Weekly Summary: 1/10/2026
The week in review, from the perspective of a veteran Catholic journalist
This was my first full week (in more than 30 years!) without the responsibility for day-to-day news coverage, and as you may have noticed, I had time for quite a bit of my own writing:
• Just for fun, I started off the week by recalling two different times when a stale old clerical joke prompted hilarious laughter.
• Then, with the consistory of cardinals looming, I called attention to a report by Diane Montagna, about a proposal to create a canonical structure for traditional Catholics— a proposal that, as I explained, wouldn’t solve the problem.
• The Vatican released attendance statistics for the papal audiences of 2025 (having not made public the declining numbers in the last years of Pope Francis), and the figures showed a distinct rise. How to explain the trend: My hypothesis: “The world— especially, but exclusively, the Catholic world— has a strong sense that important changes are coming at the Vatican.”
• President Trump’s stunning capture of the Venezuelan strongman Maduro prompted some Catholics to look at the raid from the perspective of just-war thinking. Interested though I am in the just-war tradition, I concluded that they were asking the wrong question, because what happened in Venezuela was not a war.
• I saw good news and bad news in the Pope’s Wednesday audience, when he announced a series of weekly talks on the teachings of Vatican II. The bad news: he referred to the Council as the “guiding star” for the Church— not acknowledging that it’s just one of many councils, to be understood in the context of the others. The good news: he promised to focus carefully on the actual documents issued by the Council, rather than the spurious “spirit of Vatican II.”
• In my own preview of the consistory, I explained why it would be difficult for the cardinals to talk about the Eucharistic liturgy without discussing the suppression of the Traditional Latin Mass.
• But to my surprise and disappointment, the cardinals chose not to focus on the liturgy— or on any of the other topics that ordinarily trouble the faithful— and to concentrate instead on “synodality.” I couldn’t help asking:
When you meet with your fellow parishioners after Sunday Mass, do you find that the conversation turns to synodality? Neither do I. It’s not a topic that ordinary, faithful Catholics discuss. Yet it has become the favorite— even obsessive— topic for conversations among church officials.
• Appearing on EWTN after the consistory, Cardinal Gerhard Müller said that the cardinals had decided not to talk about the liturgy because it is “not the central question” for the Church today. I protested that the liturgy is always “the central question,” and to be fair, in context Cardinal Müller was saying the same thing. But he thought it was important, at the moment, for the cardinals to speak about “secularization, atheism, anti-Christian political systems, woke ideology, and wrong anthropology.” Well, OK, but the cardinals did not talk about those issues. Instead they stuck to— wait for it— synodality.
• Later I pointed to an outstanding commentary on the consistory by Delia Gallagher, who observed that at Vatican II, the Council fathers had decided to tackle the question of the liturgy first, because (as a young peritus named Ratzinger would recall) they saw the liturgy as “the proper point of departure for all renewal.”
• In the Diocese of Charlotte, the blizzard of liturgical restrictions issued by Bishop Martin has provoked a reaction: roughly one-third of the pastors in that diocese joined in asking the Vatican to “clarify” whether a diocesan bishop has the authority to prohibit what the universal Church allows. This should be an important test case in canon law, testing the limits of a bishop’s arbitrary exercise of his power.
• My series of posts on just-war teaching continues. This week, in the second of three essays on nuclear weapons, I explain why the Church categorically condemns the targeting of civilians, and for that reason the use of nukes— at least in the way we ordinarily think of them— is never morally justifiable.
• This week on the Home Front podcast, Leila and I discussed:
- why the consistory of cardinals was disappointing;
- an American bishop who has overstepped his authority;
- the just-war perspective on Venezuela;
- and more!
• And finally, to wrap up the week’s work, I pointed to a statement by Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and asked whether American politicians would dare to say the same thing.
