apostolic character.

My second observation is that Paglia’s judgment about the irrelevance of the John Paul II Institute as it was originally constituted is not supported by what’s happened since 2017. Since Paglia recrafted the JPII as an academy for social sciences, the institute itself has foundered, we’ve been told, with cratering enrollment and an increasingly precarious financial position.

There was a great deal of desire, from bishops around the world, to send students to Rome for studies in the theology of marriage and the family. There is far less desire, it turns out, for the kind of third-tier mishmash of sociological theory on offer now at the Institute, which means far fewer promising students are actually attending the Roman institution.

The wisdom or intuition of sending bishops is that building strong families builds strong societies. And that sacred revelation, expressed in the unpacked doctrine of the Church, might have something to say about building strong families.

Imagine that.

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Bar talk

The United States continues to do well in the World Cup, and fairweather fans like me will continue having the time of their lives watching the tournament, for exactly as long as our country remains a participant.

But if you’re like me, watching the games in bars or with soccer fans can be tough — because if you get into a conversation, you run the chance of being exposed real quick for the soccer noob you really are.

So I’ve compiled a few phrases you can offer if your World Cup bona fides come into question. Drop these with confidence, and people just might believe you’re a student of the beautiful game.

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The Dicastery for Divine Worship said June 23 that it had informed German bishops’ conference chairman Bishop Heiner Wilmer, S.C.J., in a June 17 letter, of the refusal of his request for an indult to allow “in exceptional circumstances, a duly commissioned lay member of the faithful to preach in place of the homily during the celebration of the Eucharist.”

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It said that “while expressing appreciation for the pastoral concerns that inspired the request, the Dicastery reaffirms that the current discipline cannot be dispensed from by means of an indult, since the reservation of the homily to a priest or deacon is not a merely disciplinary norm but derives from the very nature of the liturgy.”

The German bishops’ conference later published the DDW’s five-page letter rejecting the request, signed by the dicastery’s prefect, Cardinal Arthur Roche, and secretary, Archbishop Vittorio Francesco Viola, O.F.M.

The letter said: “This norm has been repeatedly confirmed by the Magisterium, especially in the instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum (nos. 64-66), which expressly excludes the possibility that lay faithful may give the homily during the celebration of Mass, even under another designation.”

In what was widely seen as a criticism of long-standing practices in several European countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, the 2004 Vatican Instruction Redemptionis Sacramentum said that “any previous norm that may have admitted non-ordained faithful to give the homily during the eucharistic celebration is to be considered abrogated by the norm of canon 767 §1. This practice is reprobated, so that it cannot be permitted to attain the force of custom.”

It added: “The prohibition of the admission of laypersons to preach within the Mass applies also to seminarians, students of theological disciplines, and those who have assumed the function of those known as ‘pastoral assistants’; nor is there to be any exception for any other kind of layperson, or group, or community, or association.”

In recent decades, the Church has repeatedly ruled out the possibility of lay preaching at Masses.

Canon 767 §1 of the Code of Canon Law says that the homily “is part of the liturgy itself and is reserved to a priest or deacon.”

No. 66 of the General Instruction of the Roman Missal says “the homily should ordinarily be given by the priest celebrant himself. He may entrust it to a concelebrating priest or occasionally, according to circumstances, to the deacon, but never to a lay person.”

The Vatican’s 2015 Homiletic Directory said: “Well-trained lay leaders can also give solid instruction and moving exhortation, and opportunities for such presentations should be provided in other contexts; but it is the intrinsically liturgical nature of the homily that demands that it be given only by those ordained to lead the Church’s worship.”

The DDW underlined June 23 that “the homily forms an integral part of the Liturgy of the Word, is intrinsically linked to the proclamation of the Gospel, and constitutes an exercise of the munus docendi [duty to teach] entrusted to ordained ministers through the Sacrament of Holy Orders.”

It added: “The proclamation of the Word within the liturgical celebration is inseparable from the mission received sacramentally and from the unity that binds together Word and Sacrament in the Eucharistic celebration.”

The letter to the German bishops explained that “since the reservation of the homily to the ordained minister belongs to the sacramental and liturgical structure of the Eucharistic celebration itself, no dispensation by indult can be granted from the norm established in can. 767 §1, even in the presence of serious pastoral considerations.”

It went on: “Criteria such as better theological preparation or communicative abilities on the part of lay faithful, however valuable they may be in themselves, cannot justify entrusting the homily to them … Nor is this merely a question of theological competence. For the priest, the preparation and delivery of the homily form an integral part of his priestly ministry and spirituality and cannot be separated from them.”

The request to permit lay homilies originated in a resolution approved by participants in Germany’s controversial “synodal way” on March 10, 2023.

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The document called on Germany’s bishops to “draw up a particular norm and obtain permission for this from the Holy See, according to which the homily can also be taken over in Eucharistic celebrations on Sundays and feast days by theologically and spiritually qualified faithful commissioned by the bishop.”

The resolution noted that it was already a “long-standing practice” in German dioceses for “persons who have qualified themselves through studies in theology and have been sent by the bishop into the ministry of proclaiming the Gospel” to preach at Masses.

It suggested the practice could be expanded to include religious education teachers, “trained people for leading liturgies of the word,” and “spiritual leaders of associations.”

Wilmer, who was elected German bishops’ conference chairman in February, said the bishops had discussed the synodal way resolution in detail at their Feb. 23-26 plenary meeting in Würzburg and adopted a regulation that would govern the practice.

Wilmer personally submitted the request for an indult to Vatican officials March 30.

The DDW said June 23 that its letter to the German bishops also stressed “the importance of promoting the ongoing formation of ordained ministers so that the homily may fully express its pastoral and spiritual effectiveness.”

The letter also noted that the German bishops had suggested a linguistic distinction could be drawn between preaching at Masses by an ordained minister and by a lay person, if the first practice was known as a Homilie (German for “homily”) and the second as a Predigt (“preaching”).

But the letter said “the proposed distinction between a ‘homily,’ reserved to the ordained minister, and a possible ‘sermon,’ entrusted to a lay faithful person, does not appear admissible, since the proposed place, immediately after the Gospel, and the function exercised essentially coincide with those of the homily itself.”

The letter added that the present situation in Germany did not constitute a “genuine pastoral necessity” that would justify a departure from liturgical norms.

“When a priest is present to celebrate the Eucharist, he is thereby also present to exercise the ministry of the homily, which belongs to him by virtue of his ordination. Situations in which the celebrant is impeded, for example because of a temporary physical limitation, constitute merely occasional and time-limited circumstances and cannot be regarded as the basis for a permanent pastoral necessity,” it said.

