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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Already read the readings? Skip ahead to 6:40.

Reading 1 - Isaiah 25: 6-10a

Psalm 23: 1-6

Reading 2 - Philippians 4: 12-14, 19-20

Gospel - Matthew 22: 1-14

Gambetti, who was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2020 at the age of just 56, departs St. Peter’s after a term marked by controversy — some of his own making and some not clearly so.

The Franciscan cardinal arrives in Chieti-Vasto with no experience of diocesan or parish ministry, and succeeds Archbishop Brune Forte, 77.

Still just 60 years old, Gambetti’s departure from the Vatican scene is widely being interpreted as a statement-making personnel move from Pope Leo. While that might strike some as a little over-blown, given the relatively junior position in the Vatican hierarchy of Gambetti’s former role, the signs suggest that it does mean something — though the question is what.

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Perhaps the most important, or at least significant, aspect of Gambetti’s reassignment is the context.

As archpriest of St. Peter’s and president of the Fabbrica, the body charged with the basilica’s practical maintenance, Gambetti oversaw some notably controversial moments and policies.

The main altar had to be rededicated in a liturgy of atonement after one of several serious security lapses led to its desecration in October last year. But even with apparent holes in the basilica’s security, Gambetti faced sustained criticism for his organization of the Vatican basilica for the Jubilee Year celebrations — with visitors, pilgrims, art historians and tour guides all discontented by crowd control barriers running the length of the church and blocking both sight lines and access to major works like Michaelangelo’s Pieta.

And throughout Gambetti’s tenure, the cardinal was dogged by accusations of administrative and financial mismanagement, and overbearing behavior towards both staff and the basilica’s chapter of canons.

But those issues paled in comparison to the criticism which stemmed from the 2021 ban on private Masses celebrated at the basilica’s side altars, with the basilica requiring instead that visiting priests concelebrate at the daily Masses offered at the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter.

That policy withdrew a centuries-long permission for visiting priests to say a Mass at the Church’s most famous basilica, and for visiting groups of pilgrims to have their own group liturgical celebration at its altars.

It also served to curtail expressions of popular devotion to saints buried under side altars in the basilica, most notably at the tomb of St. John Paul II.

All that should convey that Gambetti’s tenure at St. Peter’s was not a popular one.

In fact, his ouster from St. Peter’s was effectively telegraphed a year ago, when Leo declined to reappoint Gambetti to the Pontifical Commission for the Vatican City State.

Gambetti’s transfer to lead the Archdiocese of Chieti-Vasto is most remarkable, then, for its timing.

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To a degree, Gambetti’s move to Chieti-Vasto can be seen as a natural move in this sense: Leo has been clear in his public addresses, most notably to the Italian bishops’ conference, that wants a much closer adherence to the Church’s established term limits and retirement ages, and the cardinal’s five-year term as archpriest lapsed earlier this year, while Forte turned 77 earlier this year — the age Leo previously indicated as the absolute limit for diocesan bishops absent some extraordinary circumstances.

However, it is notable that the pope has several other, somewhat larger, curial positions pending in this regard.

Cardinal Kevin Farrell is 79, and finished his second five-year term as prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life in August. The cardinal also serves as Camerlengo, chair of the committee on reserved financial affairs, president of the Vatican’s investment advisory board, and sole czar of the Vatican pension fund.

Cardinal Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, is 78 and more than a year past the end of his original five-year term while obviously too old to serve a full second term.

Beyond them there are a host of senior Vatican cardinals serving past the age of 75 and beyond their most recent five-year appointments, yet Leo has opted instead to remove — though not yet replace — one of the youngest cardinals in the college.

The background to this move is the widespread expectation in the Vatican that the pope intended to end the summer season with a slew of appointments, kicking off the autumn with a major reshuffle that would show Leo remaking the curia in his own image. That reshuffle never happened, obviously, despite reasonably credible reports of the pope using his own vacation time to brainstorm appointments and sound out candidates.

Quietly, rumors in Rome have suggested that a handful of would-be papal appointments, including a leading candidate for Gambetti’s former job, have actually cried off when asked to serve at the Vatican top table. According to some, this has caused a knock-on series of delays and rethinks among an otherwise carefully considered slate of appointments.

The names and reasons for the rumored refusals to serve vary, as do the credibility of the sources of the rumors. But however real or speculative they may be, they all point to an emerging sense that Leo is stalling, if not outright struggling, to name his own top team nearly 18 months into his reign.

But even assuming that none of it is more than the usual Roman rumor mill turning, and even if Leo has — unlikely as it would be — simply not got around to thinking about major appointments for past-due positions, that only makes the Gambetti move this past weekend stand out the more.

Leo’s decision to (re)move the archpriest of St. Peter’s, one of his youngest curial cardinals, without a successor to announce and ahead of several much older cardinals in more senior roles, has to mean something.

And whatever else may or may not be going on behind the scenes, it seems clear that shifting Gambetti out of Rome was an immediate priority for Leo, one so pressing that having no one in the job was better than keeping him in place. And that is something, whatever you make of it.

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The Secretariat of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union issued the warning Oct. 5 after Laila Medina, the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union, issued an opinion in the closely watched case known as C-12/25 Bisdom Gent.

Medina’s opinion is non-binding but could give an indication of how the Court of Justice will resolve the case in its final judgment, which could potentially be issued in late 2026 or early 2027.

COMECE’s Secretariat said it was “concerned that, if confirmed, the orientation provided by the opinion may create significant legal uncertainty for ecclesiastical data controllers in every EU member state.”

“This is particularly serious because such uncertainty would strike at baptismal registers, which are a central pillar of the Church’s internal functioning and organization, and are vital to enabling it to carry out its mission,” it said.

Medina published her 22,000-word opinion Oct. 1, as the Court of Justice prepared its ruling, which will be binding on the EU’s 27 member states and their national courts.

The Latvian national argued that an individual “has, in principle, the right to have his or her personal data erased from the baptismal register where the controller fails to demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which override the interests, rights, and freedoms of the data subject.”

She said that national courts would need to make complex, case-by-case assessments by weighing a complainant’s “right to respect for private and family life, his right to protection of personal data, and his freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” against “the autonomy of the Church and its freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.”

COMECE’s Secretariat acknowledged that the opinion did not recognize a “general or automatic right to erase data from baptismal records.”

But it expressed concern that the opinion rejected the current practice in Belgian dioceses, where the Church responds to requests for deletion from baptismal registers by striking through an entry and adding an annotation recording the data subject’s wishes, rather than erasing the text.

COMECE’s Secretariat said: “The Advocate General thus distances itself from the fact that — across diverse legal systems and state-Church relations models — consistent national jurisprudence in the EU member states has accepted this practice as an entirely adequate legal solution in case of erasure requests concerning baptismal registers.”

“Erasing the name and surname of the baptized person from the record of a baptism entirely deprives the registration of the baptism, as such, of its meaning, value, and purpose. This crucial aspect seems to have been neglected.”

An Oct. 2 Court of Justice press release presenting Medina’s opinion said: “The data must be rendered illegible to the extent necessary to ensure that the person is no longer identified or easily identifiable, while information concerning the fact that a baptism took place at a given place and time may be retained.”

“This does not require the physical removal of pages from the register. Appropriate measures may be used to conceal the relevant data while leaving other information intact.”

COMECE’s Secretariat argued that the opinion overlooked the impact of erasure on third parties. In a position paper issued Sept. 4, COMECE had noted that baptismal entries also contain the personal data of the minister of baptism, the child’s parents, and two godparents, who also have a legally protected interest in preserving the integrity of the record.

COMECE’s Secretariat also described as “unconvincing” the opinion’s suggestion that retaining an individual’s data in a baptismal register could cause emotional distress.

It said it hoped the Court of Justice would “establish a more favorable line with regard to the protection of baptismal registers from erasure” when it issues its ruling.

The case emerged in March 2021, when an individual asked Belgium’s Ghent diocese to delete their data from all files, including the baptismal register, citing the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, a 2018 EU data protection law.

The Catholic Church teaches that “baptism seals the Christian with the indelible spiritual mark of his belonging to Christ.” While a person can lapse in the practice of the faith, or even renounce it altogether, it is impossible to reverse the effects of baptism.

In April 2021, the Diocese of Ghent added an annotation to the baptismal register, noting that the individual “left the Church” on that date. Two diagonal lines were drawn across the baptismal entry.

When the diocesan authorities explained that a note had been added to the entry, the individual insisted on the deletion of their data and made a complaint to the national Data Protection Authority.

In December 2023, the Data Protection Authority ordered the Ghent diocese to comply with the complainant’s request.

The data authority said that the diocese had argued it was necessary to preserve baptismal records to prevent possible identity fraud, for example, if a person who was already baptized sought to receive the sacrament for a second time, in contravention of Church teaching.

The data authority recognized the Church’s concern, but argued that the complainant’s interests took precedence over those of the Church. The diocese appealed the ruling.

