Happy Friday, friends,
And merry Christmas, for it very much still is. And happy New Year to you, if your tastes run that way.
I cannot confess that New Year’s Eve is something I much go in for. The last time I tried to properly “go out” for the occasion was at the turn of the millennium, when I missioned it into central London and was so overcome with fear and loathing for the crowds that I was back home before 11 p.m.
Growing up, I’d always imagined that adulthood came prepackaged with invites to intimate black-tie rooftop parties to celebrate the calendar rolling over, but alas that appears to have been a fiction sold to me by films.
What I do love, though, is the feast of Mary, Mother of God. This year, I was lucky to get a catechetically very rich homily at Mass, laying out wonderfully the majesty and mystery of Our Lady’s almost oxymoronic status as mother of her own creator.
In doing so, the priest referenced the modern song “Mary, did you know?” of which I had never heard until about three weeks ago, when my kid discovered the film “The Star,” which follows the opening of the Gospel of Luke, more or less, through the experiences of an animated donkey. It also features the song, and the soundtrack has been on a more or less constant loop around me for what seems like a year now.
It's a nice little film in its way. And it has charged the child with enthusiasm to discuss the cribs in our house and the local parish, leading to her uttering a few pious exclamations of “Mary and Joseph I love you,” which reflect well on me standing nearby.
Though she also keeps shouting “Who wants a belly rub?” which raises eyebrows.
Anyway, as I say: it’s a nice little film. But I have to admit to a certain squeamishness whenever I see Herself appear as a major speaking character in a film — more so, even, than with Christ.
I suppose the reason is, we really don’t know much about what Mary “knew,” though we know and venerate her for what she did, and seek her aid as Queen of Heaven. Unlike with Christ, there’s barely a handful of dialogue attributed to Mary in the Gospels, and she’s much more often to be found treasuring and pondering things in her heart than holding forth on what she knows or thinks.
I guess I find great comfort in the mostly silent mystery of what Mary knew or thought about it all. What we know of her is that she loved, and served, and said “yes” to God, and stands ready to love us too. And in that, I think many Catholics — certainly myself included — have cultivated our own relationship with Our Mother. So, from that standpoint, I find it… icky, for want of a better word, to see her imparted with a fictionalized personality, however benevolent, and assumed anxieties or confidences in the face of her mission. Much in the way I would recoil a little from seeing someone’s fictionalized take on my biological mother appear in a film.
I’m not saying it’s bad or wrong. It’s just my instinctive reaction.
Anyway, here’s some news.
The News
A special disciplinary tribunal will consider the cases of four Syro-Malabar priests accused of defying the Church’s superiors in the ongoing liturgical dispute.
The cases were brought by the apostolic administrator Bishop Bosco Puthur amid a push to impose a new version of the Syro-Malabar Church’s Eucharistic liturgy on the archeparchy in the southern state of Kerala.
The four priests were relieved of their duties, ordered to leave their parishes, and banned from publicly celebrating the Eucharist and hearing confessions. The priests have, thus far, stayed put and seem to be refusing to comply.
We’ve been following the Syro-Malabar liturgical dispute for years now, and it has been a long road leading to this point. But the prospect of serious canonical action being taken against a handful of priests could prove the point of no return in the crisis — either the priests will back down and accept the Church’s liturgical rulings, or they could break away entirely.
If it is the latter, there is no telling how many local faithful could follow them out in the Syro-Malabar Church’s home archeparchy.
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The received wisdom in Washington, D.C., is that Cardinal Wilton Gregory’s retirement is imminent, with most of the presbyterate and chancery staff expecting an announcement in the coming weeks.
On April 4, 2019, when he was announced as Cardinal Wuerl’s replacement, he stood in front of the assembled press and said “I believe that the only way I can serve this local archdiocese is by telling you the truth…I will always tell you the truth.”
As JD says, on many of the same issues he was asked about that day, that is a promise there is still time for him to keep — just.
