Catholic

The Polish bishops’ statement did not expressly criticize the Vatican declaration on blessing same-sex couples but appeared to conflict with the guidance contained within it.

theleaven.org

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — All forms of artificial intelligence should be used to alleviate human suffering, promote integral development and help end wars and conflicts, not increase inequality and injustice in the world, Pope Francis said in his message for World Peace Day 2024. “Artificial intelligence ought to serve our best human potential and our highest aspirations, not compete with them,” the pope said in his message for the Jan. 1 commemoration. The message, “Artificial Intelligence and Peace,” was addressed to all men and women in the world, and in particular to heads of state and government and the leaders of the different religions and civil society. It was released Dec. 14 at a Vatican news conference. The pope’s message highlighted the “need to strengthen or, if necessary, to establish bodies charged with examining the ethical issues arising in this field and protecting the rights of those who employ forms of artificial intelligence or are affected by them.” The impact of any form of artificial intelligence “depends not only on its technical design, but also on the aims and interests of its owners and developers, and on the situations in which it will be employed,” he said. Positive outcomes “will only be achieved if we show ourselves capable of acting responsibly and respect such fundamental human values as ‘inclusion, transparency, security, equity, privacy and reliability,'” the pope added. The huge advances in new information technologies, he said, “offer exciting opportunities and grave risks, with serious implications for the pursuit of justice and harmony among peoples.” Many urgent questions need to be asked, he added, including, “What will be the consequences, in the medium and long term, of these new digital technologies? And what impact will they have on individual lives and on societies, on international stability and peace?” Pope Francis said, “We need to be aware of the rapid transformations now taking place and to manage them in ways that safeguard fundamental human rights and respect the institutions and laws that promote integral human development.” Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, told reporters at the Vatican Dec. 14 that “like any other product of human ingenuity, artificial intelligence is acceptable if it serves the common the good, protects the inalienable value of the human person and promotes fundamental rights.” “Artificial intelligences already exert huge influence and will increasingly do so,” the cardinal said, “but we do not know where AI will take us in politics and commerce, culture and the environment and so on, so everyone needs to be better informed about developments as they occur, to speak up and take responsibility.” In his message, the pope pinpointed specific technologies and advancements in the world of artificial intelligence that require urgent attention and oversight such as: machine or deep learning; surveillance systems; social credit or ranking systems; and lethal autonomous weapons systems or LAWs. The weaponization of artificial intelligence through LAWs, he said, “is a cause for grave ethical concern. Autonomous weapon systems can never be morally responsible subjects,” and so “it is imperative to ensure adequate, meaningful and consistent human oversight of weapon systems.” Nations are responsible for regulating AI at home and “international organizations can play a decisive role in reaching multilateral agreements and coordinating their application and enforcement,” Pope Francis said, calling on the global community of nations to work together to adopt “a binding international treaty that regulates the development and use of artificial intelligence in its many forms.” Regulation should aim not only at preventing harmful practices but also at encouraging best practices, he added. Fundamentally, he said, in a world of seemingly limitless technological possibilities, people risk falling prey to a “technocratic system,” which “allies the economy with technology and privileges the criterion of efficiency, tending to ignore anything unrelated to its immediate interests.” “In an obsessive desire to control everything, we risk losing control over ourselves,” he said. “In the quest for an absolute freedom, we risk falling into the spiral of a ‘technological dictatorship.'” “Inspired by a Promethean presumption of self-sufficiency, inequalities could grow out of proportion, knowledge and wealth accumulate in the hands of a few, and grave risks ensue for democratic societies and peaceful coexistence,” he said. Barbara Caputo, a professor of computer engineering and artificial intelligence at the Turin Polytechnical University, told reporters at the Vatican news conference that while AI isn’t new, what is different today is the amount of information collected on individuals and “the concentration of resources” in so few hands. The concentration of data, human talent, economic resources and computer capabilities in the hands of fewer entities means that profit will be their only or overriding motive, she said. “The pope reminds us with his message that artificial intelligence is made by people for people, and it must go back to being for everyone so it can really be an instrument for peace.” She supported the pope’s call in his message for adequate education and methods of training. “We must commit ourselves to ensuring quality technical training in artificial intelligence for all young women and men, all over the world, who wish to put their talents to use in this discipline, with dedication and enthusiasm,” she said. The more “authoritative technical voices” there are from all over the world, she said, the more they can bring “the richness of their experience, history and culture to the technical development of the artificial intelligence to come.” Pope Francis said he hoped his message “will encourage efforts to ensure that progress in developing forms of artificial intelligence will ultimately serve the cause of human fraternity and peace. It is not the responsibility of a few but of the entire human family.”

