The Vatican said March 18 it had closed its embassy in Nicaragua after the country’s government proposed suspending diplomatic relations, the latest episode in a yearslong crackdown on the Catholic Church by the administration of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
The Vatican’s representative to Managua, Msgr. Marcel Diouf, also left the country March 17, bound for Costa Rica, a Vatican official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Vatican action came a week after the Nicaraguan government proposed suspending relations with the Holy See, and a year after Nicaragua forced the papal ambassador at the time to leave. It’s not clear what more the proposed suspension would entail in diplomatic terms.
Relations between the church and Ortega’s government have been deteriorating since 2018, when Nicaraguan authorities violently repressed anti-government protests.
Some Catholic leaders gave protesters shelter in their churches, and the church later tried to act as a mediator between the government and the political opposition.
Ortega branded Catholic figures he saw as sympathetic to the opposition as “terrorists” who had backed efforts to overthrow him. Dozens of religious figures were arrested or fled the country.
Two congregations of nuns, including from the Missionaries of Charity order founded by Mother Teresa, were expelled from Nicaragua last year.
Prominent Catholic Bishop Rolando Álvarez was sentenced to 26 years in prison last month after he refused to board an airplane that flew 222 dissidents and priests to exile in the United States. He also was stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship.
Pope Francis had remained largely silent on the issue, apparently not wanting to inflame tensions. But in a March 10 interview with Argentine media outlet Infobae, after Álvarez’s sentencing, he called Ortega’s government a “rude dictatorship” comparable to Hitler’s that was led by an “unbalanced” president.
According to Vatican News, the care of the Vatican’s embassy, or nunciature, was entrusted to the Italian government, according to diplomatic conventions. The report said diplomats of the European Union, Germany, France and Italy gave Diouf, the chargé d’affaires, a farewell salute before he shuttered the diplomatic post and left.
During the farewell ceremony, Germany’s ambassador to Nicaragua, Christoph Bundscherer, expressed regret at the embassy’s closure and asked Diouf to share a message with Francis, according to a statement on the German Embassy’s Facebook page.
“Together with the Catholic Church, the representatives of the European Union in Nicaragua will also always defend the Christian values of freedom, tolerance and human dignity,” Bundscherer said, according to the statement.
The Nicaraguan government, which since September 2018 has banned all opposition demonstrations in the country, also restricted Catholic activities inside churches, including banning the traditional street processions that thousands of Nicaraguans used to celebrate in the lead up to Holy Week and Easter.
The restrictions forced church authorities to hold the Stations of the Cross procession on the grounds of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Managua, as they did March 17.
« Ted Lasso » showed up in our world at the perfect time. Ravaged as we were in August 2020 by a world pandemic, pervasive threats to democracy, painful racial reckonings and climate disaster, this sitcom had something of the Divine to show anyone really looking and listening. As the third season kicked off this week (March 15), it’s worth examining how this humble television show can help us learn a thing or two about who or what God is, and what our response might be in our bruised, blessed world.
Catholicism directs us to learn from the world of our senses and creative works — and « Ted Lasso » has much we can learn: true leadership, the importance of personhood, how to listen to children and the power of genuine forgiveness.
Leadership
If you Google « Ted Lasso » and leadership, you’ll see that entire MBAs appear to have been set up on the principles found in Ted’s coaching: curiosity, non-judgment, helping others, self-belief, sincere apologies and the importance of taking a stand against forces that destroy people and our battered planet.
It’s sobering to observe how different these messages are from the way too many yearning, broken people experience religion. The tagline from the second season of « Ted Lasso » was « Kindness makes a comeback. » Religion could learn a thing or two. It should just be a given that people of faith are curious, nonjudgmental, seek and draw out the best in people, apologize when they are in the wrong and take principled stands against corporations that poison the planet. But, alas.
Personhood
Just about every mainstream church today is feeling attendance-challenged. When I read religious articles bemoaning all those empty pews, the authors routinely say some version of « we need more young people, » or « we need more men, » or « we need to do a better job of reaching out to BIPOC or LGBTQ+ populations. » Here is a place where religious leaders really need to watch and learn from « Ted Lasso. »
Coach Lasso may well want more marquee footballers or more supportive fans. But he never puts that desire in such vague, impersonal ways. Lasso calls each person by their name, comes to know each person’s values and he engages from there. There’s a wonderful scene in one episode in which Ted enters AFC Richmond’s building and greets each person not only by their name, but with a question about something that matters to them. Being known by name and for who you really are is a gift. This is a truth that religious leaders must embrace: It feels good to be seen and called by our name. Churches don’t need more people, they need Rick and Rosie and Alex and Maya and Darlene; they need to know what makes those individuals glow and wither and aspire and despair and get back up again when their spirit has been crushed. « Ted Lasso » can help with that.
