Hello all, I’ve just arrived in Bologna for tonight’s event here. I am scrambling to approve comments and post a few blogs before heading off. I just saw this from Reader MarkVA:

It is truly wonderful how God has arranged the chessboard so far:

(a) Admid the crisis in the Catholic Church in America and elsewhere, one thing that stands out crystal clear is that we, the laity, must take the initiative to preserve the Faith. For the time being our clergy is mired in ambiguity, suspicion, and investigations, and as a group not good for much other than the sacraments. We can keep the pressure up, but only they can sort themselves out;

(b) At about the same time, Mr. Rod Dreher has provided a strong and practical blueprint for us, the Catholic laity, on how to survive the general crisis of Faith, and rebuild it from its present ruin. It is a time tested, historically well grounded, and rigorously articulated argument that follows St. Benedict’s thoughts and actions, who himself followed the Holy Spirit;

(c) We now also have an implicit, but robust, Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat for The Benedict Option from a close associate of pope emeritus, Benedict XVI. This is as much as we could have hoped for!

In my view, these three things complete this circle. From now on we must begin the actual building of the Benedict Option communities – the planning phase is drawing to a close;

The position of the local clergy on this is auxiliary at best. We can start by extending the bonds of friendship and solidarity to an ever widening circle in our church – and go from there. At last we can meet a few times a month, bring food, and get to know one another.

This is exciting! I have talked on and off for over a year about the need for a Benedict Option website as a central clearing house for people interested in the Ben Op — ways for them to meet each other, to share resources, etc. But it costs money, and it would require time to administer it — neither of which I have.

Still, we have to get going, somehow. Thoughts?

I strongly encourage you to buy Leah Libresco’s great new book, Building The Benedict Option, which is full of practical advice. If you live in or near New York City, Leah is going to be presenting the book at a First Things event on Thursday September 13, 7pm, at the magazine’s offices. To listen to and be around Leah is really inspiring. Don’t miss this.

Archbishop Gänswein, Pope Benedict XVI’s longtime secretary, said that The Benedict Optioncomforts him amid the Church’s  crisis, and inspires him. Read his remarks here. Judging by his extensive comments, that’s because the book acknowledges the depths of the crisis, and offers reasons for real hope (versus shallow optimism). Please don’t sit around and wait for the institutional Church to get its act together, or wait to be told what to do by your pastor (this is true for all Christians, not just Catholics). Gänswein said that “the hour of the sovereign laity has struck” — meaning that it’s time for the faithful laity to lead the Church out of this dark wood.

Let’s do it! I’ll be spending this coming Sunday with some young Italian families near Milan who are trying to do just that. I’ll report back.

Look at that, would you? That’s a View From My Table at lunch today in Rome. It’s fettucine Alfredo served and eaten at … Alfredo alla Scrofa. No kidding, this was taken in the restaurant that created the famous dish. Everyone at my table had it. The waiter prepares it tableside, and ladles it out onto plates. The head of the table gets the portion on the plate where it was made. In this case, my gracious host, Antonio Palmieri, let me have it.

Yes, reader, it tasted as cheesy and buttery as it looks. It was very heaven.

After lunch, another of my hosts, Lorenzo Malagola, the general secretary of the De Gasperi Foundation, took me for a short walk around the neighborhood on his way back to work. What a neighborhood!

We dropped into one of my favorite Rome places, the Sant’Eustachio coffee shop. Here, Lorenzo enjoys something I didn’t know existed. You can order a little cup of nothing but foam from coffee. It’s cool and almost the consistency of a light pudding. It’s amazing, like feeling a butterfly brush your face with its wings. A butterfly made of coffee and cream, I mean:

After I told Lorenzo goodbye, I walked over to the Piazza Navona, and went to pray at the altar of St. Agnes, a 13-year-old virgin who was martyred under Diocletian in the early 4th century. You can see her skull in the reliquary. I ambled over — if “ambled” is the right word for walking through steamy Rome in a gray suit on a late summer day — to the church of St. Augustine, to see the Caravaggio and to pray for a friend before the tomb of St. Monica, mother of St. Augustine. Rome is that kind of place.

Then I walked over to the church of St. Louis King of France to pray for a French friend who has been suffering health problems, and to pray for my son Matthew at the St. Matthew chapel, where Caravaggio’s famous “The Calling Of St. Matthew” hangs. Caravaggio’s “The Inspiration of St. Matthew” is also in the chapel, directly over the altar. I observed that the Angel was making white supremacist hand signals, and I made a note to write to Think Progress when I get back to the US to get them on the case:

Finally, I swung by the Pantheon, but didn’t like the crowd there, then stepped over to the basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, to visit the tomb of St. Catherine of Siena. I stopped to pray for the Catholic Church’s cleansing — Catherine told Pope Gregory XI in a 1376 letter to man up and do right — and, as this is a Dominican church, also to put in a good word with the Lord for the Dominicans in Washington.

After that I was wo’ slap out, and took a taxi back to my hotel over by the Vatican. Traffic was a mess, so I had the driver put me out near the St. Paul bookstore, as St. Paul is my publisher in Italy. I found a copy of Cardinal Ratzinger’s “Salt Of The Earth,” and a Dante book. I got a little turned around trying to find my way back to the hotel, and ended up in St. Peter’s Square. Which is a pretty swell place.

At last I made it back to the hotel. After a shower and some e-mail time, I walked back over to St. Peter’s after dark to meet a friend who lives here, and then we went to dinner. I wish we could have talked all night.

In the morning, I’m having a breakfast meeting with a journalist friend, then going over to visit Eduard Habsburg, the Hungarian ambassador to the Vatican. Will be on an afternoon train to Bologna, where I’ll be doing some more Ben Op stuff, this time with the Archbishop of the city — who, I’m told, is a wonderful man. Plus, I hear that they know how to eat very well in Emilia-Romagna. I went all day without eating gelato here in Rome, just so you know how militantly ascetic Your Working Boy is. Yay me.

Note to self: come back here in the winter, when it’s bearable outside, and you have time to walk s-l-o-w-l-y through the palimpsest, absorbing as much as you can.

Hello from Rome, where there was something of an earthquake this morning.

The De Gasperi Foundation held an invitation-only conference in Rome’s House of Deputies this morning, to discuss The Benedict Option. I gave a talk, and then gave the floor to Archbishop Georg Gänswein. He is the prefect of the papal household, but more importantly, is the longtime personal secretary to Benedict XVI. I was extremely curious to know what he would have to say about my book, as I have not hidden the fact that Benedict XVI is “the second Benedict of The Benedict Option.”

What Monsignor Gänswein said was nothing short of astounding. An Italian journalist just texted me to say

I assure you that a lot of people in Rome and all over the Catholic world are stunned by those remarks. Exactly because it clearly means approval [of The Benedict Option] by BXVI …

Archbishop Gaenswein, Antonio Palmieri and @roddreher at Benedict Option seminar organized by De Gasperi Foundation at Camera dei Deputati, Rome pic.twitter.com/mKxMGWgiW1

— Eduard Habsburg (@EduardHabsburg) September 11, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I will post an official translation of the entire text when it becomes available in English. Here are highlights from the Italian original, translated with Google and with the help of Italian-speaking friends:

1. It is “an act of Divine Providence” that we are having this conference today, on September 11, because the sex abuse scandal is the Catholic Church’s own 9/11.

