Ass Onion
Don't send a theologian to do a normal person's job.
"I keep returning in my mind to the glass onion. Something that seems densely layered, mysterious and inscrutable. But in fact, the center is in plain sight. And that is why this case has confounded me like no other. Why every complex layer peeled back has revealed another layer, and another layer, and come to naught. And that was the problem right there. You see, I expected complexity. I expected intelligence. I expected a puzzle, a game. But that's not what any of this is. It hides not behind complexity, but behind mind-numbing, obvious clarity. Truth is, it doesn't hide at all. I was staring right at it."
In March 2022 - almost a full year ago - several bishops, theologians, and journalists met in Chicago for a secret private special conference called "Pope Francis, Vatican II, and the Way Forward". The conference was sponsored by multiple Catholic universities and was attended by, among other people, Cardinals Cupich, O'Malley, and Tobin, three of the more prominent American allies of Pope Francis. Theologians from the sponsor universities were there, as was Vatican Nuncio Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the main Vatican diplomatic representative to the United States. Great pains were taken to keep the meeting private, and everyone who attended agreed to keep "Chatham House Rules" when relating what had happened at the meeting (presumably this rule was in effect because attendee and insufferable columnist Michael Sean Winters wanted to show off that he knew what the term meant). According to NCR journalist Josh McElwee, topics discussed included "the impact of moneyed conservative influence in Catholic social movements and media companies; polarization and division among U.S. bishops; the atmosphere of education at American seminaries, and the reluctance of some U.S. dioceses to implement the grassroots consultation process requested by Francis for the 2021-23 Synod of Bishops."
Fr. Mark Massa of Boston College's Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life was on the team that planned the conference; here's how he put it:
"Why don’t we have an event where theologians can talk with bishops?...It’s an opening meeting that we hope will become an annual or semi-annual event that will provide a forum where bishops and theologians can talk frankly to each other about important things that really get buried in the press … I don’t want to leave these important questions to the secular press who don’t understand what’s going on. [The goal is] How can we move the American church away from these culture wars divided between conservatives and liberals…to a united position where it’s possible to be on a spectrum of positions and still be considered a good Catholic and not be called names by people who disagree with you."
As Massa describes it, this is a complex, multi-layered theological problem that will require a complex, multi-layered theological solution, one that you really need theologians to tackle so that non-theologians (civilians?) don't end up misdiagnosing the problem. And that’s what this group worked on back in March 2022. Theologians and bishops - two groups who are famous for not always getting along! - met for an in-depth discussion, one where people felt free to speak openly, to try and find out why things had gotten so polarized and so bleak with the institutional church in America. One of the keynotes was given by Massimo Faggioli, a Villanova theologian named after the largest quantity of soup that you’re allowed to order at Sbarro. His lecture, titled “Opposition to Francis Rooted in Abandonment of Vatican II as a Source of Renewal” is reprinted in full at NCR, and is very detailed in its history of Vatican II theology, its reception in the states, and our current era in which a hardened conservative group of bishops and media outlets have dug in to their opposition against the Pope and the council overall. But all of the original opposition to the council has mutated into much weirder stuff, just as media has changed, and the political landscape has changed, and the roles that bishops take in running their dioceses have changed, and of course the papacy has changed. So now, as Faggioli suggested, opposition to (and support of) the Vatican II teachings looks completely different than it used to, and it’s a huge mess, and it’s a complex mess with theological politics at its core, and Faggioli proposed some specific ecclesial solutions to address polarization in the church and get us all back on the right track, specifically emphasizing the role of theologians in fixing the problem. Here are his solutions:
It is urgent to detach Vatican II from partisan narratives — ecclesially partisan and politically partisan. Just like other groups in American Christianity, "Vatican II Catholics" must stop consulting themselves for guidance.
There is no future for Vatican II and Catholicism in general without the inclusion of Latino and Black and Asian American Catholics. Vatican II is still perceived in the U.S. (also in academia) as "the last big thing" (not the next) for white-European Catholicism.
It is urgent to bridge the gap between bishops and theology. This is not just hurting the bishops and theology, but the entire church.
Synodality is the great opportunity to revive an inclusive, healthy sense of the church As John O'Malley wrote recently in America magazine: "although Pope Francis' call is altogether traditional, it is radically new in the breadth it envisages. This should not scandalize us but energize us. We are entering upon a great project, and our responsibility for its success is as great as the project itself."
