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Hey everybody,

It’s the 14th of January, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.

In the Church’s contemporary calendar, today is Tuesday in the First Week of Ordinary Time, a relatively unremarkable liturgical date.

But in medieval France, January 14 was something altogether different: it was the day on which Catholics celebrated the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt — and celebrated the donkey who took the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Jesus himself, to safety.

On the Feast of the Ass, as it was known, French cities held festivals and dramatic pageants, and processions in which the flight into Egypt was depicted by townspeople. They were followed by Masses, at which a wooden donkey was often displayed prominently inside the Church.

I wish we still celebrated feasts like this, where the whole town engages in a party, with ritualized plays and cool processions, at which the high point of the day was Mass followed by a huge feast.

We don’t, though, still celebrate feasts like that, because we don’t live in that kind of overwhelmingly Christian culture anymore. But we can draw from our history to create pieces of our own Catholic culture, and we should. So if you have any idea what a modern-day parish-based Feast of the Ass would look like, I’m all ears.

A companion for Luce?

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about the prominent donkeys in Scripture.

First is Balaam’s talking ass, with whom you may not be familiar, but who’s got a very cool story worth reading in Numbers 25.

“Balaam and the Ass,” 1626, Rembrandt. Public domain.

Second is the dead donkey who contributed a jawbone in Judges 15, with which the mighty Samson killed 1,000 Philistines.

But if you read that chapter, you know the donkey plays second fiddle to Samson’s foxes: According to the Scripture, the strongman caught 300 foxes, and tied them in pairs tail-to-tail. Then he tied a burning torch into each tail knot, and set those burning little crazy fox pairs into his enemies’ fields. That guy was unreal.

The next set of Scriptural donkeys, though, we can only presume to have existed: the donkey who carried Mary to Bethlehem for Christ to be born, and then the one who bore — as commemorated on the Feast of the Ass — the Holy Family into peace and security, on their flight into Egypt from the persecution of Herod.

Those donkeys, it seems to me, prefigure the donkey on which Christ rode into Jerusalem — the donkey prophesied in Zechariah 9, who brought the King of the Universe to face his arrest, his passion, and his death on a cross.

I don’t know anything about donkeys, I’m a city guy, and I’m sure if I saw a donkey in real life, I’d be afraid it would bite me or kick me in the ass or something. Further, I’m afraid I don’t have an especially keen spiritual insight about donkeys bearing burdens well, or us being donkeys for the Lord, or anything like that. Anything I tried to write to that effect seemed corny, and not worth your time.

So consider this a fun ass newsletter: The Church in some places used to celebrate a cool feast, the Festum Asinorum, and if our parishes want, we’d be perfectly justified in mid-January Donkey Festivals of our own.

The news

Before I get to The Pillar’s news, let’s acknowledge that the most significant news story of 2025 is the destruction wrought by the Los Angeles fires, which are expected to continue spreading in the next few days, as the Santa Ana winds push them into new areas.

The media has made an unusually big deal about tracking the celebrities whose homes have been destroyed in the fire, and, since celebrities are people too, we should pray for them as much as for anyone else.

But the fires will have an outsized effect on people without the resources to rebuild or move on — families sleeping on their friends’ living room floors, and trying to decide how to explain to their children that everything is gone.

A friend in Southern California says that in his Catholic school community, eight families have already lost their homes. Eight families. They’ll spend the next few years fighting with insurance companies, trying to give their children some sense of home, working to rebuild. Their school community and parish community will pitch in — but the losses will have residual effects.

Catholic schools will aim to keep enrolled the families who’ve lost everything, even when they can’t pay tuition anymore, and that will strain budgets, especially in the places hardest hit. Parishes will face extraordinary rebuilding costs, smoke mitigation projects and rising insurance rates. Businesses will shutter, and families will suffer.

The battle won’t end for the ordinary people of Southern California when the fires are out. Actually, that’s when the hard stuff will really get started.

And if you want to read about what that means for Catholics — Angelus, the L.A. archdiocesan newsmagazine, is doing a stand-up job putting reporters on the ground, to tell the stories of suffering, resilient, devastated, and hope-filled communities.

I like very much this story of a parish community fighting the fire at their parish with a ladder and garden hose — and saving the church building.

And I was especially struck by the story of Corpus Christi parish, which was completely incinerated by the fires. Days after the building burned, a fire captain recovered the parish tabernacle from six feet of rubble, under a collapsed roof and a twisted steel frame.

“The Blessed Sacrament was intact,” Angelus reported.

Do I think it’s a miracle? Not probably supernatural, no — fires are weird, some things burn while others don’t. And the tabernacle was atop a granite altar. But I do think it’s a sign of hope, for people faced with the trauma of losing everything. And God is the author of hope.

Anyway, you can read all about the fire from Angelus — they’re doing a great job with coverage.