In December 2024, the Brussels Court of Appeal (Market Court) said that the case raised questions concerning EU law that should be addressed by the Court of Justice. It posed five questions to the court in Luxembourg, including whether the GDPR must be interpreted in the light of the right to religious freedom and whether a note saying a person has left the Church constitutes erasure of their data.

Once the Court of Justice issues its ruling, the Market Court will be expected to apply the decision to the Ghent diocese dispute.

In its September 2026 position paper, COMECE said that a ruling requiring the erasure of entries contained in baptismal registers “would constitute a serious infringement upon Church autonomy and institutional freedom of religion.”

It said: “In many member states, such a requirement to erase would even give rise to a conflict between the obligations arising under the treaties and those arising under concordats, with many of the latter having been concluded at an earlier date.”

“Furthermore, canon law is recognized under national law in a number of member states. Therefore, the impact that these proceedings will ultimately have in the other member states should be taken into account.”

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Incumbent president Lula da Silva’s supporters began by accusing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro, son of jailed former president Jair Bolsonaro, of plotting to demote Our Lady of Aparecida from her legal status as Brazil’s patron saint.

Bolsonaro’s campaign reacted immediately to say there was no such plan, and that Lula had spread fake news with the help of the Catholic Church.

The controversy resonated strongly in what is still the largest Catholic country in the world in demographic terms, even as the number of Evangelicals in the country has increased greatly over the past decades.

According to the 2022 census, 56.7% of Brazilians identify as Catholic, with Evangelicals at 26.9. That represents a drop from 65.1% of self-identified Catholics in 2010, while self-identified Evangelicals rose from 21.6%.

Politically, Catholic and Evangelical voting intentions form almost a mirror image, with 50% of Catholics and 26% of Evangelicals saying they would vote for Lula, and 52% of Evangelicals and 32% of Catholics saying they would vote for Bolsonaro.

Lula, who hails from the left-wing Workers Party, describes himself as a Catholic, saying frequently he does not attend Mass as often as he used to, but receives communion when he does. The right-wing Liberal Party candidate Bolsonaro, on the other hand, is a practicing Evangelical.

Regarding the current controversy, there is in fact no record of Bolsonaro, or anybody from his campaign, having made any statement about Our Lady Aparecida. So how did the rumor begin?

A statue in the net

Aparecida literally translates as “appeared.” The name was given in 1717 to an image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception found in a river by fishermen in São Paulo, which was considered to have appeared miraculously in their nets.

Due to its prolonged immersion in the water, and possible exposure to smoke beforehand, the image had turned black, which also took on significance in a country with a varied racial composition.

In 1980, the Brazilian legislature passed a federal law officially decreeing October 12 a public holiday in honor of “Our Lady Aparecida, patron saint of Brazil.”"

In 2008 Victório Galli, an Evangelical congressman, proposed a bill that would change the wording to “patron saint of Brazilian faithful of the Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.”

The bill went nowhere, but Galli himself later joined the Liberal Party and became a close ally of the Bolsonaro family.

That and the fact that Bolsonaro’s Evangelical pastor has made controversial statements about devotion to Our Lady Aparecida in the past – saying that “God hates the worship of the Queen of Heaven” and arguing for her removal from the role of patron saint – led some Lula supporters to accuse Bolsonaro of wanting to “demote” the Blessed Virgin from her traditional role.

But the issue took off after a September 24 social media post from Brazilian comedian António Tabet, who said that: “The militia-linked family hates black women so much that they have even attacked Our Lady Aparecida.”

The use of the term “militia” was interpreted as a reference to the Bolsonaro family, because Jair Bolsonaro was convicted last year of plotting a coup against the government, following an election loss to Lula.

For his part, Flávio Bolsonaro reacted furiously to Tabet’s post, saying that the rumor that he wanted to change Our Lady Aparecida’s status was the biggest case of “fake news” in the elections.

Tabet, who is famous for his character “Peçanha” — a racist, violent and corrupt police officer who plots against the country’s government — issued an ironic apology for his post, saying: “I publicly apologize to the militia-linked family for calling the militia-linked family a militia-linked family.”

Court-side confusion

The Sept. 24 post was followed by a series of contradictory court rulings.

On Sept. 25, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court ordered social media accounts to remove any posts inferring that Bolsonaro had attacked Our Lady Aparecida. Two days after that, a judge from the Federal Supreme Court suspended the SEC’s decision, and, the very next day, on Sept. 28, another FSC judge suspended his colleagues’ decision, saying the issue should be resolved in a plenary session of the Supreme Electoral Court.

In their plenary meeting, the SEC judges ruled that any post which directly states that Bolsonaro had planned to change the legal status of Our Lady Aparecida should be removed. That ruling left wiggle room for posts which did not name the candidate directly, including Tabet’s, which remains visible.

In the meantime, Bolsonaro began publicly pushing back, blaming “people within” the Brazilian bishops’ conference for helping the Workers Party to spread fake news.

The bishops responded by saying that “you cannot fight one lie with another,” and assuring Bolsonaro that they had played no part in rumor-mongering. While the candidate thanked the bishops for the clarification, the perception that the conference had been involved had already begun to spread.

On Sept. 28, the controversy became a battle of dueling statues.

On that day, Bolsonaro was handed at an outdoor rally a small Aparecida figure by a Catholic supporter. He smiled and raised the figure in the air, to the applause of the crowd.

But on the same evening in Pará, Lula da Silva tried to capitalize on the controversy, telling a campaign rally crowd that “as long as I am president, nobody is going to get rid of Our Lady Aparecida.”

Soon after that, a local politician presented Lula with an image of Our Lady of Nazareth, the patron saint of Pará, asking that she might “bless his victory.” Lula proceeded to lift the image above his head, and solemnly process across the stage with it.

No war between religions

That such a deeply religious issue should have become central to the election comes as no surprise to Alex Villas-Boas, a Brazilian theologian who teaches and does research at the Portuguese Catholic University.

“What we’re seeing here is a polarization that is common in the west, but that takes a stronger tone in the Americas,” he explained, adding that Brazil lacks a tradition of a solid center, with power swinging between hard-left and hard-right.

Brazil’s political polarization is reflected in Church life as well, especially since the rise of Pentecostal Evangelicalism, whose pastors did not hesitate to get involved in party politics. But it works both ways.

“When Jair Bolsonaro was elected president, his first act in office was to liberalize gun laws, and the second was to go to the headquarters of Canção Nova, a major Catholic TV network, to be blessed by its founder Fr João Henrique, who was still alive at the time,” Villas-Boas said.

The country’s Catholic bishops tend to be more circumspect in their political involvement, but Villas-Boas said that there are supporters of both political factions within the episcopate.

Many people in the country, he said, “believe that Latin America has its own theology, marked by a preferential option for the poor, and even if they tend to steer clear of politics, the lack of options tends to drive them into the arms of the Workers Party. On the other hand, there are those who identify with the anticommunist rhetoric of the Cold War era, who tend to support the right.”

“Finally, there are those who try to take the middle ground, and encourage greater common sense, but they end up being attacked from both sides,” the theologian added.

For now, official statements from mainstream religious groups have been conciliatory. On Sept. 28, an association representing some 10,000 Evangelical pastors slammed Lula’s campaign for trying to “spark a conflict between Catholics and Evangelicals.”

The Brazilian Interdenominational Council of Evangelical Ministers strongly condemned “the use of fake news by Lula and his followers to target a political opponent and, what is worse, to promote a religious war between Catholics and Evangelicals.”

“Evangelicals and Catholics live in peace. There is no initiative on the part of evangelical leaders, together with any candidate, to try to cancel holidays or religious services of any religion,” the statement said.

On Sept. 30, the Archbishop of Aparecida said in a homily that “electoral theatrics” involving Our Lady of Aparecida are “inadmissible.”

He asked that “peace, harmony and respect” prevail despite the proximity of the elections, and that “our devotion to Mary should be sincere.”

Voting is mandatory in Brazil. After both Bolsonaro and Lula failed to gain absolute majorities in an Oct. 4 plebiscite, the two are headed for an Oct. 25 runoff.

With the Marian controversy cooling, Our Lady Aparecida appears like to remain Brazil’s officially recognized patroness, regardless of who takes the election.

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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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Then, they look ahead to Leo’s planned meeting on Amoris laetitia with the heads of international bishops’ conferences.

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The four who will join U.S. bishops’ conference president Archbishop Paul Coakley at the Oct. 7-14 event called “Ten years after Amoris laetitia: proclaiming the Gospel with families today” are Cardinal Blase Cupich, Cardinal Robert McElroy, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, and Bishop Daniel Flores.

The U.S. is the only country with four participants personally selected by the pope. Canada, China, Italy, and Vatican City each have two, while 10 other countries have a single personally chosen participant, including Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines, which are respectively the world’s first, second, and third countries by Catholic population.

