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Happy Friday friends,

We’ve got our first apostolic exhortation of the Leonine pontificate on top of the usual full news week. So there’s plenty to get through.

But before we do, I have a few thoughts on the prospect of a hope for some kind of peace in the Holy Land.

I qualify it thusly, as the prospect of a hope, because I don’t think anyone engaged seriously with the issue can entertain any illusions of certainty, or even probability, that this time will somehow be different.

I come at the issue through the particular window of having lived in Israel for a brief time. I’ve got a private, personal concern for the Christians of Palestine. They are not, to me, a fraternal abstraction, and I have winced daily in horror at their suffering these last two years.

I also know many Jews — friends, in some cases as near as family. And I have seen too clearly the tide of ancient evil rising around them, not through a screen, out there somewhere, but on streets I’ve walked, across squares I’ve sat in.

I know, in the kind of forensic detail that disorients the soul, exactly what happened, what was done, to families in Israel on October 7 two years ago.

What I do not know is how to live — or how to expect anyone else to live — in the shadow of a hatred that has come through your door for your mother, for your sister, for your children, and stands ready to again.

In a true and bitter and ironic failing of my own Christianity, I do not know how to preach the way of Christ, to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, in his own land. I wish I did. Perhaps no one else does either, and perhaps that is why the hatred continues.

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” is a cry older than the Psalms, and I do. But I know it is to pray for a miracle.

Here’s the news.

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The News

Pope Leo XIV issued his first apostolic exhortation on Thursday: Dilexi te, an appeal for renewed dedication to serving the poor and relieving poverty.

The approximately 20,000-word text Dilexi te (“I have loved you”), issued Oct. 9, follows Pope Francis’ similarly titled October 2024 encyclical Dilexit nos (“He loved us”).

The exhortation is divided into 121 numbered paragraphs and five chapters, though it is considerably shorter than Pope Francis’ exhortation Evangelii gaudium, which was more than twice the length. The average person should be able to read Dilexi te in around one and a half hours.

Of course, the average Pillar reader is a very busy person, we know. So Luke Coppen has put together his brief guide for busy readers — bringing you everything you need to know about the new papal document.

You can read that right here. See how we love you?

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As the first major text of the Leonine pontificate, people are obviously very interested in the exhortation and what it tells us about the mind of Pope Leo XIV.

But rather than tell you what we think, our own Edgar Beltran went and asked cardinals and bishops from across the world and the ecclesiastical spectrum for their initial reactions to the first Leonine letter.

So, you can read what people like Cardinals Anders Arbolerius, Victor Fernandez, Michael Czerny, Jaime Spengler and Bishop Erik Varden think right here.

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The Diocese of Lincoln has said that a relic of St. Gemma which appeared to be moving on its own is “not supernatural.”

After investigating this week a reliquary that appeared to move on its own — video of which went viral — the diocese determined that the phenomenon had a rather more mundane cause.

You can read the whole story here.

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Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández has denied that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith approved recent guidelines for blessings of same-sex couples issued by the German bishops’ conference.

The conference president Bishop Georg Bätzing has claimed the controversial text, issued during the papal interregnum, had been created “transparently in consultation with this dicastery.”

But, speaking to The Pillar this week, Cardinal Fernández said that “the DDF didn’t approve anything [of the irregular unions’ guidelines], and wrote a letter some time ago reminding [the German bishops] that [Fiducia supplicans] excluded any form of ritualization, just as the pope has said.”

The upshot seems to be that the German bishops’ leadership — not for the first time — told Rome what it was about to do, were told not to do it in response, did it anyway, and then claimed they “consulted” with the Holy See.

You can read the whole story here.

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The businessman who sold the Vatican the famous London building filed another lawsuit against the Vatican’s Secretariat of State this week.

Raffaele Mincione filed a claim for fraud in the Commercial Court in London. The exact terms of the case have yet to be made public, but given other similar fillings Mincione has made in other jurisdictions, we have a pretty good idea what is going on.

Mincione was convicted in Vatican City of embezzlement in 2023, handed a five year prison sentence, and made liable for millions in a group asset forfeiture over the Secretariat of State’s disastrous investment with and separation from Mincione in 2018.

That verdict struck many, including me, as the weakest of the nine criminal convictions handed down in the case (which is currently on appeal).

As simply put as possible, the Vatican judges ruled that Cardinal Angelo Becciu misappropriated reserved Vatican funds to bankroll the secretariat’s investment with Mincione and that Mincione — despite numerous signed authorizations for the deal from senior curial figures like Cardinal Pietro Parolin — should have known what Becciu was doing was illegal, and he’s therefore guilty, too.

Mincione, in turn, has been suing the Secretariat of State and the Swiss banks who introduced him to the Vatican for fraud, saying, in turn, that they didn’t disclose the true source of the funds they were investing with him, which might have allowed him to know the deal was illegal.

Now, I would argue that there is a lot, but a lot, of what Mincione did with the Vatican’s money once he got it which cries out for careful scrutiny — especially his dealings with Gianluigi Torzi, with whom he invested millions of the Vatican’s money in a bogus debt product, at the exact moment he himself owed Torzi millions over a failed bank takeover bid.

Mincione’s own version of the story, which he told us in full, seems to me to raise as many questions as it purports to answer.

But that is a separate issue from what the Vatican City court convicted him of in 2023. And, once again, it is Mincione, not the Vatican, who has filed suit in the UK, meaning he sets the terms of the case, and the Secretariat of State has to defend itself on the grounds of his choosing. And those terms and those grounds do not strike me as very favorable to the secretariat.

There’s an argument to be made that the secretariat’s hands have been tied in all this by the decisions of the Vatican City Promoter of Justice, Alessandro Diddi, who has made some controversial (I would argue seriously misguided) choices in how he has prosecuted the case in Rome.

But unless and until the secretariat decides to start making their own case on the grounds of its own choosing, it is going to be left trying to defend Diddi’s arguments in a UK court. And I am not sure I fancy their chances.

You can read the whole story here.

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As the world waits to see what the new proposed peace deal in the Middle East will bring, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa told the AP this week that the Catholic Church is seeking “a new direction” in Catholic-Jewish relations.

Speaking on the eve of the second anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem suggested that a new impulse was needed, not only concerning the Jewish people but also the Israeli state.

“As Catholics, we need also to understand that for the Jewish people, the state of Israel is not just one state among the others. It’s an important reference point,” he said.

Why does Pizzaballa believe there is a need for change in Catholic-Jewish ties and how does he envisage it? Luke Coppen breaks down the history, and what could come next, right here.

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