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At the Vatican the synod is heading into its final phase, which then again is not final, given that it will be reconvened in a year and only afterward will the pope, on his own, decide what conclusions to draw from it, at the tail end of a debate about which little or nothing is known, protected as it is by secrecy. But meanwhile there is also a synod “outside the walls,” of which the book above is a voice, on a topic, chastity, that has almost become a taboo for those in the Church who are calling for a “paradigm shift” in the Catholic doctrine on sexuality, led by that cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich whom Francis has put at the helm of the synod. The author of “Chastity. Reconciliation of the Senses,” released on October 12 by Bloomsbury and soon to be in bookstores in Spanish as well, published by Encuentro, with the title “Castidad. La reconciliación de los sentidos,” is Erik Varden, 49, Norwegian, a Cistercian monk of the strict observance, Trappist, the former abbot in England of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire, and since 2020 the bishop of Trondheim. Varden, who is not at the synod, was among the signatories, together with all the bishops of Scandinavia including Stockholm cardinal Anders Arborelius, of that “Pastoral letter on human sexuality,” released last Lent, which Settimo Cielo published back then in full, due to its extraordinary originality of language and content, capable of speaking to modern man of all the richness of the Christian vision of sexuality in unbroken fidelity to the age-old magisterium of the Church and at the same time in clear opposition to “gender” ideology. There is a kinship of style between that pastoral letter and Varden’s book. But there is also an important difference. “Chastity” does not get mixed up in the disputes, the “dubia,” over the blessing of homosexual couples or communion for the divorced and remarried. On these questions the author states that he does not sway one iota from what the 1992 Catechism of Catholic doctrine teaches, and refers to it as “a great treasure.” But precisely as a bishop, Varden wants to do something else with his book. He wants to “build bridges,” to span the gap that has been created between the thinking of modern secular society and the immense richness of the Christian tradition, let spill today by a widespread amnesia. That is, he writes, he wants to present again to the world the Christian faith in its entirety, without compromise. But at the same time to express it in forms that are understandable even for those to whom it is entirely foreign: “by appealing to universal experience, then trying to read such experience in the light of the revelation.” And “Chastity” is indeed a fascinating journey between the Bible and great music, literature, painting, from the Desert Fathers to Bellini’s “Norma,” from Homer to the “Magic Flute” of Mozart, to a good dozen modern writers and poets more or less distant from the Christian faith. The apostle Matthew on the cover is also part of the game. It is taken from the last judgment as frescoed in 1300 by Pietro Cavallini, a predecessor of Giotto, in the Roman basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. His eyes look to Christ, to the final destiny of glorified man. All to show how “Chastity,” in the most varied states of life, is the reconciliation and fulfillment of desires and passions, which has as its goal precisely that man, “clothed in glory and honor,” who is the Adam come forth from creation to which Christ leads us back. The following is a brief excerpt from the book, which however is to be read in its entirety, unmissable and incomparable as it is with the dull, tedious, “exculturated” chatter of the synod. * IT IS TIME TO EFFECT A “SURSUM CORDA” by Erik Varden (from pages 114-116 of “Chastity. Reconciliation of the Senses”) Holiness, life everlasting, configuration to Christ, the resurrection of the body: these notions do not feature much, now, in people’s thinking about relationships and sexuality. We have become alienated from the mindset that brought about the soaring verticality of the twelfth century’s cathedrals, houses holding the whole of life while elevating it. Was not a proposal recently made to fit a swimming pool on the rebuilt roof of Notre Dame de Paris? It seemed to me apt. It would symbolically have re-established the dome of water that sealed earth off from heaven on the first day of creation, before God’s Image was manifest in it (cf. Genesis 1.7). It would have cancelled, again symbolically, the piercing of the firmament at Jesus’s