It added: “Where no priest is available, no celebration of the Eucharist takes place; rather, according to the norms of the Church, provision is made for celebrations of the Word of God, within which suitable forms of proclamation or interpretation of Sacred Scripture may be entrusted to lay faithful, without any special indult being required.”

The DDW’s June 23 statement concluded by noting that current Church discipline allows for various forms of lay preaching outside the Mass.

It said: “The Church’s current discipline already provides for numerous forms of proclaiming the Word and preaching that may be entrusted to lay members of the faithful outside the homily and outside the celebration of the Eucharist, in accordance with canon law and the proper nature of these different forms of proclaiming the Gospel.”

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

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This episode is sponsored by the 2026 Amazing Parish Leadership Summit.

This August, join leaders like you from across the Church for three days of inspiration, encouragement and equipping.

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Already read the readings? Skip ahead to 6:30.

Reading 1 - 2 Kings 4: 8-11, 14-16a

Psalm 89: 2-3, 16-17, 18-19

Reading 2 - Romans 6: 3-4, 8-11

Gospel - Matthew 10: 37-42

The expectation is that Leo will make an extraordinary consistory again part of the annual Roman calendar, giving the world’s cardinals a chance to meet with the pope and each other.

After years of Pope Francis choosing not to summon the college for extraordinary consistories at all, retaining only perfunctory ordinary meetings to formally elevate new cardinals, Leo has, to some extent, the chance to reinvent the wheel.

With the pope free to choose his own format for extraordinary consistories, and how and on what topics he wants to consult the college, what do his choices for the meetings tell us about how he plans to use the college?

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The formal agenda for the two days of meetings broadly follows the format of the last consistory in January, with cardinals meeting in groups to discuss topics chosen by the pope, themed around his chosen headline topics of international affairs and evangelization.

The chosen subjects for the four working sessions — three themed around the state of the world, with two based on sections of Leo’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas, followed by a final session on the implementation of the synod — are broadly drawn, at least in the circulated agenda.

All the groups will send their feedback via email, with groups of cardinals serving as diocesan bishops presenting their summaries in the hall to the entire assembly, along with some of the other groups of non-diocesan cardinals.

The consistory’s business will conclude Saturday with a “dialogue” between the cardinals and the pope, before they adjourn to dinner.

But even this somewhat basic outline for the consistory tells us something about Leo’s expected outputs from the meetings — and, perhaps, how he wants to utilize the college itself.

For a start, the resumption of extraordinary consistories is itself significant, of course, especially in context.

Francis was sparing in summoning the world’s cardinals to discuss particular issues or themes, convening only three extraordinary consistories across his pontificate and limiting even the ordinary sessions to a minimum.

On the rare occasions the cardinals were summoned to Rome for a topical discussion — on the family and the reform of the Roman curia — some cardinals objected that, after a fractious and volatile assembly in 2014, a new format of small group discussions, narrow agendas, and strictly limited opportunities for feedback rendered the sessions meaningless.

Francis appeared to agree, effectively discontinuing them altogether. In comparison, Leo’s publicly stated intention to make the consistories annual events is a kind of monument to collegiality.

But another crucial piece of context is Leo’s having dispensed with another cardinalatial institution, the so-called C9 Council of Cardinal Advisors, created by Francis as a kind of global kitchen cabinet as he suppressed meetings of the entire college.

The balance of the Leonine changes seems to be that the pope prefers and sees the necessity of hearing from the entire college — and allowing them the chance to meet and get to know each other, both subjects of vocal frustration during the general congregations ahead of the 2025 conclave.

And, unlike Francis, Leo does not appear to be looking for, or interested in, a hand-picked representation of the larger body, either to function as a private sounding board or a kind of para-curial cabinet.

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While the “small group discussion model” remains intact, it is worth noting that the final session of the consistory is an hours long open “dialogue” between the cardinals and the pope — effectively an open mic session for the college to raise whatever issues they want with Leo, suggesting again that the pope is sincerely interested in hearing the cardinals’ thoughts.

Some observers have questioned the pope’s desire to really hear from the college, though, especially in reaction to the discussion items, both for this week and the previous session in January.

Much has been made of the absence of the subject of the liturgy from the last consistory, for example, and a shadow hanging over the June session will undoubtedly be the looming threat of a schism by the leadership of the Society of St. Pius X, with their illicit episcopal consecrations set to take place in the first days of July.

Some, too, have noted that while Leo has broadly themed the discussions this week around global conflict and division versus building up the common good, rooted in sections of his recent encyclical letter, one of its more pointed and noteworthy statements — that the Church’s just war theory has become outdated — is not listed for discussion.

While observers might perceive that Leo is aiming to keep the most contentious issues off the consistory’s agenda though, another interpretation is that the pope is simply not imposing anything more than the broadest of boundaries on their conversations.

For example, during the first day’s sessions, the cardinal are asked to discuss and to give on what “sufferings, tensions and questions most strongly affect” their people and dioceses, what “signs of hope, fidelity to the Gospel and possible reconciliation” ought be given more prominence in the Church, and to consider how “tensions, divisions and conflicts affecting the world today touch the life of our Churches and our peoples.”

The second day’s sessions ask the cardinals to discuss local points of division and marginalization in the context of building up the common good.

It is a broad agenda, but by no means a lightweight set of topics — nor, indeed, could it reasonably be called prescriptive. Virtually any issue of concern to any individual cardinal could find room under one of those headings, if any feels the need to raise it.

Another question to consider is what Leo actually wants to get out of the consistory sessions. Judging by the organization and agenda, which ends with an extended open session for free dialogue with the pope, Leo’s primary aim appears to be to hear whatever wants to be said, and to hear it within the context of the entire College of Cardinals, allowing him to gauge actual consensus behind different issues and priorities and identify outlying topics which may nevertheless be of interest.

It is also worth pointing out that the absence of specific topics from the formal agenda — like the SSPX or just war theory — could signal that Leo simply isn’t interested in canvassing the global college’s opinions on granular issues, at least at this point in time.

Each pope uses the college in his own way, as best suits his style of governance — Francis did away with the general meetings in favor of hearing from the C9 on specific priorities and plans.

Leo, for now at least, may be more concerned with re-tuning the Petrine office to hear more open feedback from the global cardinals, rather than asking them to work — as a whole or via small quasi-executive committee — as a kind of policy shop for specific problems.

A knee-jerk assessment of this would be to consider it as a decrease of collaboration, but in reality (and in context) it might more appropriately be seen as a return to more established mechanisms of curial governance.

