Shaking hands, Vigano II, and spy time
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Happy Friday friends,
It’s been a strange experience for me watching the royal Vatican visit this week, being an American-born Catholic whose first legal act as an adult was to swear an oath of fidelity to the British sovereign.
The whole meeting was a mass of obvious contradictions. The pope conferred on the King the status of “royal confrater” of the basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, not to be confused with the Anglican church in Rome dedicated to the same saint, referred to by English seminarians as “St. Paul Outside the Church.”
Charles’ new reserved seat in St. Paul’s (Outside the Walls) bears his royal coat of arms and the latin subscription ut unum sint, which is either an earnest prayer for Christian unity or subtle troll for the reconversion of the monarchy.
The King reciprocated the gesture, appointing Leo as “papal confrater” of St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle — whatever a “papal confrater” to a royal chapel within a communion established to renounce papal authority might be. It sounds nice, anyway.
And that kind of studied ambiguity sums up the whole trip.
Buckingham Palace has been clear to emphasize that this is an ecumenical trip, with Charles appearing in persona as the supreme governor of the Church of England — even going so far as to lift the standing press ban on photographing the monarch at prayer. The Holy See, meanwhile, has recognized its guest as King of the UK and made no mention of any Anglicanistic officialdom.
It’s a messy business, not least because of the whole schism thing.
There is also the small matter of the presence of the Queen, a divorcee, whose civil marriage to the King was of disputed civil and ecclesiastical validity among Britain’s legal scholars at the time it was contracted.
Though, on the whole, I’m not sure if a prayer service with a divorced-and-civilly-remarried royal couple isn’t altogether easier for the Vatican to stage manage compared to an incoming Archbishopress of Canterbury.
It’s complicated. So is the King, come to that. While he presents a pretty secular and secularist figure most of the time, he also has a real, if somewhat nebulous attachment to Orthodox Christian spirituality via his father’s mother, and is a serial pilgrim to the monastery of Mount Athos.
The thing with meetings like Charles’ encounter with Pope Leo is that, on one level, it makes no theological, ecumenical, or ecclesiastical sense. The two men’s respective offices and their histories are a mass of mutually exclusive contradictions. They oughtn’t really to be in the same room.
But, sometimes, especially when you are dealing with intractable institutional obstacles, the most constructive thing you can do is just ignore them, smile, shake hands, and pray together. You never know what might happen.
I mean, the UK foreign secretary did one of the readings at the Sistine Chapel prayer service. I’m not saying she prayed, but they got Yvette Cooper to read a Bible — that’s no easy trick, let me tell you, even if she did look like she was clenching a hornet between her buttocks throughout.
Maybe nothing comes of yesterday but some nice images — and Yvette’s reading to one side, the images are lovely.
But maybe, just maybe, a seed of something is planted in a king’s heart. Maybe something moves, just a little, enough to be noticed by, say, a pronouncedly less spiritual son, and plants the seeds of more questions.
When the sower goes out to sow, the Gospel parable reminds us, his job is to scatter far and wide. What it yields will tell in God’s time.
Here’s the news.
The News
Sticking with England and the Anglicans for a moment:
Earlier this month, a body known as GAFCON — the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans — declared it was “now the Global Anglican Communion.”
GAFCON claims to represent “the majority of all Anglicans” — a statement contested by liberal Anglicans — and was originally launched in 2008 in effective protest of the installation of the first openly gay bishop in the communion, in an Episcopalian diocese in the U.S., while insisting it was not breaking communion with anyone.
Its current re-iteration of itself and new name follow the announcement of Sarah Mullally, a lady, to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England, the origin point for global Anglicanism.
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Meanwhile, in the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Pope Leo this week named Bishop Nicholas Hudson to the Diocese of Plymouth, finally filling a vacancy which has seen two different candidates announced, only to withdraw under controversial circumstances before they could take office.
Hudson has, until now, been serving as auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Westminster, the country’s cardinalatial see, and was widely considered to be among the front runners to succeed the current archbishop Cardinal Vincinet Nichols, who turns 80 in the coming weeks.
Hudson’s move to Plymouth would appear to take him out of the running for Westminster, and, interestingly, also out of the running for the Archdioceses of Southwark and Birmingham, whose own leaders have also been tipped for possible moves in near future. It’s a surprisingly sudden shortening of the horizon for a bishop until recently tipped for big things.
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The Archdiocese of Caracas announced the suspension of a massive thanksgiving Mass for the canonizations of Saint José Gregorio Hernández and Saint Carmen Rendiles, the first Venezuelan saints.
An official statement from the archdiocese said the cancellation was due to lack of space and security reasons. But sources close to the situation told The Pillar that the Mass was cancelled because the Venezuelan regime had attempted to turn the Mass into a rally for President Nicolás Maduro, by filling the stadium with government supporters.
This is kind of a big deal. Read some real reporting on it right here.
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The Italian bishops’ conference say they are helping to build a hospital in Gaza as a “concrete help” to their public rhetoric about human rights in the Holy Land.
Amid Gaza’s ongoing humanitarian crisis, the Italian bishops’ conference and the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem announced on Sep. 30 a joint initiative to build a hospital in the Gaza territory, where more than 80% of medical facilities have been damaged or destroyed.
Vincenzo Corrado, for the Italian bishops’ conference, told The Pillar that the need for stable healthcare in Gaza was acute.
While the project is still in very early stages and the inauguration date is unclear, Corrado told us that the bishops are working with the patriarchate in the design and implementation phases of the project.
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In a wide-ranging interview with The Pillar, the prefect of the Dicastery for Inter-religious Dialogue, Cardinal George Koovakad, spoke about the importance of Nos
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