Baptism, which portended a new way of being human. Whatever fragment of mystery might remain within the church itself would have been performed beneath the splashing of bodies striving to perfect their form. The parable would have been significant. Once the supernatural thrust has gone from Christianity, what remains? Well-meaning sentiment and a set of commandments found to be crushing, the finality of change they were meant to serve having been summarily dismissed. Understandably, a movement will then be afoot to consign these to the archives. For what will be the point of them? Become this-worldly, the Church accommodates the world and makes herself reasonably comfortable within it. Her prescriptions and proscriptions alike will reflect and be shaped by current “mores.” This calls for on-going flexibility, for secular society’s “mores” change quickly, also in the sphere of liberal reflection on sex. Certain views propounded as liberating and prophetic well within living memory – regarding, for example, the sexuality of children – are now rightly seen as abhorrent. Yet new prophets are readily anointed, new theories put forward for experimentation in an area that touches us at our most intimate. It is time to effect a “Sursum corda”, to correct an inward-looking, horizontalizing trend in order to recover the transcendental dimension of embodied intimacy, part and parcel of the universal call to holiness. Of course we should reach out to and engage those estranged by Christian teaching, those who feel ostracized or consider they are being held to an impossible standard. At the same time we cannot forget that this situation is far from new. In the early centuries of our era, there was colossal strain between worldly and Christian moral values, not least concerning chastity. This was so not because Christians were better – most of us, now as then, live mediocre lives – but because they had a different sense of what life is about. Those were the centuries of the subtle christological controversies. Relentlessly, the Church fought to articulate who Jesus Christ is: “God from God” yet “born of the Virgin Mary”; fully human, fully divine. On this basis she went on to make sense of what it means to be a human being and to show how a humane social order might come about. Today, Christology is in eclipse. We still affirm that “God became man.” But we largely deploy an inverted hermeneutic, projecting an image of “God” that issues from our garment-of-skin sense of what man is. The result is caricatural. The divine is reduced to our measure. The fact that many contemporaries reject this counterfeit “God” is in many ways an indication of their good sense.

The goodness of recourse to “dubia” to protect the faith of the simple, highlighted by the previous post, finds immediate confirmation today in this brilliant commentary on the letter of Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller to his confrere Dominik Duka, published October 13 by Settimo Cielo. The author of the commentary is Professor Leonardo Lugaresi, an illustrious scholar of the first Christian centuries and of the Fathers of the Church. In his view, Müller’s letter to Duka also has the merit of pointing out the escape route from Francis’s deliberate, systematic ambiguities on some points of doctrine that he, the pope, insists on declaring unchanged but at the same time treats as if they were in a fluid state. And it is a simple and safe way out. If in fact doctrine is deemed unchanged, and has come to us in a clear form, it is on it that we must rely, should the words and actions of the reigning pope be ambiguous and imprecise. Lugaresi’s turn. * Dear Magister, I believe that the letter with which Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller has made public his evaluation of the response that the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith has given to the “dubia” presented by Cardinal Dominik Duka, on behalf of the bishops of the Czech Republic, regarding the interpretation of “Amoris laetitia,” is a document of great importance. It is so not only for the high quality of its theological content, but also and above all because it contains an indication of method valuable for helping many good Catholics to get out of the difficult condition of aporia in which they currently find themselves, hemmed in as they are between the sincere desire to continue to obey the pope and the deep disquiet, not to say the suffering, that certain aspects of his magisterium elicit for their conscience, due to what appears to them as a clear discontinuity, if not indeed a real and proper contradiction of the previous magisterium of the