Under Francis, for example, the C9 often appeared somewhat insulated from both the rest of the College of Cardinals and from the Roman curia, and the pope himself was often seen as having a very tightly knit inner circle which, the years-long synodal process notwithstanding, often appeared impregnable and somewhat unpredictable to the rest of the hierarchy.

Just over a year into his pontificate, it seems as though Leo is most interested for the moment in helping the entire college rediscover itself and its proper role, as a whole, and hearing from the whole body, much in the way he did prior to and just after his election during the conclave last year.

That in itself is a very new — at least by immediate comparison — notion of collegiality.

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At first glance, these two events thousands of miles apart might seem unrelated. Fr. Youhanna Al-Amin was killed June 19, reportedly in retaliation for denouncing the theft of medicine intended for the local population. Hansen inaugurated the shrine to Mary, Mother of Persecuted Christians, June 20 at the Church of St. John in Oslo’s Bredtvet neighborhood.

Yet in the communion of the Church, everything is connected. The new shrine’s purpose is to give Catholics a place where they can pray together for priests and laity confronting dangers similar to those faced by Fr. Youhanna.

Hansen received a proposal to establish the shrine in August 2025, seven months after he was consecrated as Bishop of Oslo, following a Vatican diplomatic career. The idea came from Fr. Benedict Kiely, an English priest of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham who runs Nasarean.org, a charity supporting persecuted Christians.

As part of his mission, Kiely invites bishops around the world to install shrines with an icon of Mary, Mother of Persecuted Christians. The image is an Eleusa icon, with an inscription in the top-left corner that reads “Mary, Mother of Persecuted Christians” in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus. Shrine locations include New York, London, and Stockholm, as well as Astana in Kazakhstan and Qaraqosh in Iraq.

The shrines draw attention to — and encourage prayer for — the estimated 338 million Christians facing some form of persecution worldwide.

Norway might seem like a surprising place for a Catholic shrine devoted to persecuted Christians. But the nation’s growing Catholic community includes people from more than 180 countries, some with firsthand knowledge of persecution in their homelands.

In an email interview on the eve of the inauguration, Bishop Hansen discussed his own awakening to the scope of anti-Christian persecution, why he decided to establish the new shrine, and his hopes for its future.

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When did you first become aware of the scale of the persecution of Christians worldwide?

Ten years ago, I was stationed as a papal diplomat in Vienna, Austria, at the Holy See’s mission to several international organizations. In one organization, the human rights portfolio included work on intolerance and discrimination against Christians in the Northern Hemisphere.

In the United Nations and beyond, the horrific atrocities committed by ISIS, also against Christians, were coming to light. It was not difficult to conclude that the anger and hatred directed against the followers of Jesus Christ are a global reality.

Why did you accept the invitation to establish a shrine to Mary, Mother of Persecuted Christians, in the Diocese of Oslo?

I believe that much greater focus needs to be directed both toward the plight of persecuted Christians and toward our shared obligation to pray for and support them.

I consider it providential that just as I began my episcopal ministry and started looking at priorities for our diocese, the offer of the icon and the idea of a shrine was presented to me.

Why did you choose the Church of St. John in Bredtvet, Oslo, as the new shrine’s location?

For two reasons: first, it is the largest Catholic church in the city of Oslo and will, therefore, ensure the shrine’s prominence.

Second, a significant number of faithful in the parish are themselves from countries where the memory of intolerance or persecution is strong, such as Poland, Lithuania, and Vietnam, or from countries where Christians today suffer violence and persecution, including Nigeria, Myanmar, and India.

Why do you think that — in addition to material support and advocacy — prayer for persecuted Christians is important?

Our Lord said: “Ask, and it will be given you” (Matthew 7:7). Placing our suffering brothers and sisters before God and calling for His aid is therefore an expression of our faith and a specific act of assistance for them. It also reminds us of our need to do more, including material support and public advocacy.

Have you had any encounters with persecuted Christians? If so, what struck you about them?

In my visits to our parishes, I have met many people who have been affected by persecution in various ways. Either themselves, or their families and communities. My priests tell of similar experiences.

What I find striking is the joy and hope they all seem to share. Despite the horror they have seen or that has hit so close to home, these two so fundamental Christian characteristics — joy and hope — are dominant. What a witness they are for us.

What role do you hope the shrine will play within the Oslo diocese?

It is my hope that the shrine will strengthen the collective work of our local Church for Christians who suffer for their faith.

With its inauguration this weekend, we have arranged talks and presentations, as well as held planning meetings — including with partner organizations — to map out future efforts. And all of this will be supported by the prayers at the shrine — for years to come.

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

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This episode is brought to you by the Benedict XVI Institute’s Reverent Liturgy Project, offering the practical wisdom of priests who have successfully adopted classically Catholic worship practices to priests who want to embark on the same journey but need a roadmap to get started.

To learn more, visit ReverentLiturgy.org

He recently ministered to Catholic death row inmate Leroy McGill and celebrated Mass for him on the morning of his execution. McGill was executed by lethal injection May 20 at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence, Arizona, after being convicted of first-degree murder, for a brutal crime, reportedly committed under the influence of methamphetamines. When he died, after more than 20 years in prison, McGill was reported in the local press as “by all accounts, a changed man.”

Wetzel spoke with The Pillar about what it’s like to accompany an inmate who is about to die, how he prepared for the experience, and his spiritual reflections in the days since then.

The interview is below. It has been edited for length and clarity.

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How is the experience of ministering to someone on death row different from accompanying someone dying in a hospital?

When my dad was dying, or when grandma’s dying, you’re kind of guessing, you’re like, “Okay. They could pass tonight, tomorrow.” But, with an execution, you know it’s going to be 10:00 on a Wednesday.

When I enter a hospital, I’m kind of confident that the space is already claimed by the Lord, or maybe there’s family surrounding, already praying a rosary. But since this was the execution chamber of Arizona, I just got a sense that I should just say some extra prayers, because I don’t know how many people have ever prayed in this building.

In other ways, it’s not so different. What sticks out to me is “the wages of sin is death,” which means that all of us come to the table with brokenness, with the reality that my sin personally has brought condemnation and death, eternal death, that I can’t save myself from my sin.

So then when I’m approaching someone in the prison — and now in particular this person to be executed — my heart is filled with a kind of hope, and with solidarity, knowing that I need a savior just as much as this person. They’re not some sort of second-class Christian. [Before conversion], St. Paul approved of the death of St. Stephen, Moses killed someone, David was complicit in the death of Bathsheba’s husband.

