Happy Friday, friends,
O clavis David
et sceptrum domus Israel;
qui áperis et nemo claudit;
claudis et nemo áperit:
veni et educ vinctum de domo cárceris,
sedéntem in ténebris et umbra mortis.
So goes today’s antiphon, hailing the coming Christ as the Key of David, He who opens what none may close, and who comes to lead free the captive and those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.
Everyone likes to bang on about the beauty of the “O antiphons” this time of year, I know. But for me, they really are the greatest focus I have for rightly orienting my own prayer.
As I mentioned last week, my family is in London with my in-laws for the holiday and there’s a great deal of nostalgia around for me — or at least the temptation to it.
The weather is right, as is the music on the radio, the cadence of the popular seasonal background noise, and the temperature of the beer. My inclination is to slide into a slightly misty-eyed recollection of childhood Christmas memories from when my whole family lived over here, and more recent ones from when my wife and I lived around the corner from where I write.
But Christmas isn’t meant to be sepia-soaked, as the O’s remind me. It’s about looking first and hard at my reality, my darknesses, my captivities to sin, and lifting my eyes in search of the Savior coming with the key to my liberation, the one who alone can open to me heaven, to which nothing but my own choices can bar the gates.
Of all the specters in A Christmas Carol, the sinister Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come seems to me to be the most poorly portrayed, for it is in the future that my hope of salvation lies, terrible and awesome as He will be when he comes on the clouds.
Maranatha.
Here’s the news.
The News
A former regional governor in Iraq has disputed claims in the pope’s forthcoming autobiography that Francis was the target of a suicide bomb plot during his 2021 visit to the country.
Published excerpts from the pope’s forthcoming book say that “a woman packed with explosives, a young kamikaze, was heading to Mosul to blow herself up during the papal visit,” according to the pope, who credits U.K. intelligence services for foiling the attack, as well as another involving “a van with the same intent.”
But in comments responding to the pope’s account, former Nineveh governor Najm al-Jubouri insisted that “No report indicated any threat to the pope’s life, and all security operations and directives in Nineveh were issued under my direct supervision.”
“The pope’s visit in March 2021 was meticulously planned with no security threats or incidents,” he said.
You can read Francis’ whole account, and the governor’s response, here.
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With permissive euthanasia laws looming in the U.K., Dutch priests said their British counterparts can expect challenges to sacramental ministry, and the Church’s public witness on the dignity of human life.
As one priest put it:
“Nowadays, the main issue is that people don’t realize it’s something problematic. They don’t even know the Church opposes this practice, which is why they openly talk about it with the priest.
“Ten years ago, you only knew someone underwent euthanasia after it happened. They didn’t mention it to the priest. Today, they speak openly to you about it.”
The consensus Edgar found was that all the predictions and warnings about a slippery slope came true, very quickly.
—
In the Church today, the three jobs no one in their right mind would seek out are: Bishop of Rome, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, and the third is apostolic administrator of India’s Archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamaly.
Puthur’s predecessor in the role, Archbishop Andrews Thazhath, lasted barely a year, during which he was blocked from entering the archeparchy’s cathedral, boycotted by the local priests, and saw his decrees burned outside of churches.
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A third political prisoner has died in Venezuelan government custody since a wave of arrests earlier this year, while families of political prisoners have called on the country’s episcopal conference to help them free their jailed family members.
Meanwhile, other activists have urged the bishops’ conference to push for the release of political prisoners and refugees.
This is an unfolding story in a country where the local Church in under enormous pressure at all levels, and where there is a full-blown diplomatic concordat between the Holy See and the government in play.
—
More than 14,000 people requested to be removed from the baptismal registers of the Catholic Church in Belgium last year, almost triple the number of the previous record, according to new figures released this week.
The enormous spike of Catholics seeking to renounce their membership of the Church is likely linked to abuse scandals in the country, and especially the documentary series “Godvergeten” (“Godforsaken”) about abuse cases in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium.
Pope Francis visited Belgium earlier this year to a decidedly mixed public reception — including from Catholics, who criticized his comments on everything from the abuse crisis to abortion to the role of women in the Church.
Since this is my last newsletter before The Pillar closes for Christmas, I just wanted to take a minute to say a sincere thank you here to all our subscribers.