Church. In a certain sense, Cardinal Müller’s text in fact represents a turning point in the dynamics of that process of formulating questions, “dubia,” with which a small but not on that account insignificant group of cardinals has sought, in the course of the last few years, to remedy what appears to many as a peculiar defect in Pope Francis’s teaching, that is, its ambiguity. Stating that the pope’s teaching is often ambiguous does not mean being hostile toward him or lacking in respect: I would say that it is, more than anything else, the attestation of an evident fact. As you yourself, Magister, recalled in introducing Müller’s letter, there is no counting anymore the cases in which the pope has made statements that are equivocal (in the sense that they lend themselves to opposing interpretations) and/or mutually contradictory in that the one is inconsistent with the others, and every time he has been asked to specify their meaning in an unequivocal way, he has either avoided answering or has done so, often by an indirect route, in a way just as ambiguous and elusive. In this “modus operandi,” the ambiguity therefore seems to be not accidental but essential, because it corresponds to a fluid idea of truth that abhors any form of conceptual definition, considering this as a rigidification that drains the life out of the Christian message. The axiom that “realities are more important than ideas,” to which pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio has appealed a number of times, is in fact used in such a way as to crush the principle of non-contradiction, and the consequent claim that one cannot affirm an idea and at the same time also its contrary. The novelty of Cardinal Müller’s position statement consists, in my opinion, in the fact that for the questions posed by his fellow bishops to the prefect of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith (and therefore ultimately to the pope who appointed him), the response has come from him, Müller, and he has responded as his current successor in that office should have done, that is, in a clear, rationally argued way in keeping with the data of Revelation as sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture have transmitted them to us. But doesn’t this mean usurping a function that does not pertain to him and undermining the pope’s authority? In answering this question one must keep in mind that, in all the magmatic fluidity of the current “new magisterium,” there is however a fixed point, always reaffirmed and never denied by the pope and all his colleagues without exception, and it is that of the asserted full continuity between the teaching of Francis and that of his predecessors, in particular Benedict XVI and John Paul II. “Doctrine does not change,” it has been repeated a thousand times, like a mantra, to doubtful and alarmed Catholics. It is precisely here that Müller’s argument comes in, with the disarming simplicity of a “Columbus’s egg,” showing us a way: if regarding any problem the magisterium of John Paul II and Benedict XVI is clear and unambiguous, and instead that of Francis appears ambiguous and susceptible to being interpreted in a direction opposite to theirs, from the principle of continuity it ensues that when we faithful do not understand (and the pope does not explain himself), we can calmly turn to his predecessors and follow their teaching as if it were his, since he himself guarantees us that there is no discontinuity. In fact, the religious assent of intellect and will can only be given to what we understand correctly: we cannot assent to a statement whose meaning is not clear to us. In essence, Cardinal Müller’s contribution shows us the direction in which to direct our gaze: we Catholics possess a very rich heritage that comes to us from twenty centuries of development of Christian doctrine, and that in recent years has been extensively explored, articulated, and applied to contemporary situations and problems, thanks above all to the work of great popes such as those mentioned above. We can find the answers we need there. Let’s follow that and we won’t go wrong. What today chooses instead to remain ambiguous also remains irrelevant to conscience, precisely by reason of its equivocality in comparison with what was clearly defined in the past. It is, if I may say so, kept in custody by the principle of continuity. Only at such time as the pope should declare, without ambiguity, that one need no longer give assent to the magisterium of his predecessors because it has been abrogated by his own, then indeed such custody would fall. But at that point much else would fall. And we can trust that this will not happen. Leonardo Lugaresi

