Happy Friday friends,
This week is Gaudete Sunday, which is one of my favorite liturgical moments of the year. I love it that we have a Sunday given over to an imperative to joy. Who else does that?
Joy is, of course, so much more than simple happiness, mere satisfaction or contentment. It is a consuming, animating state. And it is not something to which I am often prone.
Rejoicing, I know, requires of its nature a kind of self-abandon, a giving of myself over to the total celebration of something bigger than me — that one is coming who is greater than me, mightier than my sins, more powerful than death.
Indeed, waiting for the coming of the Lord in glory, whenever it may be, I should be animated with the joy still echoing through the year from the Easter vigil and the ultimate message of the Gospel, that He is risen indeed.
I say all of this because I need to hear it.
I spent last night on a trans-Atlantic flight accompanied by the worst head cold I have had in years and a three year old with her own ideas about being bolted into a chair for eight hours. It was not a restful night and I landed tired, sick, resentful, and far from any kind of joy.
But I think this is good for me.
I should not be looking out for the coming of Christ from a comfortable chair, well rested and half a bottle deep. The Gospels have words of warning about what happens if you fall into that posture.
Instead, I am on the move, if only just about upright, in need of joy, yes, but more immediately a sense of gratitude, both for the blessings I enjoy and that Christ continues to spare me in the hopes of my eventual conversion.
Maranatha.
Here’s the news.
The News
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was back in Catholic news this week, confirming in an interview that she has lodged an appeal at the Vatican against her bishop’s 2022 prohibition on her reception of Communion.
Pelosi confirmed she’s continued to receive the sacrament, since her appeal has suspensive effect on Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s pastoral prohibition, which he issued after lengthy attempts to engage privately with the congresswoman over her public advocacy for abortion.
On the other hand, it’s hard to see how the DDW could reasonably fault the archbishop’s numerous pastoral overtures prior to issuing the prohibition, or dispute Pelosi’s persevering obstinately in “manifest grave sin” over her work to entrench access to legal abortion.
And if they tried, it would be a deafening statement on the real authority Rome believes diocesan bishops to have in their sees.
All in all, JD concludes, the case is likely to languish for quite some time, not that the congresswoman seems to mind. Her reception of the Eucharist is “his problem, not mine,” she said this week.
I would just note that this is a sad stance for her to take. Her continued reception of the sacrament in a state of grave sin is very much “her problem.”
While I am always delighted to see a canonical process being deployed, it strikes me that challenging her archbishop in Rome without troubling to meet with him to discuss his stated, urgent concerns for the spiritual harm she could be doing herself betrays a somewhat cavalier approach to the state of her soul.
If my local bishops voiced similar serious concerns about me, I’d be very concerned to meet him and hear him out — all the more so if I were 84 years old.
You can read JD’s whole analysis here.
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Staying in San Francisco for a moment, Archbishop Cordileone announced yesterday — the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe — a new initiative to encourage devotion to Herself under that title and to prepare for the upcoming 500th anniversary of the apparition.
The archbishop spoke with our own Michelle La Rosa about Project Guadalupe 2031, which is a response to Pope Francis’ call for a nine-year novena, as well as his personal devotion of Our Lady.
Read the whole conversation here.
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Germany’s “synodal committee” has parted ways with its two spiritual advisers less than six months after they were appointed.
Sr. Igna Kramp, C.J., and Peter Hundertmark announced they will not attend the body’s third plenary assembly in Wiesbaden this weekend, with a statement saying they “withdrew their willingness to participate and expressed the impression to those present that spiritual accompaniment of the committee’s work was not really desired.”
Ouch.
The synodal committee, composed of bishops and selected lay people, was established at the end of Germany’s controversial “synodal way.” The committee is responsible for implementing the synodal way’s 150 pages of resolutions and preparing the creation of a permanent national synodal body in 2026.
It’s had a few setbacks so far. Read the whole story here.
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After mixed messages on a controversial pilgrimage, a Vatican official said Thursday that a planned LGBT pilgrimage was removed from a Vatican Jubilee Year calendar temporarily, and could soon be returned.
The statement came after a Vatican spokesperson told The Pillar earlier this week that the pilgrimage had never been included on the online calendar, despite evidence to the contrary.
The planned pilgrimage is organized by the LGBT organization Tenda di Gionata — Jonathan’s Tent — with support from the Italian bishops’ conference and the Society of Jesus. It is catered to LGBT pilgrims and will be held on September 5 and 6, 2025.
After the Vatican included the event in a calendar of pilgrimages and Jubilee events organized by third parties, the pilgrimage garnered attention, and mostly criticism, from commentators and on social media.
It then disappeared from the online Jubilee schedule maintained by the Vatican, with a spokesperson from the Dicastery for the Evangelization denying to The Pillar earlier this week that it had ever been listed — despite electronic evidence to the contrary and despite Archbishop Rino Fisichell having said earlier this month that the event “is in the calendar, like many other events.”
