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Happy Friday friends,
There is a war on. We shouldn’t forget that. In fact, there’s more than one. Real wars, taking real lives, destroying real homes of real families.
It’s all too easy for those of us who aren’t doing the actual fighting and dying, living out of immediate danger, to simply dial down the volume and allow this reality to recede into the background static — just one more unpleasant thing going on which we have the luxury of paying attention to, or not, as we choose.
I certainly do.
Others don’t have that luxury. They are not strangers. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ, our friends, and, in The Pillar’s case, our colleagues.
Case in point: Earlier this week I was waiting for our latest dispatch from our Ukrainian correspondent, Anatolii Babynskyi, who has been working on an important story about the shifting ecclesial landscape in Ukraine after the parliament there voted to effectively outlaw the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from maintaining ecclesiastical communion with its Russian counterpart.
I was eager to get it, since we know this is a crucial and complicated issue, one which ripples across a country and people trying to hold itself together under siege, and could force a tectonic shift in the global ecumenical landscape.
But while he was working, his city was under attack, with hypersonic Russian missiles raining down on Lviv — in homes, schools, and hospitals some 800 miles from the front but only 40 miles from the Polish border.
Amid the dozens of casualties, those attacks killed a student at the Ukrainian Catholic University, where Anatolii teaches — Dariia Bazylevych. Her mother, and her two sisters, the youngest of whom was 7 years old, were also killed. Her father, now the only surviving member of the family, is in critical condition.
Pray for them, for the university community, for the people of Lviv, and for all the Ukrainians who go to sleep at night in credible fear for their lives.
Yesterday, Anatolii filed the story he was working on, which we’ll come to in a minute. And he pitched another one he’s getting started on now. That’s the kind of week he and his family and friends and neighbors have had.
I’d ask you to remember that, please.
Here’s the news.
The News
Five bishops will not offer an apology to the patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church, despite a looming threat of canonical sanctions.
Last week, Patriarch Cardinal Louis Sako directed the five bishops, including the Archbishop of Erbil, Bashar Warda, to apologize to him for acts of perceived disunity in the Eastern Catholic Church, setting a deadline of yesterday — Sept. 5.
How that could play out is very much a story in motion — recriminations between Sako and Warda are long-standing and personal. And they encompass everything from ecclesial issues to Iraqi state affairs to relations with a regional militia leader.
If Rome gets involved, the situation could get even more complicated.
What is clear, for the moment, is that the Chaldean Church is teetering on the brink of a full-blown crisis, one which could have serious spiritual as well as practical consequences for the lives of many Catholic Iraqis, to say nothing of the fabric of an ancient Church.
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A Ukrainian government official has said that a new law banning activity by the Russian Orthodox Church will not apply to Ukrainian Orthodox Church bishops, as long as they clearly and definitively cut ties with the Patriarch of Moscow.
By way of very inexact analogy, that is like the U.S. government telling the USCCB the Catholic Church can continue to operate in America, provided they break communion with the pope.
This is a big deal, ecclesiastically and ecumenically speaking.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) is a daughter Church of the Russian Orthodox Church — not to be confused with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which is autocephalous (self-governing), and recognized as such by several other Orthodox Churches, including Constantinople.
But the Patriarch of Moscow and the Russian Orthodox Church have been eager cheerleaders for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, figuratively and literally blessing the war.
According to the Ukrainian government, the Russian Church is “an ideological continuation of the regime of the aggressor state, an accomplice to war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on behalf of the Russian Federation and the ideology of the ‘Russkiy mir.’”
Since the beginning of Russia's invasion, authorities have opened more than 100 criminal cases against UOC-MP priests and bishops, with 26 already resulting in court sentences. These primarily involve charges of treason, collaboration, and aiding and abetting Russia.
The new law has met with widespread approval in Ukraine. Opinion polls show that more than 80% of Ukrainians believe the state should intervene in the activities of the UOC-MP to some extent, and 63% support a complete ban on its activities.
The UOC-MP now has nine months to formally sever all ties with Moscow, or it too would fall under the ban. But, state ministers told The Pillar, “we are not talking about self-proclaiming autocephaly” by and for the UOC.
Rather, they want the Church to “appeal to the global Orthodox community and explain why it cannot remain part of the Moscow Patriarchate, preserving its canonical status until a council can be convened to address this issue.”
If that doesn’t sound easy, as Anatolii reports, it also isn’t as easy as it sounds.
In May 2022, the UOC-MP already asserted its independence, although it initially insisted that it was not formally breaking from ecclesial communion with the Russian Orthodox Church. A commission of experts, established in 2023 by the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience, ruled that the UOC-MP is still part of the Russian Orthodox Church.