You guys have kept The Pillar going since the day we started and it seems we are set to stay in business into a fifth year — something a lot of smart people said was never going to happen.
I mean it: Thank you.
I could give you the usual rundown of what we’ve been up to this year, why it matters in the life of the Church, and what we’re planning next, but our paying subscribers know all that already.
What I want to say to them specifically is this: You keep us in business. You are the reason our work can be truly independent. You are the reason my family can pay the rent. You and no one else.
If I am being brutally honest, we set ourselves very ambitious targets for this year and we didn’t hit them, which means we’ve had to rethink some plans for January.
But the bottom line is The Pillar is still going to be standing in 2025, and that is nothing short of a gift — of Providence first, but also of you, our paying subscribers, who read our work and decided that the laborers deserve their wages.
Thank you guys, one and all. Merry Christmas.
History in the telling
I was struck this week by the former governor of Nineveh, Najm Al-Jubouri, publicly calling out the story of Pope Francis having survived two assassination attempts during his 2021 visit to Iraq.
The story itself comes from excerpts from Francis’ own forthcoming autobiography, in which he recalls that “A woman packed with explosives, a young suicide bomber, was heading towards Mosul to blow herself up during the papal visit,” and that “a van had also set off at great speed with the same intention.”
Francis recalls, with some sadness, that he was later informed both attackers had been intercepted and killed.
Yet the local governor in office at the time has flatly denied any such attempts on his life were ever made.
The accounts are, on their face, mutually exclusive and it’s a hard one to know what to make of things.
On the one hand, it’s not exactly like the regional governor saves or loses face depending on Francis’ account being true or not.
As we have seen recently with his trip to Indonesia earlier this year, papal trips of all kinds come with serious security concerns, and I think anyone would accept that in 2021 the situation in Iraq was on the up but had still been dicey for some years.
There’s no particular shame in suggesting that a serious attempt on the pope’s life, or even two, might have been mooted — if anything, the smoothness with which the trip seemed to go speaks well of the local government, even more so if they neutralized some credible threats in the process.
So I am unclear what motive Al-Jubouri might have for so roundly rejecting the pope’s narrative, other than sincere disagreement over the facts, unless he’s out to intentionally embarrass Francis at the expense of the truth, though I am not sure whose agenda that would serve.
Of course, on the other hand, it would be odd to the point of remarkable for the pope to have simply invent a detailed story about a young woman wrapping herself into a human bomb.
The other claim of the pope’s in the released excerpts — that virtually everyone discouraged him from making the trip on security grounds — hardly needs the support of a fictional near miss to be believed. So it is difficult to believe the pope would fabricate such incidents out of whole cloth, if for no other reason than lying is a sin.
And it isn’t as if Francis needs to cook up some juicy stories to goose sales; I’m not much up on the economics of book publishing, but I imagine papal autobiographies rather sell themselves.
Of course, there’s no real scope to litigate what, exactly, didn’t happen in Iraq in 2021, even less so when you consider it all allegedly hinged on help from the U.K. intelligence services, who are not known to take curtain calls or explain what they knew, and how and when, about attacks that didn’t happen as a result — whatever a local governor might otherwise claim.
And there is plenty of wiggle room between what may have happened on the ground and what the pope may have been told, or remember being told, at the time.
But I think this is all a foretaste of more to come for Francis, once the whole book is in wide circulation. The peril of autobiography, especially for a globally famous figure, is that every anecdote can and likely will be picked apart by anyone who was anywhere near it at the time, and, as the late Queen Elizabeth memorably said once of another contentious memoir, “some recollections may vary.”
The importance of accuracy depends a great deal on what an autobiographer is aiming to achieve.
If you’re dealing with, say, some estranged members of the royal family with a tendency for lucrative attention-seeking, it’s one thing.
If you’re the pope, your aim is likely far loftier, that the account of your own life will point people to Christ.
That, far more than media hype or sales figures, is the measure of success.
Panic in the streets
There is, apparently, a growing panic sweeping the U.K. as pubs run dry of Guinness across the country.
It is difficult to overemphasize how important is the practice of cramming into proper pubs and getting outside several pints, especially at this time of year.
