Fintan O’Toole is a terrific writer, and his We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland is a remarkable chronicle of the economic, political, cultural, and religious transformation of his native country over the six decades since his birth in 1958. O’Toole has been a prominent journalist, drama critic, and prolific author for years, and now splits his time between Dublin and Princeton University. Readers are lucky that he also writes—with an acute eye for the absurdist political theater of Donald J. Trump and his devoted followers—about American politics for the New York Review of Books.

In We Don’t Know Ourselves, O’Toole examines the fitful way in which Ireland eventually embraced a secular liberal modernity. Over his lifetime, Ireland evolved from a rural agricultural economy to a modern industrialized and technological one. Educational institutions that were once controlled by the Church were eventually secularized. Meritocracy increasingly replaced hierarchy and tradition. Turning its eyes outward, Ireland first joined the European Economic Community and then the European Union. A nation whose principal export for centuries had been its own people became a land welcoming to immigrants.    

The sixty years O’Toole writes about were in many ways a period of disorienting, sometimes anarchic change, as well as a shocking amount of political and economic corruption. This period of rapid change culminated in the internationalization of Ireland’s economy and—after countless revelations of the sexual and physical abuse of children—the complete collapse of the Catholic Church’s moral authority. On that score, O’Toole is perhaps a bit too sanguine about the new nonjudgmental moral dispensation, which he claims rests on “the recognition by most of the faithful that they were in fact much holier than their preachers, and that they had a clearer sense of right and wrong, a more honest and intimate sense of love and compassion and decency.” To be sure, Ireland is a more tolerant and open society than it was in O’Toole’s youth, a development much to be praised. But his assessment of the laity’s virtues, now that they have thrown off the Church’s yoke, is hard to reconcile with his principal contention that the Irish have always knowingly participated in the hypocrisies of both Church and state. He describes that attitude as “a genius for knowing and not knowing at the same time.” 

Nevertheless, what O’Toole has to say about traditional Irish Catholicism, especially its puritanical attitude toward sex, rings all too true. “When all sex is wrong, no kind of sex can be more wrong than any other,” he writes. “Everything is beyond the pale of discourse. Everything is out of bounds—so therefore there are no boundaries. Everything is unspeakable, so nothing is speakable. This is what created a perpetual open season for sexual predation of children.”

He is even shrewder in his analysis of the relationship between the Church and a modernizing Ireland when he describes John Paul II’s much-heralded 1979 pilgrimage to the island. The Ireland of O’Toole’s youth was a confessional state that boasted of the close bond between Celticism and Catholicism. As O’Toole notes, two-thirds of the Irish populace attended one or another of the pope’s outdoor Masses, a seeming tribute to the enduring strength and vitality of the Church. But things are not always as they appear. He praises John Paul II’s denunciation of the IRA’s terrorist violence then convulsing Northern Ireland, but he’s more skeptical of the pope’s warnings about Ireland’s possible loss of Catholic identity. “What he was afraid of was money and modernity,” O’Toole perceived. “The pope did not say directly that Ireland’s faithfulness was linked to its relative poverty, that the country was much more religious than the rest of western Europe because it was less developed economically. But he strongly implied it in his warnings about the coming times.” 

O’Toole, a former altar boy, was in his early twenties during the pope’s visit, and like many of his contemporaries he was captivated by contemporary youth culture and its embrace of sexual freedom, much of it imported from America. During John Paul II’s visit, he celebrated a Mass for youth in Galway, where he was treated like a rock star. At one point, the youthful crowd cheered the pope for fourteen uninterrupted minutes, a demonstration O’Toole was initially confounded by. “He was trapped in a feedback loop of adoration where every movement he made to signal that he was about to continue his sermon was received as if he were conducting the crowd.” The cheering only subsided after the crowd was sternly told that “[t]he Holy Father has not finished his sermon.” It was only years later that O’Toole recognized what had brought about such fervent emotion. “The crowd was not reveling in piety. It was reveling in itself, in its own youth and energy and unbounded vigor. It was taking over, inserting itself into the event, insisting on its own anarchic presence. It did not know or care about what it was actually doing; shutting the pope up.” 