2. No churches have been destroyed (so far) by terrorists, but symbolically, US churches (“all the churches of Pennsylvania, along with the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington”) have “collapsed” because of the “mortal wounds” delivered to souls by “priests of the Catholic Church.”  [The basilica cite might be a reference to Cardinal Wuerl]

3. “I remember as if it were yesterday when on April 16, 2008, accompanying Pope Benedict XVI right in that National Shrine of the Catholic Church in the United States of America, he touchingly tried to shake the bishops convened from all the United States: he spoke bent over the ‘profound shame’ caused by ‘the sexual abuse of minors by priests’ and ‘the immense sorrow your communities have suffered when men of the Church have betrayed their priestly duties and duties with such grossly unethical behavior.’ But evidently in vain, as we see today. The lament of the Holy Father was not able to contain the evil, nor the formal assurances and the commitments in words of a large part of the hierarchy.”

4. Mons. Gänswein said that reading The Benedict Option, he thought a lot about the following words that Benedict XVI said on the flight back to Rome from Fatima on May 11, 2010:

“The Lord told us that the Church would always be suffering, in different ways, until the end of the world. […] As for the news that we can discover today (in this third secret of the Fatima message), there is also the fact that not only are the Pope and the Church attacked from outside, but the sufferings of the Church come from interior of the Church, from the sin that exists in the Church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a truly terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies, but arises from sin in the Church. “

5. Talking about the collapse of churchgoing in his home country, Germany, Mons. Gänswein contrasted that to the picture BXVI gave in these 2005 remarks to a meeting in Bari.  The pope talked about the arrest in the year 304 of a group of Christians as they prayed in church. The Emperor Diocletian had forbidden them from gathering on Sundays to celebrate the Eucharist, and to build churches. In the North African town of Abitene, 49 Christians were arrested during Sunday worship. They told their captors that they could not live without the Eucharist — and they were all martyred for their faith. Today, though, very few Catholics in Germany can bother to get out of bed on Sunday to go to mass.

6. Speaking in a frankly apocalyptic vein, BXVI’s secretary — think of that! — said these days make him think of the Bible’s warnings that in the Last Days, believers will see “the abomination of desolation in the holy place.” He said that he wonders, along with Cardinal Eijk of the Netherlands, if the Church is facing its final trial before the Second Coming.

7. Mons. Gänswein praised my coverage of the Catholic abuse scandal, saying that I am “a man who completely corresponds to the desires and tastes of Pope Francis, because no one else in Rome knows better than he that the crisis of the Church, in its core, is a crisis of the clergy. And so the time has come for the strong and determined laymen, especially in the new independent Catholic media, as embodied by Rod Dreher.”

8. He said that since his retirement, BXVI has considered himself to be an “old monk” spending all his time praying for the Church and the world. Mons. Gänswein offers as BXVI’s response the Pope Emeritus’s 2008 lecture to the Collège des Bernardins in Paris. The entire point of the Benedicine mission, the pope said, was “quarere Deum” — to search for God. Everything else followed from that.

Along those lines, the archbishop highlights The Benedict Option‘s claim that this general crisis of disbelief roiling the Christian world — not just the Catholic one — may actually save our souls by forcing us to draw nearer to God. Mons. Gänswein said, of the book:

…it does not contain a ready answer. In it you will not find an infallible recipe or a master key to reopen all those doors that until now were accessible to us but that are now slamming shut again. Between the first and the last cover you will find, however, an authentic example of what Pope Benedict said ten years ago about the Benedictine spirit of the beginnings. It is a real “Quaerere Deum”. It is that search for the true God of Isaac and of Jacob who, in Jesus Christ, has shown his human face.

9. Many people are saying today that the Church is finished, that she cannot recover, said Gänswein. However:

And this is the hour when Rod Dreher from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, presents his book near the tombs of the Apostles; and, in the midst of the eclipse of God who is terrifying all over the world, he comes among us and says: “The Church is not dead, but only sleeps and rests”.

And not only this: the Church “is young” also seems to tell us, and with that joy and freedom with which Benedict XVI said it in the Mass for the beginning of the Petrine ministry on April 24, 2005. Recalling once again the suffering and the death of Saint John Paul II of which he had been a collaborator for so many years, addressing each one of us in St Peter’s Square, said:
“It was precisely in the sad days of the Pope’s illness and death that this manifested itself in a marvelous way in our eyes: that the Church is alive. And the Church is young. It carries within itself the future of the world and therefore also shows each of us the path to the future. The Church is alive and we see it: we experience the joy that the Risen One has promised to his own. The Church is alive – she is alive, because Christ is alive, because he has truly risen. In pain, present on the face of the Holy Father on Easter days, we contemplated the mystery of the passion of Christ and together touched his wounds. But in all these days we have also been able, in a profound sense, to touch the Risen One. We have been given the opportunity to experience the joy that he promised, after a short period of darkness, as the fruit of his resurrection “.

10. His concluding lines:

Therefore I have to confess sincerely that I perceive this time of great crisis, one that is evident to everyone, mostly as a time of grace. In the end, we will be “set free” not by a specific effort, but by the “truth”, as the Lord assured us. Within this hope, I look at the recent accounts made by Rod Dreher for the “purification of the memory” requested by John Paul II; and hence, with gratitude, I read his “Benedict Option”, as a marvelous source of inspiration. In these last few weeks, nothing else has provided me as much consolation.

The end.

Here is a man at the pinnacle of the Catholic Church, a man who loyally served Pope Benedict XVI (and who now serves Pope Francis as head of his household), speaking in apocalyptic terms about the sex abuse scandal and the general loss of faith across the West. He praised my work on the Catholic scandal, and the work of independent Catholic journalists. He said that The Benedict Option is a prophetic work, “a marvelous source of inspiration,” and the source of the greatest consolation to him as he grapples with the meaning of the scandals.

Note well: my book is not a counsel of despair, but of hope, real hope! So says the longtime top aide to Benedict XVI. Now will you people who have set opinions about The Benedict Optionwithout having read it actually open the thing?

My gratitude to Monsignor Gänswein — one of Joseph Ratzinger’s closest friends and colleagues — for his words about my book cannot be measured. The monsignor said in his talk that in reading the book, he got the sense that much of it was written in constant dialogue with Benedict XVI. Well, he’s right about that — but then, most of what I think and write is in some real sense a dialogue with that old monk living in the Mater Ecclesiae in the Vatican.

UPDATE:Here is a translation of the entire speech, courtesy of Catholic News Agency:

The “Nine-Eleven” of the Catholic Church

(Archbishop Dr. Georg Gänswein, Prefect of the Papal Household)

Thank you very much for the invitation to this esteemed House, which I accepted gladly, to present this book by the American author Rod Dreher, of which I had already heard a lot. The great monk from Norcia, who gave the book its programmatic title, made it very appealing for me to come here. But I was also touched and moved by the date on which we are meeting with this daring author here in Rome.

For it is September 11th, which in America – since the Fall of 2001 – has only been referred to as “9/11” in reference to that apocalyptic disaster in which members of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda attacked the United States of America as the whole world watched, in New York and Washington – using fully occupied passenger planes, which they had captured in-flight, as missiles.

The more time I spent reading the book of Rod Dreher during the hurricane of news over these past few weeks, the more I grew to understand our meeting tonight as purely an act of providence, following the publication of the report of the grand jury of Pennsylvania, on which now the Catholic Church too must cast a horrified glance at what constitutes its own “Nine-Eleven”, even if this catastrophe unfortunately is not only occurred on a single day, but over many days and years, and affecting countless victims.

