VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
The Pillar [Washington DC]
July 18, 2025
By Ed. Condon
The Friday Pillar Post
Pillar paid subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Happy Friday, friends,
And a very happy feast of St. Camillus de Lellis to you. Camillus was the founder of the Camillian order in service to the sick.
Born in the Kingdom of Naples in 1550, the future saint appears to have been raised mostly by his father, who was himself a professional soldier serving, as best I can tell, if not the highest bidder then at least more than one master.
Camillus followed him into the family business and developed a penchant for what is often described as “riotous living,” and who doesn’t fancy a bit of that now and again?
But by the time his regiment disbanded, Camillus was carrying a chronic leg wound and a serious gambling problem. In the end, he sought casual work as a laborer in a Franciscan friary where he experienced his conversion.
Eventually traveling to Rome for treatment, he took on work at the hospital to pay for his own stay.
From there, he discovered both his vocation and that of the order he was to found, caring for the ill and dying who were often neglected and abused by those charged with their care — to the point where, I read, he took special care to avoid the accidental burials alive which were not uncommon at the time.
Under the spiritual direction of St. Philip Neri, he was ordained a priest by Thomas Goldwell, the last recusant bishop to escape Bloody Queen Bess of England.
Camillus and his companions slowly grew and spread their order throughout Italy, serving the sick in places and ways others simply would not — like going on to ships in quarantine with plague.
From this sort of dedication grew the “fourth vow” of the Camillians, in addition to poverty, chastity, and obedience — to serve the sick and injured at the risk of their own lives.
Indeed, members of the order were wearing their distinctive red cross while ministering to the wounded on battlefields centuries before it was adopted by a certain Swiss-based agency.
That is, as they say, pretty badass.
Here’s the news.
The News
A priest who was jailed in Vatican City for possession and distribution of child pornography has returned to work in the Holy See’s diplomatic service.
Fr. Carlo Alberto Capella, formerly a high-ranking diplomat in the apostolic nunciature in Washington, D.C., was in 2018 sentenced to five years in prison by a Vatican City court for “possession and distribution of child pornography with the aggravating circumstance of its large quantity.”
After serving his sentence in a cell in the barracks of the Vatican gendarmerie, he has remained in Vatican City, The Pillar has confirmed, and was allowed to resume work in the second section of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, the diplomatic department — first without an official title or role, but now with a formal senior designation.
Speaking to officials who have been working next to Capella since his release, it’s clear that he was brought back into the office as a private act of “mercy,” with colleagues stressing he hadn’t been laicized and effectively had nowhere else to go.
But they were equally clear that giving him an official job title and listing in the diplomatic service’s register was not the deal, and no one is sure how or why that has happened now.
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Pope Leo XIV and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem have strongly condemned the shelling yesterday of the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza by an IDF tank, killing three and injuring many more.
While the Israeli government has said that the firing on the Gaza parish on July 17 was not deliberate, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa has expressed doubts.
The Israeli foreign ministry said in a statement that “Israel never targets churches or religious sites and regrets any harm to a religious site or to uninvolved civilians,” and that “the IDF is examining this incident, the circumstances of which are still unclear, and the results of the investigation will be published transparently.”
The cardinal’s own statement said that “What we know for sure is that a tank, the IDF says by mistake, but we are not sure about this, they hit the church directly.”
As we reported yesterday, sources close to the Patriarchate chancery told The Pillar that they have not ruled out the shelling of the church as an act of deliberate retaliation for a joint statement and West Bank visit by Pizzaballa and other Christian leaders this week in which they accused the Israeli authorities of facilitating settler attacks on local Christians.
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Poland’s government formally complained to the Vatican on Tuesday over two bishops’ comments on migration, plunging Polish Church-state relations to their lowest level for years.
Poland’s ambassador to the Holy See delivered a diplomatic note July 15 to the Vatican Secretariat of State’s head of protocol expressing “deep outrage” at recent comments by retired bishops Antoni Długosz and Wiesław Mering, which the government claims violated the 1993 concordat, which governs relations between Poland and the Holy See.
What did the bishops say?
