The Fox News Defamation Case, Accusations of Heresy Among the Bishops, and the Holy Spirit
Fr. Daniel, Heidi, and David look at the recent suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, the recent accusations by Bishop Paprocki against his brother Bishops, and an exploration of the untapped possibilities of the Holy Spirit in our faith lives.
INTRO
SEGMENT 1 - The Fox News Defamation Case
David Folkenflick backgrounder on the lawsuit against Fox News
SEGMENT 2 - Accusations of heresy among the bishops
Cardinal McElroy’s article in America
Bishop Paprocki’s article in First Things
NCR interview with Bishop Paprocki
Roman jurisprudence - a tradition of aspiration
“This is not an answer book - this is a pastoral tool”
Soft Magisterium
Vatican corrective about the Latin Mass
NCR editorial on Bishop Paprocki’s article
SEGMENT 3 - The Holy Spirit
Some of Fr. Daniel’s columns about the Holy Spirit:
Is the church listening to the Holy Spirit's call in religious life today?
Is the Holy Spirit leading you — or driving you — into synodality?
Beyond birds and flames: Let's think of the Holy Spirit as jazz music
How can we get to know the Holy Spirit — and what pronoun should we use?
Catholics need to focus more attention on the Holy Spirit
The church is suffering from Holy Spirit atheism
TRANSCRIPTION
INTRO
DAULT: Hello and welcome to The Francis Effect podcast. My name is David Dault. I host a radio show called Things Not Seen about culture and faith, and I'm an assistant professor of Christian spirituality at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago. I'm here with my friends Heidi Schlumpf and Father Dan Horan.
Heidi is executive editor and vice president of National Catholic Reporter, a publication that connects Catholics to church, faith, and the common good with independent news, analysis, and spiritual reflection. Father Dan is the director of the Center for Spirituality and professor of philosophy, religious studies, and theology at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Every couple of weeks we get together to discuss news and events through a lens of our shared Catholic faith. Father Dan and Heidi, welcome to you both. Heidi, how have you been?
SCHLUMPF: I'm great. I'm great. It should, I should tell our listeners that we're recording earlier than usual. We're recording on Friday, March 10, a full week in advance, in part because a couple of us had conflicts next week, and I know my conflict is that my daughter is getting confirmed next week on a, on Tuesday evening, actually. And so we're gonna have some family coming into town next week. So I'm very excited about that. And just a little hint, that we're gonna be talking about the Holy Spirit later in this episode. So, there's a connection there for me.
Also, next week I'm gonna be in Iowa, Davenport, Iowa for a conference about the tenth anniversary of Pope Francis’s papacy. So I'm really looking forward to that. And Joshua McElwee, our news editor, is speaking there, as well as a number of other folks. So, if you're around the Davenport, Iowa area next week, it'll be Friday when we come out. The conference will still be going on Thursday through Saturday. So come up and say hi to me.
How about you, Dan? What do you have going on that might be a conflict?
HORAN: Well, we've got spring break here at the college, and so, it is, as one of my colleagues just pointed out, the one week of the semester where faculty can actually take a breath for a minute. And so, so that's the major conflict on my end. But it's been a whirlwind, a positive whirlwind, generally. Lots going on here at St. Mary's and in the tri-campus area.
But I was also privileged the other week to be in Louisville, Kentucky. So listeners may recall that I was recording remotely from downtown Louisville before this event, a symposium on racism hosted by the Archdiocese of Louisville. It was a wonderful event that was hosted, or sponsored by the Office for Multicultural Ministry. I was one of three speakers. Father John Judie, Sister Anita Baird were the other two, they're just extraordinary, where each of us gave a keynote. There was conversation among those gathered. And then we had a panel discussion that was really engaging at the end of the day where folks who were gathered could ask us questions and post comments. It was amazing. There were more than 180 people that were there. It was for all day on a Wednesday. So you can't beat that. I mean, just really good work. I also heard from at least a half a dozen of folks of that 180 who are listeners of the podcast. So those of you who came up and uh, you know, gave notes of gratitude and thanks, we send that right back to you. I promised you I would tell Heidi and David, and here you are in real time getting that confirmation. Thank you for listening. Thanks for the kind words and the support.
One other point. Next Tuesday, I will be at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut to give a lecture on, they call it Contemporary Catholic Conversations. It's a lecture series that the university hosts, and I'll be talking about the impacts of whiteness. So talking about anti-racist spirituality and what does it mean to understand one social location as identified as white in this work for racial justice, equity, and inclusion. So go to Sacred Heart University to find more information about that. We'll put a link in the show notes, but if you're in that area or not far by, in the metro New York area, come and see us. I look forward to it.
David, what's new with you? What's going on?
DAULT: So this is my spring break that I'm currently on while we're recording. I, it's just ending. But the first part of spring break, the Loyola Office of Mission Integration put together a writing retreat for faculty. And so Monday through Wednesday, I was in the extreme northwest part of what we call Chicagoland. So it's outside of Chicago proper, but in the collar counties, up in Woodstock, Illinois, at the Loyola University environmental campus. And had a wonderful, very productive time. Got a chance to really get some good work done, but also it was just a chance to connect with some people at Loyola that I had never really gotten to know across the different disciplines. So it was time well spent on every front.
I'm just really excited to be having ideas across these barriers, these silos that sometimes institutions can get. But also, I'm excited for the fact that I actually, you know, after a period of some writer's block, got back into my groove. And so, I'm excited to be working on more projects, but I was also really glad to come home. I'll be honest with you. I mean, I was outside my routine. I don't sleep well while I'm there, but now that I'm back home, I'm feeling both the burst of energy that I got from having that writer's block thaw out, but also, I can do it now in the comfort of my home.
So I'm especially excited about that. And I mean, we still got the tail end of winter here in Chicago, so we had a little minor snow shower earlier this morning and it's just, it's a beautiful cold day, my kind of weather. And so I'm feeling pretty good.
SCHLUMPF: I’m just gonna do a little mid-Lenten check-in with you guys if you want to. But what I eventually decided to do, I know when we talked about Lent, I was undecided, was I was trying to do a little more spiritual reading, and one way I forced myself to commit to that was that I volunteered to be a judge for a Catholic book conference, or a contest, excuse me.