So the blueprint was laid out here, and it included a lot about narrative and listening and the rhetoric that groups use to define themselves. Bishops and theologians discussed this blueprint seriously, and in fact, a key part of the solution to the problems in the church required bishops and theologians to continue working together more closely in the future. How can we take these principles and fix this incredibly complex, multi-layered problem in the church? How do we come in with a multi-layered theological solution? And now a full year has passed, leaders in the church have had this blueprint, and oh boy I sure hope that when I look back at the past year, I don't just see a long list of the same stupid bullshit we’ve been seeing for years with no meaningful change at all, as if the conference had never even happened in the first place. Let's see what's been going on in the year since that conference identified the theological gaps that led to the polarization of the church:
Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, KS called the Pope ill-informed in an interview and said that the Pope didn’t know how to engage with Catholics on abortion as well as Naumann did. Naumann went on to spend $2.5M of his diocese’s collection basket money to support a ballot initiative to ban abortion outright in the state of Kansas, which then lost by 20 percentage points
Robert McManus of Worcester, MA stripped a local Catholic school of their ability to call themselves “Catholic” or celebrate the sacraments because they flew a Black Lives Matter flag in front of their building. McManus’ original rationale for the decision was that BLM encouraged “broad-brush distrust of police and those entrusted with enforcing our laws”, which of course has nothing to do with Catholic teaching, so then he had to scramble to pull another reason out of his ass and landed on “they’re too nice to queer people”. To my knowledge, no other bishops have made any public statements on this action
Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco barred Nancy Pelosi from receiving Communion in his diocese, using a big loud public statement, because of her views on abortion policy and apparent disregard for the sanctity of life. It was difficult to hear his statement over the raspy cough he has because he also has been very public about his refusal to get vaccinated against a respiratory virus that has killed over a million Americans. Several bishops joined him in barring Pelosi from dioceses she has no reason to ever visit
Fan favorite and recent Falun Gong evangelist Joseph Strickland of Tyler, TX communicated that - I mean, it was a bunch of things with this guy, of course, it was the video where Pope Francis was a “diabolically disoriented clown”, it was doubling down on that video soon after people pointed out that it called the Pope a diabolically disoriented clown, it was accusing the Vatican of blasphemy for defrocking Frank Pavone, I mean take your pick. To my knowledge, no other bishops have made any public statements on any of the stupid things he’s done
Robert McElroy of San Diego, another prominent ally of Pope Francis, gave an address at Sacred Heart University in which he made some arguments that can be summarized as “a lot of people feel excluded by the church because of our monomaniacal focus on sexual sins, maybe we should act in a way that makes fewer people feel excluded”. He was publicly rebuked for making such apparently absurd statements by bishops Robert Barron of Rochester, James Conley of Lincoln, and Samuel Aquila of Denver
Two prominent Catholic governors, Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, began trafficking asylum seekers as a political stunt. To my knowledge, there has been no public discussion whatsoever of barring either governor from the sacraments, and a single-digit’s worth of our 272 bishops called out the stunt for the moral failure that it was
The archdiocese of Denver fired a teacher for being gay. When a small group of women in the community wore rainbow masks to Mass in solidarity with the fired teacher, their priest refused them Communion. When asked by the press if this was really the best way to handle these kinds of things, archbishop Samuel Aquila said words to the effect of "sure is!"
Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield published an essay in First Things in which he accused two Cardinals of heresy and suggested that they be excommunicated and barred from voting in future conclaves, lest they usher in the reign of an illegitimate and possibly heretical Pope
Retired archbishop Charles Chaput, who is a dick, sat down for an interview with The Pillar’s JD Flynn and Ed Condon, who are also dicks, in which he discussed (implicitly and explicitly) how much of a failure Francis was as Pope. The interview, which was given shortly after Francis criticized polarization in the episcopate, was titled “Chaput: Speaking the Truth is Polarizing”, presumably because “Chaput: Fuck You I’m Right And Everyone Else Is Wrong” was bad for SEO
At their November conference, the bishops elected Timothy Broglio of the military archdiocese as the new USCCB president (Salvatore Cordileone got four votes, which are widely believed to be himself, and then himself three more times in various dollar-store disguises). While I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the bishops elected Broglio to show public opposition to Pope Francis’ priorities, I think it’s safe to assume that Broglio’s election shows that the USCCB’s preeminent priority is to change as little as possible in how they run the church and engage with the world
These are all clearly outgrowths of the problems that the conference identified: a church where bishops are desperate to get mired in culture wars and political polarization, where bishops shrug off the pastoral approaches urged by Pope Francis, where you can easily find a bishop who trusts only his own moral authority and nothing else, even when told “hey I don’t think you have this right” by the actual people who do the moral authority jobs in the church. It's the same set of problems we've been seeing for at least a few years now. And look, I know I shouldn’t expect things to get fixed overnight because of just one conference, but I also feel like I shouldn’t expect things to get way worse at an accelerated pace. This first-of-its-kind theological conference is now a year old, with all of this happening after some of the sharpest theological minds in the church laid out their suggestions for addressing these problems. I think it's worth asking at this point whether the theologians actually have identified the right solutions. Actually, I think it's worth asking whether they've even identified the right problems.