Then, yesterday, the Vatican’s Jubilee press office told The Pillar that the event “was in the general calendar of Jubilee events, where all pilgrimages and events proposed by dioceses or associations are included,” but that it had been temporarily removed “solely because the [pilgrimage’s] organisers had not yet provided the [Jubilee’s] organisation with… detailed information about the event.”
“The event will be reinstated as soon as the organisers provide the necessary details,” we were told.
People can, of course, have different opinions about the benefit or suitability of organizing a Jubilee event based on sexuality. For me, this is primarily a story about internal coherence and the ability to make decisions and communicate them clearly and effectively.
Because if the world is coming to Rome for next year’s Jubilee, that is going to matter.
You can read our most recent coverage here.
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Australian Catholic University announced the appointment of a new senior adviser Wednesday, after leading churchmen accused it of failing to uphold its Catholic identity.
Fr. Gleeson’s brief is “to ensure the university remains a vibrant, relevant, and inclusive community rooted in Catholic values and teachings,” and his appointment follows some protracted and increasingly sharp exchanges among some the country’s bishops over the university’s leadership and direction, including a call for a Vatican visitation by two of Australia’s most senior archbishops.
ACU further announced this week that it would “shortly advertise the role of pro vice-chancellor or deputy vice-chancellor, Catholic mission.”
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Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the chief judge of the Vatican City court, who reached the nominal retirement age for the position earlier this year.
Thanks to legal reforms passed by Pope Francis earlier this year, we already know who Pignatone’s successor in the role will be.
You can catch up on Pignatone’s Vatican career highlights here.
Judging not
As Giuseppe Pignatone departs the Vatican City judicial stage, I think it is worth considering what may prove to be his legacy at the city state court.
This week, the former director of the Sistine Chapel Choir was convicted of embezzlement, along with two of his former colleagues.
Fr. Massimo Palombella was in charge of the famous musical troupe for nearly a decade until 2019. He was found to have stolen some 127,000 euros in cooperation with the choir’s manager, Michelangelo Nardella, who was himself separately convicted of thieving another 153,000 euros with his wife.
All three defendants were handed fines, and years-long prison sentences: The priest got three years in jail, the manager more than four years, and his wife was handed two years in the nick.
This follows the verdict this time last year in the Secretariat of State’s financial crimes trial, in which six defendants were handed prison sentences, several of them stretching to five years or more, and ordered to repay hundreds of millions of euros.
The year before that, Vatican City courts confirmed the convictions of the former director of a Vatican bank, Angelo Caloia, his lawyer, and his lawyer's son, over a multi-million euro property scam. Caloia was handed a sentence of 8 years and 11 months. He was 81 years old at the time.
I could go on, but my point is this: it was once a laughable prospect that you could go to jail for stealing on the job in the Vatican. No one is laughing any more.
But it’s also worth nothing that while financial crimes are increasingly being treated as serious in the Vatican, elsewhere in the Church — especially in the U.S. — it is still treated (and punished) as if it were hardly a crime at all.
Last week, a woman who admitted to stealing $300,000 from the Alabama parish where she worked was handed probation, instead of a possible 20-year jail term. It’s of a piece with a growing list of proven instances in which clerics and lay people are handed comparably light sentences for serious financial crimes against the Church.
Of course, U.S. courts are hardly likely to look to the Vatican for judicial precedent when it comes to meeting out justice for large scale theft but, as JD has noted more than once, American dioceses have a real habit of lobbying the court for leniency in these cases, which probably does contribute to the kind of sentences we are seeing.
While I doubt this is especially high on anyone’s radar except ours, it seems to me that the difference in attitude towards financial crimes within the Church in the Vatican and elsewhere is becoming a disparity of justice.
Either financial crimes are so serious that multi-year prison sentences are warranted for six figure thefts, in which case U.S. dioceses have a duty in justice to seek such penalties, including for the reform of the offender, or it’s only money, in which case Vatican City has become a draconian jurisdiction in need of urgent reform.
I don’t expect either U.S. bishops or Vatican civil judges to assume responsibility for noticing, let alone dealing with this. But it does for me highlight the ways in which the Church at every level needs to get more comfortable speaking about crime and punishment and what constitutes a necessary, just, or reasonable punishment.
Failure to do so, usually for fear of being held out as some kind of doctrinaire Pharisee, is one of the reasons why our canonical system remains uneven to the point of appearing arbitrary — even when dealing with the most serious sorts of crimes.
Of course, every crime in the Church is a sin first, and we tend to lose first the sense of sin, or at least of its severity, which in turn makes applying the law and notions of justice seem themselves like acts of almost sinful judgement and moralism.
Understood this way, I would argue that an unwillingness to impose, or real discomfort with calling for, just punishment in response to crime isn’t, as I suspect many like to think, evidence of a merciful disposition but rather a badly coarsened conscience.
Conclave watch
Despite my best intentions, I suppose it was inevitable that I was going to see “Conclave,” the “thriller” based on the novel of the same name by Robert Harris.
I use “”s around thriller because the tale of a conclave of paint-by-numbers personalities delivering the election of an hermaphrodite pope is likely to thrill only those who get a childish titillation from the transgressive premise (as such, it’s sure to get at least three Oscar nominations).