All 115 episcopal conferences worldwide will be represented at the event, in all but a few cases by the president of the respective bishops’ conference. Bishop Erik Varden, for example, will represent the Nordic bishops’ conference, and Archbishop Richard Moth, the bishops’ conference of England and Wales.

All 15 sui iuris (self-governing) Eastern Catholic Churches will also be represented, with the heads of 14 of the Churches present, alongside a delegate from the Armenian Catholic Patriarchate of Cilicia. Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk will represent the war-ravaged Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and Patriarch Ignace Youssif III Younan is also scheduled to attend amid upheaval in the Syriac Catholic Church.

They will also be joined by 11 couples or families, as well as 26 “experts” and 16 “facilitators.”

What’s the background to the meeting? And what will happen?

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What’s the background?

In April 2016, Pope Francis published Amoris laetitia (The Joy of Love), an apostolic exhortation “on love in the family.” It instantly became one of the most controversial texts of his pontificate thanks to footnote 351, which touched on the reception of sacraments by divorced and remarried Catholics.

The document covered an immense amount of ground beyond this neuralgic topic, from preparing engaged couples for marriage to child rearing to the spirituality of marriage. Indeed, at more than 50,000 words it was one of the longest papal texts in history.

In March 2026, Pope Leo XIV published a message marking the exhortation’s 10th anniversary. He announced that he had decided to gather the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences in October 2026, “in an effort to proceed, in mutual listening, to a synodal discernment on the steps to be taken in order to proclaim the Gospel to families today, in light of Amoris laetitia and taking into account what is currently being done in the local Churches.”

In July 2026, the Vatican published the preparatory document for the meeting, which identified five themes for discussion at the meeting:

• 1) Families today: reality, beauty and challenges.

• 2) Young people and the discovery of the vocation to marriage.

• 3) Married life. The first years of marriage: a decisive time.

• 4) In the difficulties of life: accompanying and supporting.

• 5) Christian families as subjects of the Church’s mission.

What will happen?

At an Oct. 2 Vatican press conference presenting the meeting, Fr. Giacomo Costa, S.J., consultor of the General Secretariat of the Synod, shed light on its purpose and methodology.

Costa described the gathering as “a kind of evaluation assembly,” similar to those taking place around the world ahead of the 2028 ecclesial assembly in Rome.

He said: “A synodal process, in fact, does not conclude with the approval of a document. A document is not the end point: it must enter into the life of the Church and allow itself to be put to the test by experience. The Churches are called to translate its orientations into their different contexts, to experiment with different paths, to assess their fruits and difficulties, and then to come together again to reflect on what has been experienced.”

“From this perspective, evaluating does not mean passing judgment on the text, either to praise it or to criticize it, but learning from the experience gained after its publication, in order to recognize where the Spirit is leading the Church and what new steps the Spirit is asking it to take.”

Costa added: “Ten years later, the question is not what Amoris laetitia says, but what we have learned by trying to live it. The objective indicated by Pope Leo XIV is to move forward, through mutual listening, toward a synodal discernment of the steps that need to be taken today to proclaim the Gospel with families.”

Costa stressed that the meeting won’t be a synod, though it will use the synodal methodology known as “Conversation in the Spirit,” in which an assembly forms small groups in which each participant shares their own experience, reflects on what they hear from others, then seeks to discern with others what has emerged.

The meeting will kick off on Wednesday, Oct. 7 with greetings by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, and Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary general of the synod. They are the heads of the two Vatican offices responsible for organizing the event.

Following an introductory address by Pope Leo XIV, there will be a meditation by Sr. Helen Alford, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Participants will will break into smaller groups.

The meeting will take place in the Vatican’s Paul VI Hall, where the 2023-2024 synod on synodality took place. It’s not yet clear whether the synod’s famous round tables and iPads will be brought out of storage for the Amoris meeting.

For the next six days (including a rest day on Sunday, Oct. 11), participants will work their way through the five themes. Each group will offer a brief report back to the assembly, followed by a time for further interventions in a plenary setting.

The discussions during the five thematic days will be boiled down into a summary report. A commission including representatives of the assembly will check that the report faithfully reflects what emerged.

On the final day, Wednesday, Oct. 14, Pope Leo XIV will celebrate a Mass in St. Peter’s Square. The assembly will then discuss the summary report before entrusting it to the pope, who will offer a concluding address. The summary will be made public as a working document, rather than a text that is intended to replace Amoris laetitia.

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Cardinal Zu…

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Happy Friday friends,

One of the stories we have been tracking over the past few years is a movement in Europe, mostly centered in the Low Countries, in which Catholics have been suing the Church to erase their names from baptismal registers.

As Luke noted in Starting Seven yesterday — and if you aren’t getting Starting Seven, I pity you — the advocate general at the European Court of Justice issued an opinion stating that everyone has “in principle, the right to have his or her personal data erased from the baptismal register where the controller fails to demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which override the interests, rights, and freedoms of the data subject.”

I find the whole case fascinating.

Now, on the one hand, I tend to skew in favor of telling institutions, usually companies and government agencies, to get my good name out of their filthy databases. But baptismal registers aren’t mailing lists, they are historical records of fact. Indeed, a great deal of European history would be lost to us, at the purely factual level, were it not for the meticulous sacramental record-keeping of your average parish.

It’s somehow emblematic of our age that people want to erase their own identity — and to be clear, baptism at the most basic level imparts a character and forever changes our identity — while Europe as a culture is struggling to wipe clean its own history.

I think this is a big part of the context in which we should assess Leo’s recent visit to France.

I have seen a lot of commentary touting (as good or bad, depending on the writer’s point of view) signs of a Christian revival across the West. And, indeed, I think there are some reasons to be optimistic that there is a rich harvest awaiting what workers the Church can summon to bring it in.

To better assist the laborers, I think we should understand, as best we can, what is fermenting away at the bottom of the culture. This is, to invoke a JPIIism, about memory and identity. Europe, and indeed the West, is butting up hard against the limits of democracy as a vehicle for values and the problem of evil. Bound up with this struggle is an existential question of who we are, as peoples and individuals, and what we are called to be.

The baptismal records case is at the core of this, and ought to be at the core of our evangelizing efforts. Why does it matter if a person long defected from the faith and ardently opposed to it has their name recorded in a book in a backroom somewhere in a parish they haven’t darkened the doorstep of in decades? Because their name is in another, entirely indelible book elsewhere, too. And what is written there, and upon their very essence at the time of their baptism, is that, as Benedict XVI put it, they are — individually — the result of a thought of God. They are willed, they are loved, they are necessary.

That is who we, each one of us, are. And I have always found this is the first, and most profound truth to be announced in the evangelization — and often the one hardest to believe.

Here’s the news.

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The News

Vatican peace envoy Cardinal Matteo Zuppi visited Ukrainian prisoners of war during his Sept. 28-30 trip to Moscow.

The visit followed Zuppi’s meeting in July with Russian soldiers held at a facility in Ukraine’s western Lviv region. Zuppi said later that he had “been able to speak personally with some of them to check on their conditions.”

Zuppi’s three-day program in Moscow featured meetings with senior Russian officials, including presidential aide Yury Ushakov, human rights ombudswoman Yana Lantratova, and children’s rights ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova. The latter’s somewhat benign title belies her responsibility for the tens of thousands of children kidnapped from Ukraine and dispersed around Russia.

Wherever these talks are headed, and whatever they may achieve (or not) practically, it is a real story that the Vatican is able to have them, and it is just about possible that in the event of a serious cease fire negotiation emerging, the Holy See might be the only diplomatic broker able to sell the Russians on the basic human rights of those captured soldiers and missing kids.

Read the whole story here.

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This week, a meeting was meant to happen in Lebanon. All the bishops of the synod of the Syriac Catholic Church were invited to vote on the proposed removal of their patriarch, Ignatius Youssef III Younan.

That meeting, the first to be called under the norms of a new law issued by Pope Leo just weeks ago, was denounced as unlawful by the patriarch — and he has some good grounds for arguing that it is. At the moment, the whole event is a kind of Schrodinger’s Synod, we aren’t exactly sure if it went ahead, in what form, who came, and what if anything was decided or voted upon.

We will be bringing you the full story on that as soon as we have it, and we are working hard to get it. The reason we are working so hard to get it is that, as I wrote in an analysis this week, the entire bid to remove Youssef has become something of a perfect storm over Pope Leo’s desk.

On the one hand, the patriarch is making a very public case that he is the target of a malicious and personal palace coup, blessed by the Vatican’s prefect for Eastern Churches.

On the other, Vatican officials have noted serious dysfunctions at the top of more than one Eastern Church for several years now, and allowing the new papal law to fail or be openly discredited at its first use would be a… sub-optimal outcome for Rome.

Sooner or later, the pope is going to have to get personally involved, I argued, and none of his choices looks especially edifying to me. And he is going to have to make his inevitable intervention with every patriarch in the Orthodox Churches looking on and pricing up exactly what all this says about how the Bishop of Rome really sees the role of a patriarch.

Read the whole analysis here.

