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Hey everybody,
Today is the Feast of Mt. Carmel, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
There’s a lot of news today, and I’m getting ready to head this week to the National Eucharistic Congress, but it’d be foolish not to say at least this about Carmelites:
For almost exactly 800 years, men and women in Carmelite monasteries have committed themselves to lives of austerity and seclusion for the sake of contemplating God and praying for the world.
Religious life is hard, and, of course, it doesn’t always work out — consider the challenges for the Carmelites of Fort Worth, Texas. But when it does work out — by grace, and virtue, and good fortune, it’s a beautiful thing. And it’s a gift to the Church.
One thing I learned working in diocesan chanceries, for bishops who were men of faith, is that when there’s trouble, you should call the Carmelites. I’ve carried that lesson in my own family life, and in the work of The Pillar, too. When there’s trouble coming, I call the Carmelites for prayer. It’s not hard to do — you don’t need a password or anything. You just find the phone number of a Carmelite monastery online, dial it, and ask the nuns to pray for what needs prayer.
Today, though, I’ll flip the script, and pray for Carmelites around the world. And may the Blessed Mother, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, intercede for us.
And by the way, if you meant to subscribe to The Pillar this month, and you haven’t yet had a chance, here it is:
Now here’s the news.
The news
Saturday’s assassination attempt of former president Donald Trump was, for many of us, shocking, and it may well have changed American history. As details emerge about serious security failures at the Trump rally, a perception of safety has been shattered for many people, just as it was when the failures in Uvalde came to light.
And of course, for Catholics, all of that is unfolding ahead of the National Eucharistic Congress, where large crowds of people gather for big stadium and public liturgical events. For some, the events of the past few days have made them anxious.
On Sunday, I talked with Steve Garcia, a longtime law enforcement officer who is tasked with coordinating all security for the Eucharistic Congress. He explained to me — while leaving out the specific details of law enforcement tactics — that the Congress team has built a big security matrix, involving the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and hundreds of police officers.
You might recall from previous Pillar reporting that security was a surprisingly big expense for the Eucharistic Congress. Now I know why.
For more than 25 years, Logos has served as an interdisciplinary meeting point for scholars and readers to engage with the beauty, truth, and vitality of Christianity as it is rooted in and shaped by Catholicism. Published by the Center for Catholic Studies, University of St. Thomas (MN).
Trump, as is well known, selected as his running mate Ohio Senator JD Vance on Monday.
Vance is a Catholic, having entered the full communion of the Church in 2019. He is also historically pro-life, arguing on several occasions in favor of full legal protection for unborn children.
Like most Republican politicians these days, Vance has signed on to Trump-directed changes to the GOP platform — they remove from the Republican platform a longstanding call for a federal prohibition against abortion, seemingly in favor of state regulation of abortion.
For some pro-lifers, this has played as a betrayal of their long-standing loyalty to the GOP. But from a Catholic moral perspective, this question is a matter of prudential judgment —while the Church is clear that legal protection for abortion is immoral, it does not suggest the level of government at which abortion should be regulated.
But Vance has gone beyond that. In an interview this month, Vance said directly that he supports legal accessibility for mifepristone, an abortifacient pharmaceutical responsible for more than half the abortions in the U.S. — known colloquially, and quite ghoulishly, as the “abortion pill.”
At first, Vance said only that he supported a Supreme Court decision against a challenge to mifepristone’s legality, which was decided on procedural grounds, not substantive ones.
But later in his interview, he was asked a direct question:
Question: “You support mifepristone being accessible?”
Vance: “Yes, Kristen, I do.”
The pill works, according to the U.S. bishops’ conference, by causing “damage [to] a woman’s uterine lining, cutting off nutrition and oxygen to her pre-born child, causing starvation and suffocation.”
Starvation and suffocation.
For more than a week now, reports have characterized Vance’s response as direct support for legal protection for mifepristone, the “abortion pill.” The senator’s office has not responded to those reports.
The Pillar contacted Vance’s office to ask whether he wanted to clarify, explain, or qualify any part of his remarks, and has not yet received a response.
So here’s why I bring this up. For years now, the bishops of this country — and lots of Catholics invested in the conversation — have been arguing about whether Catholic politicians supportive of legal protection for abortion should be admitted to the Holy Eucharist.
