Conclave Season

On Trusting God, Praying Like You Mean It, and Enjoying the Show

It’s Wednesday, but the family and I are driving north to Canada today, so I wanted to get this week’s newsletter out early. I’m making it free, because I don’t want to put papal musings behind a pay wall, but this is my work, as well as my apostolate, so if you enjoy reading these newsletters weekly, but haven’t yet upgraded your subscription to paid, I would be so grateful if you thought about doing so. Your $6 a month keeps these newsletters coming and my family’s lights on. It also will get you exclusive access to full subscriber only content—something that there will be a lot more of starting very soon (see below for the Chapman family’s big news).

I owe you a Q&A. I owe you a couple of Q&A’s, actually. But I am having a mighty hard time sitting down and writing about relics or singleness or any other topic, while no pope sits on the Chair or Peter.

Last week, The Pillar shared an interview with my beloved Bishop Erik Varden, and I shared it immediately on Instagram. I’ll share it again below. It is worth your time for many reasons, including his delicious line about how Catholics feel like a bunch of headless chickens right now. Which is exactly how it seems. We’re all running around in every possible direction, squawking about this Cardinal and that, unable to think about much else besides white smoke.

Apparently, this strikes some people as terrible. Yesterday, for example, Instagram offered up to me a completely random Thread from a Mormon mom, whom I don’t follow and who I’m sure is perfectly lovely, but who is also Very Concerned for Catholics. It must be a dreadful thing, she mused, to be Catholic and not have a seamless transition of power in the highest ranks of clergy like Mormons do.

Hah!

Friends, if you are not Catholic, do not worry about us. No matter how we are fussing and fretting on social media right now, we are fine! We are grand! This is our World Series, Super Bowl, and Kentucky Derby all rolled into one. The fussing and fretting are just part of the fun! Conclaves are, in the balance, the most terrifying, most exciting, most fascinating time in the Church’s life. There is no beating the drama, the humanity, and the intrigue of it all. The supernatural and the natural, the sacred and the profane, the Divine and the human are never more clearly enmeshed than in these days and weeks. We’re all on the edge of our seats wondering what the Holy Spirit will do. Who will He give us? Will he be a saint or a sinner? The pope we want or the pope we deserve? Will God’s mercy or God’s judgement be upon us when the white smoke goes up?

No one knows. And so we squawk, not knowing what else to do. We pray, too, At least some of us do. Probably not enough. But really, it’s all a fabulous reminder of how God is not someone we can control. He’s not a tame lion. And the Church He has established is not a tidy one. It’s messy—beautiful, but messy. In Heaven, the Church exists in all its glorious perfection. Here, on earth, however, it exists in human history—chaotic, surprising, tear-soaked human history, with all its shocking twists and ragged ends.

The Church is never more human than during these days of interregnum. It’s never more Divine either. The human bits stumble along, plotting and whispering and mis-stepping like we’re trying out a new dance, while the Divine bits hedge us in, setting limits on the damage we do, and somehow, someway, making something beautiful out of all that stumbling. Not something perfect. Not something evidently wonderful and grace-filled from the start. But always something beautiful, something that in the end God can use to lead the world closer to Him.

This does not mean I’m confident our next pope will be splendid. I’m no such thing. It's a silly, a-historic, and theologically inaccurate idea to think that the Cardinals always elect the right and best man for the job. They absolutely do not. See: Borgias. We might get another John Paul II before the weekend. Or we might get another Clement V, who obtained confessions by torture, financed wars with his personal fortune, and put his predecessors on trial for sodomy and heresy. We never know!

But we do know this. We know that good popes and bad popes come and go in the Church. We’ve had popes who heroically carried the sins and sorrows of the world on their shoulders, following the way of the Lord, whom they loved. And we’ve had popes who’ve carried nothing more than their mistresses to bed. We’ve also had a good lot of popes who were neither great saints nor great sinners. They just muddled along as best they could, trying to manage the unmanageable and serve Christ through their own limitations.

And yet, despite all that, here we are, the Church, following the successor of Peter, getting ready to elect the 267^th Bishop of Rome. The Bride stands. She soldiers on. She keeps proclaiming Christ to the world and welcoming people into the waters that give life. That is a grace. And a wonder. And a miracle. It is a testament to the Holy Spirit, who animates the Body, keeping it alive. The Church is God’s, not man’s, and the one thing we can know for certain is that He takes care of His own. No Divine duties go undone. No Godly responsibilities get neglected. The Gospel will still offer the world the path to new life. The Sacraments will still pour that new life into people’s souls. And the prayers of the faithful will still rise up to God, filling the Heavens like incense.

That won’t change today or Thursday or Friday. It won’t change ever. The Church on earth will keep soldiering on, right up until the end of the world, whether with a saint or a sinner at her head. It would be better to have a saint there. But, if it’s a sinner, that just means the burden on the faithful is a bit heavier. The prayers and sacrifices of the faithful take on more weight. The true Sensus Fidelium has helped keep the Barque of Peter afloat before when Peter wasn’t Petering very well, and it can very well do that again. We can very well do that again.