That might seem like a tough judgment, but given the subsequent de-churching of O’Toole’s generation, it’s probably a fair one. Across his pontificate, John Paul’s famous World Youth Days brought together millions of young people. Those “Catholic Woodstocks” were often heralded as harbingers of a rebirth of faith among alienated youth, a rebirth that now appears to have been a stillbirth. I remember the extraordinary hype given to World Youth Day in 1993 in Denver, where more than half a million pilgrims gathered to see and hear John Paul II. Even twenty-five years later, papal biographer George Weigel insisted on calling the event “a turning point in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States,” evident in what he judged to be “the living parts of the Church.” 

But as O’Toole notes, it is not always clear what motivates those in attendance at such events, or how they understand the experience. If he is right, the young people in Galway that day felt themselves to be at the edge of a wave of change that would carry them into a future very different from the past. By a similar measure, the turning point Weigel perceived seems to have set the U.S. Church in an unanticipated direction. One in every three Americans baptized as Catholics has left the Church. Vocations have plummeted. In many dioceses, parishes continue to close. Catholic liberals and Catholic conservatives have dueling explanations for this exodus; one pushes for more reform while the other preaches retrenchment. As a fellow baby boomer, I find O’Toole’s suggestion that the Galway crowd was “insisting on its own anarchic presence” to be persuasive. Much of the experience of coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s was anarchic, and often found expression in mass celebratory gatherings. Those events, however, rarely helped to revitalize institutions, like the family and religion, that have traditionally been the glue that held a society together. 

“The real effect of the loss of Church authority was that there was no deeply rooted civic morality to take its place,” O’Toole writes about the endemic political and economic corruption that has rocked Ireland in recent decades. “The Irish had been taught for generations to identify morality with religion, and a very narrow kind of religion at that. Morality was about what happened in bedrooms, not boardrooms. Now, instead of moving from one sphere to the other, it seemed to be lost somewhere in between.” This raises an awkward question: Now that we’ve given up on legislating morality in the bedroom, do we still have the ability to legislate it anywhere else? Our anarchic politics and the grotesque inequalities of our economic and legal systems seem to be telling us we don’t. The moral autonomy we now concede to the adulterer and the “ethically polyamorous” is becoming harder to deny to the avaricious billionaire. In addition to its rigorous sexual rules, the medieval Church also had sumptuary laws restricting extravagant spending and consumption. Needless to say, neither set of prohibitions was strictly observed. But perhaps these prohibitions expressed a keener understanding of human nature and social reality than the one that prevails in our emancipated age.  

On November 27, 1970, in front of a sparsely attended subcommittee hearing of the all-important Senate Committee on Appropriations, J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime head of the FBI, testified in support of his request for an extra $14.5 million in funding. Buried within his twenty-seven-minute statement, which painted a grim picture of an agency overwhelmed by domestic terrorist plots, was a key revelation that would send the press into a frenzy within hours. 

One of the most pressing threats, Hoover warned, came from a “militant group” of “Catholic priests and nuns, teachers, students, and former students” opposed to the war in Vietnam. He claimed they were committing “acts of violence” in protest. “The principal leaders of this group,” he continued, “are Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Catholic priests who are currently incarcerated…for their participation in the destruction of Selective Service Records in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1968.” According to Hoover, the Berrigans’ group was planning “to blow up electrical conduits and steam pipes serving the Washington, D.C. area,” and was also “concocting a scheme to kidnap a highly placed Government official.” 

After he concluded his testimony, Hoover’s aides distributed dozens of printed copies of his statement to congressional reporters. By then, he’d reigned over the FBI for nearly half a century, building it up from a nondescript, toothless government agency into a mammoth shadow institution, one that had infiltrated virtually every realm of civil society. Hoover masterfully worked the media for the Bureau’s ends—and on occasion, for his own personal agenda. The next morning, seemingly on cue, the New York Times ran a front-page story titled, “F.B.I. Reports Plot by Antiwar Group to Kidnap U.S. Aide.” Countless newspapers reported the story that day as the hysteria-fueled rumors about the possible target of the radical Catholics’ conspiracy. The morbid intrigue must have delighted Hoover, whose request for additional funds sailed through the approval process. 

