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Happy Friday friends,
And a very happy feast of St. Cecilia to all who celebrate.
So far as I understand, the virgin and martyr lived and died in the third century, with the young Roman saint being married off to a pagan noble by her parents, despite her vow of chastity, whom she converted by assuring on their wedding night that an angel stood ready to do him a great mischief should he not honor her promise to God.
The husband, Valerian, reportedly asked to see the angel and Cecilia told him he would, if he walked a few miles down the Appian Way and was baptized by the pope at a certain roadside mile marker.
Valerian did so, and he was, and so he did, according to the popular hagiography. And he and Cecilia lived together in perfect and perpetual continence until their martyrdom under the Roman prefect Turcius Almachius.
If I am being honest, I find this story wonderfully believable, depending on the “tone of voice” you hear it in.
If Ceclia invokes the angel and prompts Valerian to run several miles out of pious credulity, I’m not terribly sold on it.
But imagining the guy patiently hearing out his new (and not terribly enthusiastic) bride’s story about an angel standing right there who is definitely going to do something nasty to you if you come one step closer, I mean it, and then walking several miles in exasperated determination to both humor her and put an end to her nonsense, only to get the shock of his life? That sounds all too real to me.
For myself, I confess to you and to the saint that I have long nurtured a false devotion to St. Cecilia, whose church and shrine I make an exaggerated point to visit every time I am in Rome, in large part because the place is within sight of my favorite restaurant and, once I’m there already, it would be silly not to stay for an extended meal.
But it is indeed a beautiful church to a beautiful saint, and well worth a visit, even without a long lunch.
Anyway, here’s the news.
The News
The founders of the Hallow prayer app say they are going to take a wait-and-see approach to their advertising relationship with Russell Brand, the internet personality accused of various crimes of sexual violence by multiple women.
Brand, 49, is one of a slew of celebrity endorsements used by Hallow to widen the company’s reach, which include rapper-turned-action-star Mark Wahlberg (who seems to be pitching everything from cheeseburgers to gym shorts these days) and most recently Gwen Stefani, who’s recorded a Christmas song for Hallow, and for whom I cherish a fierce and abiding devotion and of whom no one may speak ill at this website.
The Hallow app’s co-founder Alex Jones told The Pillar in an extended interview that their aim in engaging Brand was “to reach out to his audience and invite them into a relationship with the Lord.”
The internet commentator and personality rose to fame as a late-night UK television personality in the early 2000s, before becoming a film actor and then pivoting to social and political commentary. However, in 2023, a UK newspaper investigation published accusations of sexual assault and abuse against Brand.
Since then, he has taken to promoting and discussing aspects of Christian spirituality on his podcasts, and in April of this year was baptized in the River Thames by another reality TV personality — shortly after which Brand posted photos of himself, in his underpants, baptizing someone else in a river.
It was about that time he entered an advertising partnership with Hallow.
The prayer app has faced a backlash over its relationship with Brand, perhaps understandably, especially after British prosecutors said this month they would consider filing sexual assault charges against him, in response to a request from detectives in London’s Metropolitan Police Service.
Jones told us that if charges are filed “we would obviously take it very seriously. It would be a really important development” — though he did not say whether criminal charges would see Hallow pull its ads from Brand’s podcast, adding that, “I could see a bunch of different ways that that goes.”
The app’s co-founder went on to outline the company’s media and advertising strategy writ large, and try to offer some context for what the company hoped to achieve by working with celebrities to maximize their reach — both for business and for evangelization.
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Pope Francis this week selected Bishop Gustavo Oscar Carrara, auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, to lead the Archdiocese of La Plata, Argentina.
Francis made the appointment following the resignation of the previous archbishop, Bishop Gabriel Mestre, after just 10 months in office, at the pope’s request, apparently over his role in a vicious succession fight in his former diocese of Mar del Plata, which has already seen two episcopal nominees fail to make it to installation.
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Pope Francis announced Thursday that he has appointed Cardinal Kevin Farrell as the sole director of the pension fund for the Holy See, covering former employees of both the Roman curia and the Vatican city state.
Dealing with the fund’s looming liquidity crisis will necessitate “difficult decisions that will require a particular sensitivity, generosity and willingness to sacrifice on the part of all,” the pope said.
That’s putting it very mildly.
Of course, this is just the latest blunt bit of bad financial news the pope has had to break to the curia and the wider Church in recent weeks.
And, I am afraid, there is going to be a lot more to come, since — however much Francis might cite “the latest in-depth analyses” — these problems and these outcomes have been on the cards for years now, and no one in the curia, including the pope, can say they weren’t warned.
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A parish church in Switzerland has introduced an “experimental art installation” into the confessional in which people can interact with an artificial intelligence program meant to imitate Christ.
The installation, titled Deus in Machina, was opened in St. Peter’s Chapel, the oldest Catholic church in the city of Lucerne, in August ahead of the parish’s centenary this month.
The installation will culminate in a presentation and discussion of the project’s results to be held on November 27.