Scholarship alert! Earn your master’s degree at the Augustine Institute in St. Louis, Missouri. The Institute’s new campus provides the perfect setting for contemplative study with the convenience of student housing and a beautiful chapel. Students enjoy rich intellectual and spiritual formation from the heart of the Church and access to apostolates and ministries for post-graduate placement. Apply by January 20.

The Apostolic See has appointed delegates to take charge of the men’s and women’s branches of the Institute of the Incarnate Word, a globally popular Argentine religious movement whose founder, Fr. Carlos Buela, was found guilty of sexually abusing seminarians.

Both communities are also forbidden from accepting new members for three years.

Among the criticisms of the IVE is that members and officials continue to revere and promote Buela and his writings, despite his convictions of sexual abuse, even organizing pilgrimages to the priest’s tomb.

Indeed, in 2022, a report from The Pillar found that IVE websites continued to include lengthy laudatory biographies of Buela and links to his homilies, articles, and books, several of which are still available for purchase from IVE Press. One site features an embedded video of Buela giving a 26-minute talk.

But while the Vatican is effecting a takeover of the order, it might also be giving mixed messages: last week, Cardinal Pietro Parolin consecrated a new church in the Holy Land, which was entrusted to the priests of the IVE.

(And if the IVE sounds familiar to you, you might recall that former cardinal Theodore McCarrick lived in his retirement at an IVE house of priestly formation outside of Washington, DC — after he was instructed to leave an archdiocesan seminary where he had been living. McCarrick’s aides in retirement were IVE seminarians, and the former cardinal was known to have a long-time affinity for the community, even traveling to perform its ordinations.)

You can read our reporting here.


In Poland, bishops are opposing a policy proposal demanding a ban on confession for children under 18, which has been floated by activists in the country’s parliament.

Petitioners say the sacrament of penance is a measure to protect children from “a relic of the Middle Ages, in which feudal social relations prevailed.”

The petition is under consideration in the Sejm, Poland’s legislature, for assignment to a committee.

It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing likely to get very much traction. Usually, we wouldn’t even cover a petition like this. But this one’s remarkable for two reasons:

One, the Church and the Polish government are in a very bitter fight right now, as the state's education department plans to reduce religion classes in public schools, over the strong objections of the Church.

Two: bishops have taken the confession petition seriously enough to respond to it. If several Polish bishops think a concerted response is worth their time, well, that’s already saying something noteworthy about the state of the Church in Poland.

Read about it here.


A prominent rabbi said in an open letter published Thursday that Pope Francis' recent remarks about Israel's conduct in Gaza represented "a historic danger.”

The letter criticized a December speech from the pope, which has been widely criticized in Israel as biased.

Here’s the story.


It was a wild weekend in the Syro-Malabar Archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamaly, where police dragged 21 protesting priests from their archbishop’s house early Saturday morning, with some reportedly hospitalized.

Just hours later, the archdiocesan apostolic administrator saw his resignation accepted after only a year in the job, and a replacement appointed, hastily.

The weekend saw hundreds of protestors at the gates of the archbishop’s house, as the long liturgy dispute in the eparchy has not relented. In fact, with the archeparchy filing charges against the 21 priests who protested in their archbishop’s house, public support is galvanizing for them — which means that things are going to get worse, well before they ever get better.

In the years we’ve been covering this story, I’ve learned that no matter what the Vatican tries, it doesn’t quell the conflict in Ernakulam-Angamaly. But Rome will keep trying, and we’ll be there to tell you what happens next.

Here’s the latest.


Cardinal Blase Cupich caused a bit of a backlash last month when he wrote a column criticizing Catholics who kneel for the reception of Holy Communion.

Soon after, Bishop Mark Brennan of Wheeling-Charleston caused a bit of a backlash when he announced that Catholics in his diocese would be required to continue standing after the Agnus Dei, even while kneeling is the ordinary posture in the United States.

Those two announcements — and a few other things — got me thinking this weekend about how Traditionis custodes has changed liturgical culture dramatically in the United States, with a growing number of bishops moving authoritatively away from the “reform of the reform” ethos of the Benedict XVI era, even as many of their priests and laity saying that’s exactly what they want.

It’s funny, because while Traditionis custodes was supposed to be about unity, I think there’s now pretty good evidence that it’s led to more discord and division.

And I’ve got an analysis published about exactly that. Read it here.


Media outlets around the world reported on Friday that the Italian bishops’ conference had shifted from the Church’s policy on homosexuality and priestly formation, paving the way for men publicly identifying as gay to be ordained priests.

But when we talked to the Italian bishops’ conference on Monday, they said that wasn’t the case at all, and that basically, its language had been radically misinterpreted.

Now, if you ask me, the misinterpreted text in question was something of a word salad, the kind of episcopal-conference-speech that is hard to parse in the first place, or find meaning in, but according to the conference, there was no intention to deviate from the Church’s policy regarding homosexuality and reports to the contrary were, in a word, fake news.

Here’s our report on the subject.