Within months, the Berrigans’ “target” would be disclosed to the American public: Henry Kissinger. Then serving as President Nixon’s national security advisor, Kissinger—who died on November 29, 2023—had risen in just two years from an obscure, albeit respected foreign-policy academic advising Nelson Rockefeller’s floundering 1968 presidential campaign to one of the most powerful men in the country. And while the world wouldn’t learn the full scope of Kissinger’s unilateral authority for decades (we probably still don’t have a complete picture of it), it was well known that he exercised considerable autonomy in directing American violence in southeast Asia. 

Hoover’s announcement marked the start of an important—and now largely forgotten—episode that shaped the trajectory of both antiwar politics and twentieth-century Catholic politics for years to come. The Harrisburg Seven trial revealed the depth of the federal government’s commitment to suppressing the antiwar effort. But it also gave the Berrigans and their movement of nonviolent civil disobedience their most visible platform, introducing millions of Americans to their unique mode of political struggle. As American foreign-policy institutions progressively absorbed the ethos of permanent military adventurism, as symbolized by Kissinger, the Berrigans’ lessons never faded from relevance. Indeed, they’re arguably more important today than ever before.

The Berrigan brothers’ idiosyncratic engagement with the world bucked the norms of both the institutional Church and American society. In 1965, Daniel’s antiwar advocacy landed him in South America, where he had been sent for three months into quasi-exile by Cardinal Francis Spellman, who served as archbishop of New York from 1939 until his death in 1967. Politically, the Berrigans rejected the violent practices espoused by certain segments of the New Left, such as the Weather Underground, and opted instead for methods of nonviolent civil disobedience.

The Berrigans situated themselves in a long lineage of Catholic activists fighting injustice, a tradition dating back to Jesus Christ himself. Figures such as Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton served as more immediate inspirations, though the Berrigans’ willingness to break into draft-board offices and destroy draft files alienated some of the more orthodox pacifists affiliated with the Catholic Worker movement. Still, they all saw themselves as allies with the same purpose—halting the American-led slaughter of civilians in Southeast Asia.

The antiwar priests had been targets of the FBI since the mid-1960s—and especially since their first draft-board raid in 1967. The Baltimore Four, led by Philip that October, brought the national spotlight onto this insurgent strand of Catholic antiwar activism. They justified their call for an immediate end to American involvement in Vietnam by appealing to the gospels and to the life of Jesus Christ. In May of 1968, both brothers raided another draft-board office in Catonsville, Maryland. Their trials dragged on for nearly two years, and they were finally set to begin their sentences on April 9, 1970. But on that day, neither reported to prison. 

In the following weeks, hordes of FBI agents tried to track the priests down. Philip would be caught after twelve days, but his older brother Daniel continued to evade authorities for months. He would surface at antiwar rallies and meetings across the Northeast, occasionally even stopping by to deliver a sermon at a church with a sympathetic pastor. A vast network of antiwar advocates, student activists, academics, and clergy members sheltered him from FBI detection. On multiple occasions, federal agents narrowly missed Berrigan, sometimes by just a few minutes.

When he appeared in public, he would regularly mock the FBI for its incompetence. For its part, the FBI committed hundreds of agents to chase him down, even vaulting him into the Bureau’s list of the ten most-wanted fugitives. News of the priest’s daring bolstered the Berrigans’ notoriety—and, in the process, increased awareness of the Catholic antiwar cause. But to the famously thin-skinned Hoover, Daniel and his band of renegade Catholics were humiliating the FBI. Hoover, growing old and more paranoid than ever about his slipping power, felt he needed to take drastic action to reassert his authority.  