The program encourages people to “think critically about the boundaries of technology in the context of religion,” according to the team that installed it, who have also insisted that putting the installation in a confessional was a practical decision meant to encourage “moments of intimacy” with the hologram, but not meant to suggest Catholics attempt to use the program as a substitute for the sacrament of penance.
This is just the most recent of a growing line of AI crossovers with Catholic pastoral work. And I suspect there will be more to come.
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One of the world’s most intricate bishops’ selection processes became even more complicated Tuesday when a lay parliament voted to expand the candidate pool.
Members of the Catholic College of the Swiss Canton of St. Gallen voted Nov. 19 to make religious priests eligible to be chosen as the next Bishop of St. Gallen. The change — approved by 157 votes in favor and 2 against, with 10 abstentions — temporarily lifts a restriction in an 1845 concordat limiting the choice to diocesan priests.
But how come a lay parliament gets a say in naming bishops, and what does it all mean?
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Any Catholic parent, myself included, knows that unpacking the lives of saints for their kids can prompt a lot of questions — about geography, kingship, and when it’s okay to break the rules, just for starters.
Meg Hunter-Kilmer of Notre Dame University is the author of several books aimed at opening the lives of the saints for young readers and this week she sat down with dear friend of The Pillar Leah Libresco Sargeant to talk about how she approached translating these vivid lives for tiny children.
This is a conversation worth reading:
“There are definitely some stories that we wrote where I knew some parents were going to be uncomfortable with us. We talk about Martin De Porres and how his parents were never married. When I read that to my niece as I was preparing the book, she said, ‘How did he get born if his parents were never married?’...
Here's the thing, kids are eventually going to need to know that some people's parents aren't married. There are children who have never encountered someone with unmarried parents in their Catholic world who need to be told that there can be holiness in the midst of that.”
Like I said, this is a conversation between two remarkable women of faith about questions that will be very familiar to a lot of Catholic parents.
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A total of 2,666 churches and chapels in 69 French dioceses have reported break-ins since the turn of the millennium, according to a study published this week.
The study — published weeks before the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris five years after a devastating fire — offered the most accurate picture yet of the state of France’s religious patrimony.
It’s definitely worth a read.
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I hate to say it
Perhaps the most famous, and most frequently misattributed lines of dialogue in Hemingway's “The Sun Also Rises” are between Bill and Mike, with the former asking the latter how he went bankrupt.
“Two ways,” Mike replied. “Gradually, and then suddenly.”
As I have been warning for about as long as I have been in this business, the Holy See is going broke. But in the light of the increasingly frequent and increasingly panicked statements from the Holy Father to this effect, I am prepared to say we’ve now moved from the “gradually” phase to the “suddenly.”
Like, right now.
Let’s be clear: when Pope Francis says that the Vatican pension fund will be unable to meet its obligations “in the medium term,” that’s as close to an admission as we are going to get that the thing is pretty much bust.
The most recent round of salary cuts, like the previous rounds before them, are the bells of the five-alarm fire which is the curia’s structural budget deficit.
The problem is, despite the increasingly frank public assessments of the scale of the crisis — though I would note the Vatican is still not publicly putting actual numbers on it — there’s little indication that there’s a credible move to do much about it.
The pope’s appointment of Cardinal Farrell as sole ‘pension czar’ is interesting, in as much as it dispenses with the prized Roman traditions of government by committee, and I’m told by those there at the time that, during the years of Cardinal Pell’s tenure, he routinely complained about the state and governance of the pension fund.
One official told me yesterday that 10 years ago, Pell’s team flagged an unfunded deficit in the fund of more than 900 million euros, only to be called “alarmists” by its administrators, who contended it was “only 600 million.”
“Things have just got worse from there,” he said.
But whatever Farrell can do, if anything, to get the fund in order is only, at this point, a small piece of the puzzle.
Everything the Holy See has announced in response to the financial crisis has been reactive, passive even, and that seems to me to be the real issue.
Is it important to stamp out financial corruption and obvious waste? Absolutely. Do the belts need to be tightened to a degree that isn’t just uncomfortable, but painful? Without a doubt. But all of this is, at best, slowing the slide into illiquidity.
To date, I have seen and heard nothing to suggest there is a serious plan in development to address the shortfall of revenue. Quite simply, the Vatican needs to make more money and, right now, the only play being run is a fire sale of assets.
Again, this crisis came gradually before it came suddenly.
The Secretariat of State’s commitment to (illegal) casino capitalism under Cardinal Becciu — borrowing hundreds of millions of euros in the hope of lucking into high-yield investments — wasn’t born out of giddy enthusiasm for profit, it was a panic move to plug an ever-widening budget blackhole.
Since that kind of nonsense has been shut down, though, nothing has replaced it. Which is a titanic opportunity wasted.
As we’ve reported previously, during the all-too-brief era when Cardinal George Pell and Libero Milone were running the Vatican’s finances — or trying to —- there were serious plans on the table to transform the Holy See’s considerable real estate holdings into credible, sustainable, long-term revenue generators.
