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Happy Friday friends,

And hello from somewhere out here on the road.

JD and I spent the bulk of this week in Baltimore, together with our ever more accomplished and reliable freelance colleague Jack Figge.

It was a good week of reporting, with several substantive issues discussed and passed by the bishops at their plenary assembly, and a few surprises among the election results. We will come on to all of that in a minute.

But I just want to start by thanking everyone who came out to our Baltimore live show on Wednesday night — some of them for the second and even third time in a row.

Every year we cram into the same little Fell’s Point bar and at some point someone asks me how and why we picked that place, with the subtext being that the size and shape of the place is wildly unsuited to the thing we go there to do.

The answer is yes, it is small, oddly-shaped, and not at all technically set up for a live podcast, but we keep having a great time there. Some silly superstitious part of me worries that if we moved to a bigger, more suitable venue, the spell might somehow break and we’d end up with a great sound system and an empty room.

And the thing is, the actual live podcast bit of the evening is just an excuse for us to get to spend time with some of the people who actually keep The Pillar in business and helped make it happen in the first place. That’s why we do these things, because this project is the people who care about the Church and believe in the way we are trying to serve her.

We aren’t in the business of pumping out “content” to grab as many clicks as we can. Our work is relational, that’s how we choose to do journalism, and how we are tied to our readers.

When someone tells us in Baltimore that a couple who went on their first date at a live show two years ago are getting married next weekend, that’s genuinely amazing for us to hear. The Pillar is a part of people’s lives — not just the handful of us who work here — and that is something we couldn’t have manufactured if we’d tried.

So thanks to everyone who came out on Wednesday, some from several states away. It meant everything.

And a reminder that we’ll be at Legends of Notre Dame in South Bend tomorrow, Saturday, for another live show — this one at the invitation of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. We’re starting the show at 10pm, but I’ll probably be there early to pregame.

Hope to see you there.

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Here’s the news.

The News

German bishops discussed plans to establish a new national body known as the “synodal conference” with Vatican officials on Wednesday.

A joint statement issued after the Nov. 12 talks described the meeting as “sincere, open, and constructive.” Though how pointed the exchanges were can only be guessed at for the moment.

One should recall that in January, the Vatican informed the German bishops that they had no authority to establish such a body — a key signatory to the letter telling them so was one Cardinal Robert Prevost.

Interestingly, though, as Luke pointed out in his report, the German contingent included Bishop Stefan Oster of Passau, who came as a “guest” — though it is not clear if he was a guest of the Vatican or his brother German bishops.

Oster’s presence in Rome was especially remarkable, since he was one of four German bishops who refused to join a committee drawing up a blueprint for a new synodal body.

And earlier this week, Oster publicly broke with the German bishops’ conference over a document on “the diversity of sexual identities” in schools.

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The Vatican has opened an investigation into alleged sexual abuse of a minor against Bishop Rafael Zornoza of Cádiz, the first probe of its kind against a serving Spanish bishop.

You can read about the allegations here — allegations which the bishop absolutely denies and appears confident he will see disproven.

But an interesting canonical aspect of this case is that, unlike in other countries, this first Vos estis process in Spain isn’t being conducted by the local metropolitan archbishop as the law presumes. Instead it has been handed to the national canonical court, the Spanish rota.

Read all about it here.

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The bulk of our reporting this week was out of Baltimore where the U.S. bishops’ conference met for the Fall Assembly.

Opening the public sessions of the meeting, the USCCB had the unusual experience of communicating its first message to an American pope, and then had the customary addresses for the conference president and apostolic nuncio.

Both those speeches were deeply interesting.

For a start, they were both delivered by outgoing holders of their respective posts — Archbishop Timothy Broglio’s three-year term ended at the close of the conference this week, and Cardinal Christophe Pierre will turn 80 in January and seems certain to be allowed to retire before next the conference meets.

The tone of the parting addresses was also a very interesting study.

After years of calling his brother bishops to more and better unity, Archbishop Broglio shifted tenses and praised the assembly for how united they already are.

I’m not sure there’s any other way of reading this than that Broglio — and the rest of the conference — have understood Pope Leo does not like publicly fractious displays, as happened over the Dick Durbin award affair.

Cardinal Pierre, on the other hand, offered a vision for the future direction of the Church which seemed, at least to me, pointed — especially for the first meeting under a new pope.

“Even if some are inclined to pursue a path that diverges from the pastoral vision of Francis, we know that the way forward is one that does not diverge but advances on the path of Francis is the way of moving forward in the Church,” the cardinal told the bishops.

I’d have expected something on the significance of a new American pope, and the vision and tone of the new Leonine pontificate, rather than an in-terms assertion that the future is Francis.

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Looking at what comes after Baltimore, the USCCB refreshed entirely its leadership across a slate of elections this week.

Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City was elected as the new conference president, making a widely expected jump from secretary and head of the planning committee.

In a much less widely anticipated result, Brownsville’s Bishop Daniel Flores stormed to vice president.

It was surprising not because anyone doubts the bishop’s intellect or ability — he’s served as chair of the doctrinal committee and been the most prominent U.S. bishop in the global synodal process, something he managed to champion articulately even while defusing its more eccentric and contentious pretensions.

But, as I pointed out in an analysis following his election, Flores has always appeared to be something of a man without a tribe in the conference hall, variously looked up on as every liberal’s favorite conservative or the thinking conservative’s preferred liberal.

His election now might mean the bishops have decided that it is possible for one of their number to live outside the often tendentious left-right paradigm, and perhaps aspire for the whole conference to head that direction, even though it would likely need a bit of generational turnover.

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Down ticket, Fort Wayne-South Bend’s Bishop Kevin Rhoades was elected as conference secretary in place of the ascendant Archbishop Coakley, and a slate of committee chairs were also elected.

You can read our round up of the results here, though there was one particular result which devolved into something of a spectacle.

In the vote for chair of the committee on religious liberty, Archbishop Alexander Sample and Bishop Michael Sis tied with 111 votes apiece.

Then, Archbishop Broglio announced there would be a second vote, only to yield to a point of order from the floor, in which Archbishop Cordileone reminded the assembly that when he’d drawn a ballot with Bishop John Doerfler in 2018, he’d been declared the winner on seniority.

This provoked a further intervention from Archbishop John Wester, who asked if it should be seniority of age or episcopal consecration — which caused some more conversation and noises off, since Sis is older than Sample, but Sample has been a bishop for longer than Sis.

Eventually, Sis was declared the winner without a second ballot, only for him to promptly announce from the floor that he didn’t actually want to be committee chairman anyway, and ceded the role to Sample.

For what it’s worth, as I understand it, the election procedures of the USCCB are rooted in the provisions of canon 119 of