And so I now have to read sixteen books before April 6. I'm on book number four, and it's been so edifying, I can't tell you, except for the pressure to get them all done and to judge them. So I've really enjoyed doing that. How are your Lenten disciplines going?
HORAN: Well, I think I shared that I'm working on a series of Lenten reflections, daily reflections, and it's going OK. Off air, I was sharing with David and Heidi that the last three weeks here have been incredibly busy. Lots of things. Search committees for positions and committee work on campus and changes that are going on that's the sort of the run of the mill life of an institution of higher education. And because we're at mid-semester, things tend to get ramped up even more. So yeah, I confess that, that I have not been as disciplined in my Lenten practice as I'd like. I hope I can make up for that. Maybe with this breather next week with spring break. But when I have been able to enter into the practice of spending more time with scripture and spending more time reflecting on the themes of Lent, it's been wonderful. So, yeah.
SCHLUMPF: I saw a great, somebody posted this online, something about that we need to remember that Lent and Advent are seasons of preparation, and so we don't need to get it right. It's a preparation for something else. So we don't need to judge whether we're doing it right or not, or doing it well.
What about you, David?
DAULT: I'm continuing to try to subvert the patriarchy and the heterosexist normativity of our culture, and I am, that is to me, the best Catholic practice I can possibly be doing right now, is standing in solidarity with the poor, the vulnerable, and the unwanted. So in my thoughts, words, and deeds, that's where my soul is. Happy Lent, everybody.
SCHLUMPF: Awesome. I love it.
HORAN: Love it.
DAULT: Well, we also have some exciting news coming up in late April that we wanted to make sure that we tell people about. We're still working out the details, but it looks as if, and Father Dan, correct me if I'm wrong on any of these details, but it looks as if we're gonna be able to do a live event down at St. Mary's College. I wonder if you'd say a little bit more about that.
HORAN: That's right. We're happy here at the Center for Spirituality to be hosting our first post-pandemic live Francis Effect podcast recording. If you've never experienced a, a live podcast recording, it may seem like a strange thing, but it's really fun. Those who have experienced know that it's great.
What it entails is the three of us will be live. That's the live part of it. We're not gonna broadcast live, but we will do an episode like we do every two weeks that greet your ears. When the episodes drop, you'll be in a live audience listening to us do what we do and see behind the scenes, see it in real time.
And we also intend to have opportunities for questions and comments from the audience, and may have an opportunity in that to appear in a future episode as we respond to those questions, comments, and insights. So yeah, mark your calendar for the evening of Thursday, April 27 here in South Bend at St. Mary's College. More details to follow, but if you're in Chicago, southwestern Michigan, Indianapolis, or wherever you are, and you wanna come to the great South Bend area, come and see us. We'll be here.
DAULT: Well, coming up on the show today, we've got three topics. We're gonna be talking about the Fox News defamation case, brought by Dominion Voting Systems. We're gonna be talking about the recent conflict among the bishops, where there's some accusations of heresy being thrown around. And we're gonna be talking a little bit more spiritually about the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit's role in our daily lives. So all that is coming up on the episode, that you're listening to The Francis Effect. Please stay with us.
SEGMENT 1 - The Fox News Defamation Case
HORAN: Welcome back to The Francis Effect. I'm Dan Horan, and I'm here with David Dault and Heidi Schlumpf. Every couple of weeks we get together to discuss a variety of topics from a perspective informed by our shared Catholic faith.
There's an old saying in politics that you don't wanna see how the sausage is made, but a recent high profile court case is doing exactly that. On the night of the 2020 presidential election, Fox News was the first among the major networks to declare that Joe Biden had won the presidency. According to both news reports and increasingly, internal documents from Fox News itself that have been made public through the discovery phase of this lawsuit, this announcement set off an internal firestorm at the network. David Folkenflik, a commentator on National Public Radio, went so far as to call it an internal civil war. In the weeks following the election, Fox News went on the war path against Dominion Voting Systems and began pushing a fabricated narrative of voter fraud.
They invited numerous guests onto the airwaves to voice a number of conspiracy theories against the company. Now, Dominion Voting Systems has launched a 1.6-billion-dollar lawsuit against Fox News, accusing the network of defamation. Normally, defamation lawsuits are hard to win in court. In this case, however, the lawsuit has unearthed a mountain of internal memos, documents, and emails that all seem to point to the conclusion that Fox News insiders and on-air hosts all knew the conspiracy narrative was a lie, but were intent on promoting it anyway.
David, what should we be focusing on as this legal drama continues to unfold?
DAULT: Well, I, you've said so much of it already, just the fact that there's a kind of unprecedented amount of access to the back-channel communications is one piece, because to really win a defamation case, you have to be able to prove that there was knowledge and intent. And normally that's difficult to do, but in this particular case, you have it in the words of Fox News executives and Fox News hosts that they were completely transparently aware of what they were saying.
Now they've recently massaged that story, and they've tried to walk that narrative back, but it seems pretty plain from, as you said, the documents that have been unearthed in the discovery process. For listeners that aren't aware about what that means, in a lawsuit, when you are preparing to bring the case to trial, each side has the opportunity to ask the other side for certain types of documentation, certain classes of files, and other sorts of evidence, and that has to be produced.
And so during this discovery process, Dominion Voting Systems was able to get access to reams and reams of written materials and other sorts of documentation that really show the internal mindset of the Fox News broadcasters and executives. This goes not just from the administrators behind the scenes, but all the way up to some of their highest-level personalities, such as Tucker Carlson. And so it's really been interesting to be watching this. I'm not sure how this whole lawsuit is going to eventually end up, but just the process that has led to this point has been incredibly fascinating to watch.
SCHLUMPF: Yeah, just as a journalist, I have to say, you would think that journalists would be more careful about what they say, and so to have all this, I know it was private correspondence, but to have it revealed as part of this lawsuit, has been very illustrative. I will say, to hear Tucker Carlson saying how much he can't stand, you know, “I hate him passionately” about Donald Trump. I, I'm sure Trump is following all this news and getting irate, but on a more serious nature, it once again, and I'm using the term, phrase, “once again” because this is not a newsflash, it indicates that Fox News is not doing journalism. They're doing political propaganda.
