Vox Sentences: Why the newest Catholic saint is so controversial

The first canonization on US soil; heads roll at Volkswagen; and a split in Japan's biggest yakuza group.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

Did Pope Francis just canonize a colonizer?

Rob Carr/Getty Images

• Pope Francis led a mass in Washington, DC today canonizing Junipero Serra. It's the first time a saint has been canonized on American soil.

• The Serra canonization was aggressively fast-tracked. Pope Francis let Serra become a saint after only being cited in one miracle (usually saints need two).

  [National Catholic Reporter / Jamie Manson]

• It's also hugely controversial. Serra's claim to fame is that he started a series of Catholic missions in 18th-century California. Depending on where you stand, that makes him either an ineffective opponent or an effective champion of colonization and oppression of Native Americans.

  [The Atlantic / Emma Green]

• Lots of Native American groups in California take the latter view, and have been protesting Serra's canonization since the Pope announced it.

  [Peninsula Press / Jessica Tonn and Kasey Quon]

• Complicating all of this is that the Archbishop of Philadelphia (where the Pope is staying later this week) is a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribe, and has integrated Native American religious practices like the vision quest into his Catholicism.

  [Crux / Michael O'Loughlin]

• And the fast-track canonization of Serra is widely seen as Francis' effort to embrace the "Hispanicization" of the Catholic Church. Serra was both a colonizer of Hispanics, and himself (now) the first Hispanic saint.

  [Commonweal / Gregory Orfalea]

• That adds poignancy to the only unscripted moment of the visit so far: a 5-year-old girl, the child of unauthorized immigrants, slipped through the barricades and delivered a letter to the pope asking him to help protect immigrants in the US from deportation.

  [Fox News Latino]

Volkswagen's cheating ways

Alexander Koerner/Getty Images

• The CEO of Volkswagen has stepped down after the discovery that millions of Volkswagens were programmed to cheat emissions tests.

  [Bloomberg Business / Chad Thomas]

• Volkswagen's now being investigated not only in the US (where the EPA put out a notice last week, and might recall vehicles in coming months) but in Germany, which is launching a preliminary criminal inquiry into Volkswagen executives.

  [Telegraph / Julia Bradshaw and Jon Yeomans]

• The EPA initially identified about half a million cheating Volkswagens and Audis. Now it's looking more like 11 million.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

• Reuters has a profile of the West Virginia University engineer whose team first uncovered the software cheat — by hooking up an endearingly low-tech-looking device to the gas tank.

  [Reuters / David Morgan]

• The WVU team's report led to the discovery of the "defeat device" — the official term for the cheat, which is illegal under current emissions law.

  [Reuters]

• The result? Somewhere from 68,000 to 274,000 tons of nitrogen oxide were released into the atmosphere each year because of VW's cheating.

  [Vox / Brad Plumer]

A yakuza war in Japan?

Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images

• Japanese police are warning that Japan could see its first yakuza gang war in thirty years.

  [Vice News / Jake Adelstein]

• Tensions are rising between the biggest yakuza group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, and a breakaway federation of 13 clans who left the Yamaguchi-gumi last month (in protest of its current leadership).

  [Guardian / Justin McCurry]

• The Yamaguchi-gumi does serious business. Fortune estimated in 2014 that it makes $6.6 billion a year, making it the second-largest organized crime group (and the largest gang) in the world.

  [Fortune / Chris Matthews]

• But the number of yakuza members is dwindling across Japan, thanks largely to new, aggressive criminal laws passed in the early 2010s — one reason, perhaps, to be less worried about an upcoming gang war.

  [Daily Beast / Jake Adelstein and Nathalie-Kyoko Stucky]

• This isn't to say that law enforcement treats all yakuza equally. As Jake Adelstein explains, Osaka's police prefer the Yamaguchi-gumi, while the National Police of Japan support the breakaway group.

  [Vice News / Jake Adelstein]

• The US, despite cracking down on all yakuza assets, has passed separate sanctions specifically targeting the clan running the Yamaguchi-gumi now.

  [United States Department of the Treasury]

MISCELLANEOUS

RIP Daniel Thompson, the man who brought industrial bagel production to America. [NYT / Margalit Fox]

• Life has gotten tremendously better for the global poor in recent decades. Take this quiz to see if you know just how much better.

  [BBC / Hans Rosling]

• Brave New World is supposed to be a dystopia. But is the world it describes really that bad?

  [Io9 / George Dvorsky]

• "What a misunderstanding!" should, indeed, win every New Yorker caption contest (note: Dara disagrees about this, is wrong).

  [The Atlantic / Robinson Meyer]

• Netflix has measured how long it takes shows to hook people; Scandal, Breaking Bad, and Bates Motel get you in episode two.

  [Hollywood Reporter]

VERBATIM

"We need everybody not named Marco to fizzle. That is the plan." [Marco Rubio campaign manager Terry Sullivan to Politico / Katie Glueck and Marc Caputo]

• "Susan Mullins has a bobcat in her freezer."

  [Fusion / Kelsey McKinney]

• "So, if you’re worried that Ramzan is murdering with impunity and Putin can’t control him, consider the alternative: what if Ramzan is murdering with impunity, and Putin does control him?"

  [The Guardian / Oliver Bullough]

• "Duncan told me that after Obama pitched universal pre-K in the 2013 State of the Union address, a 'prominent Republican senator' approached him on the floor and said: 'I love what you’re doing on this. I’m so sorry I can’t help you.'"

  [Politico / Michael Grunwald]

• "I mean if female Dalai Lama come, then that female must be very attractive, otherwise not much use."

  [Dalai Lama to BBC / Clive Myrie]

WATCH THIS

How politicians rig elections [YouTube / Ezra Klein, Joss Fong]

Vox / Joss Fong

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