May 18, 2020

May 18, 2020 By

I have terrible news for you:  As much as you wish it were true, you are not persecuted.  You are not a victim.

Here is an utterly typical example of the Fake Victim mentality, taken from a vast menu of similar expressions

Yessirree Bob! Become a Premium Subscriber at Church Militant and get the exclusive inside story from Superstar Michael Voris, who alone can save you from the Catholic Church. He’s a bold rebel who is not making a fortune from suckers by portraying himself (just like Donald Trump) as an outsider while standing boldly against Dark Persecuting Forces even as he commands (within his Cult of Personality) a reputation for absolute infallibility the pope could never dream of. He’s a victim. An underdog.

So too, are those poor, poor heavily armed bullies threatening to kill the governor of Michigan. Victims all. Guys marching under the banner of the swastika in Charlottesville? Victims of “white genocide”. Gun nuts accusing parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook of being part of a conspiracy? Victims. People babbling that the Pope wants to persecute Latin Mass-goers or claiming that the New World Order is plotting against those who like communion on the tongue? They, not people sick and dead of COVID, are the true victims.

Likewise, those asking for people to wear masks out of consideration for the sick? They are nothing less than Nazis. No, seriously. Having to show consideration for somebody else is exactly like Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia put together. The guy who runs First Things says so, and that journal is supposedly the leader for the intellectual elite of the Religious Right.

Again and again, one demographic–white conservative Christians–who have for years bragged that they are “prolife” are suddenly hell bent for leather on seeing themselves as the heroes in a weird Protestant Fundamentalist narrative in which a sinister global conspiracy fakes (and launches in cooperation with the ChiComs) a pandemic (called a “Plandemic” by the paranoids) whose sole purpose is to persecute Real Christians[TM] by forcing them to… show a little courtesy to other people so that they don’t die.

Seriously. That’s it. That’s all. No trains hauling Christians to be gassed by the millions. No firing squads. (On the contrary, it’s the Gun Freaks threatening to shoot governors who are the ones brandishing weapons.) As apocalypses go, this is pretty low-key.

Not that Christians aren’t being persecuted. It’s just that they are brown and poor, which the selfoids in the white Christian MAGA Cult love. Christians at the border are having their children yanked from them to the delight of the white Christians in the MAGA cult. They cheer it in between braying about their liberties being taken from them. Brown Christians get murdered in cold blood while out jogging or even sleeping in their own homes and the armed white Christians pumped about their heroism for defying the gummint respond by saying “They should have complied” even though the victims did nothing wrong. It’s only they themselves who don’t have to obey the law.  Once again, the watchword of the MAGA Cult is “Sacrifice for thee, but not for me.”

Which is where the phony claims of “persecution” come from. There are real persecuted Christians around the world. Christians abroad are among the most persecuted religions on earth:

But in the US, the persecuted Christians are persecuted by other Christians, overwhelmingly white and conservative, the backbone of the MAGA antichrist cult. That cult knows that it has it made in the shade, that it doesn’t suffer persecution from the state, that America is a paradise of religious liberty, especially for the white and middle class.  And at some level, that rankles.  Because the gospel says that if they are disciples of Jesus, they will be persecuted.  So they have a choice, act like disciples of Jesus and face rejection from the Cult of Trump and similarly selfish people or go along with the selfish and live an easy life.  Like their Master in the White House, the MAGA cult chooses the latter course, victimizing others while complaining of being victims themselves. And that cult has so deeply internalized a narrative of self-pity that they have made themselves, by a long shot, the single most destructive poison to the witness of the Church and the governance of the US.

As a result, this is what the world sees:

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And that appalling witness will never change until Christians learn what to fear.

Of which more tomorrow.

December 18, 2019

December 18, 2019 By

Both St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas are spinning in their graves:

Ohio lawmakers are weighing in on how public schools can teach things like evolution.

The Ohio House on Wednesday passed the “Student Religious Liberties Act.” Under the law, students can’t be penalized if their work is scientifically wrong as long as the reasoning is because of their religious beliefs.

Instead, students are graded on substance and relevance.

Every Republican in the House supported the bill. It now moves to the Republican-controlled Senate.

No. No. No. No. NO!  This is not Christian.  This is stupid gnosticism.  There are not two truths, scientific and religious, in opposition. Faith and reason are not opposed. Grace builds on, not destroys, nature. Truth is one.  If something is scientifically wrong, all the religion in the world cannot make it true.  If a student declares that his religion decrees 2+2=5 or water is not H2O, that does make those statements true.  It makes him either a fool or a liar.

The incredible thing is Catholics are now starting to go for this junk. Bad theology and science for crank conspiracy theorists used to be a Fundamentalist Protestant thing. Sensible Catholics listened to the Magisterium for their theology and let the sciences do their work. Now such nuttiness is becoming fake orthodoxy for not a few conservative Catholics who regard the Magisterium as the enemy, who regard the sciences as a liberal plot, and who get most of their formation from crank conspiracy theorists who are Fundamentalist Protestants with a taste for Latin, smells, and bells.

So we have absurdities like Michael Voris platforming quack science like The Principle and lobbing softballs to geocentrist cranks. The logic? Some churchmen five centuries ago accepted geocentrism, therefore it is Sacred Tradition and we have to torque our brains into believing that heliocentrism and relativity are liberal (and, by the way, *cough* Einstein *cough* Jewish) conspiracies.

Likewise, cranks like the Kolbe Center for Creation Research are increasingly treated as something besides the fringe group they are. Here is their state of the art scientific and theological institute that single-handedly overturns centuries of science and centuries of theological development by the Church.

Strangely, they were not invited to the Vatican by Benedict XVI when he held a conference on Creation and Evolution in 2008:

But in the world of Reactionary social media mini-popes, that only proves that the Deep Science/Deep Church/Deep State Conspiracy has its tentacles everywhere and the only salvation is for Catholics to listen to their favorite social media crank, dismiss all outside the Bubble, and soldier on with Me and My Bible.

The result is Magical Thinking: the diabolical parody of (ironically) the Catholic doctrine of creation by the Power of the Word.

Magical thinking insists that we can create alternate reality by the power of the human word known as the Lie. We can simply declare that proven facts don’t exist, that the world is flat if I say it is, that all of reality is simply and solely determined by our will. Civilizations that adopt this way of thinking are doomed. You can see it deployed by people like Stalin, shooting “counter-revolutionary weather forecasters” for predicting weather that did not fit his Five Year Plans. You can see it with Hitler, moving around imaginary armies as the Soviets closed in on Berlin. You can see it with climate science denialism. You can see it with nearly everything the Cult of Trump now says.

And you can see it with the false claim that something scientifically wrong magically becomes true if their religion declares it to be so. It can only end in disaster to pit faith against reason this way and it assaults both faith and reason to do so.

All truth is God’s truth. That this needs to be said to Catholics–and above all to Catholics who regard themselves as the last best hope of the Tradition–only makes clear how little so many people who call themselves “Traditionalist” actually know of the Tradition.

December 10, 2019

December 10, 2019 By

Well the liberal idiots in Rome are at it again:

Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of “new” sins such as causing environmental blight.

The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican’s number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.

Asked what he believed were today’s “new sins,” he told the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.

“(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control,” he said.

The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning.

Girotti, in an interview headlined “New Forms of Social Sin,” also listed “ecological” offences as modern evils.

Feh!  “Ecological sin”.  What tree-hugging nonsense!  We can all safely write off this nonsense in the words of Cardinal Gerhard Müller, who said, “Environmental policy is nothing [sic] to do with faith and morals. Those issues are for politicians and for people to vote for the party they agree with.”

Right on!  That idiot liberal Francis thinks there are “sins against nature”!  Can you believe that?  Benedict XVI would never… :::checks date on article::: oh…

In recent months, Pope Benedict has made several strong appeals for the protection of the environment, saying issues such as climate change had become gravely important for the entire human race.

Well, it’s just a newspaper paragraph.  Benedict would never formally teach…

At the beginning of this New Year, I wish to offer heartfelt greetings of peace to all Christian communities, international leaders, and people of good will throughout the world. For this XLIII World Day of Peace I have chosen the theme: If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation. Respect for creation is of immense consequence, not least because “creation is the beginning and the foundation of all God’s works”, and its preservation has now become essential for the pacific coexistence of mankind. Man’s inhumanity to man has given rise to numerous threats to peace and to authentic and integral human development – wars, international and regional conflicts, acts of terrorism, and violations of human rights. Yet no less troubling are the threats arising from the neglect – if not downright misuse – of the earth and the natural goods that God has given us. For this reason, it is imperative that mankind renew and strengthen “that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we come and towards whom we are journeying”.

The “covenant” he speaks of is, of course, our obligation to “tend the garden” made with Adam and Eve and never revoked.  We are stewards of “our common home” and it is therefore absolutely a matter of faith and morals–and therefore one the Holy Father is competent and bound to speak to.

