✣ Highlights from the week online
Beyoncé’s psalm Sarah Koops Vanderveen at Aleteia hailed Beyoncé’s new album Lemonade as a “modern woman’s psalm”. Vanderveen said that it was a recorded conversation between Bono, of U2, and the Christian scholar Eugene Peterson that helped her realise what she had found in Beyoncé’s music, “and why it felt so deeply true”. Beyoncé’s album, she wrote, “is a kind of modern woman’s psalm. “According to Peterson, the biblical psalmists created expressions not only of joy and praise, but also of anger and violence and ‘the hurt and disappointment and difficulty of being human”. That mixture of positive and negative emotion is also evident in Lemonade. “The only way we can approach God is if we’re honest, through metaphor and through symbol,” Bono says in the exchange with Peterson. “So art becomes essential, not decorative.” Curialists are thriving John Allen wondered at Crux why Pope Francis had changed so few department heads in the Curia. Despite “the surface impression of business as usual, it’s hard to escape the impression that something important nonetheless has shifted,” he wrote. “Arguably, what’s critical is not how thoroughly Francis has shuffled the deck, but rather who has the Pope’s ear and who’s been emboldened on his watch.” He cites four cases where Francis has appointed a moderate: Cardinal Stella at the Congregation for Clergy, Cardinal Versaldi at Catholic Education, Cardinal Mamberti at Apostolic Signatura and Cardinal Baldisseri at the synod of bishops. In 2013, Allen recalled, “the Pontiff expressed his admiration for ‘old-time Curialists’, describing them as ‘exemplary persons’ who ‘work with competence, with precision, self-sacrifice, carrying out their daily work with care. We need them today!’’’ Loving the poor Mark Gordon, writing at the Dorothy Option on Patheos, mentioned a friend “who frequently corners me after Mass to ask questions about things she finds baffling about Scripture or Catholic teaching”. Recently she asked him, “Does God love the poor more than he loves the rich?” Gordon cited Scripture texts, Church Fathers and Popes apparently supporting this view, then said: “You might be surprised that the answer I gave was a resounding ‘NO!’ God loves Bill Gates or Donald Trump every bit as much as he loves you or me or the lowliest beggar in the streets of Calcutta. “The Church’s ‘preferential option for the poor’ isn’t about God loving this individual person over that one. No, the option for the poor is about providing a counterweight to the inordinate prestige and privilege our fallen world confers on the wealthy and powerful. It is a call to justice.”