Please do not make the mistake of misconstruing my remarks. I am neither comparing the victims nor the numbers of abuse cases in the Catholic Church with those 2,996 innocent people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 9, 2001.

No one has (to this date) attacked the Church of Christ by passenger plane.  St. Peter’s is still standing, as are the cathedrals of France, Germany or Italy, which are still the landmarks of many cities in the western world, from Florence to Chartres, from Cologne to Munich.
And yet, the recent news from America, where so many souls have been permanently and mortally injured by priests of the Catholic Church, is worse than any news could be of Pennsylvania’s churches suddenly collapsing, along with the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.

And yet I remember, as though it were just yesterday, how I accompanied Pope Benedict XVI on 16 April 2008 to this National Shrine of the Catholic Church in the United States of America, where he so touchingly tried to rouse the bishops of that country by describing to them the “deep shame” caused by the “sexual abuse of minors by priests”, and “the enormous pain that your congregations have suffered as clergy have betrayed their priestly duties and responsibilities through such gravely immoral behavior.”

It was probably in vain, as we see today. The lament of the Holy Father could not stop the evil and not even the lip service of a large part of the hierarchy.

And now Rod Dreher is here, among us, who begins his book with the words: “No one saw the Great Flood coming”. In the Acknowledgements, he dedicates his book, in a certain way, to Pope Benedict XVI. And it seems to me that in large parts he wrote it in a sort of quiet dialogue with the silent Papa emerito, referring to his analytical and prophetic power, when he writes: “in 2012, the then-pontiff said that the spiritual crisis overtaking the West is the most serious since the fall of the Roman Empire near the end of the fifth century. The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West.”

I would therefore, if I may, like to complement the presentation of the “Benedict Option” by Rod Dreher with a few memorable words from the mouth of Benedict XVI during his ministry; words that I was reminded of when I read the book, for instance those of May 11, 2010, when he entrusted the following to the journalists accompanying him on the flight to Fatima:
“The Lord told us that the Church would constantly be suffering, in different ways, until the end of the world. … As for the new things which we can find in this message [the third secret of Fatima, ed.] today, there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church.”

At that time, he had already been pope for five years. More than five years earlier – on 25 March 2005 – Cardinal Ratzinger had already found the following words at the 9th Station of the Way of the Cross on Good Friday at the Colosseum, before the dying John Paul II:
“Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church? How often is the holy sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts! How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there! How often is his Word twisted and misused! What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words! How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! How much pride, how much self-complacency! What little respect we pay to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where he waits for us, ready to raise us up whenever we fall! All this is present in his Passion. His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison – Lord, save us.”

We had learned earlier, from St. John Paul II, that in our historical hour the true and perfect ecumenism was the ecumenism of the martyrs, allowing us to call, in our need, upon St. Edith Stein next to Dietrich Bonhoeffer as intercessors in heaven. But as we now know, there is also an ecumenism of need and secularization, and an ecumenism of unbelief and common flight from God and the Church across all denominations. And an ecumenism of the eclipse of God in general. We are only now witnessing the watershed of an epochal change that Dreher had already prophesied in the US a year ago. He saw the Great Flood coming!

But he also notes that the eclipse of God does not mean that God no longer exists. Rather, it means that many no longer recognize God, because shadows have been cast before the Lord. Today it is the shadows of sins and of transgressions and crimes from within the Church that for many darken His brilliant presence.

In the process of this darkening, the phenomenon of what in German is called the Volkskirche – a “popular church” to which everyone belonged, something which we were still born into, but that never existed in America as it did in Europe — has long since died. Does that sound too dramatic to you?

The number of people turning their back on the Church is dramatic. Even more dramatic, however, is another statistic:  According to the most recent surveys, of the Catholics who have not yet left the Church in Germany, only 9.8 percent still meet on Sunday in their places of worship to celebrate the Blessed Eucharist together.

This brings to mind Pope Benedict’s very first journey after his election. On May 29, 2005, on the banks of the Adriatic Sea, he reminded the predominantly youthful audience that Sunday is a “weekly celebration of Easter”, thereby expressing the identity of the Christian community and the center of its life and mission. However, the theme of the Eucharistic Congress (“We cannot live without Sunday”) goes back to the year 304, when Emperor Diocletian forbade Christians under death penalty to possess Holy Scripture, to meet on Sundays to celebrate the Eucharist, and to construct rooms for their meetings.

“In Abitene, a small village in present-day Tunisia, 49 Christians were taken by surprise one Sunday while they were celebrating the Eucharist, gathered in the house of Octavius Felix, thereby defying the imperial prohibitions. They were arrested and taken to Carthage to be interrogated by the Proconsul Anulinus.

Significant among other things is the answer a certain Emeritus gave to the Proconsul who asked him why on earth they had disobeyed the Emperor’s severe orders. He replied: “Sine dominico non possumus”: that is, we cannot live without joining together on Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist. We would lack the strength to face our daily problems and not to succumb.
After atrocious tortures, these 49 martyrs of Abitene were killed. Thus, they confirmed their faith with bloodshed. They died, but they were victorious: today we remember them in the glory of the Risen Christ.”
In other words, what we, as children of the so-called “popular church”, have come to know as the “Sunday obligation” is, in fact, the precious, unique characteristic of Christians. And it is much older than any Volkskirche. Therefore, it is truly an eschatological crisis that the Catholic Church has been in for a long time now, just as my mother and father reckoned they could perceive it in their day – with “horrors of devastation in holy places” – something perhaps every generation in church history recognized from a distance on its own horizon.

Finally, however, some days I felt myself transported back to the days of my childhood – back to my father’s smithy in the Black Forest, where the hammer struck the anvil without ceasing, but did not do so without my father, whose safe hands I trusted like I trust the hands of God.

Obviously, I am not alone in this. In May, the Archbishop of Utrecht in Holland, Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, confessed that the present crisis reminded him of the “final trial” of the Church, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it in paragraph 675, which the Church must undergo before the return of Christ, as a trial that ” will shake the faith of many believers”.  The Catechism continues: “The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity.’”

Like an exorcist, Rod Dreher is also familiar with this “mysterium iniquitatis”, as he has proven with his reports over the last few months, in which he also promoted the enlightenment of the scandalous history of the former archbishop of Newark and Washington like perhaps no other journalist. Yet he is not an investigative reporter. Neither is he a fantasist, but a sober analyst who has been following the state of the Church and the world alertly and critically for a long time whilst nonetheless retaining an almost childlike, loving view of the world.

That is why Dreher does not present an apocalyptic novel like the famous “Lord of the World”, with which the British clergyman Robert Hugh Benson shook the Anglo-Saxon world in 1906. Rather, Dreher’s book resembles a practicable guide to building an ark, because he knows that there is no dam to stop the Great Flood that has been flooding the old Christian Occident since long before yesterday, and to which America belongs for him as a matter of course.

This also makes for a threefold difference between Dreher and Benson: As a typical American, Dreher is firstly more practical than the somewhat eccentric Briton from Cambridge in the period before the First World War. Secondly, Dreher, as a citizen of Louisiana, has experience with hurricanes.  And thirdly, he is not at all a clergyman, but a layman who does not speak on behalf of others, but out of his own will and zeal for the Kingdom of God, which Jesus Christ proclaimed for us. In this sense, he is a man who is entirely after the flavor and taste of Pope Francis, who knows like no one else in Rome does that the crisis of the Church is at its core a crisis of the clergy. And that now the hour of the sovereign laity has struck, especially in the new and independent Catholic media, as almost embodied by Rod Dreher.

