As we mark the national semiquincentennial on July 4, we might well reflect on Benjamin Franklin’s answer to Elizabeth Willing Powel, when the elderly sage left the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the Philadelphia matron demanded, “Well, Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic, or a monarchy?”

The Holy See has declared that, if the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) proceeds with the ordination of bishops in July without a papal mandate, those involved in these illicit ordinations are automatically (latae sententiae) excommunicated – that is, excommunicated by their own acts.

What can his fellow Catholics do for Jimmy Lai at the moment? We can hold him in prayer every day. We can urge the Administration to continue to press for Jimmy’s release and we can urge our representatives and senators to press the Administration to keep pressing the Chinese regime.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, it would do well to remember that the emblematic figure of the second half of the twentieth century had such high hopes for us: hopes that now seem a call to a national examination of conscience.

Participation in the “communion of saints” is one of the great gifts conferred in baptism. As I give thanks for the gift of my baptism seventy-five years ago, it is incorporation into this “great cloud of witnesses” (Hebrews 12:1) for which I am particularly grateful.

Permit the suggestion, Your Eminence, that the Church’s pastors should avoid causing further confusion (and, indeed, whatever suffering is caused by those confusions) by helping God’s people embrace the mysteries of faith in love, rather than by suggesting that what has been settled by divine revelation and the authoritative teaching of the Church (in the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis) is not, in fact, settled.

The Way of the Cross — and the third, seventh, and ninth stations in particular — has been an especially appropriate Lenten devotion this year. Every day, it seems, some new craziness erupts in the world, the country, or the Church. Every time we think we see rays of hope and possibility, we take another fall.

The strange, Donatist parallelism between the SSPX leadership and the German Synodal Path illustrates what’s come to be called the “horseshoe effect:” in a moment of cultural turbulence, social fragmentation, and political dysfunction like our own, the extremes of left and right bend toward each other rather than occupying two ends of a linear spectrum.

Lent thus reminds us that salvation history does not consist in humanity’s search for God, but in God’s entrance into history so that humanity may learn to take the same path into the future that God is taking.

John Allen was the best Anglophone Vaticanista ever, a man of great kindness who graciously helped everyone on that beat who had the sense to counsel with him.