The argument, as you well know, hinges on canon 915, which says that Catholics who “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”
This canon has been widely interpreted to include politicians who advocate for legal protection for abortion, which is why Rep. Nancy Pelosi was prohibited from receiving the Eucharist by her local bishop in 2022.
Now, with Vance, the situation is this: The senator has once, thus far, expressed support for legal accessibility for mifepristone. He has not advocated a particular policy around that. So I’m not sure that anyone could judge him to have reached the “obstinately persist” level of support quite yet.
As it stands, the first (and only, to date) bishop to speak disapprovingly in a public way of Vance’s remarks on mifepristone is Bishop Joseph Strickland, the former bishop of Tyler, Texas, who tweeted this last night:
The bishop has faced a considerable amount of pushback online — most of it from people who would ordinarily consider themselves his supporters. All of this could get pretty rocky.
But, whatever his political positions, Vance is, I’m told, a regularly practicing Catholic whose practice of the faith is important to him.
For all I know, he might even be a Pillar reader. And so I’ll say this to him, right here:
Senator, I’d be glad to interview you, JD to JD, about the way your faith shapes your politics, and the choices you’ve made in public life. I think it’d be a great conversation, and I’m available for it at your convenience.
Among the things that some Catholics are asking right now is a shift in the GOP platform that seems to them to deemphasize principled opposition to abortion, and that has dropped a man-woman definition of marriage, with the aim of avoiding “culture war” fights during the election cycle, to focus on painting a picture of economic prosperity for a broader swath of Americans.
In short, the GOP campaign approach this year is likely to focus on economic flourishing, in all kinds of ways —including some which seem to draw from Catholic social teaching — while remaining relatively libertarian, or agnostic, on most social issues, apart from a fairly strong dose of anti-wokism.
Issues like immigration, trade, crime, healthcare etc, will all be framed in the context of providing more access to economic stability and prosperity for more Americans.
I’m not a fan of 90s style “culture war” politics either — I simply don’t care whether someone wishes me “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas,” and I don’t want to see memes about it or pretend to care.
But Christians know that human flourishing is not merely an economic question — that human flourishing means social flourishing, and spiritual flourishing, and that governments have a role in helping to order and regulate society towards the good.
Prohibiting pornography, for example, and regulating marriage, and protecting the elderly or unborn children, all direct us toward the good, and are as important for a human society as ensuring just wages or sensible border policies, or access to affordable healthcare.
But I think sometimes the framing of those things as “conservative” has made them seem irrelevant to many Americans, including many on the political right, because no one is really sure what good they’re meant to be conserving. Almost no one has experience of it.
Talk about “preserving” marriage, for example, doesn’t resonate with a lot of people today — including most conservatives — because, for decades, the sexual revolution and its resulting social fallout have not made marriage seem like anything particularly special, particularly important, or particularly dependable.
Concerns about marriage, and abortion, and surrogacy, and pornography, and family life in general, seem now to many people either like the stodgy domain of the old religious right, or the fetishistic and racially-tinged obsessions of the perpetually online “groyper” troll universe.
That’s why the Trump campaign doesn’t want to talk about those things: because Trump wants to win, and those are issues he doesn’t associate with winners.
Here’s what I’m saying. People don’t understand what we Christians are trying to say about marriage, and family life, and human dignity as human goods, the stuff that life is really made of, and the stuff that we’re really made for. And often the spokesmen for those kinds of things have reduced the beauty of being a person to a couple of talking points with which to “own the libs.”
That hasn’t helped anyone.
The job of Christians right now in public life is to propose, and demonstrate that human flourishing is not a merely economic proposal — that the human person can live well when his basic dignity is known, when he has a place in a family and in a community — and that politicians are supposed to have a role in all of that.
We all perceive something is wrong when we don’t know who we are. And we know who we are when we know what being a person is for, and we know the meaning of the ties that bind us.
We Christians care about issues like marriage and abortion not because we want to “conserve” something superficial, but because we want people to have better experiences than did their parents or their grandparents — we want for them the richness of experience rooted in being made in the image of a Triune God.