The ease of his portrayal probably has to do with the noble narrative traditions of the southern states of America, which Mark Twain once helped achieve global recognition. And when I said earlier that I last saw myself again and again as a child in the forge before my father’s hammer blows on the anvil, I must confess that the uncomplicated reading of this weighty book took me again and again into the adventure world of my childhood, where I daydreamed about Tom Sawyer and his friend Huck’ Finn.

Rod Dreher, on the other hand, is not about dreams, but about facts and analyses, which he condenses into sentences like these: “Psychological Man won decisively and now owns the culture—including most churches—as surely as the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and other conquering peoples owned the remains of the Western Roman Empire.”

Or this one: “Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes—they are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human. Our barbarians have exchanged the animal pelts and spears of the past for designer suits and smartphones.”

Chapter 3 of his book begins with the words: “You can’t go back to the past, but you can go to Norcia.” Shortly thereafter he continues – prophetically on topic, but in no way gloatingly – as follows: “Legend has it that in an argument with a cardinal, Napoleon pointed out that he had the power to destroy the church.

“Your majesty,” the cardinal replied, “we, the clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last eighteen hundred years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”
Four years after sending the Benedictines away from their home of nearly a millennium, Napoleon’s empire was in ruins, and he was in exile. Today, the sound of Gregorian chants can once again be heard in the saint’s hometown…”

In the same Norcia, however, more recently was heard the roar from the depths of that great earthquake that shook the city in August 2016 and ruined the Basilica of St. Benedict in just a few seconds, right down to the front façade. At about the same time, cloudbursts also flooded the hometown of Rod Dreher on the upper reaches of the Mississippi. These two dramatic key scenes now stand at the beginning and end of his book, as though based on a divine script – and as if to illustrate a thesis Dreher formulated in Chapter 1: “The reality of our situation is indeed alarming, but we do not have the luxury of doom-and-gloom hysteria. There is a hidden blessing in this crisis, if we will open our eyes to it… The coming storm may be the means through which God delivers us.

In recent days, the term earthquake was often used to describe the collapse within the Church, and of which I am now saying the Catholic Church has also experienced its “Nine-Eleven.”
Rod Dreher describes the response of the monks of Norcia to the catastrophe that destroyed their abbey in the birthplace of Saint Benedict, in but few words that I must read to you because they are so eloquent:

“The Benedictine monks of Norcia have become a sign to the world in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing this book. In August 2016, a devastating earthquake shook their region. When the quake hit in the middle of the night, the monks were awake to pray matins, and they fled the monastery for the safety of the open-air piazza.

Father Cassian later reflected that the earthquake symbolized the crumbling of the West’s Christian culture, but that there was a second, hopeful symbol that night. ‘The second symbol is the gathering of the people around the statue of Saint Benedict in the piazza in order to pray,’ he wrote to supporters. ‘That is the only way to rebuild.'”

Given Father Cassian’s testimony, I would like to tell you that Benedict XVI, since his resignation, has understood himself as an old monk who, after February 28, 2013, is committed above all to prayer for Mother Church and his successor, Pope Francis, and for the Petrine ministry founded by Christ himself.

From the monastery Mater Ecclesiae behind the Basilica of St. Peter, the old monk would therefore, considering Dreher’s work, likely point to a speech he gave as acting Pope on 12 September 2008 in the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, in front of the spiritual elite of France.

That was exactly ten years ago tomorrow, and I would therefore like to briefly present excerpts of this speech to you once again:

In the great cultural upheaval of the migration period of the Völkerwanderung and the emergence of new structures of state, the monasteries were the place where the treasures of the old culture survived and at the same time a new culture was slowly formed by them, said Benedict XVI at the time and asked:
“But how did it happen?  What motivated men to come together to these places?  What did they want?  How did they live?

First and foremost, it must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past.  Their motivation was much more basic.  Their goal was: Quaerere Deum.  Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential – to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself.  They were searching for God.  They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is…they were seeking the definitive behind the provisional…

Quaerere Deum – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times.  A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences.  What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.”

These were the words of Pope Benedict XVI on September 12, 2008 about the true “option” of Saint Benedict of Nursia.  – After that, all that remains for me to say about Dreher’s book is this: It does not contain a finished answer. There is no panacea, no skeleton key for all the gates that were open to us for so long and have now been thrown shut again. Between these two books covers, however, there is an authentic example of what Pope Benedict said ten years ago about the Benedictine spirit of the beginning. It is a true “Quaerere Deum”. It is that search for the true God of Isaac and Jacob, who showed his human face in Jesus of Nazareth.

For this reason, a sentence from chapter 4,21 of the Rule of Saint Benedict comes to my mind, which also pervades and animates the entire book of Dreher as Cantus Firmus. This is the legendary “Nihil amori Christi praeponere”. That means translated: the love of Christ must come before all else. It is the key to the whole miracle of occidental monasticism.

Benedict of Nursia was a lighthouse during the migration of peoples, when he saved the Church through the turmoil of time and thus in a certain sense re-founded European civilization.
But now, not only in Europe, but all over the world, we are experiencing for decades a migration of peoples that will never come to an end again, as Pope Francis has clearly recognized and urgently speaks about to our consciences. That is why not everything is different this time, as compared to how it was then.

If the Church does not know how to renew itself again this time with God’s help, then the whole project of our civilization is at stake again. For many it looks as if the Church of Jesus Christ will never be able to recover from the catastrophe of its sin – it almost seems about to be devoured by it.

And this is precisely the hour in which Rod Dreher from Baton-Rouge in Louisiana is presenting his book today near the tombs of the apostles. And during the eclipse of God, which is frightening us all over the world, he steps before us and says: “The Church is not dead, it only sleeps and rests”.

And not only that. The Church is “young”, he seems to say, and he says it so joyfully and freely, as Benedict XVI said when he took over the Petrine ministry on April 24, 2005, when he recalled the suffering and death of Saint John Paul, whose collaborator he had been for so many years. He called out to all of us in St Peter’s Square:
“During those sad days of the Pope’s illness and death, it became wonderfully evident to us that the Church is alive. And the Church is young. She holds within herself the future of the world and therefore shows each of us the way towards the future. The Church is alive, and we are seeing it: we are experiencing the joy that the Risen Lord promised his followers. The Church is alive – she is alive because Christ is alive, because he is truly risen. In the suffering that we saw on the Holy Father’s face in those days of Easter, we contemplated the mystery of Christ’s Passion and we touched his wounds. But throughout these days we have also been able, in a profound sense, to touch the Risen One. We have been able to experience the joy that he promised, after a brief period of darkness, as the fruit of his resurrection.”

Even the satanic “Nine-Eleven” of the Universal Catholic Church can not weaken or destroy this truth, the origin of its foundation by the Risen Lord and Victor.

I must therefore honestly confess that I perceive this time of great crisis, which today is no longer hidden from anyone, above all as a time of Grace, because in the end it will not be any special effort that will free us, but only “the Truth”, as the Lord has assured us. It is in this hope that I look at Rod Dreher’s recent reports on the “purification of memory” which John Paul II entrusted to us, and so I also gratefully read his “Benedict option” as a wonderful inspiration in many respects. In recent weeks, few things have given me so much comfort.