So where does this leave the UOC-MP within the Orthodox ecclesiastical landscape? And what does this all mean for freedom of religion in Ukraine?
Read Anatolii’s whole report. This is reporting you can only read at The Pillar, and it’s the stuff I am most proud of publishing.
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Last week, at a parish just a few miles north of Madrid, 18 couples celebrated the first ‘macro-wedding’ in Spain.
The couples, who had all been cohabiting for at least five years, entered into marriage on Aug. 29, after months of preparation at San Sebastián Mártir Parish.
The mass wedding was the pastoral brainchild of Fr. Javier Sánchez-Cervera, who noticed that most of the couples coming to his parish to baptize their children or register them for First Communion catechesis were unmarried. Many of them were migrants, making the prospect of getting married complex. Others believed they couldn’t afford to get married.
It all ended in a day of celebration involving just about everyone in the town of San Sebastián de los Reyes, from the mayor and the local media to the town’s hairdresser and the catechists of the parish.
This is one of those stories you just enjoy reading. It’s the kind of pastoral creativity that clearly changed a lot of lives and made a huge wider impact on the local community.
I cannot recommend it enough.
This is your weekend fun read.
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Pope Francis is on his 10-day sweep through Asia this week. But although India has more Catholics than Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Singapore combined, it isn’t on the itinerary for Pope Francis’ trip.
Why not?
These quick-fire blasts through a question or issue that should be getting more thought than it is will be familiar to readers of Luke’s peerless Starting Seven morning newsletter (for paying subscribers only, sign up here).
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“The Catholic Church in Europe needs more synodality” isn’t something too many people can argue without irony. But some can — and they are.
Thomas Söding, the biblical scholar, synod on synodality participant, and vice president of the influential Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK), for example, is worried Europe is being “left behind” by Africa, Latin America, and Oceania.
So what, exactly, is being proposed?
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Romeo & Juliet
We don’t know their names, though Italian newspapers are calling them Romeo and Juliet.
The bank is probably the most (only) transparently run, profitable, and internationally credible Vatican financial institution. It has been through waves of internal reform over the last decade, with its leadership emerging as often lonely figures for actual, not kidding, unflinching champions of by-the-book administration — often at considerable cost.
Part of those reforming efforts have included writing into the bank’s policy Pope Francis’ anti-nepotism rules for Vatican policy, which essentially bars blood and marriage relations from working together.
At the IOR, part of this policy states that if two employees decide to get married, one of them has to resign. If they won’t, both will have their contracts terminated at the end of the month. The policy was suspended indefinitely, until the five married couples already working there retired or moved on naturally — the last of them did only recently, and the policy came into full force.
But, despite this, two IOR employees got married on Aug. 31 and neither is willing to resign — instead, they’ve asked (the bank says demanded) to be accommodated, and the bank has said a firm no. According to some reports, they then went to the press to gin up support, and they’ve since been suspended.
Perhaps not unreasonably, they’ve attracted a good bit of sympathy, and the IOR has come under a lot of criticism for a policy being spun as “anti-family.” After all, how can a Vatican-owned institution punish two Catholics for contracting a sacrament?
Fair enough, you might think.
We don’t know much about the couple at all, how old they are, what their actual jobs at the bank are, or how closely they work together. We also don’t know when, exactly, they decided to get engaged, or how long they were engaged for — though the Association of Vatican Lay Workers claims they got engaged before the policy came into force.
Absent these details, I think it’s probably unwise to form too strong an opinion about the individual case. I’m trying not to.
But I have to say that, absent more information, I am reflexively on the IOR’s side here.
It’s unusual, and praiseworthy, to see a Vatican financial institution pass a policy (mandated by the pope, let’s remember) and then stick to it, rather than defaulting to ignoring the rules as soon as they become inconvenient.
Is it a little weird to have an interoffice marriage ban at a Catholic place of business? Sure. But I’d challenge anyone to claim that nepotism isn’t a problem in how business gets done badly in Italy — and in the Vatican — or isn’t a frequent factor in financial crimes over there.
While the IOR has been coming on leaps and bounds in the last decade, I’d also ask you to consider that in an office of about 100 people, apparently 10% of the employees were married to each other at the time they adopted (but did not start to enforce) this rule.
Doesn’t that sound a little odd to you?
I’m not saying anyone was up to anything sinister, but it strikes me as a reasonable risk factor to consider when drafting an anti-nepotism policy.