In February 2020 - over three full years ago - I published a piece on Taylor Marshall, noted right-wing Catholic YouTuber and conspiracy theorist, whose 2019 book Infiltration argued that Pope Francis' papacy was the result of a Masonic conspiracy, with direct intervention from Satan, to slowly destroy the Catholic church.
Marshall used to be a professor. He’s read all of the Vatican II documents. There’s nothing he missed in them, there’s nothing that anybody needs to point out to him, there’s no solution to the problem of Taylor Marshall that requires a theologian to put together. When I was writing about him, I wasn’t focused on theological arguments, because I didn’t really see any of the issues related to Taylor Marshall or similar Catholic media folks as theological in nature. This was what I originally wrote as the takeaway for that piece1:
"I really wanted to come to a definitive conclusion on how 2013/2014 Marshall turned into 2019 Marshall. But I can't speak with the same certainty as Marshall, so all I have are theories. Maybe he was always like this, and he was just full of shit when he quit FMC because he thought that was the right move for his reputation at the time. Maybe he wasn't always like this, but spending too much time on YouTube eventually turned him into a conspiracy theorist, he wouldn't be the first. Or hell, maybe he's actually a really normal dude that was just the first person to stumble across this massive Satanic conspiracy, although that seems pretty unlikely.
What seems far more likely to me is that he’s a self-employed father of eight who finally figured out where the money was…hey, it also gave him an opportunity to sell books and merch. I can't say with certainty that this is what happened to Marshall, but in general, I don’t accept a complicated theological explanation when my other option is “there once was a man who needed a job”."
For the next three years, I kind of used this framework to look at all of the other topics that I dug into on G.O.T.H.S. When I looked at someone like Sohrab Ahmari or Abby Johnson or Michael Voris, I wasn’t looking for gaps in theological reasoning, but I was looking for more basic motivations, like whether they were just doing these things to make money and get attention, and whether they would very quickly have pursued any other paths to more money and attention, if given the chance. Would Marshall abandon his current gig and become a cheerleader for Pope Francis if it paid more or got him more attention? Well, it’s what he tried to do in 2013. Would Abby Johnson become an advocate for Planned Parenthood instead of smearing them, if it paid more or got her more attention? Well, it’s what she tried to do in 2011. Would Abby Johnson abandon advocacy entirely to sell leopard-print blazers if it made her more money? I mean, she’s trying to do both right now. Overall, though, Marshall is still the clearest example of someone who does what he does, not because of any theological ignorance, but for the most obvious and simple of reasons: he likes making money and getting attention.
Every single time I tried this framework, it worked. Even if it wasn’t perfect, it worked better than a complicated theological explanation, one hundred percent of the time. And when I tried to apply it to the bishops, it somehow worked even better. Why would Robert Barron or Alexander Sample or Joseph Strickland or Salvatore Cordileone or Robert Barron or Thomas Tobin or Raymond Burke or Tim Dolan or Robert Barron2 say and do the stupid things they say and do? Have they somehow all consciously and independently chosen different ineffective ways to reject the ecclesiology of Vatican II? Is there some sort of theological information we can give them that will help them correct their ways? Or do they like power and attention, and make bad decisions based on what is going to give them more of those things? Because if it’s the latter, a theologian isn’t really the person to solve the mysteries of polarization and culture wars in the church. Because those aren’t really mysteries at all.
Glass Onion, Rian Johnson's Oscar-nominated murder mystery film from last year, is obviously named after a Beatles track, just like his previous Oscar-nominated murder mystery film, Knives Out, was named after a Radiohead track. But a "glass onion" is also how Daniel Craig's character - world's greatest detective Benoit Blanc - comes to understand the central mystery of the new film. Blanc is on a Greek island retreat with some brilliant "disruptors" - a tech mogul, a governor, a fashion entrepreneur, a new media streamer, an engineer - trying to figure out which one of them is a murderer. They're all complex people with complex and devious motives and layers and opportunities to pull off dastardly deeds.