Thank you for your attention.

Translated by Anian Christoph Wimmer

It was a pleasant surprise to walk into the Teatro Eliseo tonight and to be greeted by strangers who were happy to see me. I mean, look, it’s always good to meet people who are happy to see you, but for it to happen in a foreign country, by people who don’t even speak your language? That’s pretty great.

The discussion onstage tonight was a civil one, though difficult because of the hassle of having to translate all my remarks into Italian. I had an excellent translator, but the simple fact of having to do that slowed things down a lot. Giovanni Maria Vian, the editorial director of L’Osservatore Romano, offered some scattered criticism. He said that I try to work both sides of the street, saying no, no, I’m open to the world when people criticize the Ben Op for being too closed, and then saying, no, no, we’re away from the world when people start to wonder what, exactly, is so different about the Ben Op.

I responded by saying that it is always a challenge for Christians to live out the Bible’s command to be “in the world, but not of it.” There is no exact formula for that. I brought up the example of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the three Hebrew youths living as captives in Babylon. They served the king, and where therefore highly integrated into Babylonian society. But when the king commanded them to worship a graven image of him, they refused — even though it meant that they would be thrown into a furnace. We should ask ourselves how did those three men live, even as they were working at the pinnacle of Babylonian society, such that they had the vision and the courage to choose death over apostasy. Because that’s what we Christians are going to have to learn how to do.

Giuliano Ferrara, a legendary figure on the Italian political and journalistic scene, offered a less expansive set of remarks, focusing his criticism mostly on politics. He believes Christians should be involved in political life, and doesn’t want to see them fade away. It’s a good point, and I conceded that it’s one I think about more and more, trying to figure out what the right way for believers to involve ourselves in political life is. I did point out, however, the Benda family example from my book, and said that we cannot wholly privatize our faith, for if we do so, we fail to live it out faithfully.

I stayed around to meet a few folks. One young American woman teaching in a school here says that Italians may not grasp how urgent the sense that we’re losing Western traditions and culture is for Americans. She said that even in secular schools in Italy, Italian students get a pretty solid background in literature and culture — something that is almost entirely absent from American schools. She told me that tradition is so much deeper in Italy than in America that Italians don’t feel its loss like we Americans do.

I also talked with a couple of folks in the theater who said that they had a different view of my book after hearing me talk, and reading a bit of it, than they had had from the Italian media coverage prior to today. They said that “the Jesuits” — meaning, I guess, Father Antonio Spadaro and Civiltà Cattolica — had done a really unfair number on the book, especially by positioning it in advance as anti-Francis. Even one attendee who told me that as someone who is on the Catholic left, he has a lot of criticism of my ideas after reading the book, he recognizes that “the Jesuits” (his term too) were unjust.

Some people were eager to talk about the controversy over Archbishop Viganò and Pope Francis. I told them that I didn’t want to get into that here, because I want to stay focused on my book and its message — a message that is not against Pope Francis. One young man who identified himself as a Catholic explained why he believes that this American scandal won’t stay in America, no matter how much the Vatican hierarchy wants it to. He told a personal story about jaw-dropping sexual corruption in a particular seminary here — this hasn’t been in the newspapers; he got it from someone who was in the middle of it, and left. He said that the day is coming when this will all eventually emerge into the light.

Another American Catholic present chimed in with his own personal stories from back home, and added that Italians don’t yet grasp the depth and breadth of the US Catholic laity’s anger over all this. I’ve been in Italy a few days now, and I keep getting signs of that: that Italians, because of the way their media have covered the American situation, don’t understand what’s happening. One can understand why they wouldn’t necessarily care about what happens in the US church, on the other side of the ocean. On the other hand, Francis is their pope too, and to the extent this is damaging his credibility, and the credibility of the Church itself, in the richest and most influential nation on the planet — well, it matters.

At dinner, I sat next to an American priest, Father Vincent Nagle, who is a priest from the Communion and Liberation movement. What an interesting life he’s had. He’s from California originally, but spent years working in the Holy Land, and has an advanced degree in Islamic studies. He now works with the terminally ill and dying. He read my Little Waybook, and twice read How Dante Can Save Your Life (“I think your wife is the real hero of that book,” he said). We had a great evening together eating, drinking, and telling stories. Before we parted, I invited him to come visit us in south Louisiana, and he said he would. Making new friends is without question the greatest thing about these trips.

Tomorrow morning: a talk at the Italian parliament building. Guess who will be giving the response to my remarks? None other than Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the prefect of the papal household and the longtime personal secretary to Benedict XVI. I am a long way from Starhill, I tell you what.

Hello from Rome, where I am momentarily alighting in my hotel room before setting off for a Benedict Option speech at the Teatro Eliseo this evening. Things went reasonably well in Castelsardo, in Sardinia; the only problem was the weight of anxiety hanging over me as my hosts and I worked hard to find the bag that the airlines lost in transit. It contained all of my clothes, except the ones I was wearing. It is no fun to have to wear the same clothes for three days in Italian late summer.

At last the bag arrived this morning on a flight from Milan. It was a close call: I took at 2pm flight from Sardinia to Rome, picking up the lost bag in the Alghero (Sardinia) airport on the way. I had to open my bag for the customs officials. The suit, the dress shirts, the jacket, the pants – they all looked so clean, wrinkle-free, and unsweated-upon. I had to rush to check the just-found bag in for the Rome flight. Happily, it arrived safely with me, and here we are, in a hotel just outside the Vatican walls.

In Castelsardo, I gave a talk as part of a six-week long ideas festival. My hosts and interlocutors included Italian journalists and philosophers. My interpreter was the tireless Francesca Guerra, a student of English and Russian literature. More on her in a moment.

On my first night in town, the group had dinner al fresco at a long table set up in one of the streets of the medieval village. Castelsardo was built in the medieval period on the side of a steep hill. The historic center is a warren of narrow stone streets, passageways, and terraces linked by stairs. It truly feels like another world.

That first night, over pasta, salami, pecorino cheese, and good red Sardinian wine, we talked at length about the crisis in the Catholic Church. Everyone at my table was a practicing Catholic. Some support Archbishop Vigano’s testimony; others have problems with it.

I heard that night, and in subsequent conversations in my time there, that Vigano made a serious error (from the point of view of the Italian public) in demanding that Pope Francis resign. That was going too far for most Italians, it appears. I asked if Vigano has much support from the Italian public, and several people answered no, he doesn’t (this, even if they personally support him).

Additionally, I had the strong impression that some (most?) Catholics here don’t have the same sense of crisis over clerical sex abuse that we Americans do. About children, yes, maybe. But about priests having sex lives with other adults (men and women)? There is a world-weary sense that the Church has always been corrupt, so what can you do? Et cetera. I’m not saying everyone I talked to shares that point of view, but I am saying that in general, it’s easy to convince yourself, if you live here, that the crisis in America is not as big a deal as it actually is.

This may be important in trying to gauge why Pope Francis is failing to respond to the alarms going off in the United States. It is hard to believe that he still refuses to speak about the crisis directly, including to dispute the Vigano allegations. It beggars belief that there is a legitimate reason why he has not answered the request that Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, head of the US Catholic bishops’ conference, made in July to meet face-to-face with him to discuss the McCarrick situation. Maybe there is a good explanation for this, but with each passing day, it appears that Pope Francis is desperate to avoid accountability. It looks as if he has something to hide.