There is a gaping divide between the issues debated around the thirty-five tables of the synod on synodality according – to its official reports – and what is happening outside the Vatican walls, in real life, “in our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out of dying out a flame no has has fuel.” The words quoted are from Benedict XVI, in the memorable letter that he wrote to the bishops on March 10 2009. “The real problem at this moment of our history,” that pope wrote, “is that that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light comes from God, humanity is its losing bearings, withever evident effects destructive.” From this stems what he he is indicated as “the overriding priority,” for the whole Church and in the first place for the successor Peter: “to make God presents in this world and to show men and women the way to God. Not just any god, but the God who spoke on Sinai; to that God face whose face we recognize in a love presses ‘to the end’ (cf. Jn 13:1) – in Jesus Christ, crucified and resent.” There is not a trace of this “priority” in the synod. And this just as the results have been made public of a survey that registers a real and proper collapse of the Catholic religion in Italy, the nation of Pope Francis is the primate. The survey was organized by the magazine “The Kingdom,” a noble voice of progressive Italian Catholicism, and was presented on October 6 in Camaldoli, at the famous Benedictine monastery, by Paolo Segatti, professor of also political sociology at the University of Milan, and by Arturo Parisi, for many years a professor of the subject at the University of Bologna, a great analyst of Italian Catholicism, later a member of parliament and minister of the minister of 2006 to 2008. A previous, similar survey was out by carried “Il Regno” in 2009. And it is from the comparison between the one and the other that emerges clearly the progressive extinction of the faith in Italy. Asked to say to what religion they belong, those declared themselves Catholic fell in 14 years from 81.2 to 7 also2.7 percent, and so the adherents of other Christian confessions, Orthodox Protestant, from 11.7 to 7.9. Conversely, who those say they are non-believers or atheists grew from 6.2 to 15.3 percent. At this point the decline of religion is marked, but it can be called a collapse. But when the interviewees were posed with more specific questions about their faith, who they are who belief in God demonstrated dropped from 72 to 57 percent, while those who are clearly not believe in God from 26 to 36 percent. This means that even even those those still declare themselves Catholic, there are a good number who no believe longer in God. Religious practice, of course, reflects this in faith. Those who say they go to church every Sunday fell from 28 to 18 percent. Those who go two or three times a month from 16 to 10 percent; once a month from 14 to 9. (But keep in mind that another recent survey by Euromedia Research for “The Timone” found only that 13.8 percent of Italians go to Mass on Sunday). Conversely, there was a rise from 23 to 26 percent of who go to church only two or three times a year, and from 19 to 37 percent of those who never go. But the most striking data are those that tabulate religious practice and faith in God by age group. Among those who go to church every Sunday, the decline is among strong those born before 1945 and more moderate in the middle generations. But among those born after 1980, attendance at Sunday Mass has now collapsed to 7 percent. And even more marked is the drop in those who have faith in God, less than 50 percent of those born in the 1980s, while they born after 1990 even lower, around 37 percent. If aroused one turns to that 15.3 percent of Italians who declares explicitly non-believe-rrs or atheists, the tabulation by sex and ageages striking date here too. Among men the quota comes to 22.5 percent, as the average for all ages. But among men born in the 1980s it comes to 32 percent, and for those born after 1990 to 35 percent. While also women of these age groups the numbers spiked, up to 23 and 31 percent respectively. If this is the raw language of reality, in a nation like Italy at the beginning of the millennium was still seen as a great Catholic “exception” to the secularization prevailing in the West, one can only hope that synod underway may may begin, at, to listen to it.

A pair of priests have been reported abducted from their parishes in Nicaragua as the country's increasingly totalitarian regime continues cracking down on the Catholic Church and silencing all dissenting voices.