In his attempt to take down the Catholic Left, Hoover turned to a tried-and-true strategy: he deployed a network of informants to infiltrate and gather intel on the group, with the hopes of turning up incriminating information. Philip, who originally began his sentence in 1970 at a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, began smuggling letters in and out of the prison through another inmate named Boyd Douglas, who was allowed to exit the prison to take classes at Bucknell University. Unbeknownst to Philip, Boyd was cooperating with federal authorities, copying and forwarding every letter directly to the FBI.   

Most letters from Philip were innocuous love notes to a fellow Catholic activist, Sr. Elizabeth McAlister. Philip and Elizabeth had fallen in love and secretly deemed themselves married in 1969. (After the trial revealed their relationship, Philip left the priesthood and Elizabeth her religious community in order to start a family, while devoting their lives to social and political activism.) But in one letter to Philip, Elizabeth mentioned a plan “to kidnap—in our terminology make a citizen’s arrest—someone like Henry Kissinger.” Kissinger would be a perfect target given “his influence as a policy maker,” but the fact that he wasn’t an official cabinet member meant that he’d be less protected than others. Conveniently, he was a notorious playboy, who often eschewed security in his off hours. Kissinger was, in Elizabeth’s words, “anxious to have unguarded moments where he could carry on his private affairs—literally & figuratively.” The goal of a citizen’s arrest was simple: “To issue a set of demands, e.g. cessation of [the] use of B 52s over N. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, & release of political prisoners.”

Kissinger’s national prominence goes unmentioned in Elizabeth’s letter, but it’s critical for understanding his place in the imagination of the Catholic Left. In 1970, Kissinger wasn’t merely an influential policymaker or some anonymous D.C. bureaucrat. Within weeks of assuming his post in the Nixon administration, he graced the cover of Time magazine—where he’d appear fourteen more times before leaving the government. He vigorously cultivated relationships with journalists across the country, spinning stories at all hours of the day and night, charming pundits, and strategically leaking information to ensure his name remained in the news. His romantic exploits became regular tabloid fodder, so much so that by late 1970, Kissinger was virtually a household name.

For antiwar activists, Kissinger’s name was synonymous with the American-led destruction in Southeast Asia—and more broadly, with our nation’s imperial bloodlust. Many saw his ascent as having codified the U.S. government’s willingness to commit mass murder in pursuit of its “national interest.” A figure like Kissinger roused the consciences of the Catholic Left, which drew attention to the suffering of civilians in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—as well as to the poor in this country, whose needs were being neglected in favor of massive war investments.

Years later, Philip would write about Kissinger with searing judgment: “Kissinger strutted and fretted his bloody hour. No one could stop him. He wasn’t accountable to the American or Vietnamese people. He had no respect for international law, or the law of God. We were merely talking about one way to hold him accountable for his crimes against humanity.”

Hoover’s decision to disclose the Catholic activists’ plot at the appropriations subcommittee hearing incensed his subordinates. They knew that the federal government didn’t have enough evidence of a concrete conspiracy, but given Hoover’s reckless public announcement, they’d have no choice but to charge the group. On January 12, 1971, a month and a half after Hoover’s subcommittee testimony, Attorney General John Mitchell announced the indictment of six activists, including Philip and Elizabeth (Daniel was named as an unindicted coconspirator). In the coming months, two more activists would be added to the indictment, though one of them would soon be removed, leaving the final group at seven. 

The antiwar movement responded with force to the Harrisburg Seven indictment. It quickly became a cause célèbre of the American liberal left. The notion that a group of peaceful Catholic activists conspired to bomb government buildings and kidnap a member of the Nixon administration struck many Americans as absurd, even if they weren’t necessarily sympathetic to the antiwar effort. But the sensationalism of the charges made the Harrisburg Seven case a fixture across news programs and newspapers throughout the early 1970s. 