But God is bigger than our sins. I’m bringing that hope to the table in my prison ministry, just as fully as I would if I were to accompany someone in hospice.

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How do you minister to someone who is about to be executed?

I didn’t know how the day would turn out. I’m just kind of being present with the Lord. I’m bringing to the table the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The day-of [execution] reading had to do with not belonging to the world, and the passage where Jesus says, “Now I am coming to you. I speak this in the world so that they may share in my joy completely. I gave them your word. Keep them from the evil one.”

After having celebrated Mass, I’m in a different room, just until it’s time.

And I’m just quiet, a little conversation here and there with those that are around me, but really just kind of praying the rosary, the divine mercy chaplet, and sitting and particularly praying just deliverance prayers. I brought my deliverance prayer book.

It’s weird to be participatory in an evil. Someone is going to be killed, and that’s a crazy thought. I’m not praying for the event to go smoothly. I’m not blessing the event. I’m just saying, “Lord, this is the last moments of someone’s life, so I need you to drive out any evil spirit that would try to interfere with the possible salvation of someone at the last moments of their life.”

And so when it came to the moment [of execution], there was no dread. The Lord was with me, and I did what I needed to do. I prayed Psalm 23, the apostolic pardon, and then the “Go forth Christian soul” prayer from the Anointing of the Sick book. And then just pure attentiveness: “Oh, Lord, I’m going to keep praying under my breath.” And I just sensed the Lord’s presence through it all.

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How did you prepare spiritually for the experience?

I made sure to turn off my phone -- Instagram, the social media stuff, checking the news -- and I was just trying to pay attention to life. I think what the Lord helped me understand then is this: you already pray your holy hours, you pray your rosary on the way to work. So, then maybe just to be a little more silent, a little more reflective and almost reverential for the Spirit to do something, to make sure that those last conversations are guided by Him, that they’re sensitive to whatever the Lord wants.

The readings in the days leading up to the execution were beautiful. What I noticed the Lord was doing was giving readings that were very pregnant with meaning. In Acts of the Apostles 20, Paul says, “The Holy Spirit has been warning me that imprisonment and hardships await me, yet I consider life of no importance to me if I only finish my course and the ministry I received from the Lord Jesus.” So as I’m thinking of preparing this person, I’m looking at these readings, and it’s like the Lord is already showing his grace to let the scripture, the lectionary speak for that moment.

The night before, I wondered, is this a day to fast in preparation? But I knew, because it’s online, what Leroy’s last meal was: some Irish food, cottage pie, onion rings, chocolate cake. And I realized, Oh, you know what? Before I drive out to the prison, let me just be in solidarity with him, by having a favorite food of mine: tripas tacos.

I turned off my phone and I was just enjoying a meal at around the same time that I know he was having his last meal, just as some sort of spiritual lifting up of the heart and an appreciation of life and preparation for the next day.

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What else stands out to you about that day?

In our last interaction [before the day of execution], I had written a list of prayer requests and passed it to Leroy – “for this person in my family, for prison ministry in general, for a place of healing and reconciliation for the diocese of Phoenix’s incarcerated population,” that sort of thing.

It was right there in his Bible, and he just showed it to me, and it just kind of moved my heart.

When you’re dealing with a hospice patient, they’re not always conscious or they may be in pain and distracted. To ask for someone to pray for you when they’re in purgatory and in heaven is just a really different conversation.

There was this inner peace within my soul and then almost a confidence that like, “Hey, whenever you get to heaven, make sure to pray for these things.”

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What has your experience been in the days since the execution? Do you have any spiritual reflections or insights?

What first comes to mind is the word gratitude. All of us have charisms and gifts, and to be in this job, this job that I love so much, I was grateful to be in a spot that I needed to be as a priest.

My priesthood has been unfolding to be in this moment, having come from an incarcerated-affected background, having come from the police raiding my house as a kid, that now I’m on the other side and it’s just a joy to be there.

That week was a hard week…But with that theme of gratitude, [I was able] to have a prayer day at our retreat center, to have my priestly support group, to have continued to pray my holy hour and celebrate Mass.

I’m open to understanding that this will affect me deeper, or it might come in waves. I recognize that people process at different times in different ways.

But also there’s that deeper sense that this is a continuation of abiding in the ocean of God’s mercy. When life gets harder or it’s more difficult, or it’s more traumatic, to whom shall we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life. And so with the proper prayer and supports, it continues to be something to be with the Lord in, a space of intimacy and vulnerability, that the Lord is who he says he is and he’s going to provide for us, as life still has the struggles -- and sometimes in the priestly ministry, very deep and difficult circumstances, as you accompany the people of God.

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You are the head of prison ministry and restorative justice in your diocese. In your view, how does the idea of restorative justice fit into the Catholic understanding of justice?

While justice requires that we take responsibility for our sins, our dignity is never lost. And so this idea of restorative justice is the idea that those who are incarcerated, and also family members of the incarcerated, and also victims, at times have been so wounded that they forget or they seemingly lose the dignity of how precious they are in the eyes of the Lord.

So I find my restorative justice ministry as a part of setting captives free, to be able to bring healing and reconciliation to those who have been deeply affected by crime – both the incarcerated and the victims. When our blessed Lord wants to set captives free, he wants to save us from our sins and envelop us in his mercy, then he is elevating us and restoring us to the preciousness that we have in his eyes by his grace and healing.

Again, that 100% includes not only victims, but also the incarcerated. Mother Teresa talks about loving the poorest of the poor, that if indeed the wages of sin is death, then these individuals absolutely just as much are in need of and are entitled to the saving grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, because he has willed it. He has chosen to set captives free, to save us from our sins. No one is a second-class Christian, if we choose to repent and return to the Lord, who saved every single one of us from eternal death.

Many times in prison, once things have settled down and you’re outside of the world, you come to a freedom that you could never have on the outside. I’ve seen this multiple times in prison ministry. Many come to this falling in love with the Lord, this repentance, and that there’s this deeper meaning, there’s this deeper intercession that transforms the incarcerated heart, that they know they’re not second-class Christians, that an incarcerated individual comes to this understanding.

There’s a permission to fall completely in love with Jesus and to be redeemed by him. And I’ve seen it in multiple situations.

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The consecration was proclaimed jointly by Ecuador’s President Gabriel García Moreno and Archbishop José Ignacio Checa y Barba at Quito Metropolitan Cathedral.

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The act inspired a global wave of national consecrations that continues to this day, most recently with the June 11 consecration of the U.S. to the Sacred Heart by the country’s bishops.

The movement is likely to continue in the coming years, with England and Wales reportedly among the countries preparing for national consecrations.