And he has done so in Laudato Si, a beautiful, profound, and intensely Catholic document.

By the way, it is particularly astounding to me that a subculture of the Church that has spent its entire life talking about “sins against nature” when it comes to Pelvic Issues should suddenly pretend they have never heard of the idea of sins against nature when it comes to our relationship with the rest of the created order.  Have they never read Tolkien?

In Catholic thought, nature is not really our Mother (though it get called that by poets like Francis of Assisi sometimes). Nature is something more like our sister and even, in a certain sense, our younger sister.  We are both creatures of God and humans, though we are of the dust of the earth, have been made “a little lower than the angels” and give dominion over creation.  That is supposed to make us responsible.  But because of sin it often makes us rapists. To insult and mistreat creation is to insult her Maker.  More than that, it is to harm other human beings in the image of God who depend on nature for food, shelter, clothing, etc.

Reactionaries always portray Francis’ respect for nature as “paganism” and “idolatry”.  That is a flat lie.  It is sacramentality.

With the lie of “pagan idolatry” goes the gnostic falsehood that nature is simply a vast neutral pile of raw materials to rape and harvest without thought.  And the core gnostic lie which enables such people to do so without the slightest reference to the Church’s teaching is, “Environmental policy is nothing [sic] to do with faith and morals. Those issues are for politicians and for people to vote for the party they agree with.”

It used to be the habit of the Left to perpetually find some “authority” to tell you that you could ignore the Church (typically on pelvic issues).  There was a little rolodox where the media went to find Fr. Richard McBrien, Charles Curran, the head of Catholics for a Free Choice, or Sr. Joan Chittister to downplay abortion, talk up artificial contraception, poohpooh the priesthood and so on.

The Right Wing Lie Machine studied these tactics carefully and have now far surpassed the Left in their near total war on the Holy Father and the Magisterium of virtually the entirety of the Church’s moral teaching whenever it threatens the needs of the Cult of Trump (that includes Pelvic Issues when the Prez beds porn stars or commits sexual assault).

And so, one of the habits of the Right Wing Lie Machine is to constantly anoint Alternapopes to tell Francis-haters what their itching ears want to hear about the lawless use of money, pleasure, power and honor.

  • Want to reject the Church’s teaching on the death penalty?  Ed Feser will tell you it’s okay.
  • Want to rationalize nuclear mass murder? Fr. Wilson Miscamble will tell you can ignore the Church.
  • Want to practice sadism to brown children at the border?  Kellyanne Conway has your back.
  • Want to spit in the faces of Amazonian Catholics and lie that they are “pagan idolators”? Lifesite, 1Peter5, and Michael Voris will help you.
  • Want to launch an unjust war? Michael Novak and the editors of First Things will tell you it’s fine.
  • Want to torture people? Raymond Arroyo will invite Marc Theissen on to explain why you can ignore the Church and do it.
  • Want to hear that demons are guides to what Real Catholics think?  Taylor Marshall is your man.

Cardinal Müller is now the latest in a long line of Folk Heroes anointed by the Most Wrong about Everything sect of Francis-Haters to tell you that an issue which is massively tied to the Church’s teaching on faith and moral is purely secular.

He is dead wrong and the Holy Father is right.  Read Laudato Si and forego listening to brain- dead sneers.  How we treat our common home is how we treat our neighbor who lives there.  It’s not even hard to understand.

November 23, 2019

November 23, 2019 By

It ought not to be necessary to defend the proposition that Fred Rogers was a wonderful human being, a fine Christian witness, and exactly the antidote for our dehumanizing age.  This should not be a claim that requires defense, but a claim that invites celebration.  His life and witness ought to be, especially in Christian circles, nothing but an occasion of rejoicing over one of the greatest success stories, both in sanctity and in global evangelization, of our time.

Steven Greydanus, being normal, gets this and so when he reviewed Won’t You Be My Neighbor? a year ago, he offered a morally sane assessment of the man:

Ultimately, this is not because of the style or substance of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, but something unquantifiable and unreproducible: Rogers’ manifest goodness. His hopes for a more united country may have been dashed, but in one respect he undoubtedly succeeded: He wanted to make goodness attractive, and he did.

Is Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood hagiographical? Is it necessarily a bad thing if it is? Hagiography is usually a bad thing in biography because most of us aren’t saints. (One remarkably hagiographic detail: Each morning, after swimming laps — there’s underwater footage of Rogers’ slight frame in the pool — he stepped on the scale, and, according to the man himself, every day he weighed in at 143 pounds: a number that, to him, signified the 1-4-3 letters of the words “I love you.”)

Rogers wasn’t a perfect man, even if one of his sons recalls that it could be difficult “having a second Christ for a father.” But when his widow, Joanne, recalls reassuring him toward the end of his life, as he contemplated the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 and wondered out loud if he were one of the sheep, that if anyone qualified as a sheep, he did, it’s hard to imagine any reasonable person disagreeing.

We can’t live in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, and our world will never greatly resemble it. But what’s stopping us, any of us, from trying to bring to our interactions with others a little more of what we admire in Mr. Rogers? Is the divisiveness and cruelty of our world a reason not to treat each other with kindness and love, or is it more important to do so?

Like Jesus, like Mr. Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? challenges each of us to try to be better neighbors.

Would you be mine?

Likewise, in his review of the new biopic Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Deacon Greydanus expresses perceptions of Mr. Rogers that emanate from what most people would call ordinary human decency:

“At the root of all learning and relationships,” Mr. Rogers once said, is “love — or the lack of it.” There is so much lack in the world. Humanity is like a gaping wound of lack of love.

Mr. Rogers loved us all as much as he could. It wasn’t remotely enough. He was a lonely prophet in the wilderness, long since shouted down by competing voices.

Rage and hopelessness are increasingly ubiquitous cultural realities. Divisiveness and polarization spread and metastasize — in the political sphere, but also in popular culture, in our churches, in our homes and families. (The holiday season has always been stressful, but increasingly family get-togethers are like parties in a minefield, events to be survived as much as savored.)

Beautiful Day is about forgiveness and the seemingly unforgivable. I’m not sure that’s a point of contact with director Marielle Heller’s last biopic, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring a caustic Melissa McCarthy as the unprincipled literary forger Lee Israel; if so, it’s almost the only one.

Forgiveness has become almost an old-fashioned word, a relic of an ethos we as a culture no longer quite believe in. We find it increasingly hard not only to like or tolerate one another across cultural or moral fault lines, but even to imagine or accept the idea of liking or tolerating one another.

There are exceptions: an African American befriending Klansmen and leading them gently out of racist hatred; an Orthodox Jew inviting the scion of a white-supremacist family to weekly Shabbat meals and turning him from his ugly heritage.

Yet these exceptional examples, while they inspire, also cause discomfort. Warfare is simpler without fraternizing with the enemy.

Lloyd’s path forward is clearer because Jerry shows signs of penitence and reform. What would it mean to love him if he were unrepentant, or (what is almost worse) made noises in the direction of repentance but continued in the same abusive patterns of behavior?

Beautiful Day doesn’t have all the answers. Mr. Rogers didn’t have all the answers. I called him a prophet in the wilderness. Like many prophets, he was an odd duck, and Beautiful Day attests his eccentricity as well as his virtue. It also attests, very subtly, the effort and the cost of his constant generosity to everyone. (There’s an oblique but startling moment at the end that, without in any way detracting from his virtue, hints at the darkness of Mr. Rogers.)

But, like a prophet, he was in touch with something larger than himself, and that something occasionally comes into focus in Beautiful Day, particularly in a rare sequence of sustained cinematic silence and in a moment in which we see Mr. Rogers praying for various people by name, as he did every day — a list that here includes Lloyd, his wife, their son … and Jerry.

It doesn’t come to a climax, as the real Tom Junod’s Esquire profile did, with Mr. Rogers leading Junod to pray himself, as he never had before. The term “grace,” so notable in Junod’s account of Rogers, is absent here. The film’s Mr. Rogers is clearly religious, but his faith doesn’t make as much of an impression here as it did on Junod.

Yet I came from the film not just inspired but challenged once again by the simple goodness of Mr. Rogers: thinking about what I can do to be a better neighbor to those around me — and certainly to refrain from acting on my less generous impulses. (I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish. I can stop, stop, stop any time.)

None of us by ourselves can guarantee a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Perhaps we can at least aspire to be prophets in the wilderness.

That, and sentiments like it, should be all any normal Catholic has to say on this extraordinary, and yet ordinary, decent, good, and holy man.