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In case you missed it, shortly before Christmas, a Wisconsin judge ruled that a sexual assault case against Theodore McCarrick will remain suspended for the remainder of McCarrick’s life, but the charges against the former cardinal cannot legally be dropped or the case dismissed.
At a hearing last month, which McCarrick did not attend, Judge David Reddy said that state laws on trial competency prohibit him from formally dismissing charges against a defendant found incompetent to stand trial.
“However, the court will not set any further reviews on this matter and it will remain in suspended status until the defendant passes away,” he ruled.
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The Jubilee Year is now underway, after Pope Francis opened the first of the holy doors in St. Peter’s Basilica over Christmas.
Ahead of the Jubilee, the Nordic Bishops’ Conference released a pastoral letter, discussing the relationship between the “logic of the Jubilee” and human dignity.
One of the principal authors of that letter, and vice president of the bishops’ conference, is Bishop Raimo Goyarrola of Helsinki, who also happens to be one of the most interesting bishops in Europe.
He spoke to Edgar Beltran about the Jubilee, and the season of Christmas (which we are still in!) and this conversation is very much worth your time.
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In the 21st century, the Chaldean Catholic Church has become a truly global institution, spreading far beyond its homeland of Iraq.
That scattering of its people poses serious challenges for the transmission of the Church’s singular faith and heritage. Keeping that patrimony alive is a responsibility Fr. Andrew Younan, the first American-born Chaldean Catholic priest, feels very keenly.
It’s why he published “The Book of Before & After,” a groundbreaking English translation of the liturgy of the hours of the Church of the East, a project which took decades to bring to fruition.
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There are some pretty sobering statistics around poverty in the United States right now — homelessness on a single January night went up 18% from 2023 to 2024. Years of high inflation have left many people seriously worried about the basic costs of living.
For Michael Acaldo, the new CEO of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, this is a call to service. He spoke to Laura Loker about the storied society, how it is helping families across the country, and why, now more than ever, they need people to learn about what they do.
As Acaldo put it, “We want to embrace that humility that Christ calls us to, but we also have to evangelize about what we’re doing so people can become a part of our mission… the needs today are much greater than they were just five years ago.”
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Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world, bordering Russia, China and three of the region's other “stans,” but it is not a place that gets much attention from the wider world.
But, as Emily Koczela wrote for us in a dispatch from the predominantly secular post-Soviet nation, the 100,000-strong Catholic population is eager not to be forgotten, and to talk about its history.
To mark the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicea, the Institute of Catholic Culture invites you to join us as we explore the Nicene Creed—Christianity's most profound profession of faith. For nearly two millennia, the Creed has united believers in the saving truths of Jesus Christ. Our journey begins January 14th.
Life-saving law
One of the stories that caught my attention over Christmas, and which I would have given a full analytical treatment had I not sworn firm that I wouldn’t work over the holiday, was a new twist in the case of Tafida Raqeeb, a seven-year-old girl who has spent years on life support following a traumatic brain injury when she was four.
In 2019, Tafida’s doctors in the U.K. went to court to have her treatment withdrawn, deeming her a hopeless case and asking the court to “let her die,” over the strenuous objections of her parents. Similar petitions have been famously lodged by U.K. doctors in recent years, as was the case for Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans, both of whose parents were ordered by the courts to watch their children die.
As was also the case for Charlie and Alfie, the Vatican offered Tafida an airlift to an Italian hospital, where her treatment could continue. But, unlike with Charlie and Alfie, she was allowed to go, with a judge ruling her parents were to be allowed to take their own child to seek life-sustaining medical care elsewhere, and avoiding an effective death sentence in the U.K.
She has been there for some three years, in a Vatican-owned hospital in Genoa, and is apparently breathing on her own — something her U.K. doctors insisted could never happen.
Anyway, at the time it was all a bit of a mystery to me what made her case different — other than the vagueries of judicial discretion — though the judge did cite the “sanctity of life” in his ruling, a consideration notably absent from the Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans cases.