We want a stronger, more cohesive, more supportive and more meaningful society than the anemic “paradise” of sexual revolution and suburban atomization, because we know that we’re made for something more than that.
Family means something much richer than the shallow picture painted in “Boy Meets World,” or the dystopian one painted in “Succession.” Supporting human dignity means something more than putting up a flag for the cause of the month.
We have something special to offer. And we actually have to do it.
I think we’re in a change of epoch right now, which Ross Douthat described well in the New York Times today. I think social rhetoric which seems to hearken back to a gauzy and nostalgic past doesn’t resonate with anyone, and most people are rightly skeptical of nostalgia’s credibility.
Instead, we need to talk about human happiness. And we need to demonstrate it.
I know the idea that we’re made for something more than dollar-sign stability resonates with the questions that plague human hearts. And I know that we can’t give up saying that, just because it's becoming politically unfashionable to do so.
And Senator, I’m standing by for a great Catholic conversation.
The shortfall in funds will be felt in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, where many Catholic and aid projects rely on the Church in Germany’s financial support.
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When Pope Francis named a coadjutor bishop for the Diocese of Urgell, Spain on Friday, he also made a prince — because the Bishop of Urgell is by law a co-prince of the tiny nation of Andorra, a prosperous microstate with a population of 80,000 people, nestled between France and Spain in the Pyrenees mountains.
Whatever you call cardinals, the Urgell bishop might be the only true prince of the Church.
I’m not sure if the new prince is charming, of course.
If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that if you want to delve into the world of spiritual warfare, you should only do so with the proper and full backing of the Church’s hierarchy. Anything else seems like a recipe for a really dangerous disaster.
But the order, the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, has denied the allegations made against its members
The background is this: For several weeks now, there have been (unconfirmed) rumors that Pope Francis is planning to issue new restrictions on the Traditional Latin Mass, possibly issuing them on the anniversary of Traditionis custodes, which is today.
As those rumors swirl, there have been several “open letters” or petitions from groups of Catholics and non-Catholics urging the pope not to do that — most notably a British letter this month, signed by both Andrew Lloyd Webber and a member of the British royal family.
Well this week, some Americans signed a similar letter and posted it online, on a webpage promoted by the Benedict XVI Institute, a kind of liturgical think tank supported by Archbishop Cordileone and a few other bishops as well.
And after the letter was posted online, Cordileone’s office sent The Pillar a statement of support from the archbishop for the text.
While these kinds of letters come out a lot, it’s pretty unusual for a sitting archbishop to lend them his support. And it doesn’t seem to us that the Apostolic See is likely to look too kindly on that choice.
So we posed some questions to Cordileone about why he signed it, and what he thinks will happen next.
His answers were, in some places, quite candid. Read them here.
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Next, as the Eucharistic Congress is ready to convene, The Pillar’s Brendan Hodge this week took a look at the Pew survey that started it all — and at another, more recent survey on what Catholics believe about the Eucharist.
With his usual analytic precision, Brendan found that what’s probably most important in research like this is the way you word the question — and that most Catholics believe that they’re aligned with Catholic doctrine on the Eucharist, whether they actually know what the Church teaches or not.
This is a very interesting read. Check it out.
I wanted to know how the organizers decided to have which Eastern liturgies, how they decided to hold two TLMs, and how they could possibly decide the liturgical approach to take with the stadium Masses which aim, according to Cozzens, to foster unity in the Church.
Liturgy, as you well know, is a pretty divisive topic. So when Bishop Cozzens said he believes that a multi-day liturgical event can be unifying for the Church, well, I wanted to know what he actually had in mind.
Perhaps you do too. Here’s what he said.
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See you in Indy!
If you’re coming to the Eucharistic Congress, come to our live show extravaganza Thursday night. We “begin” at 9:30, but it’ll take us a little while to get started, so don’t worry about what time you get there. Just come to the bar, and follow the sound of fun.
And for something completely different, here’s Yakko Warner:
Sorry, it’s no longer up to date, but still impressive for a cartoon dog. (Or cat? What are the Animaniacs?) Anyway, Yakko needs to do a remake.
Please be assured of our prayers. And please pray for us. We need it.
Yours in Christ,
JD Flynn
editor-in-chief
The Pillar