What’s the background to this phenomenon? And which countries have been consecrated so far?

How did the practice begin?

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has deep historical roots. But the devotion took on its modern form following the visions of Jesus reported by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque between 1673 and 1675 in Paray-le-Monial, France.

Amid these intense spiritual experiences, the Visitation nun wrote prayers of personal consecration to the Sacred Heart. She shared these with her Jesuit confessor, St. Claude La Colombière, who consecrated himself to the Sacred Heart and dedicated his life to spreading the devotion.

Thanks in part to the global network of the Jesuit order, the devotion spread far beyond Europe. Among the most receptive regions was Latin America. Historians point out that the Sacred Heart devotion — with its stress on personal prayer, home enthronement, and family consecration — helped to nurture the faith in areas that suffered an acute shortage of priests.

That was not the case, however, in Ecuador, which had relatively robust priestly numbers. In the early 19th century, Ecuadorians engaged in a decades-long struggle to gain independence from the Spanish Empire. Local clergy played a prominent role in the battle. The country’s first provisional constitution, for example, was written by a priest.

Despite gaining full independence in 1830, Ecuador suffered from internal division and instability in the decades that followed. When Gabriel García Moreno secured power in 1860, he believed that the country’s ills stemmed from its lack of a strong national identity. He saw the Catholic Church as the one institution that united Ecuadorians of all political persuasions, so he sought to form an alliance with it.

When García Moreno received a proposal to consecrate the young republic to the Sacred Heart, he embraced the idea, after initial hesitation about whether the country was spiritually worthy of the honor.

By consecrating Ecuador to the Sacred Heart together with the country’s leading churchman, García Moreno made a powerful statement about Ecuador’s identity, affirmed strong Church-state ties, and also sent a message of solidarity to Pope Pius IX, who had lost the Papal States four years earlier.

García Moreno’s unapologetically public faith earned him enemies: he was assassinated after attending Mass in 1875, just a year after the national consecration.

Archbishop José Ignacio Checa y Barba was also killed, on Good Friday in 1877, after drinking from a literal poisoned chalice.

Although Ecuador was the first state to be consecrated to the Sacred Heart with full state backing, it wasn’t absolutely the first national consecration. That took place in Ireland on March 30, 1873, when the Irish bishops consecrated their nation to the Sacred Heart. There was no question of state support at the time because the country was then under British Protestant rule.

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Which nations have been consecrated?

Ecuador’s consecration to the Sacred Heart gained international attention. Catholics around the world saw it as an inspiring act of national devotion and support for Pius IX.

In 1875, two countries followed Ecuador’s example: El Salvador and Uruguay. The consecration in Uruguay was performed by Bishop Jacinto Vera, then serving as apostolic vicar of Montevideo. Vera was beatified in 2023.

In his 1899 encyclical Annum sacrum, Pope Leo XIII consecrated the entire human race to the Sacred Heart. The encyclical helped to inspire the national consecration of Venezuela in 1900 and Colombia in 1902.

Moments of national peril were another driver of consecrations. In 1915, as World War I tore Europe apart, both France and Germany underwent national consecrations by their respective episcopates, even as their soldiers clashed along the Western Front.

Subsequent events showed there is no simple link between national consecrations and peace and prosperity. After years of bloodshed, there was a brief pause, before war engulfed France and Germany once again, at the cost of millions of lives.

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This bitter reality was also evident in Spain, where King Alfonso XIII consecrated the country to the Sacred Heart in 1919. This remains the only occasion on which a monarch has presided at a national consecration.

The ceremony took place at Cerro de los Ángeles (Hill of the Angels), located in what is traditionally considered to be the center of the Iberian Peninsula. Photographs taken at the time show Alfonso XIII reading the act of consecration at an outdoor altar. Other images show throngs of people beneath the soaring Monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that was inaugurated on the same day as the consecration.

The monument, which was topped by a statue of the Sacred Heart, only stood for 17 years. In 1936, Republican militia seized the shrine and used the statue for target practice, before destroying it with dynamite. Images of the monument’s destruction were widely circulated in the Catholic world and came to symbolize the persecution of the Spanish Church.

A new monument was inaugurated in 1965, with the ruins of the original preserved nearby.

As the horrors of the 20th century piled up, more nations underwent consecrations, including Brazil and Portugal in 1931, Argentina in 1945, and Chile in 1946.

The Philippines became the first Asian nation to be consecrated to the Sacred Heart in 1956, in an act led by President Ramon Magsaysay.

Ghana became Africa’s first nation to undergo the consecration in 1957, three days before it achieved independence from British rule.

The national consecration movement has picked up pace again in the 21st century — another turbulent period in world affairs.

On March 25, 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, Cardinal Antonio Marto consecrated 24 countries to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fátima, at the request of their bishops’ conferences.

In a single act, Africa gained three new consecrated nations: Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. Also, consecrated that day was India, the world’s most populous nation.

As it stands, nearly 40 nations — roughly one in five of the world’s countries — have been consecrated to the Sacred Heart. It’s impossible to say how many definitively because there is no central database and sources are rife with contradictory information. This overview only includes national consecrations that are well attested in published sources, including Church documents.

Other countries have received different kinds of consecration. For example, Venezuela was consecrated to the Blessed Sacrament in 1899 and Rwanda was consecrated to Christ the King in 1946.

If you live in a country that is not yet consecrated to the Sacred Heart, there is no cause for despair. Pope Leo XIII’s consecration of the whole human race to the Sacred Heart means that no one is excluded on the basis of nationality.

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The policies, documented in the motu proprio Vos estis lux mundi, represented at the time the promise of a new approach to a serious problem, which had come to the fore with the McCarrick scandals of 2018, subsequent grand jury reports, and emerging accounts from Catholics who said they’d manifested concerns to bishops, and been met with silence, or with the appearance of cover-ups.

When it was promulgated, the U.S. bishops’ conference president Cardinal Daniel Dinardo said it would “empower the Church everywhere to bring predators to justice, no matter what rank they hold in the Church. It also permits the Church the time and opportunity to bring spiritual healing.”

Cardinal Sean O’Malley, then leading the pope’s safeguarding commission, said the plan would move the ball in the Church on “disclosure, transparency, and accountability with regard to any occurrence of sexual abuse, or intimidation, or cover up in the life of the Church.”

Transparency has not been a feature of Vos estis’ implementation in the U.S., and because of that, it is nearly impossible to assess whether the goal of internal accountability has been achieved.