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Two men from Bulgaria were given jail sentences this week for helping to launder 61 million euros (around $67 million) from a Catholic charitable organization in Luxembourg to bank accounts in Spain.
Caritas Luxembourg may have lost the 61 million euros due to “fake president fraud,” in which a fraudster impersonates a senior figure in a corporation and demands an urgent payment from an employee to an account they control. The money was transferred from the charity to foreign bank accounts worldwide in installments of less than 500,000 euros between February and July of 2024.
Perverse mercy
Following on from last week’s coverage of the decision of an archbishop in France to appoint the convicted rapist of a 16-year-old as chancellor, this week we reported that the Vatican’s Secretariat of State has been employing, since 2023, a priest convicted (and jailed) for the possession and distribution of child pornography.
It would be cathartic for me to write — and perhaps for some of you to read — a furious, caustic tirade about how this is possible, after Spotlight, after the Pennsylvania grand jury, after the McCarrick Report, after Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela and Vos estis, after the creation of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, and after more than two decades and three popes’ promises of “zero tolerance.”
But instead I am going to try to be thoughtful about this, to be upfront about my own preconceived ideas, and to consider if maybe I am the crazy person here. Because I am very definitely beginning to feel like I am.
I want you all to walk through this with me and please, tell me what you think.
Let’s start from some basic observations, because there are obvious common threads between the stories of Fr. Spina in Toulouse and Fr. Capella in the Vatican:
Both are priests, both were tried and convicted of sexual crimes involving minors. Both went to jail for years. Neither was laicized.
Both, upon release from prison, were returned to work in the Church by the local authorities, initially quietly and now in more visible and senior roles.
In both cases, the appointments have made headlines and prompted expressions of outrage among Catholics.
And, in both cases, the appointments have been defended as acts of “Christian mercy,” with Church figures insisting that the potential for conversion and reform are essential principles in conflict with the total exclusion of child sex offenders from some employment in the clerical state, since they might struggle to find any alternate means of supporting themselves.
Now, let’s stipulate that there is no sinner excluded from the prospect of salvation. Christ turns no one away who approaches him for mercy in sincere repentance.
I happen to also believe that actions and sins have enduring practical consequences that must be settled — one’s reception of sacramental forgiveness notwithstanding. Last time I looked, the Church thought so, too. It’s rather why we have the entire teaching on purgatory.
It seems to me not contradictory to both hope for, and defend the possibility of, the earthly repentance of persons like Frs. Spina and Capella, and their reincorporation into the Church and ultimate salvation, and still consider them unfit by their actions to continue in the clerical state, exercise ecclesiastical office, or work in the Church’s governing apparatus.
A person is not merely the sum of their worst sins — by no means — nor should those sins ever be taken as a vitiation of their essential human dignity, nor can any sin ever efface the image of the Creator in whose likeness we are all made. And thus no Christian can ever consider himself superior to anyone else at any meaningful level.
Nevertheless, I find it hard to empathize with the defences of priests like, for example, Fr. Capella, who argued that his downloading and dissemination of child pornography came at a personal “moment of fragility” as he struggled to adjust to his new work posting.
I am darkly reminded of the seminal Batman comic “The Killing Joke,” in which the psychopathic murder the Joker kidnaps and tortures brutally Gotham City’s police commissioner in a bid to drive him crazy enough to kill. The Joker’s point is to prove that the “average man” is “only one bad day away” from becoming a monster just like him, and he should be empathized with.
Commissioner Gordon retains his sanity and insists on the Joker’s arrest, not murder. And I find that narrative conclusion perfectly sound. Indeed, I think it reasonable to reject the Joker’s psychotic actions as beyond empathy, while still holding him to account for them within the bounds of justice and mercy.
Getting back to Capella, I have a lot of hard days at the office in my life. I have lived and worked in many places that I found stressful, sometimes intolerably so, on a daily basis. At times I am not proud of everything I have done in response.
But I still think it is reasonable to assert that people who rape children, or traffic in images and videos of children being raped, have no place in the clerical state — laicization shouldn’t be one possible penalty but an unshakable inevitability.