Yesterday the Complicit Clergy reformist website published this 12-minute video exploration of a horrible abuse situation involving priests who cared for handicapped children – kids who could not speak or talk, and therefore could not tell anyone what was happening to them. Watch:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEvEoIloCDY&w=525&h=300]

This clip features a hidden-camera interview with one of the abusers, a priest who is old now, and living in a nursing home. In the clip, he admits to all of the abuse, and even laughs about it. It’s one of the most demonic things you’ll ever see. Some of this abuse happened in Buenos Aires, when Francis was the local archbishop. Argentine victims allege that they asked for a meeting with Archbishop Bergoglio, but he blew them off. There’s more to it, including a confrontation with him as pope.

Francis is setting a tone of defiant nonchalance – and one of his closest American collaborators, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, is following the script. In a tense meeting with Chicago seminarians, Cupich blew off the clerical abuse scandal. Sure, he said, it bothers him too, but the Church has more important things to do than to worry about the sexual integrity of its clergy. Like immigration.

Anything Cardinal Cupich or any other prelate wants to accomplish will not happen if their credibility has been destroyed. Nobody wants to listen to an archbishop lecture people on how to treat immigrants when he has shown himself to be effectively indifferent about the sexual behavior of the Church’s priests. Last week I was speaking to a medical ethicist who told me that a planned 2002 campaign to deploy the Catholic Church’s moral authority to fight embryonic stem cell research imploded before launch amid that year’s abuse scandal.

Anyway, in multiple conversations since I arrived in Italy, I’ve talked with Catholics about what the laity should expect from the Church. We agreed that the Christian faith has to be more than mere moralism – that is, moral behavior as the ultimate goal. But if there is no strong moral content to the faith, then it becomes nothing but sentimentality – Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, in fact. Kierkegaard talked about this kind of thing back in his day. The Ethical stage of existence is superior to the Aesthetic stage, because at least it requires living by higher standards than service of the Self and its desires, but it is still not fully human. Only by entering into the Religious stage – which combines the Aesthetic and the Ethical and transcends them both – does the individual begin to realize his true identity, and to live fully.

That’s more than most of us care to get into here, in a blog post, but I do want to make clear that morality is necessary but not sufficient to the authentically Christian life. If we Christians live by a morality that is no different from that of the world, then how can we transform the world? I recall a passage from the liberal Episcopal priest Chloe Breyer’s memoir of her first year in seminary. She talked about how she was doing prison ministry, and was struggling to get the inmates to understand why there was no real black-or-white in a Bible story. A Muslim inmate at the back mocked her, saying to the other inmates that this is why they should become Muslim: because Allah’s words are clear. In fact, Breyer’s interpretation of Christian Scripture was a standard liberal relativist’s reading, and not what a more orthodox Christian would have said – this, even though an orthodox Christian should have no trouble admitting that ambiguity exists in many parts of the Bible. I think there is a warning in that story to all of us Christians, not to be so quick to downplay the moral aspect of Christian faith out of fear of fundamentalism.

Another topic: a friend e-mailed me a news report based on new findings from the Italian state statistics agency. It says that over the last 30 years, the marriage rate has collapsed for young adult Italians. The number of Italian men aged 25 to 54 who are married went from 51.5 percent in 1991 to 19.1 percent this year. The numbers for women are also terrible. You don’t have to be a prophet to see that If marriage goes away in a society, so does the natural family. In fact, Italy’s fertility rate is in the basement. Mass migration is a very big deal here in Italy, and the Pope, along with the other Italian bishops, have been pushing hard for migrants who are pouring into the country from Africa and the Middle East. How can the welfare of those strangers take priority in the Church’s eyes over the catastrophe that is the collapse of marriage and childbearing in this country? I don’t get it.

On the drive to the airport this morning, I talked about that to Francesca and our friend Donatella. They pointed out that the marriage-and-family crisis is not comprehensible outside of the political and economic crisis here. Unemployment is so high in Italy, especially for young adults, that it is very risky for young people to marry and begin families. They have little stability. In Francesca’s case, she would like to be a teacher, but there are few teaching jobs. Why not? Because the population is declining. Why is the population declining? Because without steady jobs, young people are afraid to commit to marriage and family.

You see the problem. Yes, there is a faith component here, but there are also material reasons.

It can’t go on like this. But what is the answer?

Donatella mentioned that only her strong faith in God gives her hope for the future. She didn’t always have it. A few years back, she spent some time with the Neocatechumenal Way, a mostly lay movement within the Catholic Church. She said that they brought her much closer to God, such that when she lost her mother and her two brothers to illness within one year, she found the strength to care for them all until their deaths, and to survive without losing her mind. Having endured that personal catastrophe thanks to her strong faith in God, she does not fear the future. She is not optimistic about it, but she is hopeful. I told her that that is the goal of the Benedict Option: to change our lives in such a way that we build that profound resilience by putting down deep roots in our faith tradition.

A Catholic journalist said to me last night: “From everything I’ve seen, I think the only thing that really converts anybody is to see a happy person.” Yes, that’s it: the embodied faith as a carrier of joy. Donatella has it. She doesn’t speak a word of English, but you can look at her face and see the peace that passes all understanding. What a grace it was to be with all those good people in Castelsardo.

It is also a grace to have clean clothes for the first time in four days. Glory to God for all things!

More later. I’m off in a few minutes to the Teatro Eliseo.

The New York Times has a terrifying story on what the Chinese government is doing to Uighur Muslims. Excerpts:

On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome.

Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party and write “self-criticism” essays, according to detainees who have been released.

The goal is to remove any devotion to Islam.

Abdusalam Muhemet, 41, said the police detained him for reciting a verse of the Quran at a funeral. After two months in a nearby camp, he and more than 30 others were ordered to renounce their past lives. Mr. Muhemet said he went along but quietly seethed.

“That was not a place for getting rid of extremism,” he recalled. “That was a place that will breed vengeful feelings and erase Uighur identity.”

The Chinese authorities have had to deal with some Islamic extremism in recent years, but how can anything justify this?:

A resident or local cadre is assigned to monitor every 10 families in Xinjiang, reporting on comings and goings and activities deemed suspicious, including praying and visits to mosques, according to residents and government reports. Residents said the police sometimes search homes for forbidden books and suspect items such as prayer mats, using special equipment to check walls and floors for hidden caches.

The authorities are also gathering biometric data and DNA. Two Uighurs, a former official and a student, said they were ordered to show up at police buildings where officers recorded their voices, took pictures of their heads at different angles and collected hair and blood samples.

The pressure on Uighur villages intensifies when party “work teams” arrive and take up residence, sometimes living in local homes. The teams ask villagers to inform on relatives, friends and neighbors, and they investigate residents’ attitudes and activities, according to government reports published online.

One account published last year described how the authorities in one village arranged for detainees accused of “religious extremism” to be denounced by their relatives at a public rally, and encouraged other families to report similar activities.

“More and more people are coming forward with information,” Cao Lihai, an editor for a party journal, wrote in the report. “Some parents have personally brought in their children to give themselves up.”

Read the whole thing. Please, do read it all. It is absolutely horrifying. The Chinese government is trying to exterminate their religion and culture. One could not blame Beijing for fighting against Islamic radicalization, and Islamist violence, but this is like dropping a nuclear bomb on a city to wipe out a terror cell.

If they do it to Muslims, they’ll do it to Christians, and anybody else who gets in their way. Notice especially the Total Surveillance State: using DNA, as well as putting cameras in people’s houses. It is utterly horrifying.