And I think I was reading an article in the Post the other day about the takeaways from this. And one of the takeaways was that Fox is on the red team or something that they're cheering for the red team. Well, you didn't need all this secret correspondence released from the Dominion lawsuit to know that. It's pretty obvious that they're taking a side and more concerned about, you know, influencing things than reporting on them. And anyone who's still relying on Fox News for some sort of objective reporting about what's really going on in our country has no excuse after this.
DAULT: Well, and I think that's one thing to make sure that listeners are aware of is that these documents demonstrate that in real time as the announcements about the election were being broadcast, there was an immediate backlash. Basically that, that we, that they were hurting their own brand. And in the weeks that followed, they began to really adjust the message to try and recapture the viewers that they had turned off, basically, by speaking the truth. And that's when these accusatory narratives of voter fraud and these rallies against Dominion Voting Systems really sort of met their fever pitch.
HORAN: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this, and everything you both have said have, reflects well, I think, my own experience and kind of reaction as we've learned more and more.
On the lighter side, I think it was John Oliver on his weekly news program, largely news, partly satire, certainly more factually accurate than pretty much anything that's conveyed on the Fox News Network. He's keen to make fun of the fact that Fox News is neither news nor is it about foxes, which you could understand. I'm a big fan of foxes. That's one of my favorite animals. When somebody asks like, what's your favorite animal in an icebreaker, I'm a big fan of foxes. And so I would enjoy a cable network that just 24 hours a day gave us news about the animal fox. What's the latest with the foxes? Are they hibernating? You know, what's, what's the population rate of foxes? How's their unemployment going? What's happening in the woods? That kind of thing.
Okay. Although I would love that, maybe Animal Planet could spin off their own Fox News Network. But the truth is there's really little news. I mean, it really is, and this is something that the deposition of Rupert Murdoch unveiled is that his one kind of very thin sense of defense is that well, in the evening we have these commentators. Commentators are protected. And as an opinion columnist myself, I mean this is important, because opinion is different from news as such; it's treated differently. Nevertheless, as David mentioned, defamation requires, to prove defamation requires you, what you're saying is wrong, and that wrong statement harms another.
And what we see in this evidence is that even, you know, and that's not protected in opinion, you can't just say whatever you want as an evening, as an evening talking head, or as a columnist like myself, I can't just say whatever I want, especially if I know that it's factually incorrect and it's gonna harm another.
The other thing I, I keep thinking about, Heidi, you made this point that we're also seeing that this drive to continue to invite people on who are peddling this outlandish conspiracy theory about these voting systems. Among other things too, right? The so-called big lie of the 2020 election. That it was rigged or stolen from Trump and all that other nonsense. And the fear that they had was that their viewers were leaving for more alt-right sort of sites. These like livestream sites, like OANN or Newsmax, or some of these other outlets because they wanted to hear a certain narrative. They wanted an echo chamber that justified their particular grievances or interpretations or ideological views.
What I have to say about this is, you made your bed, Fox News, you created this. I'm thinking, for a church analogy, I remember years ago, an older priest, a number of us priests were having a conversation in a, in a large urban ministry in the United States on the East Coast, a parish that had a lot of confession available times. And one of the things that, that a lot of the confessors saw was that there would be a number of really scrupulous people who were really burdened by, you know, maybe there were issues in terms of their mental health. And this was one way that they made sense of the world.
But confessing the same thing every single day, or feeling really debilitated by this sense of sin and evil and unworthiness and that every single day they were, they're revisiting this. And one of the priests said, and I thought it stayed with me. He said, we as a church have done this to these people, whether it's like even the way we train, first penance candidates, little second graders to come up with a list format for what does it mean, like keeping track of these things, or what constitutes a mortal sin versus a venial sin versus that another, like, it becomes this calculus in this some sort of like IRS document that God wants us to fill out on an immortal level.
And that's not a direct one-for-one here, but I keep thinking about that, ‘cause I'm like, Fox News has done this to their viewers when they became a propaganda machine, because it was a feed to those who were looking for more of the same, you know, to justify a worldview and to affirm a sort of interpretation of reality that was untrue. And then when they had to confront reality for once as a news network, these viewers weren't having any of it, because there was nothing then to distinguish Fox from CNN or somebody else like The New York Times. That's really unfortunate. So there's a lot to look at here.
SCHLUMPF: Well, and I can understand a network or a publication's desire to keep their audience. I mean, I guess, but there's a, it's a far cry from like, how are we, or who are we gonna announce has won the presidential election is, you can't like just change reality and the truth to keep your audience. And I just think you're right, Dan, that they are the ones who perfected, or maybe not the first, but certainly a network that throughout their whole history has been doing this dance with the truth as a way of posing as a news network. And we have, you know, outlets like that in the church, too, that are doing the same thing.
That's why an organization that does journalism like NCR stands out. But it makes it very difficult for citizens who are trying to get basic information. And it is concerning. I mean, I think what we've seen in the last two elections with, with concerns about, you know, the big lie or the reporting of the big lie is that this is really seriously affecting our ability to be a democracy if we don't have basic information and truth.
DAULT: I want to draw a weird parallel here. Back when broadcast.
SCHLUMPF: Weirder than confession.
DAULT: We, well, I'm gonna build off of, actually, that in a little bit, because back when the public airwaves, both radio and television, were made available to companies like Fox, there was a fiduciary responsibility. They had a certain civic obligation to program the news and to program other things that were more politically neutral in order that the public could be informed by these basically mass information outlet machines.
Over time we have seen that these various networks have clawed back away from that civic responsibility, and now they basically park on these pieces of broadcast real estate for their profit and for their own interests and for the building of their own little fiefdoms of audiences.
Now the weird parallel I want to draw is, churches are nonprofit organizations, and they are allowed to be nonprofits precisely because we believed back when the country was founded that they had a civic good that they did in the public sphere, but in return for the tax breaks that they get, they had a civic responsibility to actually do that good.
But as we see churches and parachurch organizations becoming more and more politically active and more and more camping on fiefdoms in the public sphere to try and build up their own audiences and to participate, if you will, in the kind of control of certain outcomes and not others, we can ask the same question of these large entities: are they still fulfilling their civic fiduciary responsibility that we initially granted them whatever kind of leeway that we granted them, either to use the airwaves or to act in nonprofit manners?
I think that's a live question, and I think that moments like Fox really begin to push that question to the critical point. Nobody can stop a conversation like I can.