But in the increasingly diseased world of American Christian conservatism, which is now light years from healthy Catholic orthodoxy, Ed Feser (already a Folk Hero for the Most Wrong Subculture in the Church for his championship of war on the Church’s teaching concerning the death penalty) delivers this demented broadside:

Against candy-ass Christianity

The Mr. Rogers biopic, with Tom Hanks in the starring role, comes out this week and has been getting a lot of positive attention – in some cases, embarrassingly rapturous attention.  This might seem surprising coming from Hollywood types and secular liberals, given that Rogers was a Presbyterian minister.  But of course, Rogers’ adherence to Christian teaching has nothing to do with it.  Commenting on the movie, Angelus magazine reports that “Hanks mentions that Rogers was indeed an ordained minister but seems to take comfort that Rogers ‘never mentioned God in his show.’”  In the movie’s trailer, a man says to Mr. Rogers “You love broken people, like me,” to which Rogers replies “I don’t think you are broken” – never mind the doctrine of original sin.

So, why the adulation?  The movie poster reminds us that “we could all use a little kindness.”  The Daily Beast story linked to above tells us that Rogers was America’s “one true hero” and that “Hanks could very well be a living saint,” all because of their extraordinary… “niceness.”  Indeed, “Tom Hanks playing Mr. Rogers may save us all,” because the movie reminds us that “the world we live in now still does have niceness in it.”

Niceness.  Well, it has its place.  But the Christ who angrily overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, who taught a moral code more austere than that of the Pharisees, and who threatened unrepentant sinners with the fiery furnace, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, was not exactly “nice.”

Now, my point is not to criticize Rogers himself, who I’m sure was a decent fellow, and who was, after all, simply hosting a children’s program.  I don’t know anything about his personal theological opinions, and I don’t know whether the movie accurately represents them or even refers to them at all.  The point is to comment on the idea that an inoffensive “niceness” is somehow the essence of the true Christian, or at least of any Christian worthy of the liberal’s respect.  For it is an idea that even a great many churchmen seem to have bought into.

This is evident from the innumerable vapid sermons one hears about God’s love and acceptance and forgiveness, but never about divine judgment or the moral teachings to which modern people are most resistant – and which, precisely for that reason, they most need to hear expounded and defended.  And it is evident in the tendency of modern Catholic bishops to emphasize dialogue and common ground rather than conversion, orthodoxy, and doctrinal precision, and to speak of the Church’s teachings on sexual morality, if at all, only half-apologetically, in vague and soft language, and in a manner hedged with endless qualifications.

Such “niceness” is in no way a part of Christian morality.  It is a distortion of the virtues of meekness (which is simply moderation in anger – as opposed to too much or too little anger), and friendliness (which is a matter of exhibiting the right degree of affability necessary for decent social order – as opposed to too little affability or too much).

As always, St. Thomas illuminates where modern churchmen obfuscate.  Where meekness is concerned, Aquinas notes that just as anger should not be excessive or directed at the wrong object, so too can one be deficient in anger, and that this too can be sinful.  For anger is nature’s way of prodding us to act to set things right when they are in some way disordered.  The absence of anger in cases where it is called for is, for that reason, a moral defect, and a habit of responding to evils with insufficient anger is a vice.  Thus, as Aquinas writes in Summa TheologiaeII-II.158.1:

Chrysostom says: “He that is angry without cause, shall be in danger; but he that is angry with cause, shall not be in danger: for without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable, crimes unchecked.” Therefore to be angry is not always an evil…

[I]f one is angry in accordance with right reason, one’s anger is deserving of praise…

It is unlawful to desire vengeance considered as evil to the man who is to be punished, but it is praiseworthy to desire vengeance as a corrective of vice and for the good of justice.

Now far be it from me to disagree with masters like Sts. John Chrysostom and Thomas Aquinas about the idea of holy anger.  It is particularly amusing to me read Feser praising holy anger, having listened for years to American conservative Christians simultaneously orgasm over Trump’s sadism to defenseless children at the border while whinging incessantly that they are the real victims and telling me constantly that I am “filled with anger” when I protest the ugliness of their witness. In their world, anger is only legit when turned against real threats like people who love Mr. Rogers.

But here’s the thing: I think holy anger should be aimed at the powerful and unjust, not at the meek and good.  And for the life of me, it looks like that is exactly what Feser is doing here, all under the tiresome guise of “tough love” or “muscular Christianity” or some kind of Vorisian contempt for the mythical “Church of Nice”.  Indeed, he appears to be in such a hurry to pour contempt on the story of a wounded man healed by an encounter with the love of God through the witness of Fred Rogers that, like so many champions of the mercilessness of God, he clean misses that profound moment of prayer Greydanus describes because he is too busy looking for some way to be offended and victimized while simultaneously being abrasive and triumphalist.

I have mentioned in the past that one of the strange things I keep seeing is unbelievers begging for the love and mercy of God turning to Christians and pleading for them to show them Jesus–only to be rebuffed by Christians brutally rejecting them as enemies.  When a man like Fred Rogers (or, I might add, Pope Francis) does answer this cry for some tenderness in the name of God the response is a volcanic eruption of gratitude resulting in, among other things, films like this paying deep and emotional homage to people who are simply inexplicable apart from their Christian faith.  Despite the angry denunciations of people like Feser, the reality is that nobody will come away from the film baffled about whether Fred Rogers was a Christian.  The filmmakers have no intention of covering that up.  They beautifully and affectingly show us that faith.  It only a Super-Christian who spits on it as “candy-ass.”

This goes back to the fact, yet again, that in the world of American Conservative Christianity, the driving need is to see oneself as persecuted and rejected by “Hollywood types and secular liberals”.  The one mode of engagement with the world is a kill-or-be-killed Darwinian struggle for survival. That culture war narrative requires clinging to a pissed-off, sarcastic, and sneering tone and posture where it is utterly unnecessary.  It manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of an obvious victory for the witness of a great Christian man and come away contemptuous and condescendingly dismissive of “a decent fellow, and who was, after all, simply hosting a children’s program.”

The result is the perverse upside down world where one of the finest witnesses to the gospel in our time–and a story that is touching lives and drawing people to the Christ he believed in–is treated with contempt and the image of a violent gun-toting priest with a machine gun is held up as the ideal.

I will take one Fred Rogers over a million of that sort of false gospel of power struggle.

October 9, 2019

October 9, 2019 By

Yesterday, I made the case that the problem eating the heart of American conservative Christianity is plain: it does not trust Jesus Christ and so is embarked on the project of trying to save itself since it is convinced he will not do it.

One of the warnings God gives Israel about the cost of faithlessness is this:

I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; the sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. (Le 26:36)

This seems to me to be the state of American conservative Christianity in this hour.  It is afraid of everything and, as frightened people often do, it is blustering to hide its deep terror.

This expresses itself, not only in fear of such relative trivialities as Harry Potter, but in fear of everything the Cult of Trump commands we fear: refugees, women, science, education, environmentalists, brown people, black people, Native Americans, liberals, gay people, and (for Catholics) this pope and the Magisterium.

The message of the Francis-hating right in the American Church is very clear and profoundly rooted in fear that verges on and even passes into despair.  It is this: We are on our own. The indefectibility of the Church has failed.  Our pope is a heretic.  Jesus did not know what he was talking about when he said to Peter that on him he would build the Church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it.  Hell has won, the pope is the enemy of the Faith.  So is the rest of the Magisterium. You can forget it when Jesus said he was with the Church to the end of the age.  You can forget it when he said the Spirit would guide the Church into all truth.  The Church was guided into error at Vatican II and it has done nothing but get worse, leading to the election of Satan’s Pope.  You can forget the promise he made to the apostles and their heirs that “He who listens to you listens to me.”  That’s all over now.  We are on our own, the enemy is inside the castle and in fact has taken the castle. Here is the ambient noise coming from this terrified and tiny (globally speaking) American white conservative subculture with a giant gl0bal media microphone:

Therefore, only they, the Greatest Catholics of All Time, can save the Faith from the enemies that are now everywhere, inside and outside the Church and at the very top. This is the message now being broadcast to Francis-hating, Trump-adoring white conservative Catholics by such organs of propaganda as EWTN, the National Catholic Register, and Sophia Institute Press, and CRISIS, which have published and teamed up to promote the seminal text of this thesis, INFILTRATION by Taylor Marshall. Where you would never in a million years find Dan Burke of the Register doing a warm and friendly interview with, say, the head of Catholics for a Free Choice, you do find him lobbing softballs to Taylor Marshall and assuring his audience (by not challenging Marshall) that his book is neither a conspiracy theory nor a naked attack on the Holy Father and the unity of the Church.