To be a thriller, there must be stakes, and the audience must buy into them. But while “Conclave” is about the Church, it is utterly — almost self-congratulatingly — devoid of faith. It leaves a void at the center of the plot, and the characters, which you feel rather than see as it drains the drama from every scene.
There’s a great deal this film gets wrong, both in terms of the rude legal mechanics of a papal interregnum and the theological and political contours of the voting college, to be sure.
It’s hardly unexpected, but it is a shame, because Ralph Fiennes is one of the most watchable human beings in the world.
His turn as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence is plagued by the same problems as his appearances as M in James Bond. In both outings he plays an interesting man in a fascinating job, but written as if by someone who’s read half a Wikipedia page about it all.
In “Conclave,” Fiennes plays the dean of the College of Cardinals, though he spends a considerable portion of the film doing, attempting to do, or invoking for himself the authority of, the job of the cardinal camerlengo — played by John Lithgow — messing about with the seals of the papal apartment, dealing with urgent matters of Church governance during the interregnum, running external vetting on candidates and so on.
The “surprise” dark horse candidate for pope — his eventual election is telegraphed from his first appearance with the subtlety of a flashing neon arrow — is a cardinal secretly appointed, in pectore, by the deceased pope, who only reveals himself as the conclave is getting underway.
Again, reality isn’t allowed to get in the way: cardinals appointed in pectore and not publicly acknowledged by the pope prior to death are expressly forbidden by canon law from entering or voting in conclaves.
Indeed, the whole film turns on a series of canonical nonsenses which could have been easily understood and accommodated with 10 minutes of earnest googling. But another major problem with “Conclave,” as with so much marquee Catholic-themed TV and film, is that it’s too lazy to sweat the details of its own premise.
It shows in everything from letting the wrong people into the conclave, to giving them the wrong job title, to dressing them in bizarre ways — the cardinals, for example, are shoved into chasubles whenever they have to look formal, but no one ever says Mass.
Don’t get me wrong, it is wonderfully shot in places, and the voting scenes inside the Sistine Chapel are excellent (and reasonably canonically correct) eye candy. It’s just that there is no substance or spirit to any of it.
As advertised, all the cardinal-stereotypes are there, as they are inevitably in any film dealing with the Church. And I did snort out loud when Fiennes actually said “diversity is the Church’s strength” and “certainty is the enemy of unity.”
At one point his character says he feels as if he’s “at some sort of American political convention" and it felt like the truest line of dialogue in the film.
Of course there is an African conservative who has fathered a secret love child etc. because, we’re told, he’s a homophobe and so we must be shown he is necessarily a hypocrite as well.
And yes, Stanley Tucci’s utterly self-righteous (and nakedly intended as sympathetic) American liberal is straight out of secular central casting. But while his casual rejection of Church teaching on (sorry, “common sense approach to”) homosexuality, divorce, and contraception is perfectly believable in a certain type of cardinal, his refreshing self-awareness of his own ambition and moral pliability is not.
But the real offence against the viewer’s suspension of disbelief is Sergio Castellitto’s vastly entertaining bit part as Cardinal Tedesco — a handsome, flamboyant, Italian “ultra-conservative,” who seems to possess the ecclesiology of Cardinal Burke, the bombast of Cardinal Dolan, and the visual effect of… well, an Italian film star. The implausibility of the character is simply off the scale.
Of course, the shuddering horror with which everyone speaks of him as the film’s bogeyman — his badness is taken as self-evident throughout — ends up making him something of a hero to any viewer who resents being patronized.
But all this is to be expected. And, to be clear, I liked some parts of the movie: A powerful curial cardinal is discovered to be financially corrupt and at the center of a complicated network of bribery and patronage? You have my attention.
The real problem with “Conclave” is it neither trusts the natural drama and stakes of its subject — instead relying on the Dan Brown-esque absurdity of a dead pope’s carefully calculated plan to elevate an hermaphrodite — nor does it allow for even a moment’s authentic spiritual tension.
God and faith are not present among the cardinals, but kept firmly in the background, out of focus, to serve only as color and backdrop like the rest of the Vatican scenery.
This is deeply irritating because Fiennes, Tucci and John Lithgow are all at times almost mesmeric in their performances, but the film has them making only a phonetic attempt at speaking Catholicism. It has the rhythm and cadences but, if you actually listen, it’s all gibberish — like Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol.
In this sense, “Conclave” is vastly inferior to the Jude Law TV series “The Young Pope,” which was brilliantly acted, visually stunning, surprisingly canonically accurate and genuinely suspenseful, with a bracingly fierce, authentically Catholic approach to prayer, miracles, doubt and faith.
Of course, that show insisted on splicing in segments of literal pornography, rather than progressive politics, into the plot, so it is arguably even less watchable than “Conclave.”
There’s no shortage of premises at hand for a great Vatican thriller — there are at least three active trials or investigations that just scream for the Hollywood treatment. And the setting clearly holds a fascination for movie makers and audiences.
It’s a shame no one seems to have confidence that all that ready source material could stand on its own feet, or consider that true faith is an engine of real drama.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