But public accountability is easier to assess. With the Vatican and local officials rarely acknowledging Vos estis investigations, and results only being apparent when they lead to resignations — sometimes even made under the guise of “health reasons” —- most observers have concluded that Vos estis investigations have hardly moved the needle on the question of public accountability.

And with a growing number of reports that initial third party reporting systems did not function as intended, or that the Dicastery for Bishops has been slow to respond to reports sent to Rome — most likely from the challenge of chronic understaffing — it’s possible that, in some places, the existence of Vos estis processes have actually diminished public confidence in ecclesial investigation processes, rather than bolstered them.

But some bishops and experts have told The Pillar they see another challenge to a sense of increased public accountability in the administration of Vos estis investigations: the seemingly binary choice given to investigators and ecclesiastical officials engaged in the processes — the sense that a Vatican-ordered investigation will lead either to a solicited resignation, or to no publicly known result at all.

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Both bishops and safeguarding experts have told The Pillar that if Vos estis investigations were more publicly acknowledged, with their results and consequences to be publicly known, it would seem more likely that the could Church consider a broader range of end results than resignation, especially if bishops are found to have been in some way negligent in the administration of their duties, but not to the point of necessarily warranting removal.

To be clear, there are certainly cases when removal for mishandling an allegation of abuse or misconduct is demonstrably warranted, and with very little likelihood of objections raised. But there are also cases in which a bishop might have mishandled some element of a case, even badly, without malice, and properly be investigated for it, without it necessarily warranting his removal.

In short, canon law recognizes that in ordinary circumstances, most sanctions and restrictions come by gradation, according to the gravity of the offense or circumstance. It’s plausible to consider that the same is true in cases warranting Vos estis investigations — that while zero tolerance remains appropriately the gold standard for abuse itself, administrative issues may well admit to a graduated scale.

In light of that, it’s worth asking whether Vos estis could be a more effective tool if it led to publicly known consequences beyond removal — both for ensuring better governance from bishops, and for helping to shore up public confidence in the Church’s commitment to safeguarding.

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But if so, what might they be?

One option for bishops found to have mishandled some element of a case, especially without malice, might be dubbed the “Hunthausen solution.”

In 1985, because of a track record of doctrinal failures, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle was given an auxiliary bishop with particular competences and faculties, especially surrounding liturgy, priest formulation, and catechesis. In essence, Hunthausen saw the Vatican carve out certain areas of his responsibility, while allowing him to remain diocesan bishop — a prospect foreseen by canon 403 §2 of the Code of Canon Law.

In Hunthausen’s case, it didn’t work, and the auxiliary was gone from the diocese in less than 18 months.

But the Vatican has seen fit to try a similar approach in its own governance: given concerns about his track record and competence in administering disciplinary cases, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez was in 2023 appointed prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, but with only limited involvement and oversight into disciplinary cases, being explicitly exempted (or excluded) from cases involving the abuse of involving minors.

While unusual, that approach seems to have worked in the DDF’s discharge of duties in recent years, and a similar arrangement could be considered for bishops found in the course of a Vos estis investigation to have handled cases incompetently.

There is another option that could be considered, in cases in which some fault has been found, but not sufficient as to suggest removal: public disclosure and public apology.

There are, in the life of the Church today, two practices that exist in considerable tension with one another. The first is the reflexive ecclesial penchant for sequestering information under the highest levels of confidentiality. The second is the bishops’ frequent recourse in recent years to apologies for failures to appropriately handle allegations of abuse.

The challenge with those apologies is that they are generally non-specific expressions of regret, however sincere, for generalized and depersonalized “failings.”

Such apologies can have only limited effect. But Vos estis investigations afford the opportunity for a “paradigm shift,” as it were — for a disclosure of how cases came to be mishandled, and then a genuine apology from the person directly responsible.

Given that option, it could be interesting to see whether some prelates chose resignation instead. But some bishops have proven themselves eager to learn how better to handle cases, and might well welcome the opportunity for a specific and public apology, to the extent it’s called for.

At the same time, it’s worth asking whether Catholics would forgive a bishop who offered apologies for mishandling, in some way, a very serious case. It has been long the fear that a bishop who admits to specific wrongdoing would find himself unable to recover from reputation harm, which is part of the reason there has been no public disclosure when removal is not judged to be warranted.

But there is beginning to be some precedent for an alternative path. While once, any accusation against a priest was regarded as a “death sentence,” today, priests have apologized in some circumstances for failures of prudence or judgment, and been — to some extent — reincorporated into their communities.

Whether that could be possible for bishops who fail to handle cases administratively is hard to predict, but The Pillar has spoken with whistleblowers in some cases who say that acknowledgment of wrongdoing and sincere contrition — with firm purpose of amendment — would do a lot to restore their own trust in their leaders, especially if it was accompanied by a demonstration of plans for local policy or process change.

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Vos estis lux mundi was meant as a creative application of ecclesiastical principles to address an emerging problem — and to effect “a continuous and profound conversion of hearts.” Some of those hearts belong to bishops, and some to Catholics hoping for the Church’s transparent application of justice. For both groups, the use of a broader range of responses, and the necessary disclosure of information that would entail, might well be an effective mechanism.

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Happy Friday friends,

For reasons of, I assume, terrible coincidence, this last week has seen several friends of mine, and friends of the Pillar family all, dealing with urgent medical emergencies. They’ve all been in my prayers this week, and if you’ve room I’d ask you to include them in yours, too.

It’s a sobering thing, standing in close proximity as families you care about see their lives upended, forced to confront the fundamental precariousness in which we all live but spend so much of our time skating over the top of.

Speaking only for myself, I see-saw violently in my own spiritual life between either treating Providence with a kind of unhealthy fatalism or petitioning the Almighty over daily trivialities. Neither is especially healthy, since neither reflects the real relationship I am called to have with God.

The truth is my life neither runs on rails like an inevitable pre-planned journey, nor is it simple chaos, practical and moral, which I can more or less successfully mitigate by the right kind of Divine propitiation.

Christian life is the messy mashup of individual choices, accumulated experiences (good and bad), unexpected consequences and unforeseen events, all set within and under an overarching love, which is its ultimate context and narrative force.

It is, in this sense, family life centered around the generative love of God within the Trinity.

I suppose like a lot of parents, I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make things secure, safe, stable. Where, my mind often goes, is security to be found, for me and those I love?

While it might drive me to prayer at times, fundamentally, this is an impulse to approach God out of fear, not faith. And the hard truth of the Gospel is, I think, that security, at least in the earthly sense, is nowhere to be found.

Instead, in prayer and through the Church, I am reminded, though never often enough, that it is love I should be looking for — the love which saves and consoles and redeems and which faith, when I have it, instinctively grasps for.