If that makes me the unreasonable person in the conversation, so be it.
And I am aware, and again I stipulate, that it can be very difficult for convicted abusers to find places to live and work when they are released from prison. But I cannot see that priestly ordination confers either its own privilege or creates an obligation on the Church to furnish clerical child sex offenders with lodging and jobs to spare them a life living in seedy motels on the edge of town.
I am asked, more often and with more of an edge than you might believe, if I think priest abusers should be “left to starve under a bridge.” For the purposes of clarity, I do not. I would not wish such a fate on anyone, ever.
And I do believe it part of the Church’s mission to feed and house all such people — however they may have been brought to that circumstance.
Though the last time I was in Rome, I did not see officials at the Secretariat of State going round the indigent homeless huddled in tents under the colonnade of St. Peter’s, offering them all Vatican apartments and diplomatic desk jobs. Such Christian solicitude, it seems, is reserved for priests with phones full of child porn.
The perversity of that I find hard to explain to those who can’t see it for themselves.
A crime against nature
Thought experiment: If a tree falls in a field, and there is no one there to hear it, how many years in prison is it worth?
Four, apparently. Plus three months. At least in Britain.
This week, two men were sentenced to four years and three months in prison for the (admittedly purposeless and awful) act of vandalism which was cutting down a 150-year-old tree in a world heritage site.
The Sycamore Gap tree, beloved of postcards for as long as postcards have been around, was felled in the night by Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers in September 2023, in an act of what they called “drunken stupidity,” but for which the court found they arrived “sober and prepared.”
The tree as it fell landed across a section of Hadrian’s Wall, a world heritage site, causing damage.
According to The Times, the court took into account the “serious distress” in the form of financial and emotional harm which the loss of the tree had inflicted, reportedly assessing the total damage at £620,000. There must have been a lot of hurt feelings, since the clean up and repair operations totalled £50,000.
It was, I suppose, a very nice–looking tree and thus arguably a “crime against nature,” so to speak. Though I have to question the sanity of the judge who imposed the sentence.
Four years in jail for cutting down a tree? Bear in mind that assault with a bladed weapon on a person in the U.K. yields a seven-month hitch, on average. And Britain is in the middle of a prison overcrowding crisis, because of which more than 3,000 criminals had to be released early from their sentences last December, since there simply was nowhere to put them.
Now, I want to be clear, what these two men did was a senseless act of spiteful vandalism. It ruined a view of incredible scenic beauty and harmed the footprint of an historic landmark. They should be held to account, and made to pay for what they did.
But I would have thought that, obviously bad as what these men did may be, there might be more… practical, not to say rational, means of them serving their debt to society and making reparation for what they did.
Would not these two — one of whom previously had a completely clean record — have been better deployed helping clear up their own mess, and put to work so they could make financial restitution, too?
What exactly is the concern meriting jail time? That they might reoffend? Isn’t the point of a custodial sentence to protect society from criminals while they are (one hopes) reformed? Perhaps not.
The judge ruled that the men be taken from court to start their sentences immediately, in part, “for their own protection,” suggesting that such is the depravity of their crime that they should be expected to fall victim to some kind of mob violence.
This all seems desperately unserious to me. But before you blame Judge Lorax for going loopy, it is me who appears, once again, to be outside the mainstream thinking here.
Prosecutors and police, rather than expressing concern that space these men will now occupy in an overcrowded prison system could better be reserved for, I don’t know, people who stab people, instead lamented the brevity of the sentences handed down in the tree case.
One of the investigating cops actually appeared to express his frustration that the stump of the tree survived the incident and is putting up new shoots, since it meant the men could not be prosecuted for “destroying,” but only “damaging” it, and allowing them to skate on a few more years behind bars.
“I think this whole incident will raise further legislation because trees aren’t afforded the same protection that an ancient monument gets,” Detective Inspector Calum Meikle told The Times.
In a land where praying silently in the street will land you behind bars, and where abortion at any time up to birth has just been decriminalized, soon to be followed with medical “assisted dying,” what is needed now is more laws to protect trees, apparently.
Maybe I am the crazy one.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
By Ed. Condon