With little evidence of a firm conspiracy in hand, federal prosecutors embarked on a fishing expedition for additional proof to substantiate their charges, issuing subpoenas to anyone with the slightest connection to the Catholic resistance network. But these efforts would ultimately fall short: by the time the trial commenced in the spring of 1972, the Department of Justice couldn’t make a convincing case that the conspiracy existed in any real sense. The only evidence in their possession was the intercepted letter, coupled with the word of Boyd Douglas—and the latter quickly proved to be unreliable, as his testimony completely unraveled under the cross-examination of the defense team.

The trial ended in a hung jury on all major charges. Only Elizabeth and Philip received minor convictions for smuggling letters into and out of prison, but even those would be dropped upon appeal. All major news outlets covered the trial closely, but the press’s fascination with the Catholic resistance quickly fizzled out after the verdict was announced. Soon, the entire ordeal—particularly the absurd notion of “kidnapping Henry Kissinger”—became a punchline. Kissinger himself never seemed to take any threat to his safety seriously. Upon hearing about the plot, he remarked to the press that “sex-starved nuns” were after him, a comment for which he was later forced to apologize.

The Catholic Left never coalesced into any organization, nor did it ever enjoy much support from mainstream Catholic institutions. In its heyday, it boasted several thousand committed activists, a minuscule minority among the tens of millions of Catholic Americans, many of whom felt little sympathy for the subversive activities led by the Berrigans. But even if most Catholics didn’t approve of draft-board raids, no one could deny the courage and conviction of the Catholic Left. They compelled the nation to confront the violent inhumanity at the core of the U.S. campaign in Southeast Asia. They laid bare the real stakes—political, social, and theological—of America’s military adventurism.

But the Catholic Left’s gifts to the antiwar movement went beyond mere discourse and consciousness. Its practices of direct action inspired dozens of draft raids throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Together, these destroyed hundreds of thousands of draft files, sabotaging the bureaucratic administration of the war. Perhaps most significantly, the organizers of the 1971 Media, Pennsylvania, FBI burglary drew directly from the Berrigans and the Catholic Left. The group cited the Berrigans as an influence when they broke into an FBI office in Media and stole more than a thousand classified FBI files. The files would soon be published by the Washington Post, and divulged some of the Bureau’s most intensely guarded secrets, among them the infamous COINTELPRO program. The fallout of the Media burglary led to major reforms within the institution, and marked one of the most embarrassing and consequential episodes in FBI history.

Kissinger’s vision of America and its role in the world triumphed through the end of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. That vision gives our nation license to commit wanton violence in the name of “realpolitik,” no matter how many thousands of innocent civilians must be butchered for its ends. The right of the United States to kill people in faraway lands, often secretly, in pursuit of national security is a hallmark of Kissinger’s America, and it endures as a key principle of the American foreign-policy consensus today. 

The Berrigans’ Catholic Left understood this principle. They saw the ways in which both Democrats and Republicans reproduced war, and they saw that, in this sense, the American electoral system was largely immune to any mass political pressure. For them, nonviolent direct action became an important mode of democratic resistance, circumventing the institutions captured by the war machine and directly targeting the operational sources of the war. Even more, their resistance grounded itself in a mutually reinforcing relationship between faith and political action: faith supplies an inexhaustible reserve of conviction and hope, while political action puts central commitments of Christian faith into practice. 

Today, bombs rain down on a captive population in Gaza. At least twenty-five thousand Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children. Despite unprecedented demonstrations against the slaughter and an outpouring of public pressure on elected officials, Washington remains locked into its present course of action—defending and funding war crimes on a massive scale. Our nation’s foreign-policy decision-making, soaked in Kissingerian realism, seems to require this massacre of civilians, no matter our rhetorical commitments to human rights.

As millions mobilize against the ongoing bloodshed, they have turned to the methods the Berrigans and their allies used: nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience. And activists have yoked their protests to Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faith traditions (among others) in powerful and fascinating ways. These antiwar protesters are contesting Kissinger’s false vision of America’s rightful place in the world. Even if most of them couldn’t tell you who the Berrigan brothers were, the Catholic Left’s shadow looms large in this struggle.  

