An Apology to Bishop Barron
In light of recent events
Hi all - by now, you’ve probably seen the reporting from NCR that Bishop Robert Barron’s Word On Fire media organization sent a cease-and-desist letter to Commonweal magazine; Word On Fire was upset by the characterization of their work as “aligned with Trumpism”, and considered it slanderous. Commonweal has retracted the paragraph in question from the original essay by Massimo Faggioli.
In light of these actions and the responsibility I feel as a fellow member of Catholic media, I would like to pre-emptively apologize to Bishop Barron and Word On Fire for any mischaracterizations I have made of their work in the past. I often write G.O.T.H.S. from a place of highly charged emotion, and it is easy for me to write something that I may not necessarily stand by the next day; many times, I am insulting and callous when I should be charitable and making more attempts to better understand those with whom I disagree. What I do is different from existing Catholic news outlets and magazines - it’s pretty clear that I’m writing opinions that don’t purport to be facts, and it’s pretty clear that a lot of what I write is satirical - but it’s still important to me that I’m not ‘poisoning the well’ of Catholic online conversation. The last thing I would want anyone to do - especially people who write for Catholic online publications, many of whom are readers of this newsletter - is quickly and automatically associate Robert Barron with any or all of the tasteless insults I have levied at him over the past four-plus years. So, for all of those insults, for the unnecessary, uncharitable moments in my writing, I would like to offer my formal apologies to Bishop Barron, and we can all forget these moments of weakness, these insults, and move on.
Just as a reminder, I’m referring to these specific insults:
“A fascinating story about why no bishop should ever have an internet connection”
“Former G.O.T.H.S. subject, auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, aspiring media mogul, and guy who looks like a ham that got surprised Robert Barron”
“Barron - who I assume has a full-time job that does not involve posting stupid shit”
“Barron is so extremely online that I’m worried he’ll read this, get mad, try to storm out of his house in Santa Barbara, and crash through a glass patio door because he’s dumber than a half-asleep bird.”
“Barron, who does not and has never appeared to possess the capacity to distinguish between “moral value” and “a high number of views on YouTube”,”
“Cordileone, however, is not the dumbest bishop in the country, and he's not even the dumbest bishop in the state of California. That honor, of course - of course! - goes to Los Angeles auxiliary bishop, aspiring media mogul, and star of a future live-action biopic about Mister Potato Head, Robert Barron.”
“Word On Fire, Barron's stupid website that sucks,”
“There are probably multiple reasons why the bishops act like this - the bishops’ current media diet, the church’s history as an institutional slaveholder and segregationist, Robert Barron trying to impress a YouTube bodybuilder he likes -”
“Bishop Robert Barron, a man who begins every public-facing action and statement with an implied ‘oh yeah, well would an idiot do THIS?’”
“Barron - who looks like a giant Beanie Baby doll of the one owl who wasn’t smart enough to wear a graduation cap”
“Barron - who would have died in a gas explosion years ago if the “Momo Challenge” had actually been real”
“Robert Barron, who has a popcorn machine where his brain should be. You can easily best him in a theological argument by jingling your keys in his face, and you should be insulted that the church thought he could make a competent bishop.”
“Robert Barron also gets easily distracted by beefy YouTube weightlifters, once got outsmarted by someone as dumb as Taylor Marshall, and has a face that looks like a stale pancake.”
“Robert Barron, who soaks all day in hot dog water like a stupid sticky version of the bad guy from Dune.”
“Robert Barron, who aspires to be the next G.K. Chesterton but the only thing those two have in common is their generally spherical shape.”
“Robert Barron looks like a giant Playmobil figurine draped in raw pie crust.”
“Robert Barron, whose most obnoxious online critics have lobbed all of these insults at him, along with more personal ones, like how he ‘looks like a crude worry doll that a child somehow fashioned out of Kings Hawaiian rolls’”
“Robert Barron, for those who don't remember, is the bishop shaped like a coffee stain on a city bus seat, and then the strength of his intellect is about on par with a coffee stain on a city bus seat.”
“Robert Barron looks like a man who is Perpetually Indulging in cupcakes.”
“Robert Barron, Mr. March in my Dipshit of the Month calendar,”
“…presumably EWTN chose to interview him because of his physical resemblance to a Francesinha sandwich”
“The Hamm that got surprised” [callback, includes Toy Story pun]
“A dollar store squishmallow doll who somehow achieved sentience”
““Hey, Mel Gibson is, like, a bad role model for Catholicism, right?” is the easiest IQ test for a Catholic bishop to pass, and Barron failed. But that’s not a surprise, Barron fails every test you give him: IQ (dumb), marshmallow (eats the marshmallow), mirror (thinks there’s another bishop who looks exactly like him), and pH (body is made mostly of whole milk).”
[Quoting a press release from Robert Barron] “All copies of The New Word on Fire Bible are printed in the United States; when I had advertised that previous editions were untouched by filthy Communist Ching Chong Chinese hands, that upset a lot of you, so I had to walk that comment back, and then walking it back upset a different lot of you, and I kind of feel like sometimes I can't win with you people and I just want to sell some damn Bibles.”
“Robert Barron, the only bishop in history who has written more books than he's read”
“I don’t want anyone to extrapolate anything from this piece about Barron’s political opinions. The only thing I wanted to demonstrate was that if you survey all of Barron’s output and put it right next to a recent interview by a white supremacist trying to sound polished, it suddenly becomes very easy to get these two men to talk to each other and agree on a bunch of things. But hey, it is anyone’s guess as to what that means about Barron as a thinker or a bishop.”
“Look, I know he's not actually fat, okay? I know that. It's just an easy joke to make because he has a round face. He's like Amy Schumer in that regard. He's also like Amy Schumer in that the quality of his work has been dropping precipitously since 2014.”
“Barron recently wrote an op-ed for CNN explaining how much he loves Bill Maher. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? Why is this my own personal Lathe of Heaven? How is he just a G.O.T.H.S. essay that has somehow come to life? How is there anything left that I can possibly say about Robert Barron that makes him look like more of a dim callous ignorant dipshit that represents everything bad about the global church’s engagement with the world through new media? Oh I guess I can just make fun of the conference where you have to pay seven hundred and ninety five goddam dollars to hear a professor whine about trans people or AI or some shit and you don’t even get lunch.”