HORAN: No, I don't know if it's stopped. It's just like, mic drop, it's, yeah.
SCHLUMPF: I think we're gonna see as this lawsuit continues that I think Fox is in some trouble. If not, you know, from governmental regulatory agencies, they're gonna be in trouble financially if they end up losing this lawsuit and have to pay a significant amount of money. I don't know how much all these revelations are really affecting their brand or their credibility. I mean, for many of us who are reading this and being appalled by it, we already knew this about Fox, but I can only hope that with some fresh, you know, some sunlight on these things, that it will bring some attention to what's going on there. And that other news outlets, so, I think will be following these legal proceedings as they go on and have more to comment on in the future.
But for now, you're listening to The Francis Effect, and we'll be back with our next topic shortly.
SEGMENT 2 - Accusations of heresy among the bishops
DAULT: Welcome back to The Francis Effect. I'm David Dault, and I'm here with Dan Horan and Heidi Schlumpf. Every couple of weeks we get together to discuss a variety of topics from a perspective informed by our shared Catholic faith.
In our last episode, we mentioned briefly the breaking news of one bishop seemingly accusing another of heresy. And we'd like to explore that a bit more in this episode. Some background: in an essay published on February 28 in the magazine First Things, Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois appears to accuse several cardinals of heresy. Although Paprocki doesn't mention them by name in the essay, he does quote directly from an article written by Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego, in which the cardinal calls for more inclusion of women, LGBTQ+ people, and divorced and remarried Catholics. McElroy critiques “a theology of eucharistic coherence that multiplies barriers to the grace and gift of the Eucharist.” Paprocki says in his essay that “Until recently, it would [have been] hard to imagine any successor of the apostles making such heterodox statements.”
Paprocki also mentions a cardinal who has stated publicly that homosexual acts are not sinful, and that same-sex unions should be blessed. He later told a Catholic blog that this refers to “some European cardinals.” As we are recording this on Friday, March 10, bishops at a meeting of the German Synodal Way voted to approve church blessings of same-sex couples.
In his First Things essay, Paprocki then lays out the case for how a bishop could be automatically excommunicated for heresy. He also suggests that the pope should remove such a cardinal from office or else risk the “unseemly” prospect of a heretical cardinal voting in a papal conclave. The entire essay was posed as a hypothetical, but it clearly referred to real-world people and events.
In an interview with the National Catholic Reporter, Bishop Paprocki defended his essay, saying it was important to have such “discussions out in the open” since lay Catholics, theologians, and bishops have contacted him privately with concerns about heretical cardinals in the US and Europe.
Paprocki is a canon lawyer and the newly elected chair of the US Bishops’ Committee on Canonical Affairs and Church Governance. Heidi, NCR has reported on this story and published an editorial about it, saying that accusations of heresy are “beyond the pale.” Tell us more about this.
SCHLUMPF: Yeah, David, I have to say, sometimes when I find out about these news tips, what those of us in the newsroom say to each other, like, is this satire? Is this The Onion? Did this really happen? I mean, it's just crazy. Like, is this what polarization in our church has come to? And this is a big deal.
This is not just, to reference our previous segment, this is not just Tucker Carlson name-calling the president. There's supposed to be this fraternal relationship in our church that should be better than Fox News and Donald Trump. And this idea that even under the guise of it being a hypothetical, it was clear by using that direct quote from McElroy's article, which ran in America Magazine, that he was specifically referring to Cardinal McElroy.
In his follow-up interview with us, Bishop Paprocki said that he and the cardinal had exchanged some emails, but there was no discussion. I think he refused to comment, but it was his understanding is that there's no discussion with the cardinal before this. So he went to First Things Magazine, and, or they came to him, and they published this piece.
So hypothetical or not, this is one bishop calling another bishop heretical, and that is, first of all, a very specific canonical theological charge that I'm not really qualified to, to parse. But it also is just really unseemly, and I think continues to portray our church to people outside as we, we can't even get along with each other and treat each other in a Christ-like way, never mind how we might treat the rest of the world. So it shows how divided the bishops are among themselves.
And I can say that Cardinal McElroy, who both in the piece that he did for America and many follow-up talks that he's had in the last couple weeks, including one that was about the just war theory, has really given hope to a lot of middle-of-the-road and progressive Catholics that there's somebody in the hierarchy who's saying let's have a conversation about these things. Let's talk about a different way of seeing our teachings in ways that can be more open.
And then for another brother bishop to just smack that down doesn't bode well, in my opinion, for synodality and where it might go. But I don't know. maybe I'm too close to all this, this internal church squabbles. What are you guys thinking?
HORAN: Well, I was really unimpressed by Bishop Paprocki's canon law kind of laying out the case. David and I for years on this podcast have tried to help listeners understand that those of us who come from certain Western legal traditions based on British common law, like the US is, that's centered on precedent and it’s centered on lowest common denominators, have a really difficult time understanding Roman jurisprudence. Canon law is based on a Roman tradition of aspiration. So the way that Paprocki was using this was through a very disordered lens of applying canon law to a particular case. I don't think he would've passed if he were back in canon law school getting his JCL again, that he would've gotten a good grade if this were a case study that he was responding to.
As somebody who has been in canon law courses at the graduate level and who has done case study work, I just was very mindful of that to begin with. So one has to be careful about how we use these things. I remember one of my canon law professors saying very clearly at the outset of one of the courses that I took, in fact it was the intro to canon law course. So before we even got into some of the specifics of the various books of the code, he held up the code and he said, this is not an answer book. This is a pastoral tool. He said that's the lens through which we need to understand this. This is the way in which the Code of Canon Law has developed over the course of church history.
This is what the updating in 1983, and then the subsequent revisions have suggested, that this is not meant to burden people. Jesus makes that point time and time again about religious leaders putting unnecessary burdens on others without lifting a finger to help them. And that is exactly the pastoral malpractice I saw in Paprocki's diatribe.
I think another thing is it's bad theology. And you mentioned this, Heidi, that heresy is a very serious thing to throw around. And it's something that requires a number of factors that are just, are not present. And heresy requires also an analysis that is systematically theological. Canon law talks about certain conditions and certain impositions, right, certain kind of penalties that arise, some of them inherent to positions and schismatic views and that sort of thing that, that persist in a, in an individual member of the faithful that would lead to something being identified as heresy. However, one can't just declare that on their own, not even, not even a bishop, and at least the argument that he laid out was insufficient.