Listening to children
Jesus taught us to prioritize the little children. « Ted Lasso » can help us understand why.
We see this acutely in Roy Kent’s relationship with his niece Phoebe. Scenes between little Phoebe and her Uncle Roy are among my favorite in the entire series, and I almost always need a few Kleenexes in the seven or eight times I view each one. One key story arc in the first season is Roy Kent having to navigate the slowing down of his legendary soccer skills as he ages. He tells his girlfriend Keeley that he likes being the « Great Roy Kent, » and isn’t ready to be « some loser has-been called Roy » if he were to retire.
Keeley asks Phoebe to tell Uncle Roy who he is. I love that her succinct, heartfelt description of his essence is followed by a stadium of AFC Richmond fans cheering Roy Kent as he hobbles off the field after his final heroic play. Richmond loses that game, and the Great Roy Kent accepts retirement from the sport he loves, but little Phoebe leads the way in perceiving that Roy Kent is not just about what he does, but who he is: the gruff uncle who will play the Princess to her Dragon after an ice cream, and who she will be delighted to accompany to his podiatrist’s because she loves him. He is not what he does on the soccer pitch. He matters, period. That’s a gift that Phoebe gives both him and me.
Forgiveness
The final lesson religion (and I) should take from « Ted Lasso »: the muscularity of genuine forgiveness. Rebecca’s long silent walk in her Christian Louboutin stilettos to Ted’s office to confess her scheme was a viewers’ favorite among the scenes of the entire show. True forgiveness is life-changing, it’s transformative; it’s not about being a doormat. It’s a muscular, active act, not for the faint of heart.
A number of elements from the Rebecca-Ted forgiveness scene illustrate this. First, that long walk. We do not like silence, as a species, and our constant engagement with devices suggests we especially do not like the silence in our own heads and hearts. We may be apprehensive of what we’ll hear there, and so we crowd out the sounds of our own solitude. Rebecca takes the long walk from her office in the executive level to Ted’s office at the bottom of the building by herself, facing and replaying what she has put Ted and the team through in her quest for revenge on her awful ex-husband Rupert. Asking forgiveness doesn’t start by thinking of what the other person can give you, but of taking a realistic interior look at your own complicity and guilt. That is one of the most risky, courageous things a person can do. The second most risky, courageous thing a person can do is to fully and unconditionally offer the forgiveness asked of them, as we saw Ted do in response. Rebecca’s icy (wounded) British reserve is shattered by Ted’s forgiveness.
Having experienced the cleansing fire hose of forgiveness once, Rebecca understands there are more fractured relationships she has to mend, and she goes about doing it. Once she has started to repair her relationship with her assistant Higgins, she starts calling him by his first name, Leslie.
Her scars do not go away. She still tears up when she sees her ex and his new young wife and baby; later, we see that the scars of her childhood still linger in her adult relationship with her mother. But her own experiences of being forgiven animate many of her subsequent interactions with the team, and even her ex-husband. Rebecca and Ted’s forgiveness cycle is a vibrant illumination of one of Pope Francis’ contentions in Fratelli Tutti: » ‘Goodness is never weak but rather, shows its strength by refusing to take revenge’ [referencing his own earlier words]. … Those who truly forgive do not forget. Instead, they choose not to yield to the same destructive force that caused them so much suffering. They break the vicious circle; they halt the advance of the forces of destruction. »
Entire courses and seminars are being built around the wisdom of « Ted Lasso. » Read the books, take the workshops, but never lose the joy and the pathos of your own encounters in this fictional world. Religion will be better off for it.
The idea for this Catholic writer’s book came from a rabbi, which will not seem remarkable to readers who quickly notice Barbara Mahany’s eagerness to pay attention to everything the world offers up.