It’s this love which is the rock on which I am supposed to build my house, in the image of the Gospel parable. Watching the storms hit those close to me this week reminds me I have a lot of work to do on its foundations.

Here’s the news.

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The News

An Italian archbishop has faced criticism, even from other bishops, after signing a petition to exclude a well-known Israeli novelist from a local literary festival.

Archbishop Franco Moscone of Manfredonia-Vieste-San Giovanni Rotondo has been accused of antisemitism after signing up to an appeal organized by the Communist Refoundation Party calling for Eshkol Nevo’s exclusion from the Libro Possibile festival.

Moscone said that said he signed the petition not because Nevo is Israeli, but because he believes the novelist has not sufficiently opposed what Moscone describes as a genocide in Gaza which he has compared to the Holocaust.

Nevo, in fact, is an outspoken opponent of the conflict in Gaza and a frequent and strident critic of the current Israeli government.

The archbishop is no stranger to controversy, read all about it here.

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A priest in the Archdiocese of Kansas City, Kansas, used embezzled parish money to fund cruises, casinos, and a variety of medical treatments, according to an affidavit in the case.

Fr. Richard Storey, was arrested last month after an internal audit at his former parish alleged that he stole nearly $160,000 prior to his resignation. He faces charges of theft of property or services worth $100,000 — a crime classified in Kansas as a level five felony charge, which can be punished by up to 10 years in prison.

Storey had already resigned as pastor of Curé of Ars Parish in Leawood, Kansas, last September, when police launched a separate criminal investigation into unspecified allegations involving an adult.

He had served as pastor of the parish for a decade prior to his resignation.

Read the whole story here.

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Archbishop Hubertus van Megen touched down in Berlin Monday to begin his challenging new assignment as the apostolic nuncio to Germany.

The 64-year-old Dutchman was greeted at the airport June 15 by a delegation representing the German government, the bishops’ conference, and the diplomatic corps.

He succeeds the Croatian Archbishop Nikola Eterović, who was nuncio to Germany from September 2013 to April 2026, a turbulent period — to say the least — in relations between the German bishops and the Vatican.

Who is van Megen? And what challenges await him at the nunciature in Berlin? Read all about it here.

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Peruvian President José María Alcázar met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican yesterday, formally inviting the pontiff to visit Peru in November.

Both the Peruvian bishops’ conference and Alcázar have said the trip is expected to take place that month. But a papal visit could be complicated by Peru’s fraught political climate and a series of scandals involving members of the country’s episcopal hierarchy, where Leo served as a missionary and bishop for nearly three decades.

The Peruvian trip will for sure be a kind of homecoming for Leo, but that doesn’t mean it will be without some very real challenges for the pope. Read all about it here.

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A total of 196 new priests are scheduled to be ordained in Poland this year, continuing a long-term decline in numbers.

This is expected to be the first year in the 21st century with fewer than 200 priestly ordinations in Poland. There were 208 new priests in 2025 and 235 in 2024.

The drop in priestly ordinations is likely to be felt far beyond Poland, because the country has traditionally supplied priests to other European countries, both East and West. Poland has also long been an important source of missionary priests to Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

But despite the ongoing decline, Poland remains the European country with the most priestly vocations. And that is its own potential problem.

Read the whole story here.

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Since he became pope last year, Leo XIV has become the recipient of many gifts, including an increasingly large collection of sports jerseys.

It seemed to us that it was getting a bit out of hand, and more than a little silly. And we thought it would make a nice bit of early weekend reading to do a quick tour of some of the more obscure team shirts given to the pope.

Instead, in an act of unprovoked and unbridled violence against various cities, teams, sports, and even entire countries, Michelle La Rosa turned in one of the funniest things I have read all year.

Read it here.

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As Magnifica humanitas illustrates with its more than 42,000 words in English, popes today love to write long encyclicals.

Francis was also known to cruise past the 40,000 words mark, which he did twice, in Laudato Si’ and Fratelli tutti. St. John Paul II as you might expect, still holds the record, though, with Evangelium vitae ringing in at well over 48,000 words, inclusive of its 142 footnotes.

As Bronwen McShea explains in a column this week, it didn’t used to be like this — Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum was fewer than 14,800 words.

In fact, popes of the past regularly produced encyclicals that were in the range of 500 to 1,500 words.

But what were such business-like encyclicals about, and to whom were they addressed? Read all about it here.

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For the first time in over 50 years, the Church in the U.S. will begin praying a new translation of The Liturgy of the Hours. Ascension is designing an edition with exceptional readability and top-of-the-line materials to faithfully serve the Church’s daily prayer for generations. Preorders open July 1.

Ecclesiastical dark matter

At the U.S. bishops conference meeting last week, one of the less remarked upon sessions was a presentation from Bob Cunningham, the executive director of the Catholic Prison Ministries Coalition.

It was a deeply sobering and spiritually challenging speech he gave, sadly somewhat lost amid the more immediately news-y events of a new USCCB president and apostolic nuncio, and the bishops’ vote to revise the Dallas Charter.

Cunningham noted — I say “noted,” though it came as a numerical shock to me — that a very conservative estimate of the number of self-identified Catholics currently incarcerated in the United States stands at, in Cunningham’s estimation, close to 400,000 people — possibly more if you factor in ICE detention centers.

For comparison, that is larger than the Catholic population of the Archdiocese of Denver.

The thrust of what the bishops were told was that the essence of prison chaplaincy in the United States is just showing up. There is no community of Catholics more marginalized, in a practical sense, than those in prison. And what they need, what they crave most of all, and ultimately what benefits them the most, the bishops were told, isn’t programs or curricula, but real pastoral human contact.

“Encounter” was the term used, though I think I would rather the more visceral word communion. I know myself some people who have spent more than a little time engaged in prison ministry and from all I hear this is what is desired above all, not to be acknowledged as a statistic but to be known as a person.

Introducing Cunningham to the assembly, Bishop William Wack of Pensacola–Tallahassee described receiving a letter from a local inmate which, as he put it, “convicted” him. “We need a shepherd,” Wack recalled reading. “No matter what we’ve done, or where we are or for how long, you’re our bishop and we are your sheep, please come and visit us.”

I would imagine such a letter would strike a bishop exactly as Wack reported it struck him. But I am not sure it should hit any of the rest of us any less hard. Somewhere between a quarter and a half a million of our brothers and sisters are in prison. Have we visited them, as Christ commanded us? I know I have not.

On the podcast last week, JD and I talked about the scope of prison chaplaincy in this country — which really ought to rank as a diocese, at least by the numbers — a personal ordinariate, in canonical terms.