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The USCCB announced earlier this month the creation of a Task Force on Preserving Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, headed by Bishop Oscar Cantu, whose diocese includes the Silicon Valley region.

Cantu spoke with The Pillar this week about the new task force, its goals, and how he approaches the question of boundaries for AI use within the Church.

For myself, I remain most interested to see what kind of standards the bishops are willing to articulate for Church institutions themselves, when it comes to AI. After all, it’s one thing to speak in lofty, general terms to the world at large about something you ultimately have no practical power over. It’s something else to set real limits on what you will or won’t tolerate in your own house, so to speak.

Here’s a bit of what Cantu had to say about that:

“We may get to a point where the bishops decide to provide some national policy. We’re not there yet. Usually we start with some best practices and some guidelines. That’s what we’ve done here in my diocese so far… basic things, like no confidential information should go into an AI model. So that means for schools, no student records; for parishes, no sacramental records, personnel files, donor information, certainly not using deep fakes or voice cloning for clergy or anyone else for that matter. And also admitting when we use AI to develop a flyer or a document — that kind of transparency.”

That might seem a bit on the hands-off side of policymaking to some, but I’d just note that an actual standard of absolute transparency on the use of AI for producing any documents would likely be fiercely resisted in a lot of Church offices. That alone should tell us something about how far behind the game we already are.

Read the whole conversation here.

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German bishops’ conference chairman Bishop Heiner Wilmer said this week that he hoped the Vatican would respond to a request to approve a new national body known as the synodal conference by the end of 2026.

“There is currently no news regarding the synodal conference,” he told press on the opening day of the bishops’ plenary meeting in Fulda. “We are waiting for the recognitio for the draft statutes. I have mentioned this before, and I hope you will receive a response by the end of this year.”

For the Germans, no news is not good news, and there are signs the natives are getting restless. So what’s at stake, and what might Rome do?

Luke Coppen takes a closer look right here.

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This year marks the 800th anniversary of St. Francis of Assissi. It’s been celebrated around the world with pilgrimages and paeans of praise for the poverello who, despite our joyful celebration of more contemporary saints, seems to have lost none of his power to inspire.

But what is it, exactly, that makes St. Francis such an enduring example of faith and a perennial prophet of our times — whatever times we may be living in?

Edgar Beltran talked about this with Cardinal Jaime Spengler OFM, president of CELAM and Archbishop of Porto Alegre. According to the cardinal, Francis is “a saint of the 13th century, but he’s also a human archetype, and that’s why he remains alive”.

“Marking this moment of anthropological crises that we’re experiencing, I believe, is an opportunity to bring to the center of the debate the importance of the human being. Francis of Assisi is a profoundly human saint, and certainly what he passed down to us as the promotion of the work of care – of the human person and of creation – remains more than current: it’s a pressing demand.”

Read the whole conversation here.

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When the Vatican’s synod on synodality concluded in 2024 one of the many commissions it begat was one to suggest changes to the Code of Canon Law, occasioned by the Church’s (far from universal) experience of universal synodality.

This commission’s final report came out this week, and JD has a serious and important analysis about what to make of its proposals — some of which would upend the entire underpinning of the Church’s ecclesiology as expressed by Vatican Council II.

This is, as JD notes, a very anti-Vatican II world view being put forward, for those with the canonical eyes to read. And he explains why some of the names attached to it mean it ought to be taken far more seriously than some of the other fever-dream monographs which have been produced in the post synodal wash-up period.

Leo’s going to have to reckon with this one, JD is right. And it matters. Read his whole analysis here.

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For myself, I was drawn to a particularly eye-catching proposal from the commission. They want to insert a paragraph into canon 749, which currently reads thusly:

§1. By virtue of his office, the Supreme Pontiff possesses infallibility in teaching when as the supreme pastor and teacher of all the Christian faithful, who strengthens his brothers and sisters in the faith, he proclaims by definitive act that a doctrine of faith or morals is to be held.

§2. The college of bishops also possesses infallibility in teaching when the bishops gathered together in an ecumenical council exercise the magisterium as teachers and judges of faith and morals who declare for the universal Church that a doctrine of faith or morals is to be held definitively; or when dispersed throughout the world but preserving the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter and teaching authentically together with the Roman Pontiff matters of faith or morals, they agree that a particular proposition is to be held definitively.

§3. No doctrine is understood as defined infallibly unless this is manifestly evident.

The commission wants to insert a new paragraph at the top of the canon, effectively displacing the description of the papal teaching office down to para 2, and so on.

The proposed new canon would begin with this article: “The entire body of the Christian faithful, having received the anointing from the Spirit, cannot err in matters of faith, and it manifests this characteristic through the supernatural sense of faith of the whole people when, from the bishops down to the last of the lay faithful, its universal consent in matters of faith and morals is demonstrated.”

There’s a few things to note here. The first is that the proposed placement of the new para — above the teaching office of the Rome Pontiff, not below that of the entire college of bishops — is significant and obviously disordered. The canon currently broadens as it descends, the revision would invert the pyramid.

That isn’t accidental. Neither is the omission of the office of the Roman Pontiff or communion with him in the text of the proposed paragraph, which instead simply states “the bishops.”

The import — I won’t directly allege “intent” — of this is to place an amorphous and unstructured “sense of all the faithful” above the specific and named authority of the pope personally and the hierarchy of the college of bishops as a whole.

It also, by limiting the reference to just “the bishops,” clears a linguistic and logical path to articulate a kind of infallible but local sensus fidei which can trump the universal supreme authority or Rome. Such a kind of articulation has already been floated along the German synodal way and at the Synod on the Amazon not many years ago.

And, I would just note, you know this is intended to be phrased and used and eventually asserted locally as an inerrant corrective to the universal authority of the Holy See, because it has no other conceivable purpose.

To define the teaching authority of a situation in which all the whole Church, everywhere, “down to the last of the lay faithful” agree on anything is necessarily redundant in theory, since it includes all levels of the established teaching office of the Church, including the infallible office of the Roman Pontiff and the college of bishops in communion with him. In practice, it is manifestly pointless at the universal level, since, as polling data never tires of reminding us, global Catholics are by no means unanimous in supporting almost any point of doctrine, even core sacramental teachings.

I don’t expect any such paragraph ever to be included in any revision to the Code of Canon Law by Leo XIV, who as a canonist will read it for what it is without hesitation.

But it is also, I’d argue, the key to understanding the mindset behind the rest of the committee’s proposals. That, too, I hope Leo will see and reject wholesale.

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Sophia’s pitch

I got an interesting pitch from a new potential freelancer this week.

Sophia, and I will only use the first name she gave me, emailed me to offer a story — one she promised she’d researched deeply — on the history of the Vatican’s standoff with the SSPX.

Key to her pitch was a massive piece of alleged canonical malpractice by the Vatican back in 1988, which she summed up this way:

“The decree of 1 July 1988 cites canon 1382 as the penalty for the Econe consecrations [which triggered the initial SSPX schism]. In the 1983 Code, 1382 is profanation of the Eucharistic species; consecrating a bishop without a pontifical mandate is 1387. It was not the consecration canon in 1917 either (there it concerned school visitation). The Society’s own 1988 canonical study repeated the same 1382 citation, so the error sits in both sides’ record of the rupture.”

Sophia offered me the story, which she said she had in full, ready and waiting to go, at very reasonable terms. Interestingly, she didn’t even want a byline, necessarily. If I wanted to just buy her research and cover it myself as our own story, that was fine by her.

She’d picked her pitch well, of course. If you want to get my attention, point out a hidden-in-plain sight canonical issue at the heart of a major and ongoing news story in the life of the Church. As any diligent editor would, I got right back to her — I had some questions about the scope of the story and our window to acquire it.

For a start, I asked how many other outlets she’d pitched, and was she offering it on an exclusive basis? Nothing makes you feel like a mug faster than realizing after the fact you’ve purchased a reheated “scoop” already sold elsewhere.

“Yes,” she confirmed, “I offered the same brief to a small number of Catholic outlets. I won’t pretend the findings themselves are private; they are checkable at the sources I cite, which is the point. What is not elsewhere is the brief as written work. If you take it, I will not sell it to anyone else and will not publish it.” So far, so standard.

And she was thoughtful enough to make the point that “[my] piece on why Leo will not meet the Society, and your excommunication explainer, sit closest to the canonical detail I have been checking,” and since “the finding I pitched is a canon-citation question, you were the obvious name.”

One always likes a bit of flattery.

I went back and forth a bit more with Sophia about the import of her finding and the potential ramifications for the legal texts involved. Typos in law have real consequences, after all.

And to her credit, Sophia wasn’t looking to sensationalize her findings, either: “If what you want is ‘the 1988 excommunication was invalid,’ this is not that story and I will not dress it up as one,” she told me. “If what you want is a source-checked account of a canon citation that was wrong in both codes, repeated by both sides, and never corrected, with the primary texts attached, that is exactly what it is.”

Good for her sticking to her guns. I hate it when people try to sensationalize news to gin up clicks.