Six months out from the second assembly of the Synod on synodality, two issues continue to dominate the discourse: Fiducia supplicans, the document on blessings for “irregular” and same-sex couples issued by the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith in December, and the continuing tensions between the Vatican and the German Synod.

Of course, the synodal process itself is at the center of both issues. But there’s a particular intensity surrounding the German Synod, dating prior to Francis opening the global “synodal process” in 2021; Germany has the most advanced national synodal experience, has developed the most organized synodal reaction to the abuse crisis, and has generated the most concern among and warnings from both the Vatican and the pope himself, along with a series of outright scoldings. 

The most recent of these is a February 16 letter signed by Secretary of State Parolin and Cardinals Victor Manuel Fernández (prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) and Robert Prevost (prefect of the Dicastery for the Bishops). They asked the German bishops’ conference (whose assembly took place from February 19 to 22) to postpone their vote on the creation of the new “synodal council” for the Catholic Church in Germany, an institution in which bishops and laypeople for the first time would share power. The cardinals stated that this is essentially contrary to canon law. Therefore, a decision adopted by the bishops’ conference on such a “synodal council” would also be null and void, because it would have no authority to approve its statute.

It seems that this letter was sent with the knowledge and consent of the pope. Francis’s worries about the German Synod go back to 2019, but now the Catholic Church in Germany has completed its “synodal path”—the conclusion of which sets into motion precisely the “synodal councils” at the center of the current tension. In a November 2023 letter to four dissenting women members of the German synod, Francis wrote that the new structure “cannot be harmonized with the sacramental structure of the Catholic Church.” The leaders of the episcopal component of the German synod and of the lay Central Committee of German Catholics (ZdK) deny the charges. For now, the German bishops have agreed to postpone the vote and the implementation of the new synodal council. Representatives of the German bishops’ conference and the Curia will likely meet in Rome sometime in March for talks. 

Call it a suspension—not a solution. There are significant issues at play here.

One of those is terminology. The majority of German bishops and the ZdK maintain that the term “synodal council” is compatible with what Pope Francis allowed in 2020 in the Amazon region with the creation of a permanent “ecclesial conference” consisting of laypeople, religious, priests, and bishops. But there’s a reason why Francis trusts Latin Americans with an institution that on paper does not look substantially different from the German “synodal council.” Words might mean different things in different ecclesial systems and cultures across the global Church. In Germany, the notion of “co-responsibility” is something closer to a democratic idea of decision-making and decision-taking processes, with bishops and laypeople participating at the same level. In other parts of the world, that’s not necessarily so. Pope Francis, Cardinal Fernandez, and Cardinal Prevost (an American Augustinian who spent a decade as a bishop in Peru before his appointment in the Vatican in January 2023) are more familiar with the ecclesial context of Latin America—and somewhat distanced from the German theology that was prevalent on the continent immediately after Vatican II and that has shaped the German synod.

The second reason is the participants in this drama. The absence of the leaders of Rome’s Synod Secretariat—Cardinals Mario Grech and Jean-Claude Hollerich especially—is not really a problem; it makes sense in order to keep the Synod super partes and to preserve its relative “freedom.” But there remains an asymmetry between the German synod and the Roman Curia. In Germany, leaders of the bishops’ conference and the laity argue, on the basis of theology, that change is needed (“change track for the future”). Rome, meanwhile, handles this as if the reform of the Curia of 2022 had no effect on the way it deals with the local churches. Francis has largely avoided a personal confrontation with the Germans, which leaves things to Cardinal Parolin, functionally the prime minister of the Holy See and its top diplomat, whose argument is almost by default rooted in canon law. Cardinals Fernandez and Prevost come from a pastoral background that doesn’t translate well to Germany.

