✣ Highlights from the week online
A Chinese revolution Victor Gaetan, writing for the Il Sismografo website, suggested that Pope Francis was likely to realise his dream of visiting China. Gaetan said that despite the Chinese authorities’ increasing aggression towards Christianity with the notorious “cross removal” campaign, a breakthrough between China and the Holy See was on its way. He noted that the primary dispute between China and the Vatican was control over the appointment of local bishops, on which they might reach an agreement. He added: “In September, Francis will canonise Mother Teresa, who served as Pope John Paul II’s informal ambassador to China on three trips – the perfect occasion to announce a breakthrough.” The Pope Francis code John Allen of Crux offered a guide to decoding a Catholic’s views on Pope Francis. Catholics who are usually loath to criticise their Pope tend to word things in a particular way. For Francis the words to look out for, according to Allen, are ‘clarity’, ‘enemies of the Church’, ‘primacy of the spiritual’ and ‘sin’. For the first two categories, he explained, “When somebody talks about the importance of being clear about Church teaching, it often means they find some of Francis’s verbal formulae to be sloppy.” He added that “when you hear a Catholic insisting that the Church does indeed have enemies, it can suggest discomfort with all the applause Francis draws from the secular world.” Referring to the “primacy of the spiritual” suggested that you were unhappy with Francis’s emphasis on good works, while emphasising “sin” could “sometimes hint at a desire for the Pope to be a little sharper in calling sin by its real name.” All this reminds us that “It’s just not easy being pope.” An epic light bulb task “How many Jesuits does it take to change a light bulb?” asked Thomas Reese at National Catholic Reporter, as he described how he set out to make the Jesuit residence Neal House, in Washington DC, more environmentally friendly by introducing more efficient light bulbs. To convey the difficulty of the task he revealed that “the third floor alone, where I live, has about 70 light bulbs”. In the end, after a challenging endeavour climbing ladders and trying to find lighting settings which pleased everybody, Thomas replaced “about 80 light bulbs”. He concluded: “The new bulbs were not cheap, ranging from as low as $3.32 for a 60-watt equivalent soft white general purpose LED Bright Stik light bulb to $19.97 for the outside 100-watt equivalent bulb for the front porch ... All of these lights will save money and last for years. To the extent they use less energy, they also reduce our carbon footprint.”
