Catholic church

The Cathedral Church of the Holy and Undivided Trinity in the Cambridge-shire market town of Ely is one of the supreme achievements of European Gothic architecture. Its octagonal tower lifts the eye to a sumptuously restored wooden lantern from which Christ looks down in majesty. Who on Earth thinks faith can be awakened by seeing a crucifix floating in urine? On the last Friday in June, his gaze fell on a congregation worshipping him at Evensong. Two hours later, as the Times reported, the cathedral was filled with ‘a very different crowd: 800 people [wearing headphones] attending a 1990s-themed silent disco. They wore diamanté strappy heels and leather trousers, carried glow sticks, drank chardonnay, yelled the words to Robbie Williams hits and twerked in the nave to Beyoncé.

It’s been a pattern under Joe Biden’s time in executive office. As much as he has prefaced his political career in the media on his deeply held faith as a Catholic, time and again it is his administrations, as vice president and now as president, that have targeted American Catholic organizations with burdensome and often ridiculous regulatory challenges. The Little Sisters of the Poor met the ire of the Obama administration. Now Biden's Department of Health and Human Services is demanding that the largest hospital system in Oklahoma, Saint Francis Health System, literally snuff out the flame of their belief to keep their doors open. St. Francis, a nonprofit hospital system which opened in 1960 and now serves 400,000 Oklahomans every year, has chapels, you see.

From Stalin’s Russia to Castro’s Cuba, socialism and religious persecution have nearly always gone hand in hand. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, a seventy-seven-year-old former Sandinista terrorist turned twenty-first-century dictator, is no exception to that rule.  The Havana Times reported last week that at least twenty Nicaraguans were kidnapped by Ortega’s dictatorship during the first ten days of April, most during Holy Week, a period in which the regime prohibited processions and religious celebrations in the streets. “In 2023, the policy of terror imposed by the Ortega government has mostly focused on the Catholic Church, and proof of this is that most of those imprisoned have some relation with the religious institution,” the report notes.

As 2022 slipped away, so did Benedict XVI, quietly and without enormous impact on world affairs. Popes generally die in action, their hands still gripping the helm of Saint Peter’s barque, giving up the job only with their last breath. But Benedict had long ago passed the wheel over to Francis and settled in a sheltered spot away from the wind and the waves. No major change will follow his death. The man in charge is, and has been, Pope Francis. With the death of Benedict, Catholics can simply expect more of the same. The great tragedy of Benedict XVI concluded years ago, on that fateful February day in 2013 when he announced his abdication. The shock of his loss was felt with heightened poignancy, since it was of his own choosing.

There is a lot to dig into amid Pope Francis’s recent interview with America magazine, but the most interesting tidbits might be his commentary on foreign affairs. Whereas the traditional head of state represents the interests of a nation, the Holy Father’s most important duty is the shepherding of the Catholic faithful. His message thus carries much weight, not because of the raw power at his disposal, but because it is backed by the moral authority of the Catholic Church. The pope has been in some hot water recently over both the war in Ukraine and the Vatican’s relations with China. Though he has long condemned the violence in Ukraine, he has not been as clear in condemning Russia and Putin specifically.

Usually, Cockburn is somewhere on the pessimistic side, talking about how so-and-so isn’t good, how who-knows-what is corrupting society. But today he's feeling nice for once. Mark Wahlberg, in a recent Instagram video, congratulated his son Michael for getting confirmed and praised other young people who want to serve God by way of the Catholic Church’s teachings. And it's got Cockburn feeling light. “Congratulations to my son Michael on making his confirmation,” Wahlberg said. “All the young people out there who are confirmed and taking their relationship with the Lord into their adulthood, what a commitment you guys have made.

San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone’s recent announcement that Nancy Pelosi has been barred from receiving communion brought fresh to Cockburn’s mind a memory he has of once having accidentally attended church with the Speaker of the House (and lived to tell about it). Sometimes alcohol can stir in one a devotional feeling, and so it was that Cockburn found himself at Mass one day at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown, seated a few rows behind Pelosi. When the time came, Cockburn refrained from receiving communion, but wondered as he watched Pelosi head toward the altar whether anyone should tackle her to the ground to prevent the sacrilege.

On February 25, the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, Pope Francis met with Aleksandr Avdeyev, Russia’s ambassador to the Holy See. Yet rather than summoning Mr. Avdeyev to the Vatican, Francis called at the Russian embassy, just two blocks from the Castel Sant’Angelo. The visit was a violation of diplomatic protocol. Heads of state don’t just pop ‘round to the local embassy. Over the next couple of days, it became clear that Francis wouldn’t be paying the same honor to Ukraine’s ambassador. Even more strikingly, Francis refused to condemn Russia for the attack. Vatican-watchers fumed. On February 28, the Vatican’s secretary of state released a video condemning the conflict “unleashed by Russia against Ukraine.

As the pro-life movement in the United States looks with optimism to the very possible overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court later this year, the tide seems to be flowing in a different direction down south. First came Argentina, where the Senate passed a highly contested bill in early 2021 legalizing abortion in the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy. The vote was preceded by months of protests, debate, and even a series of personal pleas from the world’s most famous Argentinean, Pope Francis. In September, Mexico’s Supreme Court struck down abortion bans in two states, effectively paving the way for decriminalization nationwide. Most recently, Colombia effectively legalized abortion in the first twenty-four weeks of pregnancy.

I am going to have to boil this down as crudely as I can, because it's a complex subject with a simple message, but the Pope is attempting to make it as hard as possible to say, and thus attend, the Old Rite Mass. This is the form of Mass most Catholics went to before the 1970s. It was replaced with a New Rite and the Old was driven more-or-less underground. In 2007 Pope Benedict XVI decided that priests who wanted to say the Old should be allowed to. Francis has rescinded that: now you must get the bishop's permission and things will be weighed heavily in favour of the bishop saying no. Why does this matter for Catholics and non-Catholics alike?

I’m used to waiting for the Catholic church to make sense. I’m a convert to Catholicism, and Catholic ideas sometimes take a while to become clear. I start from a position of suspicious distaste, but if I sit tight, I’ve found, the strangest things come right. It’s in this spirit of patient confusion that, since the beginning of the year, I’ve been waiting for the Catholic bishops of England and Wales to speak out in defence of the word ‘mother’, and to state the simple, unremarkable fact that only biological women give birth. Out of America, out of universities, from the HR department of every big business has come this push against ‘gendered language’.