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Hey everybody,
This is the week the Church celebrates the miraculous, and you’re reading The Tuesday Pillar Post.
What do I mean?
Well, here it is: We’ve got the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Thursday, and yesterday was St. Juan Diego (kinda — he was actually bumped for the Immaculate Conception, which was itself bumped from the 8th for an Advent Sunday).
Today, the Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Loreto, and the pious legend (there are some interesting facts about Loreto here) that angels transported the Holy Family’s house from Nazareth to mountainous northeastern Italy.
That’s a lot of miraculous stuff.
But amid all the miraculous we recount this week, the Church also commemorates an ordinary man, who lived at a pivotal moment in history.
Pope St. Damasus I, whose memorial is Wednesday.
He was the son of a Spaniard priest. He seems to have grown up in the Roman basilica of St. Lawrence.
Damasus himself was eventually a priest at that basilica, until he was in 366 elected by most of Rome’s clergy to be the Bishop of Rome, the pope.
Except not everyone agreed.
While Damasus had the support of the Roman presbyterate, and a wealthy swath of laity, he didn’t have everybody. The city’s deacons, along with a large group of laity, claimed a deacon named Ursinus as the pope.
There were riots, and violence in the streets — and there is no objective account available of who started what. But Christians were killed in the fighting, including 137 at a basilica riot. And by most accounts, both Damasus and Ursinus sent militias to defend their claims to the papacy.
It was a mess, and a bloody one.
Eventually, city officials stepped in, and Ursinus was exiled to France, along with some of his supporters. But that didn’t end the controversy. Because Damasus had the support of wealthy Catholics, he was accused often of paying off the Roman prefects to get Ursinus out of town.
And as his papacy got underway, even with Ursinus out of the picture, Damasus was accused of murder, of (unspecified) sins against the sixth commandment, and of heresy. It seems the allegations came from Ursinus’ supporters, and from the Arian sect Damasus was aiming to stamp out in the Church.
It took until 378, 12 years into his papacy, that Ursinus was formally declared by Rome’s clergy an anti-pope, and Damasus had a full mandate to lead.
By then, the pope had gone through lawsuits, criminal investigations, and popular uprisings. And Damasus had made a lot of enemies, both within the diocese of Rome and among the Apollinarianist heresy he’d tried to stamp out.
In truth, I wish The Pillar had been around back then. We would not have lacked for things to cover.
But by time the Ursinus controversy was over, Damasus was exhausted. Few would blame him if he’d spent the rest of his papacy drinking wine and licking his wounds.
Instead, Damasus set his sights on just a few things: among them better Roman relationships with Eastern bishops, restoring Roman catacombs, and stamping out several other burgeoning heresies.
The most important of his projects was Scripture.
In 382, at the Council of Rome, Damasus prioritized setting an official and definitive canon of Scripture, the one which perdures today.
But the pope knew that the Latin translations in use at the time were not very good: they were mostly copies of copies of copies.
So Damasus encouraged his intellectually gifted priest-secretary to get away from the court politics surrounding his papacy, and to focus instead on making better translations of Scriptural books, using the best possible Greek and Hebrew sources.
That secretary? St. Jerome. The work he produced? The Vulgate.
Pretty cool, huh?
We have a seeming study in contrasts this week.
The feasts of Juan Diego, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Our Lady of Loreto point us to the transcendent and the sublime, and to the way works through poor, uneducated simple people of faith, like Juan Diego.
But God can work through people stuck in the rough-and-tumble of ecclesiastical politics, too — no matter how bad that stuff can seem as it unfolds.
Grace is operative in the life of the Church in ways we can’t always see in the moment. Just ask the embattled Pope St. Damasus I. Or St. Jerome, his secretary.
The news
And the thing about conclaves is that just anybody who enters could end up being The One — not just an elector, but the elected himself.
Since many of Francis’ new cardinals are fairly unknown figures, we asked Edgar Beltran to do something of a cardinatial speed round at the new consistory. He talked with seven new cardinals, aiming to give you a snapshot, at least, of who they are, and what makes them tick.
So have at it, guys — meet some new cardinals. They’ll influence the Roman curia for years to come, they’ll be significant Church leaders in their home countries, and then — who knows? One of them might just be The One.
But the DC chancery and some archdiocesan priests are at odds over how exactly they’ve gotten into this situation. And over whether a new assessment scheme — one that would tax even restricted gifts and grants to parishes — will set things right.
With Cardinal Wilton Gregory’s retirement looming, there’s trouble over the balance sheet in Washington, and blame seems to be spreading in all directions.
Can new plans, and a new CFO, set things aright? How widespread are the problems? And why are priests speaking out?
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Of course, if you believe the internet commentariat, the pilgrimage in question had been designed, called for, approved, or insisted upon by Pope Francis himself, and was taking place as an official activity, at his specific behest.
That didn’t quite sound right to us, so we did a little bit of digging.
Turns out, the event is organized by an Italian non-profit, as a pilgrimage to the Jubilee doors, soon-to-be-opened at Rome’s major basilicas. The pilgrimage does have the support of the Italian bishops’ conference, and Catholics can rightly debate the prudence or pastoral wisdom of that, if they like.