The last thing I just wanna highlight is, it was bad ecclesiology. The Catholic Church is a communion of communions, and you're right to say that the bishops are not playing well with one another. And it is not Fox News, though they, a lot of them act like it is. They're defending sort of party politics, both literally in terms of certain US political parties, but more importantly, sort of ecclesiastical ideological politics. There are camps within camps of the USCCB, and it's a scandal. It's an embarrassment, it's a shame. The fact that a bishop in Springfield, Illinois is not in communion with a brother bishop in the same country is scandalous. But I would say this is not surprising coming from a bishops’ conference, some of whose members have been out of communion with the Bishop of Rome, which makes them by definition the same sort of structure that Paprocki was introducing, makes them schismatics. They are breaking with the Bishop of Rome. They are not an ordinary in communion with the Bishop of Rome and their brother bishops. That's a problem.
DAULT: Well, and I want to pick up on something that I've talked about before on this program, and it's this sort of theory that I have of what we might call the soft magisterium. Where there is, there are actual canonical ways, as we've discussed just now in this conversation, for heresy to be brought, and there are certain requirements, it has to be in writing, there has to be evidence, there ha-, like there's a whole process there.
But a lot of times what we see happen is the bishops short circuiting the process in order to exercise some kind of power without being beholden to the responsibilities of canon law. And that always raises flags for me. But in one particular point, it really raised a flag for me, and I want to circle back to it.
It's this moment when Paprocki says, but what if what I'm trying to do is avoid the possibility of a papal conclave with heretical bishops. And for those that have been around any kind of ultra-traditionalist or even set of vacantist kind of people, you know that there's already conspiracy theories that maybe, maybe Pope Francis isn't a legitimate pope, maybe Pope Benedict was the last legitimate pope, and in some cases it gets so wild to say not even Pope John Paul II was a legitimate pope, but we haven't had a legitimate pope since Vatican Two.
Like, as soon as you're starting to have these kinds of conversations, you're basically in a land where we're not talking about a Catholic Church anymore; we're talking about a balkanized church. This should concern all members of the faithful, regardless of where you find yourself planting your political flag.
HORAN: Well, in this notion of soft magisterium, David, I thought you might go in another direction and emphasize what you've talked about in the past as well about this choose your own bishop. You know, it's like the choose your own adventure, and it's what great theologians like Tony Godzieba and Vince Miller and others have talked about in terms of a digital magisterium, which is, you know, Bishop Paprocki has, he has episcopal authority only within the boundaries of the church of Springfield. Absolutely nowhere else, absolutely zero. He has no episcopal authority anywhere else. And yet the audacity of somebody in a relatively small diocese in downstate Illinois to level these kinds of accusations against a cardinal of the Catholic Church. I mean, no sense of humility, no lack of arrogance, no lack of delusion. I think that's also something that's really important to emphasize, as obvious as it seems.
SCHLUMPF: And, and not just one cardinal, like cardinals in another country, too. So—
HORAN: Yeah, fair point.
SCHLUMPF: Europe. I mean, I will, I understand the technicality of that, but I feel like that cat is out of the bag. I mean, I think even before there was digital media, there were bishops through columns and publications, including ours, who were speaking to people outside of their diocese. I think of like Bishop Gumbleton, a longtime columnist at NCR.
I guess one thing that I would just add, and this may or may not be related, ‘cause I don't know how the timing of this all worked out when he wrote the piece or how long it had been in the works for First Things, but a week before that article came out, there was also news that involved Bishop Paprocki, because the Vatican had to release a corrective about this whole issue of who has the authority for exceptions about when the Latin, traditional Latin mass is being limited in dioceses.
So there were a number of bishops who were saying, oh, again, going to the Code of Canon Law and saying, according to this canon, I have the right to say, well, an exception is gonna be made here in my diocese. And again, I'm not the expert on this, but apparently it was pretty clear in more than one instance, the pope had made very clear that no, you didn't have a chance to get outta jail free with that, that coat, piece of the code. And in fact, it was the Vatican office that would be helping to decide if there were gonna be some exceptions to that.
And so he had just been slapped down by the Vatican, he and other bishops who were trying to do this just a week before this. So it really does seem like all of that happening in a period of just a couple weeks that there was this, there's this attempt to be separate or above any of the regular rules of engagement of being in our church, I guess. So, yeah very strange times we're living in the church right now. I know it's been this way before throughout history, but it certainly seems a little crazy sometimes to me.
DAULT: Well, and it strikes me that there's a parallel here between this particular case and what we were just talking about with the Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News. There's an accusation that some great transgression has happened without any actual evidence, but the effects of it are very pronounced, and I am constantly thinking about how this plays out to the faithful. And whether or not in the same way that, that there's an erosion of confidence in our voting systems, there's an erosion of confidence in the leadership of the church to be prudent and wise and to actually act in accord with the gospel and not towards political ends. So I think that there is a short-term reason why bishops do this kind of thing, but it's a poison pill. It's a Faustian bargain, and they're really playing with fire.
SCHLUMPF: That's funny that you mentioned that, David, ‘cause I was thinking the same thing in our first segment. And I, I'll read you one line from our editorial and we can link to this in the show notes, but we wrote, “It's a sad day when a church leader sounds more like a MAGA politician on Fox News calling someone a traitor than a follower of Jesus.” And that's precisely how this comes off to me, yeah.
HORAN: Well, and we've talked a lot about the procedure. We've talked about the context in which this has kinda been deployed in a very partisan journal like First Things targeting certain brother bishops and cardinals and, and the like. I think one thing we haven't spent as much time talking about, and because of sake of time, we're not gonna have much time to get into it, but just the highlight is the content of what actually is motivating this, right?
So what is upsetting this bishop in Illinois? What's upsetting him is, apparently when people like Pope Francis himself or a Cardinal McElroy or anybody else actually embraces the gospel message to welcome those at the margins, what is being advanced here is the field hospital understanding, field hospital sort of ecclesiology that Pope Francis has laid out from the beginning of his pontifical ministry, which is rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
He took the name Francis, and this is something I am an expert in, is Franciscan history and spirituality and theology. I can say that one of the things that distinguishes Francis of Assisi is the birth of the mendicant movement in the thirteenth century, and part of what distinguished the Franciscans and other mendicants is the moving outside of the cloisters and the walls of the normal convents, the rectories and the monasteries, to be there with the people, to go to the places, to the margins where people are, to be with them.