In The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text, set to release on March 21, she urges readers to be equally attentive so they will notice and fall in love with what she calls « God’s first sacred text » and what St. Augustine called the book of nature — the natural world in which we live. She argues our failure to be attentive is costing us a great deal, including experiences of the presence of the living God.
« Mine, » she writes, « is the God of sunrise and nightfall, the breath behind birdsong and breeze in the oaks. Mine is the God of a thousand voices, a thousand lights and gazillions of colors. Whether I notice or not, mine is the God who never hits pause when it comes to creation: inventing, reinventing, tweaking, editing, starting from scratch all over again, day after day after heavenly day. »
This God’s first sacred text, she insists, « needs no translation; it’s unfurled without words, composed in an alphabet of seashell and moonbeam, the flight of the birds and even the plundering of nests. »
Mahany, who has written for The Chicago Tribune for decades, writes in ways that are nearly as arresting as the book of nature she describes. She has no time for the pathetic excuses we have for missing what’s in nature’s book, the pages of which are all around us and free. She writes:
Ours now is a world lit up in digital glare. We stare into our phones instead of the stars, glued to our screens instead of the world in all its real-time rumblings and respirations. It’s an ecology of loss; we’re too often blind to creations. And the losses I worry about aren’t only the ones tabulated by climatologists, counted in species decline and extinctions, water rising and ice caps melting. The losses I tally are just as profound yet outside the bounds of measurable beauty: beauty, wonder, the wild, intimacy; knowing the world by the whorl of your fingertips, by the dew of the dawn under your toes. Most of all, there’s a slipping away of a palpable sense of the sacred. It needn’t be. It shouldn’t be.
Mahany asks readers to do something Buddhists have been urging the world to do for centuries: Pay attention, be mindful. In other words, walk neither on a city sidewalk nor on a path through the forest with your eyes focused on your smartphone. She issues a call to notice the sacred and the inexplicable all around. In some ways, it’s an echo of what Annie Dillard argued decades ago in her classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
However, unlike Dillard — whose considerable attention to the cruelty that can be found in nature sometimes leaves her slack-jawed with horror — Mahany leans toward beauty, intricacy, astonishing complexity. Yes, she certainly notes how, as she says, it all started 13.8 billion years ago with the violent Big Bang, « when untold numbers of bits — think heavenly cinders — kaboomed into the black canyon of space. » But her focus is much more on what she calls nature’s « endless bedazzlement. »
There’s a strange story in the Gospel of Mark (8:22-25) in which Jesus heals a blind man in two stages. After Jesus first spit on the man’s eyes and then asked him if he saw anything, the man’s response was: « I can see people, but they look like trees, walking. » So Jesus touched the man’s eyes again, at which point the man « looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. »
Mahany seems to be saying that many of us are half blind when it comes to reading the book of nature. The best we are able to do is misread what we’re seeing, just as the man being healed saw what looked like walking trees.
We need spiritual healing to be able to read God’s original scripture, of which we’re a part. Mahany wisely includes several references to the ways in which Indigenous peoples in North America have a better grasp of the nature of nature than do many of us who are descendants of European invaders who stole the land on which such people lived unmolested for centuries.
It’s common for Indigenous peoples to say that they belong to the land and are always and everywhere a part of nature, whereas many others hold to the imported idea that the land belongs to them — and they have the deeds to prove it.
That approach can prevent us from seeing the sacred, complex, beautiful, sometimes inexplicable nature of nature itself. As Mahany writes, « Peel back the wisdoms of East of West, plumb the canons of any civilization, listen to the thrum of Indigenous truth telling, and there you will find the spiritual practice of paying closest attention. On alert to the visible invisibility. »
Humanity once was gentle enough with the planet that Earth could recover pretty quickly whenever it felt some injury. But as Pope Francis wrote in his 2015 encyclical on the environment, « Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home, » Mother Earth « now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. »
Let’s listen to both Francis and Mahany, both of whom urge us to fall in love again with nature — not because nature is God (that’s pantheism) but because God is in all of nature (that’s panentheism).
« It’s ours to love, » she writes, « this Book of Nature offering page after page to pore over — this book with its infinite lessons, its thousand embraces. If only we put down our distractions and behold it — all of it, any of it. »
The church in Ireland is launching a Year for Vocations as it grapples with a steep decline in seminary numbers and with aging priests.