But, of course, it is both those things and is steeped in fear that the Church is both betrayed and persecuted, not only by shadowy forces here in the US, but by the Holy Father and the entire Magisterium:

Here is Marshall’s intensely paranoid thesis, briefly summarized by D.W. Lafferty at Where Peter Is:

The central thesis of Infiltration is this: “The Catholic Church is in crisis because the enemies of Christ plotted organized efforts to place a pope for Satan on the Roman Chair of Saint Peter. […]It has been a slow, patient plan to establish a Satanic revolution with the pope as puppet” (1). Marshall leaves no doubt that he believes this “pope for Satan” is Pope Francis. The story begins with a document entitled The Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, which was allegedly written by a member of an Italian secret society, the Carbonari, sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century. The goal of the plot proposed in this document was, as Marshall puts it, to one day have “a Freemasonic naturalistic Pope reigning on the Chair of Saint Peter […]” (2). With the election of Pope Francis by the “Sankt Gallen Mafia” of corrupt cardinals, Marshall alleges, this goal was reached: “Mission accomplished for the Sankt Gallen Mafia: at last they delivered to the world a ‘Revolution in Tiara and Cope’ as had been prophesied by the Freemasonic document Alta Vendita more than 150 years before. After a slow, patient revolution, they had secured ‘a Pope according to our heart […]’” (31). Pope Francis’s “worldview and philosophy,” Marshall states, “is essentially that of a nineteenth-century member of the Freemasonic Carbonari.”

Marshall gets from Point A (the Alta Vendita) to Point B (the election of Pope Francis) by assembling a ramshackle narrative with parts largely dredged up from existing fringe Catholic sources. What gives him leeway to shape and twist his material into any shape he wants is that he hovers between constructing a narrative with human conspirators and a narrative that is driven by Satanic, demonic forces.

The way to spot these enemies is listen carefully not for ideas compatible with the Faith as laid out in the Catechism (since this is a document tainted by post-conciliar thinking) but for the right wing culture war shibboleths and code words that we, the Greatest Catholics of All Time, either approve or condemn.  There are certain Folk Heroes you can trust and a certain constellation of media, both social and right wing, that you can rely on.  Some of these include sources you can trust even if they are not Catholic at all (such as libertarian economists and NRA spokesmen and certain celebrities known for their right wing views about abortion, money, sex, conspiracy theories, and power).

But beware!  There are many, many people who are enemies, the pope chief among them, as well as any who speak well of him, or who are connected to them (guilt by association is an important component of the conspiracy theorist’s analysis).  And nearly everything outside a very narrow list of approved things and people is a colossal spiritual danger compounded of liberalism and demonic power.  Touch it, and you will be spiritually poisoned and die an eternal death. (A favorite image for them is that of the giant bowl of M&Ms with a few of them being poisoned. Would you dare touch even one????!!!!!????) In the end, the only thing you really have to go on is your feelings, your particular conservative peer group (all others must be scrutinized for impurity), and your personal take on what the Tradition said–or used to say in your personal opinion.

If that sounds uncomfortably like conservative American Evangelicalism and its sola scriptura/sola conscientia/sola socio-cultural-political-peer-group-of-middle-class-whites habit of navigation-by-panic, that’s because it is.  All the Catholic tradition provides for this mindset is some smells and bells aesthetics.  The Magisterium is effectively written off as something that ended somewhere around 1958 with the birth of the “Novus Ordo Church”. From here on in, we are to trust in a small network of celebrities who will tell us what to think and do. We are at war, and the world is divided between a small remnant of Real Catholics[TM] on the one hand and Spies and Enemies on the other.

And the Real Catholics[TM] are now fighting a desperate and losing battle with a false pope and a false Magisterium in league with evil liberals across America who are forcing us to drink from Holiday Cups at Starbucks, wishing us Happy Holidays at Target, not caring that Tinky Winky is gay, playing D&D, reading Harry Potter, confiscating our guns, letting brown people invade, letting women be extraordinary ministers, receiving communion in the hand, not caring about banners and bad art in the sanctuary, not caring about the Extraordinary Form, not caring about Marty Haugen music, and the legion of other things that people who would not know real persecution if it bit them on the nose regard as the Martyrdom of the American Church.

The irony, of course, is that this entire way of navigating the Tradition owes nothing to the Tradition and everything to an American culture driven by fads and celebrities and panics.  And the choice of celebrities is frequently sketchy and often visible-from-space nutty.  It is fond of overtly military Manly Catholic Merch, pitched to exactly the same demographic that talks ceaselessly of imaginary garbage like “white genocide” and The Great Replacement.

The popularity of such “soldier of Christ” military imagery is telling and particularly sinister when priests adopt it, because it signals the adoption of an adversarial rather than pastoral relationship to the flock.  Jesus’ words to Peter were “feed my sheep” not “annihilate my enemies” or “Root out my infiltrators.”  But in a Church where even the Pope is not pure enough, the Culture War priest must, first and foremost, presume his flock are enemies in need of crushing unless they can prove their bona fides. Only when they capitulate to his authoritarian will to dominate them do they become sheep worthy of anything other than suspicion and expulsion in such a a worldview.  MAGA Christianity, fretting about junk like “white genocide” and imagining that Antifa is coming to invade our homes and stewing in the paranoia of Marshall, Skojec, Crisis, Voris, the Papal Posse, and the dozen other voices that have convinced this sect to fear and hate the Magisterium has created a subculture that is every bit as driven by winds of doctrine, fads, panics and folly as American fundamentalism.  It is a world of mini-popes with an incredible talent for wrongness. And it is so for one reason: it despairs of Jesus as Savior and so has appointed itself to the role. His promise to the Church has failed.  Therefore if the Church is to be saved–from the Pope no less–the Greatest Catholics of All Time will have to save it.

Needless to say, this is an absurd position and wholly unnecessary.  It is born of a kind of fevered hysteria that gives away the game by the fact that is not simply this thing or that thing that the Francis-hater hates about the Pope.  It is every single thing he says or does. As one of my deranged readers put it, “There is nothing that comes out of this man who is now pope which is not heretical to the Roman Catholic doctrine.”  When a critic cannot find anything whatsoever good about the object of his hatred, the problem is not with the object, but the critic.  As much as I detest Donald Trump, I would not say that he is devoid of any redeeming qualities.  To say such a thing about an obviously good and decent man like Francis–and to say it from virtually the moment of his election–makes clear that the despair and terror of the Catholic conservative Francis-hater was just waiting to be tapped.  The fear that Jesus had abandoned the Church was already there.  He just galvanized it.

David Mills remarks:

Part of my sympathy for Francis comes from reading him early and finding so much of his writing so compelling. But part of it is just a response to the way his critics read him. The venom and the dishonesty of the reactions are telling and arouse my sympathy for the underdog and victim.

They start yelling that he said X. You show that he did not say X. They keep saying he said X and/or they say it’s his fault for being unclear. You show he was perfectly clear. They go back to saying he said X. They read him, as I said here, like unscrupulous prosecuting attorneys.

And they started very very soon after Francis’s election. Not, I think, in response to anything religious he said, but in reaction to what they perceived as his leftish politics. Conservative politics is a deeper commitment than many of them seem to realize.

And that, in the end, is what this is about.  When you despair that Jesus is in charge of the Church, remains with the Church, and will save the Church, you don’t believe in nothing.  You believe in anything.  You believe in Trump, Voris, Skojec, Coffin, Marshall, Arroyo, Burke, Bannon, Breitbart, FOX, Hannity.  You believe in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass. You believe in the battle against “white genocide”. You believe in this or that form of piety as the Only True Way.  You believe opposition to abortion taketh away the sins of the world.  You believe voting Republican will save you. You believe kidnapping and torturing little children in sadistic camps will save you. You believe avoiding Harry Potter will save you.  Or homeschooling.  Or head coverings.  Or Chesterton.  If you are dumb enough, you believe in me (trust me, I’ve gotten my share of fanboi mail from people whose faith is dangerously dependent on me). You believe, like Boromir, that since you are on your own, the only thing left is to make a grab for the One Ring and try to bend the Church and the world to your will.

That is what the schismatic wannabes of the Francis-hating Right seek. And I can tell you already where they are trying to bend it: into a cult of ethno-nationalism.  Because when you despair of Jesus, you inevitably fix on one or all of the Four Great Idols to replace him: Mammon, Pleasure, Power, and Honor (sins fully incarnated by the idol to whom Frank Pavone chose to offer a dead baby on the altar of Christ).

They will fail in the end, of course (even if they manage to get somebody they want elected Pope). Because in the end, as the Holy Spirit once reminded John XXIII, it’s His Church, not the pope’s–and not the Greatest Catholics of All Time.

Be not afraid.

October 3, 2019

October 3, 2019 By

Yesterday, I wrote of my appreciation for the Catholic intellectual tradition and what a relief it was for me to step into the wide sunlands of a Catholic Christianity that was not afraid to engage with the wide range of human culture and thought.  From St. Paul on the Areopagus down through the Catholic invention of the university to the present, the Church’s capacity for engagement with the breadth of the human experience is one of the most beautiful things about her and I have always loved her capaciousness and ability to, as Paul says, “test everything and hold fast to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

I also noted that, like tofu, Catholic culture tends to take on the tint of the culture in which it finds itself. This can be both good and bad, depending on the culture. In the early English Church, for instance, when the martial virtues of the Anglo-Saxon warrior were prized by the culture, the author of The Dream of the Rood saw and celebrated the courage of Jesus’ embrace of the cross.

