On the way, nuclear winter, and on the road
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Happy Friday friends,
And a happy feast of St. James the Greater to you all. If you’re like me, you may have wondered what is so great about him, relative to other James in the game. As Lucy might note, he never got his picture on bubblegum cards, after all.
Well, I’m reliably informed, and thus so are you, that the designation was likely about his age or height, relative to James the Lesser (often called “the brother of Our Lord”, but let’s not get back into that mess), rather than any assessment of his character or prominence.
He was, of course, the first Bishop of Jerusalem and first of the 11 surviving disciples to suffer martyrdom, being beheaded by Herod Agrippa some 11 years after Christ’s resurrection.
Somewhere in there, according to some legends, he found time to nip to Spain to preach the Gospel, before coming back to the Holy Land. Whether he did or not, other traditions have it that his body (not head) was brought to Spain following his death, and eventually laid to rest in Compostela — if you’ll take the word of a Spaniard.
What is beyond dispute is that the great cathedral there has been for centuries the culmination of the great pilgrim route of the Camino de Santiago, which I have never myself walked but cherish as a great ambition.
There are, of course, all the great spiritual metaphors of an arduous pilgrim march through weather and privation and tiredness and uncertainty, mirroring as they do our pilgrimage through this life towards an ultimate encounter with God.
But, as someone who lives more or less terminally online, at my desk, and at work, I can think of nothing more spiritually healthy than switching off my phone and going dark for a few weeks, winding along trails and praying as I go.
Properly severed from distractions, I find it worryingly easy to speak to God in prayer — worrying in the sense that when I do make the time, I am appalled how little time I make for it, given how much I need it.
There is a discipline of Jewish prayer called Hitbodedut which I encountered first many years ago, and which I rely on especially in times of stress. Put in simple terms, one makes time alone, somewhere secluded, to speak to God directly and spontaneously, as if in conversation, about the actual concerns of one’s mind and heart, however acute or mundane.
It’s fruitful practice for me, though uncomfortable. I dislike talking about myself in conversation and we do have a whole book of psalms that tend to put things better.
This weekend I found myself given an unexpectedly direct opportunity, acting as an impromptu courier for the blessed sacrament. Alone in the car with Himself, I was granted a good 20 mins of unfiltered prayer, the immediate fruits of which were clarity on a few questions which had been plaguing me for a while and, most importantly, the grace to let go of a handful of rather poisonous grievances I had been nursing from the previous week.
I can but guess how much more I might get to discuss with Himself on a long walk along the Way of St. James, alone in conversation with God. Though, as with so many things, I suppose I can assess something of the state of my soul from my failing to make time for it.
Anyway, here’s the news.
The News
A U.S. Congressman has introduced a bill which would prevent an American pope from being stripped of his citizenship during his time in office.
The bill, proposed by Rep. Jeff Hurd, would as he put it, recognize the extraordinary nature of the papacy and the historic election of Rober Prevost as Pope Leo XIV.
The Holy Sovereignty Protection Act would also dispense an American called to the Petrine ministry from any and all tax obligations — something identified as a concern by senior officials in the Holy See’s Secretariat of State in the weeks following Leo’s election.
“This legislation ensures that any American who answers the call to lead more than a billion Catholics worldwide can do so without risking his citizenship or facing unnecessary tax burdens,” Hurd said.
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The Vatican City Court of Appeals has rejected an appeal from Libero Milone for a new hearing in his bid to sue the Vatican for wrongful dismissal.
The first and former auditor general of the Vatican has seen two courts now refuse to consider his case or allow him to present evidence in support of his claim that he was criminally forced from his job for being too good at it.
The judges dismissed as "groundless" Milone’s argument that the Secretariat of State should bear responsibility for the actions of its former senior official, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, to arrest, detail, and compel Milone’s departure under threats of criminal prosecution in 2017.
Milone’s options for judicial satisfaction are now very limited.
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A Catholic woman says a North Carolina diocese did not sufficiently address a priest’s alleged pattern of sexual and spiritual manipulation in the context of spiritual direction.
And while the priest has been banned from a Catholic university in Virginia over the allegations against him, he became last month a parish administrator in the Diocese of Raleigh.
The Diocese of Raleigh says the priest engaged in a consensual relationship between adults, but the woman says that Raleigh’s Bishop Luis Zarama has not taken seriously a very different account of the relationship.
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A Florida court last week sentenced a former parish administrator to 10 years in prison for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the church to pay off personal debt and living expenses.
Deborah True, 72, pleaded guilty in May to first degree felony grand theft in state court, admitting to stealing over $700,000 from Holy Cross Catholic Church in the Diocese of Palm Beach, Florida between 2012 and 2020. She was sentenced July 18.
Prosecutors alleged that True participated in an elaborate scheme with Fr. Richard Murphy, the deceased former pastor of the parish, to embezzle $1.5 million from the parish over an eight year period.