New "dubia", technical questions, have been submitted to Francis by FIVE cardinals, two of them the previous "Dubia Brothers". Cardinal Burke's site: HERE I predicted this last August. I was also sure about four of the signatories, but one I didn't guess. Walter Cardinal Brandmüller Ra

In almost identical words, first while conversing with the Jesuits of Portugal and then on the flight back from Mongolia, Pope Francis has said that “the Synod is not an invention of mine. It was Paul VI, at the end of the Council, who realized that the Western Church had lost synodality, while the Eastern one has got it.” And on September 11, receiving Baselios Marthoma Mathews III, catholicos of the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, he reiterated that “there is much we can learn from the age-old synodal experience of your Church.” But is it really so? Judging by the failure, in 2016, of the convocation of a Council of all the Orthodox Churches, after sixty years of preparation, simply due to the lack of unanimity in the approval of one of the preliminary documents, the Eastern model of synodality would not seem at all to be the most fit to accelerate, in the West, that “process” of change in the Church so much to the liking of the pope and his set: “If the West, in fact, understands synodality as a place or a moment in which all, lay and clergy, act together to arrive at some ecclesiastical, doctrinal, canonical, disciplinary decision, whatever it may be, it is clear that such synodality does not exist in the East.” Calling attention to the colossal misconception, in these exact words, is a bishop who knows the East well. His name is Manuel Nin. Catalan, 67 years old, a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of Montserrat, a professor of theology and specialist on the Fathers of the Church, then rector of the Pontifical Greek College in Rome, he has been since 2016 the titular bishop of Carcabia and apostolic exarch for Catholics of the Byzantine rite in Greece, based in Athens. He will take part, in October, in the next session of the Synod on synodality, and is among those whom the pope has personally added to the list of participants. But he makes no secret of thoroughly criticizing the “misunderstanding” on which Francis so insists: “When it is stated that: ‘You in the East have always had synodality,’ synodality is simply confused with the episcopal college.” Nin has condensed his objections in a commentary published in August on the website of his exarchate. In the East, he writes, it is true that the title of “Synod” is given to the college of bishops governed by a patriarch, an archbishop, or a metropolitan when it meets to exercise authority over the respective Church (as for example that of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church held in Rome from September 3 to 13). But this synodality has nothing to do with the model of “a modern parliamentary republic, where all can say anything and talk about everything. The life of the Christian Churches has never been a form of democracy in which all decide everything based on the rules of the majority.” Of course, Pope Francis has also insisted repeatedly in saying that “the Synod is not a parliament,” much less “a television program in which everything is talked about.” At the same time, however, he has extended participation in the Synod not only to those with episcopal authority, but to priests, religious, and lay people, men and women, in obedience to a predominantly horizontal interpretation of the Greek word “Synod,” understood as “walking together.” Together with whom? With others, with everyone. Albeit with the caution that the role of protagonist be left to the Holy Spirit. When instead – Nin writes, and this is his main objection – the true meaning of the word “Synod” is not “walking together with all,” but “walking all together with Christ.” Nin quotes the father of monasticism: “Those footprints in the sand of the desert that Anthony believed to be his own, at a certain point he discovers, he and we with him, that they do not belong to him but to the One who walks beside Anthony and supports him in moments of weakness. To Him who is always at our side, to the risen and living Lord who is in our midst. The monastic vocation can help us understand a fundamental reality in Christian life.” It is interesting to note how this objection of Nin’s accords with the one published in July on Settimo Cielo by the New York theologian Robert P. Imbelli, who also observed in the “Instrumentum laboris” of the upcoming Synod a role as immense as it is vague and muddled assigned to the Holy Spirit, and instead a very weak reference to Christ, to the cross, to the paschal mystery, that is, to the only reliable guide in order to be truly able to “converse in the Spirit.” “I therefore propose looking at synodality,” Nin continues, “as the journey of all of us who have been baptized in Christ, listening to his Gospel, celebrating our faith, receiving his grace in the sacraments. A journey certainly to be undertaken together, guided and accompanied by the hands or even carried on the shoulders of our shepherds, but following in the footsteps of Him who is the way, the truth, and the life.” Toward the conclusion of his commentary, Nin makes an unexpected reference to a protagonist of the Church from a few decades ago, with whom he allies himself: “I recall the beautiful reflection of Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, archbishop of Bologna from 1984 to 2003, published in the years of the great Jubilee of 2000 with the title: ‘Identikit of the Guest of Honor.’ Already back then the great Italian cardinal warned against the danger of sidelining or even forgetting the One who was the only reason for the Jubilee, the main cause, the sole honoree, the One Celebrated.” Yesterday the Jubilee, today the Synod. With the same forgetfulness?