But what’s the alternative policy the IOR is supposed to write? One that prohibits stable extramarital sexual relationships? People would go nuts that the bank was policing employees’ bedrooms and regulating out-of-office morality.
Unless and until we learn more, I’d say the bottom line here is pretty simple: Pope Francis wanted anti-nepotism rules brought in across curial institutions. The IOR wrote a policy in line with the pope’s wishes, kept it in abeyance to accommodate existing staff as a matter of justice, then held to enforcing it from the day it came online.
If you want a serious commitment by Vatican institutions to follow their own rules — and I do — this is what it looks like.
Romeo and Juliet might be nice kids (they could equally be a pair of near-retirees for all we know) and very much in love. But they knew the deal, made a choice in freedom, and seem to have expected the rules to change to accommodate them.
Much as with their namesakes, I’m not sure that was a mature discernment destined to end well.
Knives out
I was reading Starting Seven yesterday morning, as everyone who wants to know what’s going on in the Church should.
Quite apart from getting you up to speed on what’s happening in a hurry, which I much appreciate, the genius of Luke’s morning dispatches is that they come peppered with plenty of rabbit holes to fall down, if you so choose.
So it was that I spent yesterday, the 402nd anniversary of his elevation, thinking a fair bit about Armand Jean du Plessis, Bishop of Luçon, later cardinal and Duke de Richelieu, by which titles he is best known.
Lately, I haven’t spent as much time as I used to thinking about Cardinal Richelieu, but he rewards the attention.
While no one would call him holy, I hazard to suggest that Richelieu might be one of the most fascinating, if not pivotal, figures in European history — if your only real familiarity with him is as the bad guy in “The Three Musketeers,” I would recommend Jean-Vincent Blanchard's “Eminence: Cardinal Richelieu and the Rise of France.” It’s what you’d call a page-turner.
As the French king’s chief minister and head of foreign policy, which involved a very lot of wars and international intrigue, he remade the fabric of French government and had a determinative impact on the geopolitics of 17th-century Europe (and arguably for a few hundred years following),
Richelieu did find some time to blend in a little work for the Church, too, so long as it was in the national interest, of course.
In those days, missions into what was then the Ottoman Empire needed considerable financial support, often coming from quasi-private benefactors under state protection. As such, under Richelieu’s watch, France became the chief protector and patron of various dioceses in modern-day Iraq, Turkey, and so on.
It’s not an exaggeration to suggest Cardinal Richelieu invented the modern centralized nation-state, espionage services, and the practice of secular realpolitik.
He also left a surprisingly deep cultural footprint.
We speak today of a power operating behind the throne as an éminence grise, which was the slightly snarky nickname given to the cardinal’s right hand man, personal envoy, and chief spy, François Leclerc du Tremblay, a gray-robed Capuchin friar.
We also owe Richelieu use of the word “dupe” to describe the credulously deceived.
It comes from the French huppe, an especially stupid-looking bird. It was famously first used to describe the Queen Mother, Maria de Medici, and her allies after they mistakenly believed they’d persuaded the king to expel Richelieu from court on what became known as “the Day of the Dupes,” or la journée des Dupes, if you’re that way inclined.
But by far Richelieu’s broadest, most pervasive and enduring contribution to Western civilization has to be the table knife.
Yes, Cardinal Richelieu invented the actual table knife, the semi-sharp, rounded cutting instrument you find laid at every place setting in every restaurant from La Pyramide to your local Hoss's Steak & Sea House.
No, really.
Until the 17th century, it was normal to bring your own cutlery to dinner, including and especially a more-or-less fancy eatin’ dagger to serve yourself with. By the 1600s, though, the classier maisons began laying the table for their guests, including of course a proper pointed knife.
As the de iure head of government and very nearly de facto head of state, Richelieu had to do a lot of entertaining at his palatial table, and he naturally laid it well.
But while the cardinal had a strong stomach for the cloak and dagger work necessary for the exercise of power, he abhorred bad manners. Richelieu observed that (then, as now) however high their social rank, if you give a Frenchman a knife he’ll use it to pick his teeth at the table — a habit he reasonably detested.
He solved the problem by ordering that all the table knives have their blades blunted and points rounded off. Et voilà.
Naturally, the resulting implements became a talking point, then fashionable, and soon ubiquitous across Paris, then France, then Europe.
I’m not sure it totally makes up for fomenting and funding decades of proxy wars across Europe, or the brutal repression of portions of the French people at home — it’s not for me to judge.
But the next time you set the table, or massacre some Huguenots, spare a thought for France’s most interesting man.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