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A French archbishop has publicly criticized the appointment of a priest convicted of rape as chancellor of the Archdiocese of Toulouse, calling the appointment was “unacceptable and untenable.”
Archbishop Hervé Giraud of the Diocese of Viviers criticized the appointment of Fr. Dominque Spina in the Toulouse archdiocese, which caused uproar among French Catholics earlier this month first in a social media post on July 21 and then again in an interview with the magazine La Vie, published the following day.
The archbishop said he was “appalled by this appointment,” and called his intervention over the decision of a brother bishop an expression of “fraternal correction.”
You can read the whole story here.
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The Archdiocese of Cologne has confirmed it will not implement guidance on blessings for unmarried and same-sex couples issued in April by the German bishops’ conference and the lay Central Committee of German Catholics.
Msgr. Guido Assmann, the Cologne archdiocese’s vicar general, said the April guidelines appeared to “go beyond the regulations of the universal Church” set out in Fiducia supplicans, the 2023 Vatican instruction on blessings.
The archdiocese’s decision to reject the guidelines suggests that Catholic divisions over blessings exist not only between continents, but also within individual countries.
Vatican nuclear winter
The news this week that the Vatican City Court of Appeals has rejected Libero Milone’s lawsuit for wrongful dismissal is an interesting case study in the confluence of interests.
It’s also, at least I have to imagine for Milone himself, one of those situations that can leave a man driven to the brink of total distraction.
People new to the story might be reasonably tempted to look at two different courts having considered and rejected his claims and conclude that maybe Milone just doesn’t have a case, legally speaking. Or even that maybe he is, actually, a rogue actor whom the Vatican is reasonably trying to protect itself against.
Having followed his career and case from the beginning, though, I don’t think either is a reasonable conclusion.
This is a guy who was recruited by Francis in the first months of his papacy to bring order, transparency, and above all legal probity to the scandal plagued curia, and he arrived with impeccable international credentials, having previously worked for major global firms, including a 32-year career at Deloitte. He is, in short, a serious man with a serious track record.
But for those who’d like a recap, there are a few salient data points in this case which no one really disputes:
- Milone was forced from office in 2017 under threat of criminal prosecution by Cardinal Angelo Becciu and Domenico Giani, then head of the city state’s police service. Neither disputes their role in this, Becciu publicly boasted of it at the time.
- Becciu and Giani both subsequently left their offices under a cloud, and Becciu is now laboring under a criminal conviction on multiple counts of financial corruption.
- Milone, in the course of his work, identified financial misconduct by both Becciu and Giani.
- Two separate Vatican tribunals have now ruled Milone cannot sue the Vatican, in the person of the Secretariat of State, for what was done to him because neither Giani nor Becciu have been sued or criminally prosecuted in Vatican City, and so the illegality of their actions has not been established, and therefore nor has the liability to the Secretariat for what they did.
- Neither man can be sued in Vatican City by Milone because Giani is not resident nor been employed there since 2019, and Cardinal Becciu has been the defendant in a criminal trial, on related but not directly connected matters, since 2021 (his conviction is currently on appeal) which precludes civil action against him until it is completed.
- Milone has been blocked from presenting evidence that would, he says, prove his case — that he was forced from office illegally for being too good at his job — because the evidence would harm the “good name” of people like Becciu.
- At all points since his forced departure in 2017, Milone has said he is open to an out-of-court settlement and just wants to get his life back. The Vatican, through the Secretary of State, has declined all such offers.
Now, if I were Milone, I would feel pretty well justified in seeing myself as the victim of a Vatican-wide conspiracy to prevent me from getting justice. And I might even conclude the whole city state is functionally a banana republic in birettas, and do my damndest to show them up as such — Milone has, he claims, reams of documents outlining institutional corruption.
But, so far, he hasn’t. He’s patiently let the legal process play out while quietly pressing the Secretariat of State to just do the right thing by him and make the whole thing go away.
Of course, the Secretariat of State is the locus of much of the most egregious and criminal financial misconduct that we know about so far, so they aren’t keen to validate Milone in any way.
They have been helped, so far, by a Vatican City judiciary making relying on, what in my own humble legal opinion I would consider to be, at best paper-thin and at worst obviously spurious arguments to shut him and his evidence out of court.
I cannot guess at the judges’ motivations. It may be the petty delight of part time juristis asserting themselves, it might be a genuine institutional concern to protect the Holy See, or something else altogether, but I really have no insight.
But what I will say is this: having spent a fair few years following all this, and having had a lot of conversations with people familiar with Milone’s former work in the Vatican, I have some idea of what might be in his files.
And if my suspicions are correct, it makes the Vatican’s treatment of him not just unjust but downright crazy. Because if Milone has what I think he has, it would do more than just bring embarrassment to a few superannuated senior prelates caught with their hands in the cookie jar — it could lead to total financial nuclear winter for the Vatican.
I am not exaggerating, and I shall explain, with granular specifics.
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