And while we’re reading about this particular story, allow me to note a strange circumstance at the pages of America magazine. The magazine published yesterday a report on these norms, syndicated and republished from Religion News Service, which said that the Vatican had “allow[ed] openly gay men to become priests in Italy.”

The RNS report was initially published Friday, and included no comment from the Italian bishops’ conference — it took up as fact the then-accepted social media narrative, namely that the Italian bishops had made some genuine policy change in defiance of Vatican norms, instead of doing what they seem to have done, which is to use confusing and ambiguous language that effectively created a dustup over nothing.

But between Friday and Monday, the Italian bishops had given statements to that effect, which meant that the RNS story was out of date: not including key information, and with a lede that could not be called correct, since it claimed that the Italian bishops had “cautiously opened” a door which they claim not to have opened at all.

In short, knowing on Monday what had been said over the weekend, it doesn’t make much sense that the RNS story would still be republished, given that the fully emerged facts would require a considerable rewrite to reflect the whole picture.

But it seems that when America initially published the story on Monday, editors didn’t know that, and so they just ran it. By the time they realized the story had developed, they decided the best thing to do was to put in the Italian bishops’ clarifications into a couple of the paragraphs in the middle of the story, with a short note at the bottom saying the thing had been updated.

That left a Frankenstein’s monster of a news story on the America website: the lede and headline said one thing, but if you were to read eight paragraphs down, you’d find a spokesman-bishop for the Italian conference, telling you that the lede and headline were “not a correct reading of the situation,” — that the seven preceding paragraphs were basically not right — and with no prior recognition of that position.

It’s one thing to present different interpretations of things in a news story. It’s another to stick in something that radically shifts the story only after publication, and only “after the fold,” so to speak.

Ah well. That’s why you read The Pillar.


Le ‘space’

A Pillar reader alerted me yesterday to a French company offering wealthy people the chance for a low-carbon trip to “space,” in a pressurized shimmering capsule called Celeste, suspended from a balloon, which promises to travel some 25 kilometers above the surface of the earth.

Meet Celeste. She’s not in space. She’ll never be in space.

The cost is $170,000 per passenger, and the company promises that the trip takes less carbon per person than a drive from Paris to Lille, a city in northern France with an incredible Catholic history.

Readers, I’ve looked into this for you. If you were considering the ride, I need to advise you to save that $170k, or give it to the great Catholic media outlet of your choice.

First, 25,000 meters is pretty high, but in all the wrong ways. It’s an altitude dangerous enough to see the saliva boil out of your face without a pressure suit, but not high enough to properly be called “space.”

It’s the altitude of risk and no reward: lots of things that can go wrong will kill you, but if everything goes right, and you return to the ground with saliva unboiled, people who know things will chuckle when you say you’ve been to space — which is usually understood to begin much higher, at the 100km altitude Kármán line.

Everyone knows a Frenchman is going to exaggerate, no matter what he’s talking about, but this is a bridge too far, if you ask me. Even William Shatner crossed the Kármán line, and he didn’t have to pay anything for it.

Twenty-five thousand meters is the altitude at which U-2 spy planes can fly, and they’ve got “plane” right there in the name, which is a good sign you’re not in space.

If you’re still not sure, consider that in 1960, the United States Air Force persuaded Joseph Kittinger to step out of a gondola at 31,000 meters in a patched together pressure suit, and to parachute all the way to the ground.

Not space.

When Kittinger’s glove malfunctioned, his hand swelled to twice its size, but he didn’t die. If your glove can break without causing your imminent death, you’re not in space. And if you can jump from something, and hurl back to earth at 614 miles per hour, you’re not in space.

Space is the place where you can’t fall at all, actually.

Now I admit, the view from 25,000 meters would be pretty great, and to some rich thrill-seekers, it might be worth the dough. But after June 2023, when a bunch of “explorers” were instantaneously crushed in a shiny unregulated silver capsule probing a dangerous place, I would have thought that kind of thing had gone out of fashion. I would have hoped we’d learned our lesson, actually.

I guess our collective memory for the sudden death of wealthy passengers is only 18 months. So now we know.

But with all that in mind, if you’re still considering a flight in the Celeste capsule, consider this troubling reality. I’ve scoured the website, and I see no indication this capsule has a bar. Of any kind. It’s a 6-hour flight — that’s nearly a whole Parisian working week — without a drink. It’s no way to fly, even to “space.”

Use your carbon emission for that road trip to Lille. Drink a local beer. Take in the sights. See whether the cathedral has any remnants from the Festum Asinorum.

Please be assured of our prayers, and please pray for us. We need it.

Yours in Christ,

JD Flynn
Editor-in-chief
The Pillar


Scholarship alert! Earn your master’s degree at the Augustine Institute in St. Louis, Missouri. The Institute’s new campus provides the perfect setting for contemplative study with the convenience of student housing and a beautiful chapel. Students enjoy rich intellectual and spiritual formation from the heart of the Church and access to apostolates and ministries for post-graduate placement. Apply by January 20.

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