It's what Pope Francis describes as having the smell of one sheep. When I hear this sort of stuff, getting so upset about not having an esoteric, antiquated experience of liturgy that I understand is meaningful to some, but to the vast majority of contemporary Christians is not, to hear somebody who is upset that a cardinal or the pope himself will extend as Jesus himself would and does at many points in analogous ways in the gospel, a hand of welcome and warmth and acceptance to those who are in marginal identities, whether that's sexuality or gender or social location or race or ethnicity or what have you. Their marriage status, their immigration status. It is a scandal. It is a scandal and a stumbling block to faith to have people like this who claim to be ministers in the church. That is Paprocki's claim to vocation, and to behave this way and to get so defensive and to accuse people who are merely walking in the footprints of Jesus Christ of heresy is abhorrent. I mean, there's nothing else to say about it, but I think we shouldn't lose sight, too, of what he's interested in, and what he's interested in is not, I would argue, and I'm gonna be very bold here, is not what Jesus is interested in.
DAULT: I, I couldn't say it better, and I'm grateful that you said it, because when you say it, it carries extra weight. But Dan, I am in full agreement with everything that you just brought here, and I hope that listeners will find ways in their hearts to welcome the vulnerable and to do that kind of gospel hospitality that you're pointing us to, even when our leaders fail to do it.
And unfortunately, I'm certain that we'll have more opportunities to revisit this particular issue with Bishop Paprocki and with other bishops that want to shut the door on the unwanted. But we will keep holding that door open, and we hope, listeners, that you will join us in that prayerfully and actively. You’re listening to The Francis Effect. We’ll be back in just a moment.
SEGMENT 3 - The Holy Spirit
SCHLUMPF: Welcome back to The Francis Effect. I'm Heidi Schlumpf, and I'm here with David Dault and Dan Horan. Every couple of weeks we get together to discuss a variety of topics from a perspective informed by our shared Catholic faith. Every time we stand together as a faith community to profess our shared faith in the creed, we proclaim that we believe in “the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,” who is “with the Father and Son glorified.” While we all acknowledge the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, the Spirit is the often forgotten third wheel of God.
Most Christians find thinking of God the creator as like a divine father or mother fairly intuitive. Likewise, that the second person of the Trinity was incarnate and became a human person in Jesus of Nazareth makes the eternal word very easy to picture and relate to. But the Holy Spirit continues to be elusive for many believers. As a result, the Spirit doesn't often surface as the focal point of prayer and reflection, and then becomes relegated as what one theologian once described as “the forgotten God.”
Dan, you've recently concluded a five-part series in your NCR column about the Holy Spirit, highlighting a range of themes related to the spirit, including the role of discernment, synodality, and even jazz music as a metaphor for the Spirit's action in the world.
Years ago, you wrote a piece in which you raised the specter of Holy Spirit atheism as an affliction that confronts the church in manifold ways. Why do you think the spirit is so often neglected in personal prayer, in theological reflection, and in church discussions? Why is it important for us to pay more attention to the Holy Spirit in our individual and collective lives?
HORAN: How much time do we have? Listeners, are you ready for another eighteen hours of podcast? I mean, I think it can all be distilled down, these questions about why does the Holy Spirit come across as the third wheel, the forgotten God, and so forth? Why do the average kind of Christians, though profess belief in the Holy Spirit, which is genuine and sincere, I have no doubt when we stand at the creed or at the Easter vigil and renew our baptismal promises, but oftentimes doesn't play a prominent role in kind of everyday prayer and spiritual life and that sort of thing. There's that kind of ordinary neglect, we might say, of the Spirit, but then I think there's also something a bit more insidious, which has more significant consequences, particularly when we look at church leaders and what I would call a kind of tacit Holy Spirit atheism among them.
And in either case or both cases, I think it can be distilled down to fear and control. That the Holy Spirit continues to be present to creation in creation, ongoing in God's drawing near to us, animating us, drawing us through history, through salvation history, and the Spirit acts in a way that is like, well, the spirit acts as God acts, ‘cause the Spirit is God. And God does not act according to our will. That is the biggest rub between human freedom and God's will for humanity. This is the reason why Jesus was crucified. It's because Jesus came and preached nothing but a gospel of inclusion, of a ministry of welcome forgiveness, of mercy, of reconciliation.
And people said enough of that, we can't have people thinking that for real. Let's silence this guy. So therefore, the Spirit who doesn't manifest herself in the form of a human, like the, through the incarnation, of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ. It's even easier for many people to kind of push God as spirit away.
And that's because we're afraid of where the Spirit might lead us. That's tied to discernment. I think a lot of people don't wanna surrender control. There's a false sense of control. I see this, especially with those who are entrusted with leadership in the church and other institutions. We think it's all about us.
Instead, we forget that the Holy Spirit is the one who's really driving the cart, right? Driving the ship, as it were. I'm reminded of St. Francis of Assisi, who is remembered to have said on a number of occasions that the true minister general, the true general superior of the order of friars minor of the Franciscans is the Holy Spirit. And that anybody who's in that position is one who needs to be attuned to the Spirit.
And I think there's another thing, too, which is the spirit moves in ways that are unpredictable, again, that buck up against our desire to be in control, a false desire that we have or a false delusion that we could ever be in control.
And I like to think of it sometimes, David you've said, you said off air that we talk about moving from a spirit of agnosticism or atheism to a spirit of anarchy. And I love that because to many people who are fearful, who desire to main, maintain control, they see the Spirit's action as anarchic, right? As disturbing, as threatening. But I would argue that what seems like anarchy to some people is perhaps seen as a creative renewal in the world by God. And that's where I think we should begin.
DAULT: Well, and I, thank you for that gesture towards me, and now I want to make a gesture back to you. One of my favorite of this five series of columns that you did was from a few weeks back, where you were talking about synodality. Longtime listeners know that's a topic that is of endless fascination to me. But I really liked what you did because you, you likened the kind of Holy Spirit push into synodality. Some people would interpret that as the bad kind of desert and not the kind of generative kind of desert or, or liminal space, but rather as a kind of barren place where only death for the church will occur.