Over Christmas, however, I read that the judge in Tafida’s case apparently weighed a ruling from a U.K. Islamic sharia court in his thinking.
Her parents, who are Muslim, as is Tafida, sought the ruling from the Islamic Council of Europe which advised in a theological ruling that it is “absolutely impermissible for the parents, or anyone else, to give consent for the removal of the life-supporting machine from their child … This is seen as a great sin that has a multitude of grave consequences for them [in] this life and the hereafter.”
As a result, the judge in her case has said that his ruling “permit[ted] Tafida to remain alive in accordance with the tenets of the religion in which she was being raised and for which she had begun to demonstrate a basic affinity.”
Secularists are up in arms about the case now — and don’t get me wrong, I have as many objections to their approach to jurisprudence as I do to Islamic theology in general.
But it seems to me that the Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland, who were very vocal in championing the cases of Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans, ought to consider gearing up their canonical tribunals (assuming they haven’t already) to make similar authoritative decrees for other cases that might arise.
It seems to me that the precedent has been set for religious courts to weigh in on these matters and, while the usual secularist suspects are as opposed to that as they usually are to child welfare in general, Catholics should have every reasonable expectation of the Church’s legal structures being ready to come to their aid as the U.K. Musilm community seems to have.
Canon law could save lives.
Fake New Year’s news
As I said up top, I really don’t go in for going out on New Year’s Eve, though I get why some people do. I can appreciate the allure of mass gatherings and celebrations, even if I shy away from them myself — and who doesn’t like fireworks?
So spare a thought, if you would, for the thousands of people who gathered in Centenary Square in the English city of Birmingham for a “spectacular midnight show” of live music and aerial pyrotechnics that didn’t just not happen, it never existed at all.
Thousands of people packed the square, including families with kids, to await a promised New Year’s Eve big bash, despite no event ever being planned, announced, or even considered by city authorities. In fact, they came despite several public announcements from city hall and the police advising that no such event was happening.
So why did they go? Apparently because AI told them to.
Several websites and social media feeds carried supposed details of the fictitious event, including round-up articles on “The UK’s Top New Year’s Eve Fireworks Displays to Ring in 2025.”
According to The Times, it seems that the articles were all generated by AI software, which populated websites and Instagram feeds with hundreds of thousands of followers like “@bhamupdates.”
The best guess is that one or more AI algorithms just assumed that since Birmingham is a major city, and because the city used to hold New Year’s Eve firework events (until 2016), and because all these events tend to be pretty boilerplate in their descriptions — “a mix of performances, local food vendors, and a spectacular midnight show” — there would be one, and so it generated a description of what it assumed would happen.
It did not go well. As you would expect. A lot of people were annoyed, to put it mildly, and the city had to manage a huge (and angry) crowd for which it had laid on no preparations.
Now, I have to admit to finding the whole thing pretty funny, from my safe distance. And I have long been a vocal skeptic of AI, so forgive me a little smugness.
But this does go to the serious point that a lot of media sites are using AI to generate copy, and a lot more are tempted to do so. This is apparently the ultimate, farcical example of what you get: literal fake news that leaves thousands out in the cold.
I get how this happens: sites that make their money from clicks and traffic need clickbait listicles to grab eyes quickly and keep the hit count rolling. Ideally, they need that copy to be free to produce, because when a site is free to read, your margins are razor thin and staff is the ultimate luxury item.
That’s where a whole section of the media industry is headed right now. Nobody likes it, but we — all of us, myself included — got used to news being free to read online over the last two decades. But the Google ad revenue bubble that fueled much of that industry has been deflating for a while now, with ruinous consequences for a lot of outlets, both in terms of finances and professional standards.
It’s not good. But it does mean that now, more than ever, you need to know and trust your media. And you can trust me when I say we aren’t ever going to let robots write our copy, or throw a New Year’s party.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