Now, I am not a pub landlord, and I haven’t worked behind a bar in several decades, but my (usually infallibly correct) general sense of things is that Guinness accounts for something like a fifth of what you see in your normal pub round.
There are, basically, five standard orders in your average London boozer, especially during the Christmas crush:
“Bitter” encompasses ales of various kinds, with the defaults depending on the brewery to which the pub is linked;
“Lager,” which means Peroni or Heineken, Carlsberg maybe, Carling if you’re desperate, Foster’s if you’re a teenager, and Stella if you’re the one in the group who inevitably makes a scene, starts a fight and embarrasses everyone later;
“Wine,” red or white, anything more specific is asking for an eye roll;
“Gin/vodka and” — and you get one “and” (tonic, soda, coke, whatever) only. If you want an old fashioned or a cosmopolitan, don’t go to a pub.
Then there’s “Guinness,” which isn’t a stand-in for stout or especially dark beers. It doesn’t encompass that chocolate-oatmeal nonsense you heard about from the guy who’s “into microbrews.” Guinness means Guinness and nothing else.
For pubs to run dry of an entire class of drink in the middle of the Christmas rush is nightmarish, though some newspapers have been predicting this particular seasonal apocalypse for a few weeks. Back in the first week of December, The Times was warning of “panic buying” and “allocation limits” to U.K. pubs by the Dublin brewery.
Guinness unwisely shut down its London site back in 2005, so now all Guinness in the U.K. is brewed in Dublin. Given that, I have to imagine there is only limited tolerance for a sudden surge in demand, which apparently there is across Britain, and it is now coming to a crisis point.
Diageo, the brewery’s parent company, said it “has seen exceptional consumer demand for Guinness in Great Britain” over the last month, which is saying something.
While accepting the acute risk to the British social fabric that a Christmas shortage could represent — “regulars are not taking the shortages well,” according to The Times — I would have thought a sudden uptick in consumption speaks well of the country’s general direction.
In fact, after years of being told British pubs were closing at the rate of one an hour, or something equally terrifying, and that young Britons were shirking nights out for the postmodern dystopia of staying home with Netflix and social media, I was inclined to welcome a national Guinness shortage as a positive sign of life.
Of course it wasn’t.
While four consecutive weekends of international rugby games played a part in setting up the shortage, apparently the real run on Guinness is the work of “influencers,” like adult film star Kim Kardashian, who have, for reasons known only to themselves, posted recent social media images of themselves drinking the stuff and spiking demand.
Apparently, the kids now like to film themselves “splitting the G,” drinking just enough on the first sip (about a third) to leave the level halfway through the G on the Guinness glass.
Why? I don’t know. I never understood why they used to film themselves snorting cinnamon or eating Tide Pods, either, though both made much more compelling viewing.
Anyway, I should have guessed it was all a TikTok game. But, as most things that start there tend to be Chinese disinformation, I was disinclined, as a journalist, to accept the story at face value.
So I’ve been conducting my own extensive, albeit informal, survey of London pubs to assess this supposed nationwide shortage and have yet to find a place that couldn’t fill my order.
In St. James, both The Red Lion and Chequers have Guinness in stock, as do the tourist land Irish-pub stalwarts The Harp and The Coach and Horses in Covent Garden. Up in Kilburn, The Railway and The Sir Colin Campbell are still pouring pints of the black stuff.
I haven’t actually been in to check on the actually Irish Lucky 7 in Cricklewood, because the place slightly terrifies me and always has, even when I lived around the corner. But if their bar ever ran dry I am sure we’d know about it, since it would probably lead to the suspension of the Good Friday Agreement and a city-wide bombing campaign.
All this leads me to believe that there’s only a lack of Guinness in the sort of pubs where it’s not usually drunk in any great amount but social media is very much on tap.
I don’t want to stereotype, but they are probably the sort of pubs with extensive lunch menus, “craft gins,” and organic dog biscuits for sale — you know what I am getting at.
That being said, Guinness is good for you. So I have to assume that, even if the kids are doing it for a meme, drinking real beer in a pub can only tend toward the improvement of the TikTok types.
Who knows, maybe it will even, slowly, teach them to spend more time with a pint in their hand instead of a phone. Wouldn’t that be a Christmas miracle?
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