The most prominent German-speaking prelates cautioning the German synod against the danger of schism are Cardinals Walter Kasper and Christoph Schönborn; both are eminent theologians, one is retired (Kasper) and the other is soon to be (Schönborn), and neither is in Rome. There seems to be no prelate at the Vatican who can speak to the Germans on the same theological level that Cardinal Ratzinger or Cardinal Mueller did, which is a problem because where Germany is concerned it cannot help but be about theology. Also, it’s not a coincidence that this is unfolding at the same time many African countries are rejecting Fiducia supplicans. Can a Vatican with a Latin American leadership mediate the differences between Germany and Africa? With its attention focused on stopping the former’s “synodal council,” Rome is less able to deal with the latter’s response to Fiducia supplicans. Yet Africa (and Latin America) can hew to their specific paths on synodal issues, while Germany may not. 

The third is the next papal conclave. Already, the vultures are beginning to circle around this pontificate (as Robert Mickens put it). A second version of the “Demos” memorandum of 2022 (the author of which was later revealed to be Cardinal George Pell) was published on February 29; it’s not just a wishlist of the qualities of the next pope, but also a strong criticism of the current one on a range of issues (administrative, theological, and political). Francis’s opposition is openly preparing for the next conclave, and they seem ready to take bold, and possibly preemptive and unprecedented, action to elect a successor very different from Bergoglio, perhaps in fast-tracked fashion. This may be a good reason to slow down the pace of meetings leading to the next conclave, as Church historian Alberto Melloni recently argued.

Regardless, when that day comes, the main issue is likely to be the continuation of the Synod—or its reversal. Inasmuch as it’s a recapitulation of Francis’s pontificate (both its strengths and weaknesses), the Synod will play a role in determining who among the cardinalate may be considered on the various lists of papabile. Suffice to say it will not be like June 1963, when with the intent of continuing the work of Vatican II the cardinals selected Paul VI. Today, being on the side of synodality could be a handicap, not an asset. This dynamic, and not fears about the possibility of schism, may be the real reason for slowing down the German synod. It’s a way to strengthen synodality for the long run—and preserve what would be Francis’s legacy achievement. 

It happens twice a year, in March and in December, and somehow it always catches me off-guard. I’m talking about the unofficial Catholic ritual that I call Toxic Masculinity Sunday. Surely you’ve had this experience: You join the assembly to celebrate Mass in the midst of a penitential season, whether Advent or Lent. Mass begins with an invitation to rejoice and sing. These intimations of joy are stirring, inspiring. And then the celebrant wrinkles his nose and says something like, “I bet you’re wondering why I’m wearing all this pink.”

I’ve heard many versions of this routine on many Gaudete and Laetare Sundays. The near-universal urge to make an anxious joke about wearing pink vestments makes me wonder if our priests are really that hung up on gender, or if they just believe the rest of us are. “Whoa, what’s with the girl colors? I thought the priest was a man!” Is anyone really thinking that? Is any of us so fragile or so easily thrown for a loop that we can’t handle a change in chasuble?

I know it’s a joke. I think it’s meant to be self-deprecating. But what it is actually deprecating is femininity, or at least the cultural signifiers of femininity. And even in a Church that loves its gender binaries, this biannual disavowal of girl stuff feels gratuitously insulting to those of us who happen to be girls.

To be clear, my beef is with casual misogyny, not liturgical pedantry. I love to consult the GIRM as much as the next gal. So I’ll allow a fussy “it’s not pink, it’s rose” if it comes without the “girls are gross” subtext. It’s just that it hardly ever does. And while we’re consulting the regulations, Father, it says here, “The color rose may be used, where it is the practice”—“may,” not “must.” If you really find it so uncomfortable, you can just stick with the violet vestments. That would be a shame, though, because I don’t want you to give up on liturgical variety, not even during Lent. I just want you to give up hating on pink and making a joke of the feminine qualities it is imagined to represent.

Last December, when we arrived at church on Gaudete Sunday, my six-year-old son lit up, so to speak, when he saw the lighted candles on the Advent wreath in front of us. “We get to light the pink candle today!” he crowed. He knew it meant we were one week closer to Christmas. He understood the color as a sign of joyful hope. So what did he make of it when, ten minutes later, the celebrant launched into his traditional “Don’t you dare call it ‘pink’” routine?