But I was, in all of it, yanking her chain. I never had any intention of ever buying this story. For a couple of reasons.

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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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The Archdiocese of Baltimore plans to ordain next year the highest number of priests in a single year in more than a half century. The Diocese of Peoria will soon establish the first-ever pa…

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After years of quiet work on the subject, the commission released a final report this week, ripe with proposals intended to enshrine the commission’s understanding of synodality’s lessons into the Church’s positive law.

The concrete suggestions have been met with mixed reactions by canon lawyers, and some represent particularly controversial viewpoints in long-contested questions about the power of orders and the nature of ecclesial authority.

But the very existence of the report poses a challenge for Pope Leo, who is himself a canon lawyer. And how the pontiff responds to the suggestions will give a clear indication of whether the canonical momentum of the Francis era was a flash in the pan for the Church, or the start of a new chapter in the Church’s legal history.

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The final report proposes a series of amendments to canon law which seem mostly intended to increase both the voice and presence of laity in the life of the Church. Some are small and technical — dropping a requirement, for example that a priest notarize certain official acts of the Church, rather than a layperson appointed by the diocesan bishop.

But others are decidedly more controversial.

The proposed amendments would allow, for example, a diocesan bishop to permit a single lay judge to serve in place of a collegiate tribunal in trial processes — the current law allows only for a cleric to serve as a sole judge, and only with the permission of the conference of bishops. Such a change would seem to obviate the distinction often made in canon law between those who possess by sacred orders the “power of governance” in the Church, and those who do not.

Further, the proposed amendments would seem to allow laity to serve functionally as episcopal vicars, under the title of episcopal delegates, overseeing a territory or group within a diocese, or exercising more-or-less vicarious episcopal authority (while avoiding that precise term) for some specific facet of governance.

Again, the change would seem to allow laity to exercise the power of governance historically understood as correlated to sacred orders. That idea has already been taken up in some parts of central Europe, but it’s been widely seen to stretch the boundaries of ecclesiastical possibility, and — until now — many canonists have expected it to be among the practices Leo would eventually begin reining in. The canonical commission report might call into question whether that expectation is wholly accurate — and would seem to put some pressure on the pope to nip the practice in the bud, if he intends to do so at all, before the momentum of the practice and the report make it all more widespread.

It is worth noting that the proposed amendments are not comprehensive. Canon law is a connected web of canons, all of which reference and depend upon one another, and place restrictions on the meaning of their precise terms. A change in one canon often requires changing two or three more just to make the intended change actually stick.

In other words, modifying canon law effectively is a painstaking process, which must be undertaken with rapt attention to detail by experts in the field. There is no evidence the synod’s canonical commission has done that work.

But the intended effect of their proposed changes is clear — that, as the synod’s final document explained, laypeople “be given greater opportunities for participation, also exploring new forms of service and ministry in response to the pastoral needs of our time in a spirit of collaboration and differentiated co-responsibility.”

Under the guidance of Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda — a canonical star of the Francis era — those opportunities seem to involve a formal proposal for flattening the distinctions between clerics and laity when it comes to the daily work of governing the Church.

And, in fact, those proposals are only the first step in the commission’s set of recommendations. The group was clear that in the long term, “there is an obvious need for a complete revision of the two Codes to reflect the theological and ecclesiological issues that have emerged” through the synodality process.

That idea was first floated in a July 2025 L’Osservatore Romano essay by Luigi Guzzo, an Italian legal theorist — not a canon lawyer — who argued that the contemporary Code of Canon Law reflects a more hierarchical society than was the early Church, in which, according to his view, authority centered on charisms more than ecclesial or sacramental offices.

Leaving aside questions about the accuracy of that historical account, Guzzo’s argument, taken up by the commission on which he sits, will strike many theologians and canonists as confirmation of their biggest concerns about synodality — that it would deviate from the actual documents of Vatican Council II — whose theology is meant to be reflected in the 1983 Code of Canon Law — and reshape the council as the beginning of a theological evolution, rather than a concrete and deliberative act of ecclesiastical magisterium.

In short, the report issued Tuesday by the synod on synodality’s canonical commission would seem for the most part to represent some of the most controversial camps in the synodality movement, and to stand therefore in contrast to Pope Leo’s decidedly more irenic and tempered approach to synodality, which has tried to incorporate the broad notion of common consultative prayer and conversation into the Church’s life, without framing synodality as some kind of populist ecclesial revolution.

In some ways, it might do for the pontiff to simply give the report little heed, to acknowledge it with a promise to take it under consideration, and to let its ideas stew before taking up even the mildest suggestions. But one problem for the pope is that the coordinator of the commission is Archbishop Filippo Iannone, the pope’s own handpicked successor at the Dicastery for Bishops. Iannone’s name on such a controversial text is sure to raise questions about whether the pope’s chosen collaborators — and therefore the pontiff himself — would be supportive of the ideas contained within the commission’s recommendations. The other problem is, again, that some of the floated ideas are already being tried in Germany and other parts of Europe, and failing to respond to them with alacrity, especially in light of the report, might seem increasingly to represent tacit papal support.

By all available evidence, Pope Leo is trying to restore peace, normalcy, and a sense of stable governance to the life of the Church. Nothing about his papal comportment suggests that he likely desires to advance the agenda of the synodal canonical commission. But if the pope wished to ease synodality gradually toward a more stable position in the Church without much disagreement along the way, the audacity of the commission’s report would seem to make his job all the more challenging.

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The trip marked the Italian cardinal’s third mission to Moscow, following visits in June 2023 and October 2024, but the first in which he was able to meet with Ukrainian servicemen detained in Russia.

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The visit followed Zuppi’s meeting in July with Russian soldiers held at a facility in Ukraine’s western Lviv region.

According to Avvenire, a newspaper owned by the Italian bishops’ conference, Zuppi visited the facility holding Ukrainian POWs Sept. 29.

Zuppi said later that he had “been able to speak personally with some of them to check on their conditions.”

The president of the Italian bishops’ conference added that “we found a great desire to embrace their loved ones again: I therefore hope that this visit can encourage the exchange of prisoners and lead to further developments.”

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Zuppi’s three-day program in Moscow featured meetings with senior Russian officials, including presidential aide Yury Ushakov, human rights ombudswoman Yana Lantratova, and children’s rights ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova.

Avvenire reported that Zuppi and Ushakov discussed exchanges of military prisoners, civilian exchanges, the search for missing persons, and family reunification and children displaced by the war.

The two men also spoke about the emerging humanitarian crisis in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky in Ukraine’s Kherson region, where residents are reportedly facing severe shortages of food and medicine. The discussion touched on the possibility of opening a humanitarian corridor.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a Sept. 30 statement: “The discussions, held against the backdrop of the conflict in and around Ukraine and the emerging prospects for its resolution, addressed cooperation between Russia and the Holy See on humanitarian matters — including the search for missing persons, the exchange of prisoners of war and civilians, family reunification, and the so-called ‘children’s dossier.’”

Expressing the Russian government’s perspective on Oleshky, the Foreign Ministry said: “A significant item on the agenda was the humanitarian crisis in the city of Alyoshki [Oleshky], Kherson Region. Cardinal Zuppi received a detailed briefing on the criminal actions of the Kiev regime, which has effectively taken the city’s civilian population hostage and is obstructing all attempts to deliver food and medicine or to evacuate the civilians remaining in the city.”

It added: “At the Vatican’s request, a visit was arranged for Cardinal Zuppi to one of the places of detention of Ukrainian military personnel arrested for putting up resistance to the special military operation. During this visit, the special envoy was able to speak personally with the Ukrainian detainees and to verify Russia’s strict adherence to all relevant humanitarian standards.”

“Cardinal Zuppi’s visit confirmed the constructive and regular nature of the dialogue between Russia and the Holy See, as well as the commitment of both sides to continuing cooperation in the humanitarian sphere.”

Human rights ombudswoman Yana Lantratova gave an account of her meeting with Zuppi in a Sept. 29 post on her Telegram channel.

She wrote: “The main topic of our meeting was the return of Russian servicemen from Ukrainian captivity. I spoke about how prisoner exchanges are being carried out today and about how direct dialogue with the Ukrainian ombudsman has been established on this and other issues.”

“We also separately discussed the return of civilians.”

“Cardinal Matteo Zuppi expressed his readiness to continue cooperation on humanitarian issues. Behind every such issue are real people who need our help. I thank the representative of the Holy See for his constructive approach.”

A Sept. 30 press release from the Office of the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights said that Zuppi and children’s rights ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova “discussed issues concerning the protection of children and families, including the reunification of minors with their relatives.”

Lvova-Belova, who is subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued in 2023, said: “We are continuing our cooperation with Cardinal Matteo Zuppi and the Apostolic Nunciature in the Russian Federation on humanitarian issues involving children and families.”