What a gorgeous, cool Sunday morning on the shore of the Mediterranean.

Greetings from Castelsardo, a beautiful medieval town on the coast of Sardinia. I am here without my luggage, which was lost either by American Airlines, British Airways, or Alitalia, I don’t know which. It took me four changes of plane to get here, so I’m not all that surprised that my luggage went missing. I just hope it gets here tomorrow.

I have been in transit for over 24 hours, so it’s fair to say that I’m worn out. I did have a wonderful dinner with some of the folks from the ideas festival going on here. I learned that some on the Catholic left are going apesh*t over my Benedict Option book tour here. Look at this tweet from a professor in Bologna:

Ah, so my book tour — which has been planned for months — is part of the anti-Francis conspiracy. It wasn’t just the delicious Sardinian wine that made me laugh when they showed me this tweet. I’m just a fat middle-aged ex-Catholic who sits on his couch in Louisiana with his dog at his side and blogs. But see, I’m part of the Vigano Mafia. Lord have mercy, out of what troll-hole do these people come from?

Look at this too, by Beaner:

“Explicitly”? Beaner can’t find a single line in the book criticizing Francis. He’s huffing something again, and in his delirium slamming Archbishop Zuppi of Bologna, who invited me to dialogue with him about the Benedict Option there. This is another example of the fraidy-cat left trying to no-platform people with whom they disagree. It is true that I have criticized Francis strongly for the way he is handling clerical sexual abuse, and I am glad Archbishop Vigano wrote what he wrote (though I think he was wrong to call for Francis to resign), but there is absolutely nothing in The Benedict Option critical of Francis. The troubled Father Antonio Spadaro is the one who weirdly described the Benedict Option as anti-Francis. In France earlier this year, I met a young Catholic who helped start a communal living project inspired by Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si, and the Benedict Option. I think that’s fantastic. I’m sure the progressive Bishop Zuppi and I will disagree on some things, but why shouldn’t we talk about it? He’s a Christian, I’m a Christian. We are brothers. We might even learn from each other. I’m not here in Italy to put down Pope Francis at all.

Shocking, I know.

It would be interesting to know what Pope Francis thought about the Benedict Option, as opposed to his irritable disciples. One would think that a pope would be excited about an idea that calls on Catholics and other Christians to be a lot more intentional in their discipleship. But maybe not.

I was waiting to see something definite before posting about it, but I’m leaving tomorrow for Italy, and I’m afraid that it’ll happen while I’m on the book tour, and I will not have the opportunity to note it. So I’m going to post this here, because it’s important, and it probably won’t make the news in the US.

Some background: Orthodox Christian ecclesiology is pretty much a confederacy of national churches, all believing the same things, and worshiping in the same way, but administered by national hierarchies. The Russian Orthodox Church is the Orthodox Church in Russia. The Greek Orthodox Church is the Orthodox Church in Greece. And so forth. They’re all normally in communion with each other. If you’re a Russian traveling in Greece, you can go to communion in a Greek Orthodox parish, no problem.

It’s confusing to Americans, because we have so many different Orthodox churches here in the US. It’s not supposed to be that way, but that’s how it happened, with each immigrant group bringing its own hierarchy over. We’re supposed to have a single Orthodox church in our country, but it hasn’t happened, and might never happen. We’re all in communion with each other, though.

That’s probably about to change, and for ugly reasons.

The two great rival churches in Orthodoxy are the Greeks and the Russians. This goes back many centuries. In Orthodox ecclesiology, the Patriarch of Byzantium has historically been considered the first among equals. Orthodoxy does not have a pope; it’s ruled collegially, by synods. The Byzantine patriarch is more like the Archbishop of Canterbury in that way. After Byzantium fell to the Ottomans, the Moscow — the Russian church — became the de facto great power in world Orthodoxy. The Byzantine patriarch — now called the Ecumenical Patriarch — has continued on all these years as a figurehead. The current one, Bartholomew, lives in a small quarter in Istanbul. Unlike Moscow, he has no money, but he does have the power, by virtue of his office, to grant “autocephaly” — the right to self-rule — to national churches in communion with his See.

(I have probably oversimplified this explanation. Forgive me. It’s complicated.)

So, the crisis coming to a head right now threatens to split world Orthodoxy. Since Russia and Ukraine began fighting, a large number of Ukraine-based Orthodox parishes have wanted to break away from the Moscow Patriarchate and form a Ukrainian Orthodox patriarchate — a national church independent from Moscow. Moscow has fought this hard. For one, a huge number of parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church are in Ukraine. To lose them would be a big, big blow to Moscow. For another, Ukraine is the birthplace of Russian Orthodoxy, in the 10th century.  It is hard to overstate how much this means to Russian Orthodoxy, on an emotional and symbolic level.

But if the breakaway Ukrainian Orthodox bishops ask the Ecumenical Patriarch for autocephaly, he can grant it — and, according to this report today, is moving very quickly to do that. If this happens, there will almost certainly be a schism between Moscow and the Ecumenical Patriarchate. World Orthodoxy will likely split along lines of those faithful to the EP, and those who align with Russia. It will be a severe wound to the body of Orthodoxy, and highlights Orthodoxy’s greatest weakness: its lack of unity.

I’m about to jump on an overnight flight, so I’m going to need to wrap this up. This take on the controversy from an Orthodox reader here in the US is a good summary of the scandal of this war between the Orthodox superpowers. Note well: I’m not necessarily endorsing what this reader says — I don’t know enough details about the situation from either side to take an informed position — but I am telling you that this is the kind of thing one hears in US Orthodox circles these days:

The Moscow Patriarchate, aka the Russian State Church, has a disproportionate number of its believers and parishes in the Ukraine. Ukraine wants as much separation as possible from the Putin kleptocracy, to include its servant church. As per this AP report last month:

The nexus between Russia’s intelligence and religious establishments survived the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and the KGB’s reorganization into the FSB, according to Moscow-based political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin. “Our church leaders are connected to the FSB and their epaulettes stick out from under their habits,” Oreshkin said. “They provide Vladimir Putin’s policy with an ideological foundation.”

Their solution? Apply to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople (Istanbul) for a tomos of autocephaly that would mean independence from the KGB church in Moscow.

This request, brought personally by the Ukrainian head of state and spurring a visit from Patriarch Kyrill to Istanbul in response, gives Constantinople the first bit of leverage it has had in years against the state-supported Russian church. The attempt at an Oeceumenical Synod last year — the first steps toward union with Rome — were blocked by the Slav churches in obedience to Moscow and at the anything-but-universal Synod by anti-ecumenist bishops from Greece who refused to recognize the papist heresy as a “church” akin to the Orthodox Church. The Ukraine tomos possibility gives Constantinople, essentially toothless in any political or ecclesial battle with the well funded Russian State Church, a chance for payback and to assert its claims to ‘first among equals’ status in the Orthodox world.

Here’s the thing.

What you find is that it is all about politics, demographics, money, and power.

Autocephaly, though, is supposed to be granted in recognition of a daughter church’s maturity in the faith, i.e., that it producing wonder working saints, an Orthodox culture, and a distinct aspect of Christ unique to its part of the world.

This is what made the Russian State Church’s awarding of autocephaly to the Metropolia, now ‘The Orthodox Church in America,’ during the Vietnam War such a comi-tragic farce. It was a pay-off for tribute and the transfer of the Orthodox Church of Japan to Moscow’s control, not a token of American sanctity or Orthodox maturity.

