✣ Highlights from the week online
Behind the scenes of a papal press conference At Crux, CNN’s Vatican correspondent Delia Gallagher lifted the lid on papal press conferences. The journalists are split into five language groups, Gallagher explained: Italian, English, French, Spanish and German. “Each group must agree on one or two questions for the Pope.” Journalists debate which question to ask. In the English-speaking group, it’s the more Catholic-specific questions which get left behind – reporters want big headlines, so they ask about immigration or Donald Trump. “For several papal trips now, a question to the Pope on the ‘dubia’ has been proposed, referring to the critical questions posed to Francis by four cardinals about his document Amoris Laetitia.” Journalists are increasingly interested in the dubia, says Gallagher, but “so far” the “more liberal Catholics” in the press pack have blocked the question: they “think it’s a fringe issue”. Meanwhile, secular journalists “fear that the topic would not make a big enough headline”. What drives the young men filling seminaries? At Cincinnati.com, Dan Horn visited a local seminary, Mount St Mary’s, which reflects a growing trend of rising numbers in US seminaries. “Enrolment plummeted from about 200 in the 1960s to less than 40 in 2011. Then something changed.” Numbers rose sharply in 2012 and have more than doubled in the past five years. Horn said that the younger seminarians have “embraced the notion they are taking on a secular world that’s sometimes hostile to their beliefs. They see themselves as part of a counter-culture movement, pushing back against consumerism, greed and other forces.” “They came from that culture. They lived in that culture,” says seminary director Fr Benedict O’Cinnsealaigh. “They know that culture doesn’t have the answers they were looking for.” Twelve Days of secret catechesis? Well, no You’ll often be told that “Twelve Days of Christmas” was composed by recusant English Catholics in the difficult years after the Reformation, as an underground work of catechesis: “10 lords a-leaping” is a symbol for the 10 Commandments, and so on. But at ncregister.com. Steven Greydanus was sceptical. There are no surviving documents which support the legend. Moreover, the Commandments and almost all the other supposedly hidden doctrines were held by Anglicans. (The sole exception is the seven sacraments.) Also, “virtually every idea of Catholic theology that was controverted by Anglicans is absent from the ‘underground catechism’ interpretations” – there’s no possible reference to the papacy, for instance.