She added: “Over the past four years, with our assistance, 32 children from 24 families have been reunited with their relatives in Russia, while another 145 children from 118 families have been reunited with their relatives in Ukraine and third countries. We are working on the basis of all the information submitted to us.”

The Office also said that Lvova-Belova spoke to the cardinal about children in Russian regions affected by the war and “cases involving minors in unlawful activities, including the recruitment of teenagers via the internet.”

“We discussed further cooperation in the interests of children and families. We are proceeding with this work consistently, within the framework of a bilateral group with the assistance of representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry,” she said.

Zuppi’s trip to Moscow was preceded by an Aug. 24-28 trip to Russia by Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States.

Both men visited Ukraine in July, with Zuppi traveling to the country on July 13-16 and Gallagher on July 16-21.

Pope Leo XIV called for dialogue to end the Ukraine war during his Sept. 28 inflight press conference following his visit to France.

He said that the Church was “continually inviting leaders — such as those from Russia and Ukraine, and from other countries — to come, to sit down, to engage in dialogue, and to seek ways to resolve problems without continuing these wars that no longer make sense.”

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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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In ”The Magician’s Nephew,” C. S. Lewis tells the story of Uncle Andrew, a pompous, self-important magician who finds himself present at the creation of Narnia as it is sung into being by the great lion, Aslan.

Initially repelled, Uncle Andrew’s perspective changes when a piece of iron brought from London drops to the earth and springs up as a large lamppost in this miraculously fecund world:

The commercial possibilities of this country are unbounded. Bring a few old bits of scrap iron here, bury ’em, and up they come as brand-new railway engines, battleships, …. They’ll cost nothing, and I can sell ’em at full prices in England. I shall be a millionaire.…The first thing is to get that brute [Aslan] shot.

Uncle Andrew is the embodiment of the technocratic paradigm, which Pope Leo XIV recognizes as a central threat to our age. This paradigm defines our relationship to the natural world and to other humans exclusively through efficiency, profit, and power, fostering a throwaway culture that produces rampant consumerism and a deep disregard for humanity. Like Uncle Andrew, the technocratic paradigm looks on the wonders of creation and sees only a tool for profit.

The challenge of artificial intelligence, Leo argues in his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, is not the technology itself, but its enmeshment in the technocratic paradigm. To confront the challenges of the digital revolution, we must disentangle the tech from that paradigm. And Leo’s consistent message for the last year has been that Catholic education is an essential force in this work.

In January, Leo said that just as the Church relied upon education in its response to the industrial revolution, she now turns to education in response to the digital revolution, calling upon institutions to offer a humanistic and cultural formation for their students. The principles that define human excellence and lead to human flourishing will provide these young people with the formation necessary to resist the paradigm seeking to control and commodify them.

Leo notes that “fidelity to the truth requires integrating the possibilities offered by technology within a framework marked by wisdom, which is capable of safeguarding both the dignity of each person and the future of our common home.” In his teachings, first canonizations, and declarations, Leo proposes a four-part educational approach to promote human dignity and to liberate technology from technocracy: fast with St. Carlo Actuis, immerse with St. Pier Giorgio Frassati, integrate with St. John Henry Newman, and incarnate in community.

Fast with Acutis

More than a quarter of the world’s population is struggling with some form of digital addiction; we are immersed in a “dopamine culture,” drowning in 30-second hits of repetitive, compulsive, gamified activity.

Such a culture, Leo warns will reduce humans to “passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love.” In losing authentic culture, we lose the prophetic witness that provides insight into the human experience. Education must begin by providing spaces free from the disorienting effects of digital addiction.

Leo notes that the newly-canonized St. Carlo Acutis offered the world an example of just such disciplined use, reminding us that we can rightly use technology only by first training ourselves in digital sobriety. Before we can use such pervasive technologies appropriately, we must teach ourselves when not to use them.

Immerse with Frassati

“Do not remain fixated on your smartphones and their fleeting bursts of images” says Leo. “Instead, look to the sky, to the heights”—a clear reference to “Verso L’Alto,” the motto of St. Pier Giorgio Frassati, canonized by Pope Leo in the early days of his pontificate. It is not enough to turn away from the phone; we must turn toward reality and be immersed in the beauty of nature and in the power of poetry and of song.

As Leo noted in his apostolic exhortation, “Drawing New Maps of Hope,” contemplating God in creation and art cultivates a disposition to divine inspiration in young people and reminds them of their human calling. “No algorithm can replace that which makes education truly human: poetry, art, imagination, and the joy of discovery,” wrote Leo, for “each of us possesses an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation that originates from our own lived experience.”

The fabrications and hallucinations of AI make it difficult to distinguish the authentic from the insincere, tempting us to prioritize the fake and easy over the reality that is so vital to human flourishing. It is essential that education give students time “for engagement with reality beyond appearances.” This engagement will imbue them with a deep longing for the real, reminding them that “we are a desire, not an algorithm!” It is only by recognizing rich, human realities through a deep immersion in their truths that we can rightly judge the algorithms.

Integrate with Newman

Artificial intelligence treats human knowledge as fragmented data points, and is incapable of judging its ultimate meaning. If AI becomes the source and measure of our understanding, we will lack the necessary wisdom to properly orient ourselves to reality. In Magnifica humanitas, Leo notes that “as knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought.”

In this world of fragmentation, an “integral education” like that proposed by St. John Henry Newman is of paramount importance. Such an education provides a unifying vision of the whole of existence—both what is known by faith and what is known through reason—and rejects the mercantilist’s inclination to measure value in terms of functionality and practical utility. It depends on silence and conversation, and careful reflection on one’s own experiences and sufferings and on those experienced vicariously. And it requires great effort, placing it in direct conflict with the modern method where, as Leo noted, “passive adaptation to dominant paradigms will be mistaken for competence.”

Such an integral education is at fundamental odds with the technocratic paradigm. Without it, we risk confusing the rhythms and value of human knowing with the empty work of artificial intelligence. If AI-assisted learning becomes the standard for our education, we will lose the ability to rightly judge its role within the whole of human life, for while AI imitates (and even surpasses) our capacity for data computation, it lacks the “affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”

Incarnate in Community

The AI of the technocratic paradigm makes us lonely. It perpetuates “the pervasive lie of a distorted system, which reduces people to numbers, exacerbating competitiveness and leaving us caught in spirals of anxiety.” To free ourselves from these distortions and lies, we need an education incarnated in a rich, authentic community life, for, as Leo wrote, “Truth is sought in community.”

In Magnifica humanitas, Leo reminds us that “in an era that favors speed and fragmentation, the human person still yearns to receive care and recognition from attentive minds, kind words and hands capable of tenderness. The digital culture multiplies connections and offers new opportunities for interaction; yet, the human heart retains an irrevocable need for genuine closeness.” Humans yearn for a community that is unified through a shared pursuit and embrace of the Truth, entrusted to it by God.

Education is the work of a community, Leo argues, for “the deepest and most important things are learned only after much time and effort, by engaging in discussion with others, ‘striking upon’ ideas and experiences together like flint until the spark of understanding is kindled within us.” This unhurried, communal pursuit is truly the instrument of the education; it cannot be outsourced or downloaded.

“Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world,” Leo continues, “but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.” By rooting education in the rich soil of real community, we push back against the isolation and distortion that AI brings into the world of academia.

I opened with C.S. Lewis’s description of the technocratic paradigm; I close by appropriating the quote from J.R.R. Tolkien that Leo used in Magnifica Humanitas.

In the fight with the technocratic paradigm, “it is not our part to master all the tides of the world,” but in the field of education, we must “do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set.”

The teaching of our young people has been given into our care, and we must uproot the evils present in this paradigm so that future generations “may have clean earth to till.” We must protect them from the “pervasiveness of digital media [that] fosters a culture of immediacy and hyper-stimulation, which gives rise to fatigue, boredom and apathy concerning the effort required for seeking the truth,” immersing them in the richness of reality, and offering them an integrating education within a place of authentic community.

Whether this humanizing education will free them from the prison of the technocratic age is more than we can know, but for those of us entrusted with Catholic education, let us at least give those in our care the freedom to fight another day.

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Fr. Deacon Kyle Washut is president of Wyoming Catholic College

Wilmer made the remark on the opening day of the bishops’ Sept. 28- Oct. 1 plenary meeting in Fulda.

He told German media: “There is currently no news regarding the synodal conference. We are waiting for the recognitio [Vatican approval] for the draft statutes. I have mentioned this before, and I hope you will receive a response by the end of this year.”

Wilmer personally submitted the synodal conference statutes to the Vatican on March 31, 2026. A photograph showed him placing the document in the hands of Archbishop Filippo Iannone, prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops.

What is the synodal conference? What’s happening to its statutes? And is the apparent delay surprising?

What’s the synodal conference?

The proposal for a new, permanent national synodal body in Germany emerged from the synodal way, an initiative that brought together bishops and select lay people between 2020 and 2023 to discuss sweeping changes to Catholic teaching and practice.

