Alien Lanes

One sign of hope in dark times

I don’t have anything new to say about Springfield, Ohio. I have been writing about Catholics in public life and online bullshit and reactionary politics and stupidity for almost five years now, and this is just a dark and painful thing to witness, something that looks like America at its absolute worst, something that I can’t think about for too long without seeing red. Signs of hope are few and far between, but there has been one recently, and it’s important for me to call it out, to share it all with you, in case you can draw some hope from it as well. It’s that our bishops have actually, finally, for once in their stupid miserable careers, stepped up, and condemned the hatred being directed at the immigrant community of Ohio. Beyond that, though, they’ve gone even further, and explicitly laid the blame for this hatred right where it belongs: the abstract concept of “gossip”.

In their statement on September 19, the Catholic bishops of Ohio, speaking with a unified and prophetic voice, called out that:

“Today, our nation is divided by partisanship and ideology, which blind us to the image of God in our neighbor, especially the unborn, the poor, and the stranger. These negative sentiments are only exacerbated by gossip, which can spread quickly across social media with no concern for the truth or those involved… As the residents of Springfield, Ohio struggle with violent threats and life disruptions fueled by unfettered social media posts, we exhort the Catholic faithful and all people of goodwill not to perpetuate ill will toward anyone involved based on unfounded gossip.”

It was a badly needed blast of daylight, one that clearly was the product of careful thought and discernment. To call out gossip is a major step forward for an episcopate that has too often punted their own moral leadership. To a less learned and less pastoral group of men, a situation like this can seem “messy” or “ambiguous”, without any clear signposts like “a candidate for Vice President admitting that he’s lying about all of this but is going to continue doing it anyway because it advances his own political goals” or “a candidate for President literally yelling THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS THEY’RE EATING THE CATS on a live television broadcast watched by over sixty-seven million people”. It can be difficult to know who started all of this, who riled up this vile anti-immigrant sentiment, but the bishops of Ohio, not unlike Jesus being questioned by the scribes, gracefully sidestepped all of the seemingly easy answers by correctly identifying the true culprit as “a mindset of judging who belongs to our community,” and that mindset could belong to any number of equally influential and thus equally responsible individuals.

Even more importantly, the bishops stayed above the argument. When others went low, they stayed high. Issuing a venomous polemical broadside like “perhaps it’s not very helpful when JD Vance or Donald Trump say these things” may have seemed easy and obvious to the untrained eye; to a more trained eye, this was clearly the wrong approach. Sinking into obscenity like that so quickly was a trap, a rhetorical snare that our shepherds recognized and wisely avoided. With the skill of Blaise Pascal writing the Provincial Letters, the bishops surgically diagnosed what was really going on here: people were angry, and they were hateful, and something probably caused them to be that way but who even knows what it was.

I did not, honestly, think that our church’s leadership could do this in my lifetime. I am cautiously optimistic that, even in as dark a time as this, we may be about to turn a corner, as bishops start to speak out more in the media and find new allies to stand with them against something so obviously, intrinsically evil as gossip and unfettered social media posts.

I had dinner with a friend earlier this week, and she compared her experience of Catholicism to “circling the drain”; that is, to going around and around in a circle, over and over again, lower and lower every time. It’s an easy image to grasp. More abuse cases mishandled, more churches closing, more conservative assholes posting stuff, more bishops pursuing short-term political gain at all costs. More time passing with nothing changing, with the bishops telling us that nothing is going to change, with a Synod that we’ve been told is not supposed to change anything, six decades after a Council that we’ve been told hasn’t been given enough time to change anything. This was going to be another moment when nothing changed, even in the face of violence and threats against an immigrant community, when immigrant communities had been and still are part of our church today, spurred on by one of our country’s most visible Catholic politicians, or possibly not spurred on by him at all and people are just spurring themselves, I suppose that’s also a reasonable explanation for what’s happening right now.

In any event, I want you to know that a week ago, some of our leaders, who have something to lose by taking a stand, stood up and did something. They saw that the mobs had been roused up, possibly by strange particles in the air or something, and said “enough”. Enough of what? Remains to be seen. But that “enough”, that first “enough” that I’ve seen in five years, could be the first of many that we’re about to see. The tide is turning. The tide of what? Not really sure, could be anything, people do racist things for completely inscrutable and indecipherable reasons unrelated to public statements made by the politician with the biggest microphone in the world. But I am excited to watch this tide, whatever it is, turn with the rest of my church. I hope we all take the final words of the bishops’ letter to heart: “put on the mind of Christ to understand that God walks with all his people, especially those in need”, followed by an implied “all you people do is bitch, just leave us alone, what do you even want us to say, Jesus fucking Christ.”