In the high Middle Ages of Dante, the doctrine of courtly love helped Dante to see something the ancient Greeks missed: that the love of woman could be ennobling. His Beatrice (and far more, the Blessed Virgin) are encounters with divine grace. And, of course, just a little before him, Thomas’ encounter with Aristotle vastly enriched our way of speaking about the Faith and about the world.

This has happened again and again in the history of the Church and the Church has always had within it those who seek to capitulate to the culture, those who are cautious and judicious in “testing everything and holding fast to what is good” and those who simply live in fear of the culture.

In the past twenty years, especially under the influence of American white conservative Evangelicalism and an alliance with increasingly demagogic Right Wingery culminating in the Freak Show of Trumpian Republican Rite Christianism, conservative Catholics have embraced the habit of fear, panic, and conspiracy theory as their primary reaction to cultural phenomena they deem “liberal”. Rather than thinking with the Church and with the tools of her intellectual tradition, they have come to think with the often dubious opinions of certain Folk Heroes whose judgment is spectacularly bad. As a result, they give utterly unnecessary scandal to sensible people of good will.

So, for instance, there is the absurd phenomenon of Catholic geocentrism, promoted by Robert Sungenis and endorsed by the reliably wrong Church Militant and Michael Voris. Employing a flat-footed Fundamentalism to reading certain Catholic texts as foolishly as a Flat Earther reads the Bible, they have taken the same hostility to “liberal science” that animates  Climate Change denial and hatred of environmentalism and applied it to cosmology.  In an infamous essay (now flushed down the memory hole), called the “The Fall of the Pink Einstein”, Sungenis managed to glue together a great many of the fears and obsessions of Conservative Catholics with the ingenious thesis that the relativity of the Jew Einstein was one of the sources of liberal science’s fiendish moral relativism contributing not only to godless heliocentrism but also to homosexuality and gay priests abusing kids.

No.  Really.

Meanwhile, there is also the Kolbe Center for Creation Research, a quack organization that is basically the Catholic-flavored version of Ken Hamm’s Answers in Genesis.  Of them, Augustine wrote long ago:

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.

If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

Augustine grasped that baptism is grace, not magic, and that it did not confer competence in the sciences: study, brains, understanding and hard work do.  And all these things are achievable by Christian and non-Christian alike.  Because of this, non-Christians can tell when you are a crank and when you are competent and honest.

Augustine, who also wrote a (now tragically neglected and opposed) treatise against lying made the obvious point that Lying for Jesus is stupid. What lay at the back of his thought was a profoundly Catholic confidence that the Faith is really true and therefore does not need to be defended by tricks and lies.  Like St. Thomas, he really internalized the conviction that “all truth is God’s truth” and that the Author of Creation is the same God as the Author of Redemption in Christ Jesus. He deeply and truly believed Jesus when he said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). He did not, as so many conservative American Christians today do, live in the everlasting fear that the other shoe was going to drop, that the whole thing was a fraud, that something would turn up to show the Faith was a lie, and that he needed to be perpetually on guard against those who might discover that it was all a scam.  So he was able to grasp that the temptation to tell pre-emptive lies was just that: a temptation from hell and not, as some absurdly claimed, “being wise as serpents.”  In a word, his faith was not fragile, but sturdy, and able to stand up to one of the most rigorous and searching minds and consciences God ever created.

It precisely this jittery fragility that now characterizes conservative Christianity in the US, both Catholic and Protestant.  From Evangelicals terrified of evolution to Catholics afraid of the Pope to conservatives afraid of the brown “invader” and willing to endorse every single lie Trump tells in order to defend this most fragile of gods we see a demographic endlessly stampeded by

Most recently, on the Catholic side of the aisle we witnessed the ridiculous resurgence of the Harry Potter Satanic Panic as Fr. Dan Reehil, pastor of St. Edward Church and School, in Nashville, TN, banished the boy wizard from his school, explaining:

These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception. The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text. I have consulted several exorcists, both in the United States and in Rome, and they have recommended removing the books from circulation.

This is, to be blunt, a move rooted in fear and ignorance.  I know this, not because I am an exorcist, but because I know how to read a book.  In point of fact, there is no, none, nada, zip, zero, invocational magic in the books. Nothing and no one is ever summoned or invoked.  Literally, the worst curse in the entire series is “Avada Kedavra”–Abracadabra.  The “spells” in HP are Latin doggerel and if you think they have occult power, I recommend you try waving a stick at somebody and shouting “Expelliarmus!”  If the book or teacup they are carrying flies out of their hands I will sell you the Brooklyn Bridge free of charge.

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I do not know what exorcists the good Father consulted with.  I am frankly sceptical he has consulted with any beyond the opinion of Fr. Gabriele Amorth (of whom more in a moment).  But whoever he consulted with, they simply cannot have read these books if any of them seriously claim the books invoke demons.  Magic is treated as a sort of super-power in the books, exactly the same as the powers used by super-heroes in Marvel comics and precisely the same as the powers used by Gandalf or Elves in the Approved-by-Righteous Catholics Lord of the Rings.  Father’s simplistic declaration about a work of literature that any presentation of magic as anything other than evil being a “clever deception” condemns the work of Tolkien, Lewis, MacDonald, E. Nesbit, LeGuin, the Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang, Greek myths, and a host of fairy stories, not to mention a good portion of the works of Shakespeare, to the flames.

Which reminds me, Shakespeare (whom we are reminded by Joseph Pearce, was a Catholic):

does actually write a chilling Satanic invocation in Macbeth as Lady Macbeth prays to demons:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry “Hold, hold!”

Here’s what does not happen and has never happened to any actress playing Lady Macbeth when she says these words that were written specifically to be spoken aloud: no demon has ever come. Why? Because this is fiction and Lady Macbeth is not real and the actress is playing a part.

That does not mean I disbelieve in demons.  Demons (and angels) are both real and we can wilfully open our hearts to their influence to disastrous or blessed effect.  But, to paraphrase Claudius in the occult ghost story Hamlet, “words without thoughts never to heaven (or hell) go”.  It is one of the more telling traits of panic-driven Christianism that it believes God must be begged and implored to respond but the devil will show up instantly if you even accidentally say some wrong magic word.  And (more to the point) it believes that such fear authorizes the Christianist to tell wanton lies about the author of a series of pretty good books in order to accuse her of seeking to involve children with Satan.

So here’s the thing: instead of panicking about catching demonic cooties from works of J.K. Rowling or Shakespeare, what the Catholic intellectual tradition does is engage such books as the works of literature that they are and see how to “test everything and hold fast what is good.”

Fr. Reehil’s assessment of Harry Potter is a compound of ill-informed rumor, ignorant opinion, and lies that have spread everywhere in conservative Christian culture, both Protestant and Catholic. On the Catholic front, the lies come from Lifesite News who, in 2005, chose to lie that Benedict XVI “condemned” Harry Potter. Jimmy Akin, no fan of the books by the way, but an honest man, does the autopsy on that lie.

Then there was the opinion of the late Fr. Gabriele Amorth, the alleged “Chief Exorcist of Rome” (that there is not and never has been such an office as “chief exorcist” is already a warning that the fanboi who grew up around him were inclined to exaggerate his authority and his often crackpot opinions):

“Practising yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter,” he told a film festival in Umbria this week, where he was invited to introduce The Rite, a film about exorcism starring Sir Anthony Hopkins as a Jesuit priest.

“In Harry Potter the Devil acts in a crafty and covert manner, under the guise of extraordinary powers, magic spells and curses.”

This is, again, the words of a man who either has not read the books or who does not understand even elementary things about literature. It is also the words of a man who is notorious for saying absurd things (such as his ridiculous claim to have performed 30,000 exorcisms in the space of nine years, totaling nine exorcisms every single day including Sundays), as Jimmy Akin and others have also shown on more than one occasion.

Now it is true that there is evil and black magic depicted in the books. Just as there is evil and black magic depicted in the works and authors mentioned above. But it is also true that the entire point of the depiction, as with the works and authors above, is to show the triumph of virtue. And the real battle in the books is, as in those other works and authors, a moral struggle. Indeed, every book–and most especially the culminating book in the series, is a recapitulation of the Paschal Mystery of self-sacrifice, death, and resurrection. In fact, asked if she believed in magic, Rowling replied that she did not and that she was a Christian and a member of the Church of Scotland. She even noted that she did not discuss it too much because she did not want to give away the ending of the series.

Are the books perfect? No. And indeed, moral critiques can be made of the characters and it is clear that part of what Rowling is doing is struggling with aspects of her own Christian faith–a faith she has lived with beautiful generosity to the least of these. My strongest objection to the book is that Dumbledore attempts a consequentialist (“end justifies the means”) solution to the problem of the main conflict in the book. It fails, as perhaps Rowling intends, but I find it troubling. All of that is legitimate fodder for ordinary literary criticism as the Catholic intellectual tradition has done for centuries. But banning the books as “demonic” and then giving a rationale that is both ignorant and false, not to mention vicious and slanderous, is a dreadful way to address a series that is, on the whole, a fine collection of stories.  And it is a sure-fire way to teach a generation of kids that their Faith is stupid and fearful and afraid to test everything and hold fast to what is, in this case, obviously good.