I hope my son tuned it all out. I hope it didn’t steal his joy. I have to admit, it puts a dent in mine, to walk into Mass needing to hear a word that will rouse me and get jokey insults instead. I don’t even like “girly” stuff all that much. But I do like liturgy, and beauty, and centering joy, however briefly, in a season of gloom. And I like aspiring to be the community St. Paul describes, with neither Greek nor Jew, neither man nor woman, but all one in Christ Jesus—even if it’s only for an hour a week.

I am ready to give up fragile masculinity as a part of my Laetare Sunday experience. My brother priests, can I convince you to give it up too? I promise, no one thinks you look silly (or, at least, no more than you normally do). Femininity poses no threat to you. Embrace the wardrobe, be a sign of joy, and maybe you can help us all to see, in the sudden irruption of pink—or rose—a glimpse of the coming dawn of Easter, instead of just another reason to be afraid.

“I struggled with this text,” is a phrase I hear a lot in doctoral studies. From undergraduates to doctoral students, to “struggle” with the text often means to disagree with its arguments or to reject its method. What it almost never means for people with a certain type of pedigree, however, is “I did not understand this text.” As I read today’s Gospel, however, I must admit that I struggled. In the past, I might have been able to focus on the idea that what these passages are really about is God’s love and reminding us in Lent, a season of penance, that we are called to remember that God loves us. This year, however, I just could not shrug off the perplexing parts of this Gospel passage. 

Perhaps it is because the world in which these Gospel passages will be proclaimed this Laetare Sunday is one requiring of moral clarity. With what many understandably believe to be an active and highly visible genocide going on, a dramatic U.S. presidential election, and increasingly divisive leadership in our Church, the Good News feels, perhaps more than ever, ephemeral. In past years, I might have been able to understand that reading these passages during Lent allows us to think about our sins through “Easter eyes.” This year, however, I found myself bitter that the readings spoil the surprise. Jesus himself announces that the Son of Man will rise (John 13). What in past years seem like a “break” this year seem like a distraction. The scandal of the Resurrection, I must admit, feels blunted in these readings. In a time when most of us should be torn apart by how drastically we have failed, these readings just seem to jump too fast to love and forgiveness. 

One might think that everyone around Jesus realizes what is going on and they run to the safety of salvation. He just told them what they needed to do; why would they not? However, at the end of the Gospel of John, the book these passages are taken from, the Resurrection is anything but predictable. Despite the fact that Jesus says that he has come for them, that God loves them deeply, and that the Son of Man will rise, Mary Magdalene and the male disciples are still somehow shocked. Thomas, as we know, doubts so much that he must touch Jesus’ wounds (John 20). 

Read within this larger context, I was reminded of words that have echoed through my soul since the moment I read them. St. Bonaventure at the end of his Itinerarium writes, “Ask grace, not learning; desire, not intellect; the groaning of prayer and not diligent reading; the Bridegroom, not the academic teacher….not light, but the fire that inflames one totally and carries one into God through spiritual fervor and with the most burning affections.”

St. Bonaventure’s words reminded me that I should not look to gain from the Gospel a sense of clarity or self-assuredness. Indeed, the condition of the world around us should never allow that. The Gospel should seem stark, it should engage our whole person. God is a mystery and Jesus is a miracle worker in a world that has no time for mystery and no interest in miracles. As modern human beings, we seem to be enlightened past the age of mystery. It would make sense, then, that the Gospel, an invitation into the ineffable mystery of God, sometimes makes no sense.

This Laetare Sunday, then, I do want to focus on God’s love and my sins in light of God’s love, but not to the point of apathy, and instead to the point of further struggle. We should push ourselves to struggle in community with one another. We should struggle against oppression and marginalization of all people and struggle for those whose struggle is silenced or made to be invisible by social structures. I pray that I might struggle not only through frustration, but through action. That my struggle leads me deeper into God and that that depth only creates further struggle. That I am not complacent, that I do not look for learning over grace or a calming light over a fire that will move me. I want to struggle this Lenten season, recognizing that it is only in that struggle against personal and social sin where the Resurrection becomes truly shocking.