But it was not an official Jubilee Year event, and there is no evidence that Pope Francis had anything to do with it.
Except, guess what?
After The Pillar published an explainer yesterday, the “LGBT pilgrimage” was seemingly removed from that calendar.
The Pillar has reached out to the relevant offices, and has not yet received a response.
But you can read what’s true, and what’s not, right here.
The persecution of Catholics in Nicaragua has already seen bishops exiled, priests tortured, universities seized, and radio stations destroyed.
Now all foreign sisters — and religious priests — have been told to expect imminent exile from the country.
In recent weeks, the regime has faced criticism for forbidding priests from accessing public hospitals, not allowing them to visit people who have requested pastoral visits or the reception of the sacraments of anointing of the sick or penance.
So that’s really something, huh?
Now, it’s not clear why this particular woman got an extremely light sentence — nowhere close to the 20 years in prison she could have faced. Since her probation order included a mandate for mental health counseling, and since prosecutors didn’t file a sentencing memo, it seems like there might be something unique to the case.
And indeed, the Diocese of Birmingham said it requested she get probation because of undisclosed “personal circumstances.”
In short, there are unknown circumstances about this particular woman and her particular sentence. But it is not uncommon for people — clerical or lay — who steal lots of money from parishes to get very light sentences.
And according to experts, that’s a problem in the big picture — it means that there are few deterrents to prevent people from stealing more from parishes in the future. In short, if most people who steal get light sentences, and dioceses don’t advocate for more, the criminal justice system won’t have much preventative effect.
A university spokesperson told The Pillar that “[l]ike many universities nationwide, Catholic University faces financial pressures that require decisive action.”
What will that decisive action be? Well that’s not clear. Kilpatrick says he has some committees working on it.
One cut will seemingly begin soon: According to a source close to the university, CUA is discontinuing its room-and-board scholarships for student "residence ministers" — a group of student ministers who live in residence halls and minister to the people who live there — and will consequently be ending its residence minister program.
Here’s what’s known — and what’s coming next.
Wisdom! Be attentive!
Until this morning, I didn’t know anything about the albatross except that one can be tied around the neck as a sigh of shame or guilt — a metaphor that emerged in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and since become popularly ubiquitous.
Actually, that’s not true. Until this morning, I knew that “albatross around the neck” was a metaphor for something, but I had no idea where it came from, or how exactly to use it. I pretended I knew about the poem just now so you all would think of me as literary and cultured. I’m not.
When I started looking into the saying about the albatross and the neck, I had two theories.
The first was that “albatross around the neck” was a scriptural metaphor, and that I’d end my research feeling all the more inadequate about my knowledge of the sacred text. I’m glad that’s not so.
The second theory was that “albatross around the neck” had something to do with the legendary rural practice of teaching a farm dog not to kill chickens by tying ‘round its neck one it has already killed, leaving the dog to grow sick from the decaying bird affixed to its collar.
That theory turned out to be more or less correct. In Coleridge’s poem, a mariner curses his ship by shooting an albatross, which is regarded at sea as a good-luck-bird.
To shame him, the crew tied the bird around his neck, as a kind of scarlet-letter-of-the-sea, so that all would know he caused his shipmates distress.
I looked into all this today because of an albatross I’m rooting for — the first such creature to attract my attention, obviously.
The albatross, if you don’t know, is a big smelly seabird that looks like a gull crossed with a duck.
The albatross can catch wind currents to fly great distances, and it hunts squid and fish by diving into freezing ocean waters.
Albatrosses generally live about 30 years in the wild, and only if they’re lucky. To get that old, an albatross has to fend off attacks from cats and rats, and avoid being caught by longline baithooks, dangling in the ocean, and cloaked by the albatross’ favorite treats.
They also have to avoid the arrows of mariners, I guess — at least that one dumb mariner in Coleridge’s poem. (see how literary I am?!)
But if it’s an accomplishment for an albatross to live 30 years, imagine the bird who doubles that, and then some.
Readers, meet Wisdom.
Wisdom is a 74-year-old Laysan albatross, who was first tagged by researchers on Midway Island in 1956.
When she was tagged, she was already five years old. She has since been tracked flying more than 3 million miles, circumnavigating the earth a bunch of times.
Her tag has been replaced six times.
She has outlived three breeding partners (I prefer the term husbands).
She has had almost 40 chicks.
And guess what?
At 74 years old, Wisdom laid a fertile egg last month. She is incubating the egg. She is expecting a chick.
Wisdom is the oldest known wild bird in the world. She’s queen of the skies. And she’s done it again. Life finds a way.
Scientists expect the chick will hatch soon. That’s the good news we all need.
I don’t know how you feel about praying for a bird and its chick, but I’d sure like this one to make it. And you can bet we’ll keep you posted on this story.
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Please be assured of our prayers, and please pray for us. We need it.
Consider coming to Rome with us.
And have a great week.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
JD Flynn
editor-in-chief
The Pillar
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