Unsurprisingly, parishioners at the parish report the pastor is a man with Right Wing Culture War and control issues:

  • Psychological, emotional and spiritual abuse of the school children through his messages in and outside of the church, including in the confessional, that has resulted in children seeking professional counseling. This is including, but not limited to, public assertions at school Mass that Lady Gaga made a pact with the devil for fame and suffers from fibromyalgia as a result
  • Bullying of students, teachers and parents who disagree with his views
  • Irresponsible administration of the school, resulting in plummeting school enrollment and mass departure of long-term faculty

And last, but not least, they report he “hates Pope Francis and views himself as ‘a soldier of God.'” Their rather sensible response to him was, “‘Our school, however, consists of children, not soldiers.'”

And thereby hangs a tale, of which more on Tuesday.  Tomorrow, we switch gears slightly and look at another manifestation of related phenomena coming to a theatre near you.

 

August 19, 2019

August 19, 2019 By

They say:

Thank you for getting back to me with this reply. Although I appreciate all of it, two things in it stand out in particular:

While the ChurchMilitant crowd does call out sin in the hierarchy, it fundamentally has a false view that the problem can be fixed by replacing everyone without conservative views or who is gay. So many of those implicated in the abuse crises as enabling abusers, like the Diocese of Lincoln or Cardinal Hoyos, were theologically Orthodox and defenders of the Latin Mass.CM and others in that crowd are, in their own way, covering up the problem by trying to pin everything on one side of the church.

Precisely.  Recently, news broke that the Trad priest who happens to be Michael Voris’ priest not only was accused of abuse and removed from his duties but he was co-founder of a group that helped priests accused of abuse under the radar, including priests who had confessed to abuse.  Instead of his customary railing at the evil corrupt Church of Damn Libruls, Voris’ response has been to do nothing but instruct Premium Subscribers that Fr. Perrone categorically denies the charges.  How does Voris Just Know the priest is innocent?  Well, he’s a Traditional priest, of course.  One of Our Team.  It is impossible that One of Us could be guilty.  If that sounds like the entire basis of every clericalist coverup of every sexual assault in the Church since forever, that’s because it is.  He’s Our Sort.  His accusers are Them—out to bring Us, the Good Guys, down.  And that is the massive hubris that underlies the Us vs. Them narrative upon which the entire project of the Greatest Catholics of All Time depends.  They Just Know that God has anointed them to cleanse the Church of the Impure, including the Pope, so it is unthinkable that sin could really be an issue for them too.  It’s only the riff raff, by which they mean most of the Church and not themselves, who need to be purged.  Just the gays and libs.  They are the trouble, not the Righteous whom God has sent to deliver the Church from the impure, including the Pope.

For the abuse crises, it may be that we have to use secular media as our prime source, even if it does seem hostile to the faith in general. If we have confidence that the faith is true, their opinion shouldn’t  shake our own.

We most certainly should be turning to ordinary media journalists and never the Right Wing Noise Machine.  The measure is simple.  It is not “Do they never err?” but “What do they do when they err?”  Real journalists retract, apologize and correct.  Fake journalists double down and maintain the lie in order to stay on propagandistic message.

Another question, and I hate to bother you so much, but this has been on my mind: What should our attitude by towards John Paul II? My understanding is that he was deeply respected throughout the 80’s and 90’s for fighting communism and his outreach to other faiths. It now seems as if the church has done a lot to make him as an example of the faith, from canonizing him to selling children’s books about him. However, as lately confirmed by the harrowing Polish Documentary Tell No One, he did not act on bishops who he knew were enabling pedophilia, and even appointed them to higher positions, both here and in Europe. Maybe I’m thinking too much like a modern American, but it seems as if, while respect is owed for his accomplishments, he was a deeply flawed human who enabled great evil, and therefore should not be upheld so highly in Catholic circles.

I think the truth has to be told about both his failures and his achievements.  To me, he shows the very typical characteristic of the Petrine ministry: massive failure and real faith in Jesus.  Without any possible exception, his most colossal failure is with sexual abuse. Make what excuses we will for him, the reality is that when, for instance, Ratzinger tried to warn him that Maciel was a monster, he simply refused to act.  The instant that Ratzinger became Pope, Maciel was gone.  I get that a favorite Commie tactic was to accuse priests of being pervs and JPII grew up in the Cold War mindset that saw the Church as the Persecuted Noble Resistance that it typically was under the Commies.  But the fact remains that he behaved, alas, much as most bishops of his age acted (and still act) when confronted with what we now know is a global issue. He enabled.  He did not stop it and he did not put the good of victims first.  Indeed, if there is something the Church can learn from his failure it is that we must, especially here in America where the Church is not even persecuted, stop addressing the sins of the Church with the instant assumption that the Church is being persecuted when the victims of bad Catholics ask for justice.  We have to remember Jesus’ warning that the real danger facing the Church is not persecution (even if they kill us).  It is seduction (cf. Matthew 10:28).

Our simplistic ideological age will (I think stupidly) spend decades trying to stick a white or black mitre on JPII.  In the end, I think we will have to face the fact that, like Peter, he both denied and trusted Christ, committing grave sins and achieving great things by faith.  The prayer is “Look not on our sins but on the faith of your Church”.  I think, in the final analysis, JPII is a saint who failed profoundly in the area of sexual abuse, just as Peter is a saint who failed profoundly when Jesus, who was not only his Lord, but his friend, needed him most.  Jesus forgave him all the same.  I, who owe both men a huge debt for their work as Shepherds in my formative years, cannot imagine Jesus wanting me to do anything other than forgive JPII for his sins as well as pay him the debt of gratitude I owe him as I owe Peter.  So I do.  That’s the best I have anyway, though I also hasten to add that I speak only for me and not for victims struggling with a sense of betrayal.  Mostly I pray for peace and healing for the Church.

August 16, 2019

August 16, 2019 By

They write:

I want to start by saying the I appreciate your writings, especially on poverty. I was coming to the conclusion that American churches alignment with Ayn Randian economics was related to “faith alone”/antinomian theology, which claims that the Christian life ought to require no sacrifice, and you expressed these thoughts very well in your books and blogging. Some protestants have also come around to that idea, as articulated in David Platt’s book.

I’m unfamiliar with Platt, but I am struck by how much conservative Catholicism in particular (in the US) has taken on the flavor, culture, and sometimes the theology of Evangelicalism.  The false political soteriology that opposition to abortion (and voting Republican) taketh away the sins of the world is, in particular, everywhere in the culture right now, to the degree that Trump and FOX, far more than the Holy Father and the Magisterium, tend to form the thoughts and minds of conservative Catholics.  This deeply troubles me, as you have no doubt noticed.  The idea of comparing one’s thinking to the Magisterium and not to Democrats is foreign to many American conservative Catholics now.  And the idea of the Catholic both/and (expressed in, among other things, the concept of the Seamless Garment) is regarded with reflexive contempt.  Much that I loved and appreciated in coming into the Church, precisely because it was more capacious than American Evangelicalism’s cramped either/or is now dismissed with a sneer.  The Rules, rather than the Person, have come to matter most.  The Randian habit of subjecting the person to diagrams, property, and things is one manifestation of this.  It breaks  my heart.

I know you have heard this a million times, but one things that is giving me hesitancy to become a member of the church is the current corruption of the hierarchy/sex abuse cover up. I understand that these incidents have fallen since 2002, but many of those who protected abusers are in the church. I believe, as an outsider, that Catholic laity should have the ability to be critical of bishops and priests who stray from Catholic teaching.