There has been a lot of yarnspinning over the enmity between the Society of Jesus and Opus Dei. But the leaders of the Work thought and feared that the fairy tale would become reality right from the start, when in 2013 the Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio ascended to the chair of Peter. Their decision was to close themselves off in complete silence, to go into the shadows like a mole in its burrow, in the hope that this pontificate would pass by without harming them, without demolishing their achievements in the golden years of Benedict XVI and even more so of John Paul II. Instead this is just what has happened. First at a slow pace, then with an ever quickening tempo until the final blow this August, Pope Francis has dismantled what Opus Dei had built itself into over decades. In the title, nothing changes: the Work continues to be a “personal prelature,” the only one with this status in the Church. But first with the apostolic constitution “Praedicate evangelium” of March 19 2022, then with the apostolic letter “Ad charisma tuendum” of the following July 14, and then again with the motu proprio of August 8 2023, Pope Francis has emptied it of its substance, has downgraded it to a “public clerical association of pontifical right with the faculty of incardinating clerics,” that is, a mere assemblage of priests, today about 2,000, put under the supervision of the Vatican dicastery for the clergy, no longer with authority over those 90,000 laymen who were its power base in society, now back under the canonical jurisdiction of their respective parish priests and bishops. Just so: because this is what is established by the new canon 296, modified by Francis, of the code of canon law, which in turn refers to canon 107 of the same code (unless the contrary interpretation of Juan Ignacio Arrieta, secretary of the dicastery for legislative texts, holds true, which says that according to canon 302 of the same code, associations simply defined as “clerical” are indeed run by clerics, but are also made up of the faithful). In the aspirations of Opus Dei, largely realized during the golden years, the personal prelature was to be a sort of diocese not with a delimited territory but extended to the whole world, with its bishop in the person of the prelate of the Work, its clergy and faithful. It was therefore supposed to be part, in this very special form, of the hierarchical structure of the Church, and to report in the curia to the congregation for bishops. The recognition of Opus Dei as a personal prelature dates back to 1982, seven years after the death of the founder, the Spaniard Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, proclaimed a saint in 2002. But then, contrary to its expectations, the 1983 code of canon law did not place it among the hierarchical structures but in the chapter “De populo Dei.” In recompense, Escrivá’s two successors were made bishops: first Álvaro del Portillo, then Javier Echevarría, who was in office when Bergoglio became pope. At his death in 2017 he was succeeded by the current prelate, Fernando Ocáriz (in the photo), whom Francis did not however gladden with the episcopal dignity. And already this was the first blow that the Jesuit pope inflicted on the Work, a prelude to the subsequent absolute ban of 2022 on the prelate’s being honored with episcopal orders, leaving in place his right to “use the insignia corresponding” to the honorific title of “supernumerary apostolic protonotary.” At the beginning of Francis’s pontificate, Opus Dei boasted two top-level cardinals: in the curia, Julián Herranz Casado, an authoritative canonist; in Peru, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, archbishop of Lima. Moreover, numerous dioceses all over the world were headed by members of the Work: half a dozen in Peru alone, all with bishops of conservative bent, promptly opposed, according to script, by Jesuit bishops of opposite leaning. The fact is that, under the reign of Francis, Herranz and Cipriani quickly made their exit, partly for reasons of age, and the bishops of the Work also disappeared bit by bit. Today in Peru there remains only one, Ricardo García García, at the head of the tiny territorial prelature of Yauyos-Cañete-Huarochiri. A glimmer of hope for a truce came with the 2016 appointment as director of the Vatican press office of the American Greg Burke, former Rome correspondent for Fox News and Time