We also talked a bit about the enormous logistical hurdles which can make just getting in to see our brothers and sisters in Christ anything but straightforward. And that is before we talk about the known barriers to bringing them the sacraments that crop up in different states and can sometimes be entirely arbitrary.

Since then, I have been wondering about the effects on the Church, as a spiritual ecclesia, of a situation in which hundreds of thousands of Catholics are cut off from the rest of us, often totally forgotten.

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

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Archbishop Franco Moscone of Manfredonia-Vieste-San Giovanni Rotondo has been accused of antisemitism after joining an appeal calling for Nevo’s exclusion from the Libro Possibile festival, scheduled to take place in July in the town of Vieste.

Moscone has previously drawn criticism for comparing the situation in Gaza to the Holocaust. The archbishop said he signed the petition not because Nevo is Israeli, but because he believes the novelist has not sufficiently opposed what Moscone describes as a genocide in Gaza.

Nevo, however, has repeatedly and publicly criticized both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

The grandson of former Israeli PM Levi Eshkol, Nevo lives in Tel Aviv and is best known for his novel “Nostalgia,” set in 1990s Israel.

However, Nevo has become an even more prominent figure in Italy through a column he wrote for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera between November 2023 and October 2025, chronicling life in Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks and throughout the war in Gaza. In the articles, he repeatedly called for an end to the conflict, criticized the Israeli government, and lamented the suffering caused by the war.

The petition signed by Moscone was launched by the regional secretary of the Communist Refoundation Party, Sabino De Razza, and anthropologist Laura Marchetti.

The petition starts by saying that the request to exclude Nevo “stems from the pain, dismay, and outrage we feel over what the Israeli government and military are doing in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

“Entire families have been wiped out. An entire people has been subjected to bombings, sieges, forced displacement, starvation, and deprivation…Compounding this tragedy is the expansion of Israeli military operations to other areas of the Middle East, particularly Lebanon, where bombings and incursions have caused civilian casualties [and] widespread destruction.”

The petition then says that it doesn’t intend to dispute Nevo’s works or freedom of speech.

“We believe, however, that intellectuals bear a special responsibility during the most tragic moments of history. It is not enough to portray humanity: we must defend it. It is not enough to celebrate dialogue: we must denounce war,” it says in an apparent reference to Nevo’s own criticism of Netanyahu.

“It is not enough to evoke coexistence among peoples: we must take a stand when thousands of civilians are killed, when boys and girls die under bombs, when entire communities are deprived of their land, their homes, and their future,” the petition adds.

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In a Jun. 14 interview, Moscone said that the petition is “not about censoring a writer or banning his works. The point is another: what role should an intellectual have today in the face of tragedies involving thousands of people?”

The archbishop said the petition “invites consideration to the appropriateness of hosting him at a festival without his ever having expressed a clear position on what the Israeli government is doing.”

He criticized Nevo for not “having the courage to offer a contribution of criticism and clarity… The current situation in Israel is no longer sustainable. One expects an intellectual to say things as they are. This particular intellectual has not done so.”

In an uncommon move among Italian bishops, Archbishop Michele Pennisi, emeritus archbishop of Monreale, publicly criticized Moscone, saying that “the Israeli government’s policy must be condemned, but that doesn’t make it plausible to exclude a writer from the festival simply because he is Israeli. It constitutes an act of anti-Semitism. Everyone should be able to freely express their opinions without being required to explicitly declare their compliance with the order.”

On the day the petition was released, Nevo spoke at an event in Bologna, where he said “not only am I ashamed [of the Israeli government], but Ben-Gvir represents neither me nor the values ​​of my country nor Judaism… in four months, my country will vote. I will do everything I can – I’m just a writer – so that this man is no longer part of the government.”

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This is not the first time Archbishop Moscone has drawn criticism for his statements on global affairs.

In March 2025, Moscone took part in a march for peace in Puglia, where he was one of the speakers. During his address, he said that “since 1947 the Gaza Strip and Palestine have been an open-air concentration camp. Since October 7, 2023, they have become an extermination camp.”

“What has always struck me is that the people behind this concentration camp [in Gaza] are the very people who were victims of concentration camps until the end of the Second World War,” he added.

In a June 2025 address, he also encouraged Italy to leave NATO, saying “we must have the courage to free ourselves from this American leash. And, I say this without caution and without mincing words, in my opinion this means leaving NATO.”

“A second missed opportunity was the Minsk Agreement (Belarus). If the West had respected them, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would not have happened,” he added. “Pope Francis was right when he said, ‘We’ve gone barking at Russia’s doorstep.’ I was living in Poland when it joined NATO, and I said to myself, ‘We’re headed for a new world war.’”

In the same address, he had said that Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretariat of state, had asked him “to be ‘prudent’ when discussing certain topics, which is a way of giving me a friendly reprimand!”

Moscone has also spoken against American foreign policy, and in one interview questioned the idea that Iran was actually rearming itself.

“The West, in recent decades, has fueled tensions and then wars. I’m not saying that regimes like Assad’s in Syria or Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq were paradises, but there were no civil wars before international intervention,” he said.

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Moscone’s archdiocese is also at the center of one of the largest financial crises in the Italian Church.

On May 27, the pope signed a chirograph establishing a commission for the direction and oversight of the Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza (House for the Relief of Suffering), a large hospital in San Giovanni Rotondo – part of Moscone’s archdiocese – founded by Padre Pio in 1956 and overseen by the Vatican Secretariat of State.

According to several reports, the hospital has a debt close to €250 million. The hospital is also in the middle of a €32 million dispute with regional authorities, and in a tense internal situation over new labor contracts.

In April, 1,300 workers filed a court injunction demanding payment of a 2024 contractual adjustment, which would provide each of the workers with an average €170 for every month since the adjustment.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin went to the hospital on May 5 to celebrate its 70th anniversary, while workers organized a demonstration protesting contractual adjustments and management decisions, such as the extension of night shifts to 12 hours.

After a TV program on Rai 3 – one of Italy’s public TV stations – claimed that the total debt had grown to €250 million and that issues included inflated paychecks and administrative corruption, Gino Gumirato, the director of the foundation, said that the foundation actually owed “only €108 million.”

Local outlet Il Post reported on May 28 that the debt included €116 million to suppliers, €40 million to banks, and €5 million in unpaid wages to employees, plus the €32 million in dispute with the regional government of Puglia.

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A New Jersey appeals court rules that Seton Hall will not need to fully disclose a report detailing its response to abuse allegations against former…

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

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