Focused on diocesan priesthood, the Year for Vocations opens April 30, on the 60th anniversary of St. Paul VI’s launching of the World Day of Prayer for Vocations in 1963. It will last until April 2024.
« Take the Risk for Christ » is the theme of the initiative, which was unveiled at the national seminary in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, March 7 by the Irish Bishops’ Council for Vocations.
It takes place as the Irish church’s 26 dioceses implement radical structural changes, including parish partnerships and enhanced roles for the laity, to offset the lack of priests.
« I suggest you look at your priest. He may be the last in a long line of resident pastors and may not be replaced, » Archbishop Francis Duffy told the congregation in St. Mary’s Church, Westport, in the Archdiocese of Tuam last July.
His stark warning was borne out by a survey published by the Association of Catholic Priests (ACP) last November that showed that a quarter of all priests currently serving in the Irish church are set to retire over the next 15 years.
The survey revealed that 547 of the 2,100 priests working in the Irish Church are aged between the ages of 61 and 75 and nearly 300 or 15% of working priests are 75 years old or older. The survey also showed that just 52 priests — or less than 2.5% of working priests — are younger than 40, and there are just 47 seminarians in St. Patrick’s College. In 1984, there were 171 ordinations in Ireland.
One of the factors that has contributed to the decline in vocations is the clerical sexual abuse scandals. It was publicly underscored recently when a rising political star of the Fianna Fáil party announced he was resigning his council seat to train as a priest. Thirty-year-old Councillor Mark Nestor said he first thought about priesthood in his late teens but was « put off by the various scandals involving the church in Ireland. »
« There are vocations in Ireland. God is constantly calling; it’s just that in the midst of the loudness of the alternative voices, God is being drowned out a bit at present, » Bishop Lawrence Duffy of the Irish bishops’ Council for Vocations, told OSV News.
Ordained in 1976, Bishop Duffy trained for priesthood at St. Patrick’s College Carlow, one of a string of seminaries across Ireland that no longer offers formation. « The decline has been gradual, from an exceptionally high level of priests historically to a level today that calls for urgent change, » he said.
He believes the church of the future « will be less clerical and less dependent on a priest » as the Irish church moves toward « greater lay leadership. » But he underlined, « To say that there are ‘no Irish priests’ is clearly not true. »
A case in point is the Redemptoris Mater Seminary in Dundalk, in the Archdiocese of Armagh, seat of the Primate of All Ireland and the place where St. Patrick is reputed to have built his first church. Last year the seminary, which was established in 2012 to form priests for the Neocatechumenal Way, announced it was building an extension to cater to a sustained growth in vocations.
So far four priests have been ordained from the seminary, and they are now serving in the parishes of the Archdiocese of Armagh and in the Diocese of Dromore. Martin Long, a spokesman for Armagh, told OSV News that another 16 men from six countries (Croatia, Italy, Malta, Poland, Spain and the U.S.) are currently studying for priesthood there.
A number of Irish dioceses have recruited priests from Africa and Asia to serve in their parishes in a bid to counter the collapse in priest numbers. In the Dioceses of Clogher, where Bishop Duffy serves, two priests from Nigeria are currently in parish ministry, out of a total of 48 priests serving in the diocese, several of whom are in their late 80s.
Polish priests are also playing a significant role in most dioceses. Father Stanislaw Hajkowski of the Society of Christ is coordinator of the Polish Chaplains in Ireland and rector of St. Audoen’s Church in the Archdiocese of Dublin.
He told OSV News that « at present eight priests are serving Polish communities in Dublin and are involved to a various degree in serving local Irish communities. » The total number of Polish priests serving in Ireland is 25.
According to Father Hajkowski, « Polish chaplains support Irish dioceses by providing pastoral care to Polish immigrants in the Polish language. » As many as 130,000 Poles are living in the Republic of Ireland and 20,000 in Northern Ireland. « Parents with children attending the Irish schools tend to participate in the life of the local parish more often but still come to the Polish chaplaincies for confessions and major feasts, » he explained.
« People really do value their local priest, » Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan, chair of the Council for Vocations highlighted in Maynooth March 7. The new vocations drive aims to tap into that goodwill.
Speaking to the Irish Independent at the national seminary in Maynooth, Bishop Cullinan acknowledged that it was « a battle » to promote priesthood in the wake of the church abuse scandals. But he added, « We believe in it and therefore we are going to promote it. »