The initiative produced 150 pages of resolutions calling, among other things, for women deacons, a re-examination of priestly celibacy, lay preaching at Masses, greater lay involvement in selecting bishops, and a revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on homosexuality.

But arguably the most controversial resolution, passed in September 2022, proposed a permanent “advisory and decision-making body” composed of bishops and select lay people.

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The new body would “take fundamental decisions of supradiocesan significance on pastoral planning, future perspectives of the Church, and financial and budgetary matters of the Church that are not decided at diocesan level.”

It would replace an institution known as the Joint Conference, a consultative body that has brought together representatives of the bishops’ conference and the ZdK roughly twice a year since 1976.

The resolution said the new permanent body should be established “by March 2026 at the latest.”

In November 2025, an interim body called the synodal committee finalized the statutes of the permanent body, to be known as the synodal conference. Members of the lay Central Committee of German Catholics, or ZdK, approved the statutes days later.

The German bishops endorsed the text at their plenary assembly in February 2026, the final step before the document was submitted to Rome for recognitio ad experimentum — approval on an experimental basis for a fixed period.

The draft statutes adopted in November 2025 defined the synodal conference as “a synodal body in which bishops and other members of the faithful, in accordance with their common baptismal dignity and their respective vocations, deliberate together and take decisions in order to fulfil the Church’s mission.”

The draft added that the new body “respects the constitutionally established order of the Church and safeguards the rights of diocesan bishops and of the German bishops’ conference, as well as the diocesan procedures and bodies.”

That statement was an attempt to reassure Vatican officials alarmed that the proposed body could potentially usurp the authority of the bishops’ conference and undermine the episcopal office as expressed in the documents of Vatican Council II.

Only a third of the synodal conference’s members are bishops. Another third are ZdK members. The final third were elected by participants in the synodal way’s sixth and final plenary assembly, held in Stuttgart in January 2026. The statutes say that decisions require a two-thirds majority of votes to be passed. This means that a decision could be adopted without any bishops voting for it.

Synodal way organizers announced in November 2025 that the synodal conference’s first meeting would take place on Nov. 6-7, 2026, in Stuttgart, followed by a second meeting on April 16-17, 2027, in Würzburg, subject to Vatican approval.

What’s happening with the statutes?

When Pope Leo XIV was asked about the synodal conference during an inflight press conference in November 2025, he replied, somewhat enigmatically: “We shall see.”

But the Vatican has made no public comment on the statutes since it received them in March 2026, creating an air of uncertainty around the document.

As the text was handed to Archbishop Iannone, the Dicastery for Bishops seems to be the Vatican office primarily responsible for assessing the statutes. Cardinal Mario Grech, the secretary general of the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops, appeared to confirm this in a recent interview.

Bishop Wilmer first hinted in May 2026 that the Vatican’s recognitio would not be granted before the synodal conference’s first scheduled meeting in November 2026.

In an August 2026 interview, Wilmer said: “The statutes are currently being reviewed in Rome. I’ve been told by the people in charge there that it will take a little more time. I’m confident that we’ll make progress on this.”

At the end of August, the ZdK confirmed the inaugural meeting had been postponed.

Archbishop Hubertus van Megen, the new apostolic nuncio to Germany, said in a Sept. 23 interview that he planned to visit Rome to inquire about the status of the synodal conference.

“As far as I know, the statutes are currently being studied by various dicasteries. To be honest, however, I can’t say much yet about where things currently stand,” he commented.

“I hope to be able to travel to Rome at the end of October. One of the main reasons for doing so is to listen and get a sense of where we are in this discussion and how the curia views the matter.”

Ja, aber?

Most German Church figures seem to believe that Rome will approve the statutes, rather than reject them.

Bishop Stefan Oster, for example, is an avowed critic of the synodal way who refused to join the interim synodal committee that paved the way for the synodal conference. But in March 2026, he said he believed Vatican approval would be forthcoming.

“Rome also has an interest in ensuring that nobody comes out of this looking like they’ve lost face,” he said.

In September 2026, Oster said a Vatican response would probably not arrive before spring 2027.

In a Sept. 18 article for the German version of the theological journal Communio, the theologian Jan-Heiner Tück predicted that the Vatican’s response would be “Ja, aber” (“Yes, but”).

“A complete veto from Rome would be understood in Germany as a defeat for the synodal way as a whole. It could strengthen those forces that already accuse Rome of being insufficiently willing to pursue reform. For Pope Leo XIV, who, out of concern for the unity of the Church, has to contain tensions, this would be politically and pastorally unhelpful,” Tück wrote.

“An unqualified approval, on the other hand, would also be difficult. It could create the impression that Rome accepts a new national decision-making structure whose relationship to the episcopal office has not been sufficiently clarified. A ‘yes, but’ could avoid both dangers.”

Tück outlined what a “yes, but” might look like, suggesting that Rome could insist on diocesan bishops’ freedom to reject synodal conference decisions, require episcopal approval for specific types of decisions, make it clear that the synodal conference does not have oversight of bishops, clarify the nature of the body’s financial powers, and better define the relationship between the synodal conference, the bishops’ conference, and individual bishops.

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Yet not everyone in Germany is confident that the Vatican will approve the request for recognitio ad experimentum.

The canon lawyer Heribert Hallermann argued that the statutes don’t meet the formal requirements for approval. He suggested, for example, that they should have been drafted by the German bishops’ conference — a body formally recognized in Church law — rather than the synodal committee.

Hallermann also claimed that the statutes failed to address Rome’s fundamental concern, about the undermining of episcopal authority.

He said: “It is objectively untrue that all of the curia’s comments were incorporated into the draft statutes; for example, the concerns that the synodal conference might take precedence over the bishops’ conference were not addressed — quite the contrary!”

Meanwhile, frustration is growing among German lay groups that enthusiastically supported the synodal way.

In a Sept. 23 joint statement, the German Catholic Women’s Association, the Catholic Women’s Association of Germany, and We Are Church Germany said: “Rome’s continued failure to recognize the statutes for the planned synodal conference is more than disappointing.”

“However, this must not be used as a pretext to slow down the reform process in Germany. The synodal assembly has passed resolutions. Now the German bishops must demonstrate that these joint resolutions are more to them than non-binding declarations of intent by consistently implementing the resolutions in their respective dioceses and thus continuing to bring about a synodal Church.”

Is the perception that Rome is slow-walking the synodal conference statutes valid? Perhaps it looks that way if your measure is the November 2026 date set for the synodal conference’s inaugural meeting.

But the notion that Rome could issue a decision within 220 days of receiving the draft statutes was somewhat unrealistic. While the Vatican can take quick decisions when it judges them necessary, it tends to take its time when granting recognitio. The more complex the document, the longer the process generally takes.

The synodal conference statutes touch on deep and, in some respects, unresolved issues of episcopal authority and lay responsibility. While the Dicastery for Bishops appears to be overseeing the process, other offices are likely to be involved, perhaps including the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Secretariat of State, adding further complexity.

How long should we expect the process to take? Consider the case of Australia. The decrees of the country’s Fifth Plenary Council were submitted to the Vatican for recognitio in 2022. Four years later, they still haven’t been approved.

The rising impatience in Germany suggests a lack of understanding of Vatican procedures. Perhaps this isn’t surprising given that speed was of the essence during the German synodal way. It was sheer velocity that allowed the organizers to race past the Vatican’s many “stop signs” and cross the finishing line in 2023. But this may have created a false perception that the Vatican too can be made to work according to an externally imposed timetable.

Perhaps Bishop Wilmer has reasons to be confident that Rome will respond by the end of 2026. But if it’s merely a wish, he risks adding to the growing restlessness in Germany if there is no decision forthcoming.

It is clear by now that while the synodal conference’s architects think in months, Rome still thinks in centuries.

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But why is a friar who lived 800 years ago still one of the Church’s most beloved saints and how does his message still resonate with Catholics today? The Pillar spoke with Cardinal Jaime Spengler, OFM, Archbishop of Porto Alegre, Brazil, about Saint Francis of Assisi, Franciscan spirituality and philosophy.

Spengler, who also serves as the president of the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil and the Latin American Episcopal Council, joined the Franciscans in 1982, made his solemn profession in 1985 and, after studies in the Holy Land, was ordained a priest in 1990. He then worked as a seminary and novice formator and teacher and completed a doctorate in philosophy in the Antonianum in Rome in 1998.

After working in several leadership positions and Franciscan-ran parishes in Brazil, he became the auxiliary bishop of Porto Alegre in 2010, later becoming its archbishop in 2013. In 2023 he became both the president of the Brazilian bishops’ conference and the Council of Latin American and Caribbean bishops’ conference.

The interview was conducted in Portuguese and has been edited for clarity and length.

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It seems that today that Catholics are responding with great devotion to contemporary saints. It’s no accident that the devotion for figures such as Saint Carlo Acutis, Mother Teresa, Saint John Paul II has spread far a wide.

But why hasn’t St. Francis of Assisi lost his relevance?