For now, though, our job is to pray. So, please pray. Even if you’re not Catholic. Pray for the men doing the voting. Pray for docility to the Holy Spirit. Pray for patience. Pray for freedom. Pray for faith. And maybe pray for a nice long conclave while you’re at it. We don’t need an Insta-Pope, who is rushed into the papal cloakroom to meet some homesick Cardinal’s imaginary timeline. We need a good pope. And just like all good things, good popes take time.

In other news…

…Some big news in the Chapman family: Listeners to our podcast, Visitation Sessions, heard my husband Chris recently announce that at the end of this school year, he is retiring from his work as a high school theology teacher. Starting in June, he will instead be taking over as CFO of Emily Stimpson Chapman, Inc.

This is a huge leap of faith for us. Chris is not coming to work with me because I make so much money writing that we can afford to go without his teaching salary. I don’t. Rather, he is quitting because we believe this is what is best for him, for me, and for our family. The commute has been hard on him, I’m spread out thinner than a human should be, and neither of us know how much time God will give us with the kids, so we want to make the most of the time we do have. Going forward, Chris will be in charge of overhauling my website so we can sell books year round, handling all book sales, doing a lot of the behind the scenes work on our podcast, and just dealing with the hundreds of little business details I simply can’t stay on top of between the writing and the kids (any of you who have sent me emails over the past year, know of what I speak).

The hope is that this will free me up to do more interacting with you, both here on Substack and in dms, and allow both of us to be more fully present—in mind and body—to the kids. Chris will also be teaching classes for Homeschool Connections (if you’re interested, check them out here) and working with the St. Paul Center on producing courses for high schoolers through Emmaus Academy. He is such a wonderful teacher and has so much wisdom to offer, so I am excited to see others beyond Pittsburgh benefit from his gifts.

Please keep us in your prayers as we make this transition. We have been dreaming about implementing Wendell Berry’s vision of home as a place of production and not just consumption for many years now, and we are so excited that our dream is about to become a reality. We also expect it will be extremely challenging and are trusting God with our finances in a way we have never trusted before. So, prayers would definitely be appreciated. (Saints Louis and Zelie Martin are our intercessors on this one!)

…The family and I just returned Sunday from Buffalo, New York, where I had the most wonderful time speaking at the Buffalo Catholic Women’s Conference. The ladies there were so gracious, and I loved getting to share more about the amazing witness of Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Hildegard of Bingen with them. Later today, we are all getting back on the road for Ottawa, where I will be speaking tomorrow at the Canadian March for Life, then speaking again, as the keynote speaker at the official Rose Dinner following the March. My talk will largely focus on IVF, and I am anxious as heck about it. Your prayers would be so, so, so appreciated. This is my last talk until late summer, but if you’re interested in bringing me to your neck of the woods this fall, email me at emilystimpsonchapman@gmail.com.

…Speaking of Visitation Sessions, last week we released a special episode with our good friend Rob Corzine, the St. Paul Center’s Executive Director of Academic Programs, about papal conclaves past and present. Yesterday, we dropped a short Q&A about NFP and AI. And tomorrow, full subscribers will get exclusive access to The Inner Seas, Kate’s beautiful documentary about adoption, motherhood, and music. Kate is still showing the film on the festival circuit—thus far it has been featured at festivals in Rome, Italy; Houston, Texas; Dubuque, Iowa; and Door County, Wisconsin—so, it can’t be publicly available during this time, but many of you have asked to see it and this the way we can make that happen. We are so excited, so if you’re a subscriber keep an eye on your inbox!

…I promised you the Bishop Varden interview. It is so wonderful and helpful and consoling. I hope you can make time to read it.

…Speaking of good reads, this is a long essay from The Atlantic, but I think it does a great job of pointing out the deficiencies of our current education system: How the Ivy League Broke America. Yes, it’s by David Brooks and yes, he makes some strongly liberally slanted asides, and yes, I know that will bug some of you. If you are included in that number, just try to ignore them and keep reading. It’s worth it.

…Last but not least, if all of the focus on Rome has you hankering to get on a jet plane and meet the new pope, then you are in luck! We have just a handful of spaces left on my family’s Christmas-time pilgrimage to Rome, including space for a single women who wants to split the cost of a room with another single woman. I traveled to Rome during the Christmas season three times when I was single, including a couple times when I was struggling mightily with my lack of a husband and babies. I never regretted that decision. Each time, it reminded me that every season in life has its silver linings, and that one silver lining of the single years was the ability to easily spend New Year’s in Rome. We leave December 26 and return January 4, so we will be there for the last days of the Jubilee and the first New Year’s of our new pontiff. I hope you can join us! You can learn more and register here.

In Case You Missed It

The Both/And Pope: On the Burden of Poping in the Age of Social Media

Fifty Words of Wisdom for Fifty Years of Life

The Weeds and Wheat of Motherhood: On Chappell Roan, Motherhood, and the Light in Our Eyes