And I really like how you played with that image of the people that are scared to go into the desert with Jesus. And I wonder as you're thinking about the ways in which we think about the Holy Spirit, one thing that strikes me again and again is just as you have said, unlike the Father, unlike the Son, we have a lack of metaphors sometimes for what the Spirit does and what the Spirit is all about in our lives.
The Spirit is that thing that brings and continues to teach us and continues to guide us into new life and into life and abundance in Jesus's absence. Now, as I'm saying all this stuff, I wanna make sure that I'm understanding it correctly as a layperson. Am I right to put that amount of weight into the Holy Spirit, or would you say it in a different way?
HORAN: Yeah, I would say it's a beginning. I think it, I think the weight's actually greater. So if you look at, for instance, our liturgies, it's the epiclesis, it's the calling down of the Holy Spirit in the celebration of the eucharist, that is transformative. It is in baptism. It's baptism in the spirit, right? It's the triune formula for sure.
But as Jesus says in his own earthly ministry, captured in the gospels, or maybe it was John the Baptist, I, pardon me, at Jesus's baptism, I baptize you with water, but he who comes after me with fire and the Spirit, Jesus, who sends the spirit as the paraclete, the helper, the guider, the one that, that we can lean on and rely on.
The Holy Spirit is, as Lumen Gentium says, that which bonds all the baptized together. And I love this line. It's adopted as well in eucharistic prayer three. The line is, “The Holy Spirit unites all those baptized, scattered as they are throughout the world.” I love that phrase, scattered as they are throughout the world. There's a beauty to that, and that's part of as you say, David, there's, there is a lack of metaphors, I think, not to make fun of people who appear appreciate a dove or bird image or a disembodied flame somewhere with no fuel, which is always curious for physicists out there. But for me, as somebody who is a pretty mediocre musician, but who loves jazz music, especially live, and David, you're a musician. I know this about you as well.
It's one thing to play an instrument or to sing by oneself, and that's fun and that's great. It's something magical, to use a kind of a secular kind of language, when you play music with others. There's a reason why people go to the orchestra to hear a performance, and not how it's different than just putting in the CD or playing Spotify, and what is it that brings all those people together?
So, the Holy Spirit is what brings people together. It is what's between the spaces. It's what allows for creativity and originality and newness. And we see that in the Psalms, like Psalm 104, send your spirit to renew the face of the earth. It's not about the same old and repetition. It's about a God who is life-giving, as we pray in the creed, the giver of life. The Spirit is the one who is in charge. The question I have for many of us is, do we listen, or do we close that out? And that's where that atheism comes in.
DAULT: Well, I, I just wanna build on that image that you just said about music and jazz. When I played in the Atlanta music scene, we had a saying that we would pass around, because oftentimes you're not up on stage playing alone, but you're with other musicians in a round robin sort of thing where you're all kind of playing together, but you don't play together on a regular basis.
And what we used to say to each other is you can play any note you want as long as it's the right one. And what we meant by that was if you're listening and if you're in the moment, you are at liberty to do whatever you like, because it shows that you are part of the kind of blossoming, organic, generative thing that's happening. And when I hear you talking about the Holy Spirit and our interaction with it, that's the image that I have. It invites us to join in with whatever note we want, as long as we're demonstrating that we're listening and we're willing to play along. So I just, I'm really loving where this conversation is going. I'm learning a lot.
SCHLUMPF: Well, and I'm thinking like, what does it say about me that actually the third person of the Trinity is the one that speaks to me the most. So I don't know, I'm not a musician, but maybe do have anarchist tendencies, so maybe that's it. But I guess for me, and it's not that Jesus Christ is a historical who is God and God the Creator don't speak to me. But the Holy Spirit is the one who’s evident in my everyday life. So that's to me even more concrete than someone who lived and died 2,000-some years ago, even though his presence is still real to me in other ways or to a creator God that I haven't, you know, met on this earth, really, except through God's creation. So I think the idea, for a lack of metaphors, is actually a plus for me because there's that, as you mentioned in your column, Dan, that potential for female images or metaphors. But again, it's the concreteness of experiencing the Spirit's work in my own life, in the life of people I know and seeing God's presence in the world through the Spirit’s moving.
I grew up in a church that very much emphasized Pentecost as the big celebration. Easter was obviously the main one, but Pentecost was a close second. I was never involved in charismatic groups per se, but kind of spirituality speaks to me in some ways. So I don't know, maybe I'm the more unique, not typical, Catholic or something. But I think there's a lot of potential there for us if we embrace that kind of spirituality to speak to people who, for whom maybe some of these other ways of imagining God don't speak to them, like young people.
HORAN: Yeah, I love that. I was thinking about that as well. And people who've read my writings, have heard me speak before, know that I am not at all pessimistic about Generation Z. I, I think, folks, the age of both of your kids they have a lot to teach us. And you know this probably better than I do. It's probably frustrating, too, at times as a parent in a way that it isn't for me as an educator or as a pastoral minister.
To your point, Heidi, I think, you know, I used to think like a lot of people, maybe twenty years ago, that this expression that really became popular in the Nineties, spiritual but not religious, was somehow a bad thing, right? There is this rise in institutional disaffiliation. We could think of Robert Putnam's famous book Bowling Alone. So there was a secular social aspect to this. I think it's only gotten in some ways heightened by advances in social media technology and that kind of thing.
Nevertheless, something that I see in young people and not-so-young people alike, regardless of their affiliation with the religious institution, though they are people of conviction, if they are people of humanism, like a humanistic openness to the other, there is an awareness of what you're describing. There's an awareness of the creativity of what we as Christian believers might call the Holy Spirit that I'm comfortable as a scholar, spirituality talking at times as the more-than. When you realize that we are more than the sum of our parts, or there's more than meets the eye, or when you're sitting there in an Irish session at a pub and you hear these musicians in the round robin way that David's talking about, or you go to a jazz performance or you're jamming in the garage with some friends, musically, that is the more-than, there’s, what is resulting in that sound is more than the sum of your individual presences and skills and musical actions.
But I also think it's true that there's a more-than in the church that has been suppressed. I think sometimes it's conscious and I think sometimes it's more tacit or implied. And what I'm talking about is the church's doctrine of the census fidelium, which is the sense of the faithful, and the condition of the possibility of the sense of the faithful, which is known as census fide.