Every age has its saints that are proper to their times. St. Francis was indeed a saint of the 13th century, but he’s also, I’d say, a human archetype, and that’s why he remains alive.

Marking this moment of anthropological crises that we’re experiencing, I believe, is an opportunity to bring to the center of the debate the importance of the human being. Francis of Assisi is a profoundly human saint, and certainly what he passed down to us as the promotion of the work of care – of the human person and of creation – remains more than current: it’s a pressing demand.

In what sense is he a human archetype?

It’s because Francis goes beyond the boundaries of the Franciscan world, of the Catholic Church, and even of Christianity. Francis is, without doubt, a universal man.

How did St. Francis come to be the saint of ecology?

Isn’t that a way of domesticating him or would that rather make him a rebuttal against the de-Christianized ecologism that Pope Francis so often criticized?

Francis was a prophet in his time. What is a prophet? Not someone who foresees the future, as if a kind of fortune-teller or something similar, but someone who, out of what animates him inwardly, is able to read the present — and that reading endures through time. He brought something that perhaps we had to wait almost eight centuries to recover again. Here I’m referring to something that Pascal, for instance, had already grasped in his own time, or Pope Francis with Laudato si’. Saint Francis in a very simple way, reminded us of that famous expression that marks Pope Francis’s reflection on the so-called ecological question, when he said that everything is interconnected, what Pope Francis called “integral ecology.”

Saint Francis, already in his own time, said “we are all brothers and sisters” — different language, but underneath it carries the same principle: Brother Sun, Sister Water, Sister Light, Sister Earth, Brother Wind, Sister Death. Everything truly is interconnected. We are part of a much greater whole, which we might call creation, or, if we prefer, the family of God.

Chesterton said that “ each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.”

I don’t know. It could be, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that he contradicts it, but he certainly knew how to read his own time through God’s eyes.

Although St. Francis is best known for the poverty, for the radical humility he lived — but if we read his letters, a good part of them are devoted to worship, to prayer, especially to the Eucharist — in a Church so divided over disputes over the liturgy, how can St. Francis help us better understand the Eucharist, the liturgy?

Saint Francis’s greatest reference point in all his writings is the Gospel. The Gospel is at the center of Francis’s entire search. It was, so to speak, the desire to live the Gospel in its radicalness — radicalness understood as the fact the Gospel is incarnate. It is not a text: the Gospel is a person. And so this striving of Francis’s is to live the Gospel in its radicalness.

That may seem frightening at first, perhaps, but on the other hand, it brings to the surface a dream that is present, I believe, in the soul of every true Christian, every true Catholic: to respond to the Gospel at the height of its distinctive demand.

Today we do have this question of the liturgy, which stirs up various groups. But the main issue isn’t the liturgy. The main issue is the sense of belonging to the ecclesial community. That’s where the real question lies: the sense of belonging to the ecclesial community, to the Church as a community, and fidelity to the Gospel. I’d say the liturgy question has been, or is being, used ideologically for other interests that seem to me not to be authentically motivated by the Gospel, and even less by a sense of belonging and shared responsibility for the ecclesial community.

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St. Francis tends to be associated with interreligious dialogue because of his meeting with the sultan. But his intention wasn’t interreligious dialogue — it was to preach the Gospel and convert the sultan.

How can St. Francis teach us to respect other religions without compromising our own beliefs and our task of evangelization?

What the Franciscan sources preserve is that Francis’s intention in this regard was to proclaim the Gospel to his neighbor, in response to Jesus’s mandate: go into all the world and proclaim the Gospel. And we’re still called to do that within the context of the religious diversity in which we find ourselves.

Better put: our responsibility is, starting from our own belief, to go out and meet the other, not in order to “proselitize” them, but to show what animates me, what guides me, what sustains me. And if that is expressed in a way that is objective, clear, attractive, and profoundly human, then it can convert.

It’s interesting that, at this moment in history that we’re living through, there is news, there is data, of many conversions in the West. Sometimes it’s lapsed Catholics who return to the faith, or people who grew up with no religion, or were part of other Christian denominations. But also of people from other faiths who, through encounter, through dialogue, without confrontation, convert.

Saint Francis wasn’t a philosopher, but the Franciscans produced a philosophical school, with St. Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and other philosophers — even if it’s less well known than the Thomistic school.

Is this Franciscan philosophical-theological school still relevant today?

I’d say it is extremely relevant. And today I believe Franciscan philosophy has its own distinct contribution to make to philosophical reflection itself. Also, speaking internally, at the level of clergy formation, in a special way, I believe we need to recover what we call Franciscan intuition, namely, this particular way that Francis discovered for radically living the Gospel and that animates Franciscan philosophy.

It’s true that Thomas Aquinas was brilliant in his time, just as Bonaventure, Scotus, and so many others were brilliant. It’s true that Thomas Aquinas came to prevail, even through an institutional endorsement of sorts, but these great Franciscan minds also need to be rediscovered — and not only internally. I believe we need an ever broader, more open dialogue with all the currents or philosophical schools that mark, above all, the history of the West.

There’s a tendency in some circles to think philosophy ended in the Middle Ages, which isn’t true. The moderns, the contemporaries, aren’t sufficiently studied and I think the Franciscan school also equips us better for this dialogue.

I believe every school, every thinker, brings a specific contribution; and if a critique is raised regarding our own core convictions, it’s because we need to think even more intensely, and not close ourselves off within our own positions. Bonaventure, Scotus, and others brought to reflection what is proper to philosophy: the intuition of Francis of Assisi. What an extraordinary thing! Scotus’s intuition regarding the fullness of the mystery of Our Lady — potuit, decuit, ergo fecit [He could do it, it was fitting, therefore He did it] — was something extraordinary.

Such a simple intuition, but at the same time carrying an evidence, a clarity, all its own — and that’s exactly what intellectual reflection is really about. When we speak of philosophy, we sometimes imagine a complex, difficult discourse, sometimes incomprehensible. It’s the opposite.

In that era there wasn’t really a distinction made between what we today call theology and philosophy; it was a reflection moving within a single dynamic. Bonaventure, in his works — the six days of creation, for instance, the Journey of the Mind into God — is, in truth, a reading rooted either in philosophy or in theology, whichever you prefer, drawing from the founder’s intuition.

I think that is part of what the Franciscan intuition can teach us today in philosophical reflection, to see things as an integrated whole during disintegrated times.

What drew you to the Franciscan order in your vocational discernment?

Why did you become a Franciscan, and not a member of another order, or a diocesan priest?

It’s very simple. In the region where my parents lived, we knew two religious families: one were the Dehonians, the other the Franciscans. The Franciscans led the parish in Gaspar, in southern Brazil where I was born. And we had contact with the Dehonias through my father’s friendship with two families who lived in the same area and had sons who were with them. So priests would come, when they were on holiday or during their free day, to our house to play cards — my father liked to play cards, never for money, just for friendship’s sake.

And when I decided I wanted to become a priest, I wasn’t so much thinking about consecrated life, because I didn’t know that distinction. I sought out the parish priest, who was a Franciscan, and naturally he pointed me toward the Franciscans [laughs].

Later, during formation, I came to understand the distinction between being a diocesan priest, a religious priest, and particularly a Franciscan. And something that marked me deeply was my experience, still during my formation, in Israel, when I was asked to pursue theological studies in the Holy Land.

There I had a quite particular contact with Franciscan history, tied not only to the holy places but also to reflection on the Gospel. Because Francis is nothing more than a return to the Gospel and you see it very practically in the Holy Land. So, having been able to live alongside the friars in the Holy Land, and on the Holy Land, studying there, gave me the elements for an even more convinced decision toward the Franciscan life as a way of life.

What is the main gift that St. Francis and his order can offer the Church and the world?

I would highlight its fidelity to the Church. The Franciscan movement had every chance to go its own separate way, and yet Francis of Assisi never wanted to walk outside ecclesial communion. Respect and reverence for the figure of the Successor of Peter, but also reverence for priests — I believe that has a relevance all its own today. But it also reminds the priest of the dignity that constitutes him.

This is very important today, in the ecclesial context we live in, with all these currents that sometimes seek to impose themselves beyond the radical need to walk in ecclesial communion. I believe that this insight, which comes from Francis’s intuition and from the Franciscan tradition, is an element that today needs to be highlighted again and again, always in a new way.

Another element that I believe speaks to the relevance of Francis is that he saw the identity of each thing as entirely his own — how that identity of each thing was expressed in what he called brother, sister: everything is a divine work; everything is born out of God’s love. And so everything, down to the simplest element of nature, needs respect and promotion. At this tremendous moment we’re living through, there are crises on every side: ecological crisis, anthropological crisis.

Returning to Francis is drawing from a well where we can find fresh water, capable of quenching our thirst today. So, to rediscover the dignity and the need to care for our common home is more than an urgency: it is a matter of survival, and of recognizing that this doesn’t belong to us — it was given to us by God not simply to enjoy, but to care for and promote it for the benefit of every human being.

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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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