Everything has to be politics now, not just the reporting, but in the Church leadership itself. They don’t even bother to pretend that the tomos would be in recognition of anything spiritual.

As an Orthodox monk shared with me:

It amazes me how utterly political all of these matters are to the prevailing “Orthodox world.” There was a time when autocephality[cephaly] was, at least ideally, akin to a recognition of a local Church’s spiritual maturity and status. Today, superficial issues of demographics, power alignment, and even ecumenical consensus from heterodox voices obtain. Analogous would be the tonsuring of a Great Schema monastic because he or she has a sufficiently well-sewn or brightly colored analabos for the ceremony of tonsure. No need for an new name. Just use the largely unused “church name.”

Anyway, there are a bunch of links below that show just how bad the political infighting is between the equivalents of the Vatican in the Orthodox world. Note especially the fears in Istanbul that Patriarch Kyrill would poison Bartholomew in some kind of FSB hit.

The Catholics have it bad, that’s for sure. But in these end times, the figurehead leaders of Orthodox, Inc., are at least as worldly and disconnected from anything of Christ as Francis and company.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to embed all the links the reader included. But please know that this is dirty business on both the Russian and the Ukrainian-EP side. Nobody’s hands are spiritually clean. Putin’s war on Ukraine has done terrible damage to the unity of the Orthodox Church there, that’s for sure.

It is a relief to many of us American Orthodox that the worst scandals in Orthodoxy right now are about money and power, not doctrine and sex. But that’s cold comfort, all things considered. This is a dangerous and deeply tragic moment for Orthodox Christianity.

When I get to Europe, I will approve comments from people on both (all?) sides of this issue. Again: I’m not taking sides, because I don’t know enough about it to make an informed decision. I just pray that schism can be avoided.

UPDATE: A friend e-mails:

A prediction from 1895:

“It is obvious that there are questions on which the Russian Church could and ought to negotiate with the Mother See, and if these questions are carefully avoided it is because it is a foregone conclusion that a clear formulation of them would only end in a formal schism. The jealous hatred of the Greeks for the Russians, to which the latter reply with a hostility mingled with contempt — that is the fact which governs the real relations of these two national Churches, in spite of their being officially in communion with one another. But even this official unity hangs upon a single hair, and all the diplomacy of the clergy of St. Petersburg and Constantinople is needed to prevent the snapping of this slender thread. The will to maintain this counterfeit unity is decidedly not inspired by Christian charity, but by the dread of a fatal disclosure; for on the day on which the Russian and Greek Churches formally break with one another the whole world will see that the Ecumenical Eastern Church is a mere fiction and that there exists in the East nothing but isolated national Churches. That is the real motive which impels our hierarchy to (p. 69) adopt an attitude of caution and moderation towards the Greeks, in other words, to avoid any kind of dealings with them. As for the Church of Constantinople, which in its arrogant provincialism assumes the title of “the Great Church” and ‘the Œcumenical Church,’ it would probably be glad to be rid of these Northern barbarians who are only a hindrance to its Pan-Hellenic aims. In recent times, the patriarchate of Constantinople has been twice on the point of anathematizing the Russian Church; only purely material considerations have prevented a split.” (p. 70)

Vladimir Solovyev, *Russia and the Universal Church,* trans. Herbert Rees (London, 1948: Geoffrey Bles), pp. 69-70.

UPDATE.2: An Orthodox friend writes:

The reader’s statement you posted in your article is by no means “a good summary” of the situation, but a spiteful and mendacious screed. Almost nothing the author states is true. And anyone who would call the Russian Church “the KGB Church” is ipso facto a hater. Even more egregiously, he/she totally ignores the fact that the two “Ukrainian” Churches (UOC-KP and UAOC) are both schismatic, making the granting of a tome of autocephaly a patriarchal endorsement of schism, an utterly terrible precedent. It would isolate the Phanar (and Kiev) from the rest of the Orthodox world. I could write much more here, but you would not likely have time to read it before leaving.

UPDATE.3: JamesP writes:

Where to begin untangling this knot?

Russia has provoked Ukraine with its imperial ambitions, and now the former’s Church will pay a price. Yes, Ukraine is a schism-ridden mess with multiple bad actors, so that’s Constantinople’s cover which does have some legitimacy even if it’s in bad faith.

The autocephaly of the Russian Metropolia in the US and Canada (now the OCA) was a cynical move by Moscow, and everyone knew it. In the US/Canada, though, the motive was mostly good: to create a unified Orthodox church in North America free from all of the foreign influence, dysfunction, and blood-sucking. (Many will disagree either because Holy Russia or Global Pope of Constantinople.) Some Romanians, Bulgarians, and Albanians signed on with the Metropolia Slavs. The more numerous Greeks and Arabs did not, so the principal aim of the autocephaly failed miserably. I’m in the OCA, and I am extremely thankful for this autocephaly, misbegotten though it was. We’re left alone and have nothing to gain from inter-church politics. Cool by me.

Russia, despite its enormous faults, stands firm theologically and understands the apocalyptic dimensions of the West’s backsliding into sodomy. (Too bad the Church’s influence over Russian society on killing the vast majority of their babies in the womb, human trafficking, alcoholism that beggars belief, etc. is so minimal.) Demographically, Russia is doomed. So is Ukraine. And any other white-ish place.

Constantinople is pro-sodomy/Western just like Rome. Ukraine fears Russia, as it well should, so it’s turning West with all that is entailed by that.

C’ople needs a powerful ally, and it will take Rome or Ukraine or EU or whatever, theology and morality be damned…and Roman radioactivity be damned. (Remember, they like that kind of radioactivity.)

Ukraine and C’ople are both fighting for their lives, and Russia probably miscalculated. Russia is fighting for its long-term viability against Western decadence, but they will lose to their own kinds of decadence.

It is possible — normal, actually — for various national Orthodox Churches to be in communion with other churches that are not in communion themselves. Witness the recent breaking of communion between Jerusalem and Antioch over a poorly-handled territory dispute on the Arabian peninsula. Nobody else broke communion with those churches as a result.

No, autocephaly isn’t always granted upon the recognition of spiritual maturity, wonderworking saints, etc. Russia declared its own independence, and C’ople didn’t recognize it for centuries. Other countries did, too, as they threw off the murderous Turkish yoke while C’ople was paralyzed by its muslim overlords.

If there is a political realignment of the Orthodox churches, God forbid, you will have a reduced Russia, (tiny) Poland, and Serbia together. Not sure about Czech-Slovakia or Bulgaria. Georgia would align with Russia if it had to, fearing its tanks which it well understands. All others (Greece, Cyprus, Antioch, Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Romania, Alexandria) would align with C’ople if push came to shove.

I’d like to think the OCA would remain neutral; it has nothing to gain from choosing either side, and it could blow apart in different ways if one side or the other were chosen. That’s not a bad thing.

I’d also like to think that most churches would call BS on the whole sordid affair and put both warring parties in time out, do with Ukraine as each feels it must, and publicly express the unity in Christ that’s really there among the actual Orthodox Christians.

What a bloody, embarrassing mess, eh? Right faith, wrong people, as we like to say. And Satan will always be the big winner…until he isn’t. Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

I encourage all of you to read the comments for various perspectives from Orthodox Christians. I have made a point over the years not to get involved intellectually with international Orthodox Church politics, so I honestly don’t know what to think about this. Sorry about that.