Those terms get confused sometimes ‘cause they sound similar, and they have similar roots. But I hope I'm not boring people with a little theology lecture here, but census fide means the sense of faith. It is a capacity, it is a, like our capacity to hear or to see or to smell or to taste. Every baptized Christian has a census fide, the capacity to be aware of God's revelation, to perceive it, to recognize it. And it is that capacity in all of us, the faithful, to recognize the Spirit in the world. And so, Heidi, to your point, I would say you might have a fairly well, a tuned-up, census fide, which is wonderful. Right. And then the census fidelium is the collective, it's the jam session of all of us with the census fide, attuned to the Spirit’s calling and guidance and inspiration, receiving, as it were, God's gift of self, God's self-communication as Spirit.
And so there's a role that the whole faithful play in the development of doctrine, for instance, in, in the life of the church, in pastoral outreach and concern and so forth. So, I think that there are so many layers in which a more robust pneumatology, that's just the technical jargon in theology to talk about studying the Holy Spirit, I think we suffer because of the lack of that. Some of it, I think, is rooted, as I mentioned, in fear and the need for control, but some of it, I think, is just missed opportunities of connecting with young people and people who are disaffiliated, I think, of connecting what is inherently part of our identity as Christian believers through baptism that we, we are already united to one another in the spirit. We just pretend like we're not.
DAULT: So we've joked earlier in the conversation about moving from Holy Spirit, atheism or agnosticism to Holy Spirit anarchy. And then Heidi, you were saying maybe the lack of metaphors is a good thing, because maybe not naming it too much really leaves things open. As we were having all of that discussion, I thought a lot about my first philosophy teacher, a guy by the name of Rick Roderick at Duke University, and this class that I took with him literally changed my life and my intellectual trajectory.
But towards the end, after he had walked us patiently through the sort of development of the history of Western philosophy, he began to look towards the future and he said, I can't tell you what the next thing looks like, but the word that I have for it is anarchy. Because to us, that's the only word that we have that doesn't talk about a kind of determined future or a kind of set future, but rather something that is open and is still being built from the bottom up. And that's what I'm hearing in this conversation when we're talking about Holy Spirit anarchy, we're not talking about chaos, but instead we're talking about just as you were saying, Dan, really listening to the spirit of, and the voices of the people who are on the margins, the people that we encounter every day, not necessarily the leadership, but rather the people that are really trying to find God and God's love in their daily lives. And so I'm very excited by what the possibilities are, even if I can't name what's next and we have to call it something like anarchy.
HORAN: Well, and I think you're hitting the nail on the head tapping into that fear, right? People hear anarchy, they get scared. What the term anarchy suggests as well is we can't be in control of everything, and that's the thing, is we are not actually in control. And so when we come to accept that, the question is, well, who is in control? Right? If we recognize that God's presence draws near to us, Saint Augustine says God is the one closer to us than we are to ourselves. That's an act of the Spirit, and I just wanna go back to sacred anarchy is at the core of our Christian and our Jewish siblings’ tradition.
It goes back to Genesis 1, in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, there was the tohu wa-bohu in Hebrew, the disorder, the chaos, the anarchy, and it was the ruah elohim, the breath, the spirit of God that draws near to that chaos, brings order, brings sensibility, brings a future that is not able to be forecasted, and in God's working with that chaos, that anarchy, then all of a sudden, evening came and morning followed, evening came and morning followed.
SCHLUMPF: Well, it’s funny, we all have, the three of us at least, have so much enthusiasm to talk about this. We should do topics like this more often. I guess to elaborate on what I said before, too, is like it dawns on me that the Holy Spirit is the way I experience God, like working through other people, and through me, too. So it's this experience of God in people, and I'm not equating people to God. I'm just saying that God works through people. So like when I've had hard times in my life and people have been there and literally saved me, that's God working through them. And the God that I think of is not God, the Father of Jesus Christ, but the Holy Spirit.
So it's very tangible for me and very positive. And so to me seems like maybe we've discovered this key or something about how we're going to, we can help move the church forward. I do know that another way that the Holy Spirit has been discussed a lot recently is with this whole idea of synodality in the church and that the spirit is guiding it and that it's really the Holy Spirit and we need to trust the Holy Spirit.
And so, maybe there's some connection there with synodality and a rise to this third person in the Trinity because of Dan's five columns is now gonna become like the God. They're gonna be doing columns, a thousand years from now about how there's not enough, there's too much emphasis on the third person of the Trinity.
HORAN: Yeah. As a note to the future columnist who has that problem, I envy you. That's, that's great. I mean, the thing I would say is about synodality, I think that's exactly right. And maybe just to dovetail to our previous segment about Bishop Paprocki, and his, he's a man that's very afraid. I mean, that's, that would be my assessment. To operate the way he has in public settings and with these kind of internal debates, they're debates too kind, these attacks and accusations leveled against brother bishops and cardinals, and even the pope himself. I, that to me screams of a fearfulness and a fear of losing control, that he's not in power, he's not relevant, he's not significant. He can't control even his own experience of God, which anyone who tries to control an experience of God is missing the point. Right. I think St. Augustine would make that point very clear. And so I think, this is also why I think there's the same types of folks tend to be really resistant to the synodal process, right.
And my prayer for them is “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” come, you know, creator Spirit, come Holy Spirit, renew the face of the earth, renew the face of the church. And may we be open to what you're saying, Heidi, you know, recognizing the Spirit's work in other people. I mean, it redounds to so many possibilities.
I think of, especially as David, you were saying, you know, the voices of the marginalized, those who are put to the periphery of our church and of our world. Maybe we need to hear, as Heidi was saying, not maybe, we do need to listen. Those of us who are in positions of authority and leadership in the church and those who have greater authority, have all the more responsibility to hear how the Spirit’s speaking through their experiences.
DAULT: Well, dear listeners, we know that the Spirit has been working in your lives just as it has been working in ours, and if we are in any way able to help you hear and respond to that a little better, then our work is really where we want it to be. We are praying for you, and we ask that you be praying for us.
Know that we are praying together that the Spirit would work in our world to bring about more hospitality, more peace. And more connection. And thank you for connecting with us here on the program today. For Father Dan and for Heidi, you've been listening to The Francis Effect, and we'll be back in just a couple of weeks.