Unfortunately, those plans were stuffed in a drawer and the people advocating for them were hounded from office, by one means or another.
Now, it’s (probably) too late to start the process of long-term reform in time to prevent what’s coming.
So what can be done? I think the Holy See needs to commit, like yesterday, to some serious crisis fundraising, and get creative about how it does so.
You can, broadly speaking, put Vatican annual expenditures into two buckets: operational costs and liabilities and maintenance.
The latter, by which I mean the constant costs of keeping up and restoring a priceless collection of buildings, art, and archives, is a huge expense each year and is going to require some serious — and probably seriously unedifying — consideration of external partnerships and sponsorships.
The former, by which I mean the actual operational budget and obligations of the curia and city state is, given its global importance and workload, actually not that extravagantly funded.
By the last publicly disclosed figures, only three Vatican departments had annual budgets over 20 million euros: Evangelization (21m), Communications (38m), and the diplomatic service (41).
Some of the most important departments actually seem to run on a relative shoestring — in 2022, the DDF had an annual budget of 3 million.
I would suggest again, as I have half-jokingly in the past, that someone come up with a deadly serious “sponsor a dicastery” program in a hurry.
One of the major problems many Catholics have in donating to things like Peter’s Pence — be it big or small amounts — is that people are wary of just flushing cash into “the Vatican.” And who can blame them at this point?
But could you find a cohort of donors or even dioceses willing to pony up 2 million a year to sponsor the Dicastery of Laity, Family, and Life? I bet you could.
I’m not saying ringfenced fundraising for the lower-cost, more viewer-friendly Vatican departments is going to solve every problem, but it could at least be a start towards what really needs to happen — finding creative new ways to bring in more money and tell people how you’re going to spend it.
That’s more than the Vatican’s dicasteries for consecrated life, saints, and laity spend in a year between all three of them. Don’t tell me we can’t raise the money.
But here’s why I don’t think that will happen: no one is in charge of making it happen.
The Vatican has plenty of people in charge of spending money, and plenty more tasked with giving it away. And increasingly there are officials and entire departments dedicated to overseeing how it is all spent and given away — and even reining it in, a little.
But who is in charge of making the Vatican money? Who is the chief revenue officer, or fundraising czar? Nobody.
If there’s nobody to do it, then it’s not going to get done. And the Holy See will continue sliding into a liquidity crisis, gradually, then suddenly, selling off the family silver to grease skids along the way.
Lord of the ring
For reasons I do not need to explain, we take subscriber data protection extremely seriously here at The Pillar, and I would no more hawk around the personal details of our subscribers than I would those of my own family.
That having been said, I don’t think I am violating any trust by saying there is a significant demographic in the Pillar universe with an interest in professional wrestling, including and even especially among some of our clerical readers.
With that in mind, I was interested to read this story in The Times about a professional Christian wrestling promotion, currently installed in an Anglican church.
Now, again, without violating any confidences, I think it's fair to say most, if not all, of our readers will bridle at the use of a sacred space for the erection of a squared circle.
But for the easing of your consciences, the church in question was built in 1909 — so it was never a Catholic church and, to the best of my knowledge, Mass has never been validly celebrated there.
And, all things considered, if I have to choose among the profane schemes installed in Anglican churches in recent years, like carnival rides and putt-putt golf courses, I think I am most persuaded in favor of Kingdom Wrestling, which purports to be the UK’s “first faith based pro-wrestling charity,” somewhat raising the question: is there a second?
According to his interview with The Times, the promotion’s founder Gareth “Angel” Thompson — who also does in-ring work — started the outfit as a way of dramatizing deeply human experiences and Christian themes.
“Any Christian will tell you that when you go through life, you wrestle with stuff, you wrestle with your faith. And when you face a really tough challenge, how do you see God in that challenge and how do you continue to remain in the faith? I really feel that wrestling gives us that opportunity to tell those stories.”
It would be easy to sneer and mock at all this, but I’m certainly not going to.
The power of professional wrestling to dramatize operatic narratives and capture popular attention is self explanatory. According to Forbes, WrestleMania is a genuine rival to the Super Bowl in terms of cultural impact and ability to draw a crowd.
And, apart from pushing Christian allegory as plotlines in the matches, the shows open with a prayer and halfway through Thompson gets in the ring to share his experience — a broken family, absentee father, alcoholic mother, surviving childhood sexual abuse and periods of homelessness before finding God and, through his first experience of Christianity, “feeling loved for the first time in [his] life and no knowing what to do with it.”
Now look, is organizing wrestling events and running afterschool clubs for kids the first things I would think of as a means of evangelization? No. And again, I would not want it in a church building, full stop.
But apparently more than 30 people have come to baptism through Kingdom Wrestling, and the big takeaway from this is twofold.
One: this world is spiritually bleeding and people are yearning, but yearning to hear that there is a God who loves them.
And two: there is no line of work any of us are in, no pet passion or hobby we have, that cannot be turned toward telling everyone around us that God loves them.
Except probably golf. Golf is stupid.
See you next week.
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