Understood.  A couple of things, simply from the perspective of an ordinary layman:

  1. Catholic laity, especially in the US, are plenty critical of their clergy, right up to the Pope.  Some of that criticism is richly deserved and is taken, not to bishops but to cops, as it should be, since the bishops have show  themselves untrustworthy in such matters as abuse.  Yet at the same time, the irony of the abuse scandal and the reforms that come from it is that the American Church really has performed a sort of miracle of reform.  One lawyer who has prosecuted over 500 suits against the Church (an agnostic, by the way) has argued that the Church’s work in reforming itself in the US should be a model for every institution troubled by sexual abuse (which is essentially every institution that brings adults and children together, since predators are attracted to prey).  He has written a book about it.  The great irony of the abuse scandal is that the guy who oversaw the reforms and who did a brilliant job of it, as far as they went, was Cardinal McCarrick, who saw to it that a system was put in place that held everybody but himself accountable.  It is one of the weirdnesses of life that a really and truly gifted and competent bureaucrat who knows how to run and reform systems can also be a grave sinner.  Given such a task myself, I would have curled up into a fetal position and had no idea where to start, as would most people.  This guy knew what he was doing and brought all his skill to bear to really fix a massively broken system—and to cover up his own sins.  Weird.  Simul iust et peccator.
  2.  As to the notion that corruption in the hierarchy is a verdict on the truth of the Faith, I more or less give my views here.
  3. Of course, there is the question of simple safety in the Church, but that is basically the same issue as safety in schools or other watering holes that attract predators.  I would say the reforms have made the Church much safer and I certainly have no fears for my grand-children there.
  4. The basic problem now, it seems to me, is the reform of the global Church.  The core issue is predators, gay and straight, and enablers, liberal and conservative.  I am not at all convinced the global hierarchy has any idea what to do, and much of that is due, paradoxically, to the fact that the sexual revolution is still far in the future for millions of Catholics (including many victims) and they themselves would rather not discuss abuse.  The west is mostly past that.  But in many places, it is the victim of abuse who is still seen as the defiled one (including by him or herself) and getting from there to calling the cops is a long, long journey.  Also, I think a lot of bishops in the global south saw and see this as a decadent American thing and not as it actually is: a global issue.
  5. At the end of the day, the question comes back—theologically—to what the Church is.  If it is the body of Christ, animated and made holy by the Holy Spirit and not by our human wonderfulness (as I believe) then my duty to Jesus Christ is to stay and fight and pray for her healing, not out of devotion to some human institution, but out of love for Christ.  It was not Francis or the bishops who died for me and it sure as hell is not them who drew me to the Church, but the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist and the sacraments and the whole body of Christ that I, just as much a sinner, require because Jesus called me here.

My reader continues:

My problem is that the ones who seem to be doing this are Catholics very aligned to US conservative politics, like Michael Voris. People who you are critical of. I think that despite my disagreements with them, I sincerely appreciate that they challenge the idea that Catholics have to always agree with the Pope and Bishops. Then again, I am not sure on what is proper teaching on how laity should criticize “bad shepherds.”

The problem with the conservative subculture typified by Voris is that it does not think with the Tradition,  but with right wing culture war categories.  For them, the problem is gays and liberals.  That’s it.  That’s all.  Just purge the gays and liberals and the Church will be right as rain and anybody they think is light in the loafers or a lib is the enemy.  The problem is, this is just not real.  Abuse is committed by gays and straights.  Victims are male and female and not all of them are underage.  And enablers are liberals and conservative, as the careers of Maciel, Law, Neinstadt and, alas, JPII make clear.  Indeed, when John Corapi, an exalted right wing celebrity priest, got caught canoodling and walked away from his vows, Voris attacked, not him, but his bishop for trying to bring him to heel.  Why?  Because Corapi was a conservative folk hero and therefore couldn’t be an abuser while his bishop was presumed to be part of the shadowy Church of Nice liberal conspiracy.  Just because some demagogue is railing about “the bishops” does not mean they have the good of the Church in mind.  Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the endless war that has been waged against practically everything Francis says and does by a well-financed cabal of American (and a few contintental) conservatives who have hated his guts from the moment he was elected.

That’s not to say I think Francis is perfect.  I think he is on an agonizingly slow and frustrating (to me) learning curve when it comes to the abuse crisis.  I think his prescriptions for reform are well meant, but that he needs to face the fact that in addition to reporting abuse to bishops, abuse must be reported to the cops. But the blinding hatred of Francis which sees everything that he says and does with enmity and which has now culminated in the utterly nutty charges that he is a heretic and even a Satanist say everything about that toxic subculture and nothing about him.

There are Catholics who are outside conservatism critical of the hierarchy, like Elizabeth Bruenig. I guess my overall question is if you know of other good Catholic sources dedicated to exposing hierarchy who abuse their power, or if you disagree with the approach taken by sites like ChurchMilitant and CruxNow. The scandals  are the greatest reason people have a negative opinion of Catholicism, even though the abuse was obviously a violation of church teaching.

I believe Church Militant is a gravely toxic and spiritually deadly phenomenon that should be avoided.  I could not tell you five words CruxNow has written, so I’m not much use there.  Elizabeth has her head screwed on right and I generally agree with her critiques.  As far as exposure of crime, I would just stick with ordinary media.  Right wing Catholic media has long ago lost its credibility for me.  But more than that, I would keep in mind the old illustration from the Department of the Treasury.  They don’t teach Treasury agents to find counterfeits by having them pore over every conceivable permutation of a false bill.  They teach them what a genuine bill looks like.  Far better is to set about learning what the Church actually teaches and, above all, seeking to be a fruitful disciple of Jesus Christ in the midst of his Church than to marinate our minds in the sins of clerics. God knoweth they are there.  Nor is it wise to practice “enemy of my enemy is my friend” ethics which look to culture war enemies and then just perversely embrace whatever they hate, even if it’s stupid to do so.  This is what has turned the Christianist Right into a massive Freak Show.  There is also much that is good, holy, right, true, and lovely in the Body of Christ.  Nobody ever became a saint by obsessing over the crimes of others.  If it happens to be our duty to call out an evil, then let us do our duty.  But it is also vital that we devote ourselves to the Presence, more than the absence of Jesus in his Church.

Hope that helps!

July 31, 2019

July 31, 2019 By

Unmarked buildings, quiet legal help for accused priests

DRYDEN, Mich. (AP) — The visiting priests arrived discreetly, day and night.

Stripped of their collars and cassocks, they went unnoticed in this tiny Midwestern town as they were escorted into a dingy warehouse across from an elementary school playground. Neighbors had no idea some of the dressed-down clergymen dining at local restaurants might have been accused sexual predators.

They had been brought to town by a small, nonprofit group called Opus Bono Sacerdotii. For nearly two decades, the group has operated out of a series of unmarked buildings in rural Michigan, providing money, shelter, transport, legal help and other support to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse across the country.

Again and again, Opus Bono has served as a rapid-response team for the accused.

When a serial pedophile was sent to jail for abusing dozens of minors, Opus Bono was there for him, with regular visits and commissary cash.

When a priest admitted sexually assaulting boys under 14, Opus Bono raised funds for his defense.

When another priest was criminally charged with abusing a teen, Opus Bono later made him a legal adviser.

And while powerful clerics have publicly pledged to hold the church accountable for the crimes of its clergy and help survivors heal, some of them arranged meetings, offered blessings or quietly sent checks to this organization that provided support to alleged abusers, The Associated Press has found.

Though Catholic leaders deny the church has any official relationship with the group, Opus Bono successfully forged networks reaching all the way to the Vatican.

The AP unraveled the continuing story of Opus Bono in dozens of interviews with experts, lawyers, clergy members and former employees, along with hundreds of pages of documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests.

In recent months, two of the group’s founders were forced out after Michigan’s attorney general found that Opus Bono had misused donated funds and misled contributors. A third co-founder, a priest, was abruptly removed from ministry earlier this month after the AP began asking about an allegation that he had sexually abused a child decades ago.

Still, since 2002, Opus Bono has played a little-known role among conservative Catholic groups that portray the abuse scandal as a media and legal feeding frenzy. These groups contend the scandal maligns the priesthood and harms the Catholic faith.

Opus Bono established itself as a counterpoint to the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and other groups that have accused the church of trying to cover up the scandal and failing to support victims of clergy misconduct. Opus Bono focuses on what it considers the neglected victims: priests, and the church itself.

“All of these people that have made allegations are very well taken care of,” Opus Bono co-founder Joe Maher said in a radio interview, contending that many abuse accusations lodged against priests are false. “The priests are not at all very well taken care of.”

By all means, read the whole thing.

In related news, Michael Voris sprang to the defense of Fr. Corapi while accusing his bishop and his critics of being part of a shadowy Church of Nice conspiracy. Four years later, Church Militant was still very solicitous, not for Corapi’s victim, nor for the flock he betrayed, nor for the bishop Voris attacked for doing his job, but for Conservative Folk Hero Corapi (who still has not obeyed his bishop in 2019). Speaking of Conservative Folk Heros,  Fr. Z. has pitched Opus Bono to his cult of personality for quite some time, in between going on cruises and asking for stuff and bullying laypeople.  Seems to have left out the seedier parts.

This year, Voris’ priest was put under investigation for ‘credible’ allegations of sexual abuse. Yet again, Voris (and various others) immediately sprang to his defense, not to the defense of those bringing the allegations. Oh, have I mentioned? This priest is also the co-founder of Opus Bonus Sacerdotii.

At the same moment, a priest beloved by Lady Gaga was also accused. Much gloating from, you guessed it, Michael Voris and Church Militant. Just goes to show what these damned liberals are up to, say the Righteous. But stony silence about their Conservative Folk Hero priest.

Long ago, Tom Kreitzberg created a flow chart to explain this:

Meanwhile, here’s reality. The issue is not and never has been Gays and Liberals, despite the endless ignorant pronouncements of Michael Voris and the rest of the Righteous. The issue is abusers, gay and straight, and enablers, liberal and conservative.

