✣ Highlights from the week online
Quiet Americans With the departure of Archbishop Peter Wells, an official of the Secretariat of State who has been appointed the nuncio to South Africa, there is no obvious candidate to become the most important American in the Vatican, wrote John Allen at Cruxnow.com. He listed several possible candidates before ruling them out one by one. “Meaning no disrespect, however, no one could confuse those posts with ones where real Vatican policy is set or political muscle is wielded,” Allen wrote. He continued: “In other words, we may be in a sobering moment for US Catholics, in which the most honest answer to who’s the most important American in the Vatican simply is, ‘Nobody’.” Allen said the Pope was not suspicious about America, just not especially fond of it either. “It’s not that he doesn’t like us – we’re just not what he’s thinking about when he gets out of bed in the morning.” Bishops change tack John Gehring at commonwealmagazine.org lamented a “shift in priorities” for US bishops. He wrote: “Over the past decade, a new generation of conservatives replaced longtime conference staff forged in the heady afterglow of the Second Vatican Council and inspired by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s ‘consistent ethic of life’ framework. As these younger staffers began to fill leadership positions, the prioritisation of issues at the conference has tacked in a different direction.” That direction, Gehring said, diverged from Pope Francis’s priorities. Heavenly Confession A teenager from Madrid who made her Confession to the Pope told Zenit that Francis “speaks to you like a father, as if he knows you thoroughly”. During Confession, she said she “heard nothing but his voice. I felt at ease, in peace and ... after a while, calm. I felt as if I were in heaven, safe, protected, happy and as if nothing bad could happen to me. “I could tell that it was my heavenly Father that was speaking to me through a person, as he spoke with concern about my problems, and looked for ways to solve them, giving me advice.” Imitating Ikea The Church can take lessons from the Swedish store Ikea, according to Fr Michael Rossmann SJ at The Jesuit Post. For instance, “Own – and learn from – mistakes”. Ikea celebrates its blunders because it has learned from them, Rossmann wrote. He quoted an Ikea manager saying: “We are world champions in making mistakes. But we’re really good at correcting them.” Rossmann added: “Some might think that Catholic leaders are also ‘world champions in making mistakes’. Fewer, however, would say, ‘We’re really good at correcting them.’ It happens ... but sometimes our learning can be glacially slow.”