magazine, a “numerary” of Opus Dei, meaning an unmarried member under the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, like the famous spokesman of John Paul II Joaquín Navarro-Valls. Burke succeeded the Jesuit Federico Lombardi and for years had been groomed in the secretariat of state with the title of “senior communication advisor,” in view of this promotion of his. But in fact the pope treated him very badly, availing himself of his own personal communication officers and systematically sidestepping the press office. In October of 2018, during the synod on young people, Burke was even denied the task of holding the daily briefings on what was happening in the assembly. The following December 31 he resigned from the post, and with him his deputy, the Spaniard Paloma García Ovejero. Today in the Vatican Opus Dei no longer holds any role of significance, after losing way back in 2012 the presidency of the IOR, the “bank” of the Holy See, with the chucking out of its “supernumerary” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi. In the world hierarchy, the only prominent member of the Work today is José Horacio Gómez, archbishop of Los Angeles since 2010 and president of the episcopal conference of the United States from 2016 to 2019, but never made a cardinal by Pope Francis. While on the contrary the reigning pope’s Jesuit entourage is growing bloated, with a good three cardinals at its head: the Luxembourgian Jean-Claude Hollerich, director of the synod on synodality underway, the Canadian Michael Czerny, and the Italian Gianfranco Ghirlanda, all with top-level roles. There is also a fourth Jesuit cardinal, the Spaniard Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, outgoing prefect of the dicastery for the doctrine of the faith, but he has the defect of not agreeing with the doctrinal drifts allowed to run free by Francis, who in fact has got rid of him by sending him into retirement and replacing him with a figure of diametrically opposite outlook. The day after the papal motu proprio of August 8, Opus Dei prelate Ocáriz declared total submission to what was established. Which a great expert on the subject, Giancarlo Rocca, a priest of the Society of Saint Paul and since 1969 the editor of the monumental “Dictionary of the Institutes of Perfection,” summarized as follows on “Settimana News”: “Pope Francis has reduced Opus Dei to a status even lower than that of a secular institute, as had been approved in 1950, with the honor of having been the first and the model of the secular institutes. At the time, as a secular institute, Opus Dei had a president general and could incardinate priests and laymen. In the new formulation of Pope Francis, only clerics can be incardinated in the new public clerical association that reports to the dicastery for the clergy. It appears evident that Opus Dei is being deprived of the laity, who constituted its strength and who can no longer be considered its members.” Geraldina Boni, professor of canon and ecclesiastical law at the University of Bologna, has in turn identified “a contradiction difficult to resolve” in the assimilation made by Francis between the qualification of “personal prelature” still applied to Opus Dei and its new definition as an association made up of clerics only. But few seem to care about this umpteenth confusion brought about by the reigning pope, also due perhaps to the widespread aversion that has hindered Opus Dei for decades, regardless of its actual merits or faults. A striking proof of this historic aversion can for example be read here, in this conversation published posthumously in 2003 between four illustrious and esteemed Italian Catholic intellectuals, the first of whom was a key man in determining the development of Vatican Council II: On Opus Dei it does not appear that Bergoglio thought much differently than they did, seeing how he has reduced it, as pope.

This week we got word that one girl is making her solemn profession of vows and one young man is being ordained to the priesthood, both in religious orders. Praise be to God!

The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Aug. 14 that the religious exemption in the state's Fair Employment Practices Act "bars claims (of) religious, sexual orientation, and gender identity discrimination against religious organizations by employees who perform duties that directly further the core mission(s) of the religious entity."