I have no idea what the facts are about either priest and am content to wait for the results of the investigation. It could be both are guilty. It could be both are innocent. It could be one is guilty and the other innocent. We’ll know when we know.

Meanwhile, for the love of God, stop talking as though being a conservative is somehow a guarantee against being an abuser or an enabler. The iron skulls of the Righteous seem to have learned nothing from Maciel, Euteneuer, Corapi, Law, Neinstadt–or the behavior of Michael Voris and Church Militant and the people they defend.

We are a year out from the attempted coup against Francis by the shady Abp. Vigano.  The Right Wing Noise Machine was johnny on the spot with the attack against the only pope who actually acted against McCarrick, doing what Vigano had six years to do and did not.  This coordinated assault by such organs of propaganda as Liesite, 1 Peter 5, Church Militant and, of course, the Register was instant in their screams for the Holy Father to resign.

But this story?  It took real journalists to do this, because real journalists are getting at facts and not merely baseless ideological assaults.  When asked for evidence of his charges, Vigano refused to provide it and then disappeared, claiming that They were trying to kill him.  Did Voris or Church Militant challenge this?  Of course not.  Because they only hear what they want to hear and they only tell their premium subscribers what they want them to hear.

Get your news from real journalists, not this crowd.

June 24, 2019

June 24, 2019 By

They write:

Mr.Shea,

I want to start by saying the I appreciate your writings, especially on poverty. I was coming to the conclusion that American churches alignment with Ayn Randian economics was related to “faith alone”/antinomian theology, which claims that the Christian life ought to require no sacrifice, and you expressed these thoughts very well in your books and blogging. Some protestants have also come around to that idea, as articulated in David Platt’s book.

I’m unfamiliar with Platt, but I am struck by how much conservative Catholicism in particular (in the US) has taken on the flavor, culture, and sometimes the theology of Evangelicalism.  The false political soteriology that Opposition to abortion (and voting Republican) taketh away the sins of the world is, in particular, everywhere in the culture right now, to the degree that Trump and Fox, far more than the Holy Father and the Magisterium, tend to form the thoughts and minds of conservative Catholics.  This deeply troubles me, as you have no doubt noticed.  The idea of comparing one’s thinking to the Magisterium and not to Democrats is foreign to many American conservative Catholics now.  And the idea of the Catholic both/and (expressed in, among other things, the concept of the Seamless Garment) is regarded with reflexive contempt.  Much that I loved and appreciated in coming into the Church, precisely because it was more capacious than American Evangelicalism’s cramped either/or is now dismissed with a sneer.  The Rules, rather than the Person, have come to matter most.  The Randian habit of subjecting the person to diagrams, property, and things is one manifestation of this.  It breaks  my heart.

I know you have heard this a million times, but one things that is giving me hesitancy to become a member of the church is the current corruption of the hierarchy/sex abuse cover up. I understand that these incidents have fallen since 2002, but many of those who protected abusers are in the church. I believe, as an outsider, that Catholic laity should have the ability to be critical of bishops and priests who stray from Catholic teaching.

Understood.  A couple of things, simply from the perspective of an ordinary layman:

Catholic laity, especially in the US, are plenty critical of their clergy, right up to the Pope.  Some of that criticism is richly deserved and goes, not to bishops but to cops, as it should.  The irony of the abuse scandal and the reforms that come from it is that the American Church really has performed a sort of miracle of reform.  One lawyer who has prosecuted over 500 suits against the Church (an agnostic, by the way) has argued that the Church’s work in reforming itself in the US should be a model for every institution troubled by sexual abuse (which is essentially every institution that brings adults and children together, since predators are attracted to prey).  He has written a book about it: https://amzn.to/2JZkiIO  The great irony of the abuse scandal is that the guy who oversaw the reforms and who did a brilliant job of it, as far as they went, was Cardinal McCarrick, who saw to it that a system was put in place that held everybody but himself accountable.  It is one of the weirdnesses of life that a really and truly gifted and competent bureaucrat who knows who to run and reform systems can also be a grave sinner.  Given such a task myself, I would have curled up into a fetal position and had no idea where to start, as would most people.  This guy knew what he was doing and brought all his skill to bear to really fix a massively broken system—and to cover up his own sins.  Weird.

As to the notion that corruption in the hierarchy is a verdict on the truth of the Faith, I more or less give my views here: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2019/02/rod-bennett-on-his-new-book-bad-shepherds.html

Of course, there is the question of simple safety in the Church, but that is basically the same issue as safety in schools or other watering holes that attract predators.  I would say the reforms have made the Church much safer and I certainly have no fears for my grand-children there.

The basic problem now, it seems to me, is the reform of the global Church.  The core issue is predators, gay and straight, and enablers, liberal and conservative.  I am not at all convinced the hierarchy has any idea what to do, and much of that is due, paradoxically, to the fact that the sexual revolution is still far in the future for millions of Catholics (including many victims) and they themselves would rather not discuss it.  The west is mostly past that.  But in many places, it is the victim of abuse who is still seen as the defiled one (including by him or herself) and getting from there to calling the cops is a long, long journey.  Also, I think a lot of bishops in the global south saw and see this as a decadent American thing and not as it actually is: a global issue.

At the end of the day, the question comes back—theologically—to what the Church is. If it is the body of Christ, animated and made holy by the Holy Spirit and not by our human wonderfulness (as I believe) then my duty to Jesus Christ is to stay and fight and pray for her healing, not out of devotion to some human institution, but out of love for Christ. It was not Francis or the bishops who died for me and it sure as hell is not them who drew me to the Church, but the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist and the sacraments and the whole body of Christ that I, just as much a sinner, require because Jesus called me here.

My problem is that the one’s who seem to be doing this are Catholics very aligned to US conservative politics, like Michael Voris. People who you are critical of. I think that despite my disagreements with them, I sincerely appreciate that they challenge the idea that Catholics have to always agree with the Pope and Bishops. Then again, I am not sure on what is proper teaching on how laity should criticize “bad shepherds.”

The problem with the conservative subculture typified by Voris is that it does not think with the Tradition,  but with right wing culture war categories.  For them, the problem is gays and liberals.  That’s it.  That’s all.  Just purge the gays and liberals and the Church will be right as rain and anybody they think is light in the loafers or a lib is the enemy.  The problem is, this is just not real.  Abuse is committed by gays and straights.  Victims are male and female and not all of them are underage.  And enablers are liberals and conservative, as the careers of Maciel, Law, Neinstadt and, alas, JPII make clear.  Indeed, when John Corapi, an exalted EWTN right wing celebrity priest got caught canoodling and walked away from his vows, Voris attacked, not him, but his bishop for trying to bring him to heel.  Why?  Because Corapi was a conservative folk hero and therefore couldn’t be an abuser while his bishop was presumed to be part of the shadowy Church of Nice liberal conspiracy.  Just because some demagogue is railing about “the bishops” does not mean they have the good of the Church in mind.  Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the endless war that has been waged against practically everything Francis says and does by a well-financed cabal of American (and a few contintental) conservatives who have hated his guts from the moment he was elected.

That’s not to say I think Francis is perfect.  I think he is on an agonizingly slow and frustrating (to me) learning curve when it comes to the abuse crisis.  I think his prescriptions for reform are well meant, but that he needs to face the fact that in addition to reporting abuse to bishops, abuse must be reported to the cops. But the blinding conservative hatred of Francis which sees everything that he says and does with enmity and which has now culminated in the utterly nutty charges that he is a heretic and even a Satanist say everything about that toxic subculture and nothing about him.

There are Catholics who are outside conservatism critical of the hierarchy, like Elizabeth Bruenig. I guess my overall question is if you know of other good Catholic sources dedicated to exposing hierarchy who abuse their power, or if you disagree with the approach taken by sites like ChurchMilitant and CruxNow. The scandals  are the greatest reason people have a negative opinion of Catholicism, even though the abuse was obviously a violation of church teaching.

I believe Church Militant is a gravely toxic and spiritually deadly phenomenon that should be avoided.  I could not tell you five words CruxNow has written, so I’m not much use there.  Elizabeth has her head screwed on right and I generally agree with her critiques.  As far as exposure of crime, I would just stick with ordinary media.  Right wing Catholic media has long ago lost its credibility for me.  But more than that, I would keep in mind the old illustration from the Department of the Treasury.  They don’t teach Treasury agents to find counterfeits by having them pore over every conceivable permutation of a false bill.  They teach them what a genuine bill is.  Far better is to set about learning what the Tradition actually teaches and, above all, seeking to be a fruitful disciple of Jesus Christ in the midst of his Church than to marinate our minds in the sins of clerics. God knoweth they are there.  But there is also much that is good, holy, right, true, and lovely in the Body of Christ, including her priests.  Nobody ever became a saint by obsessing over the crimes of others.  If it happens to be our duty to call out an evil, then let us do our duty.  But it is also vital that we devote ourselves to the Presence, more than the absence of Jesus in his Church.

Hope that helps!

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