Weekly Summary 7/11/26
The week in review, from the perspective of a veteran Catholic journalist
As you’ll see, I post a lot of Notes in the course of a week. If you don’t have time to read everything I post, I understand.
If you can wait until the weekend, sign up for this Weekly Summary, take a look at what I’ve written, and settle down with your favorite items.
Also, at least for now, each Saturday afternoon I take down the paywall on Articles that I wrote during the week. So if you can wait— but I hope you can’t— you’ll find everything in this Weekly Summary. That temporary-payroll policy is an experiment; I can’t guarantee that it will last.
This week, for instance:
Articles
Now that the schism has been declared, how can both the SSPX and the Vatican move to repair the damage? I offered some practical suggestions, following the advice of Pope Benedict XVI: “to make every effort to enable for all those who truly desire unity to remain in that unity or to attain it anew.” The first, indispensable step: overturn Traditionis Custodes.
Disputes over the interpretation of canon law can be tiresome— especially when, as in the case of the SSPX excommunications, we all know what the Vatican intends. Still, as the serious questions persisted, I had to ask: Why this remarkably sloppy handling of such a sensitive case?
Leila and I resumed our Home Front podcasts this week after a quick vacation break. Technical problems with the recording delayed the release of this week’s edition, but it’s here now. Leila discovers, in a sermon by the great St. John Henry Newman, an argument about the ordo amoris that applies to the American immigration debate. Then I sympathize with the influential prelates who have decided that Traditionis Custodes must be overturned.
Notes
At yet another meeting on implementing the Synod on Synodality, North American bishops concluded “clearer explanations” of synodality would overcome popular resistance. Please: spare us from more “explanations” of a term nobody understands.
The Supreme Court decision upholding “birthright citizenship” should prompt a discussion of a serious problem that the authors of the Constitution didn’t envision.
HHS Secretary RFK Jr. has ended the emergency authorization of Covid medications, emphasizing that “emergency authorities are temporary and targeted.” Temporary in this case meant several years; targeted meant forced on the whole population.
If God is pure act, and Jesus is the Word of God: a beautiful meditation on God’s “performative speech.”
Both the Vatican and the SSPX handled their conflict poorly; Kevin Tierney suggested several ways each could have done to avert disaster.
Oh, look: another explanation of “synodality”— in which Cardinal Cupich tell us that it’s like learning to dance. So now you know.
For fifteen years and counting, the Little Sisters of the Poor have been forced to fight legal battles, distracting them from their work to care for the poor. The people who keep hounding them profess to… care for the poor.
As the newspaper industry falters, I worry that American society will suffer a great loss: what will we use for starting fires, wrapping fish, etc?
One last perspective on the Vatican-SSPX dispute, based on a prophetic vision of St. Hildegard of Bingen: Don’t try to separate the indefectible faith from the human institution; there’s only one Church.
As the years roll past, I find that I’m more apt to notice my own failings, and the virtues of other people. I think that’s a good thing.
And at times I’ve stumbled across evidence of what looks like heroic virtue in people who’ve kept it hidden. You’ve heard of secret sins? There are secret saints, too.