Except that they're not actually those things. Blanc just assumed that they were smart and complex people because of where he was, and that's why he has so much trouble finding the murderer. Because the actual murderer is an idiot, who committed the murders for the dumbest possible reasons, did a bad job covering their tracks, and at one point is only able to pull off a murder by doing the "hey guys look at that over there" trick. Blanc doesn't grasp this at first because it doesn't occur to this brilliant detective that the mystery, and the perpetrator, could be so stupid, or that Blanc could solve the mystery by just seeing all the mistakes that the murderer committed as actual mistakes and not twelve-dimensional chess moves. The tech mogul, the governor, the entrepreneur - they're not actually brilliant, they're very, very dumb. They're rich, and they're powerful, but it turns out you don't need to be brilliant to become those things, you mostly just need to be lucky. Once Blanc finally cracks the case - and delivers the monologue at the beginning of this essay - he sighs, embarrassed at himself, and growls "it's so dumb!" One of the suspects responds, awestruck, "yes, so dumb it's brilliant!", to which Blanc yells, exasperated, "NO! IT'S JUST DUMB!"3
To find what's wrong with the church and address it, to "move the church away from these culture wars", we need to peel back every layer of the onion. We need to understand the Second Vatican Council, and its implementation, and its response, and how bishops and theologians have responded to those responses, and the complex competing theologies that surround the core of the onion. Except the onion is made of glass, and you can see the center without peeling away any of the layers, and realize that at the core of everything, we're just dealing with a bunch of stupid people who want stupid things. Things like money and power and attention. Things that a deeper connection between bishops and theologians isn't going to fix.
Going back to Faggioli’s list of ecclesial solutions: I’m not here to make fun of them or pick them apart. I actually agree with most of the things Faggioli said in his keynote. The question I’m asking isn’t “was Faggioli correct?” but rather, “do any of the things he said actually matter for the problem he’s trying to fix?”
Pick one example off my list of events from the past year. Take Robert McManus, who stripped a school of its Catholic status over their flying a Black Lives Matter flag. Which of Faggioli’s solutions addresses the root issue there? How would McManus getting closer to the world of academic theology have prevented him from being a dick to those students? Would you go to McManus and tell him “actually, there is no future for Vatican II and Catholicism in general without the inclusion of Latino and Black and Asian American Catholics" and expect him to say “ah, you’re right, that school can be Catholic again”? Of course you wouldn’t, because if you came to him with that, he’d say “actually, in my diocese, we back the blue”, and that would be the end of it. And that viewpoint wouldn’t come from a concerted effort to separate the episcopate from the academy, or a conscious effort to reject the documents of Vatican II or undermine Pope Francis. That viewpoint comes from McManus being kind of dumb, and wanting to feel important, and believing whatever he sees on his television and his computer. Which is still very bad, because McManus has the power to actually strip that school of its status, but it’s a completely different problem than the March conference of theologians addressed.
Or take Joseph Naumann, and think about what a theologian might have told him before he set two and a half million dollars on fire. Could they have said “you know, this doesn’t seem like the right path to pursue on political engagement, especially when you consider what Pope Francis, who has really been bringing the spirit of Vatican II to life, has been demonstrating?” They could have said that, but the guy who interviewed Naumann for that magazine basically said exactly the same thing, and Naumann still went with “no, I’m pretty sure I’m right and the Pope is wrong.” And then when presented with twenty percentage points of evidence that he may not have actually been right, consistent with the overall response to legislative abortion restrictions in the past year, Naumann went with “maybe the biased secular press just lied to everyone”. Naumann was not waiting for the right theological argument to change his mind. He had the power to spend millions, and he wasn’t about to cede his power or his status by letting someone else tell him what to do. He likes power, he likes being the one who tells other people what to do, even if it costs him millions of dollars and the actual outcome he was supposedly trying to achieve. So we need to consider the possibility that he wasn’t ready to consider the past fifty years of ecclesial theology and how it should influence his actions, because he’s dumb. Not so dumb he’s brilliant, just dumb.
Should I be giving the bishops more intellectual credit when I try to identify these problems? How deep do you think the talent pool is for bishops? In a Catholic church that has to run parishes without pastors in every diocese, do you think the office of bishop is reserved for men who distinguish themselves as the absolute best and brightest, as brilliant administrators, as guys who can definitely practice good discernment and prudence, as guys who won’t just cave immediately if a donor handles them a big bag of money, as guys who stop and say “maybe I shouldn’t just immediately believe this headline I scrolled past”? Or are we just dealing with a bunch of dumb guys who like power and attention, consuming media that is created by a different bunch of dumb guys who like money and power and attention, funded by rich people who can also be, as it turns out, pretty dumb and fixated on getting money and power and attention?
Now, these might sound less like specifically Catholic problems and more like problems you see in many other institutions throughout the country. And they are! Why would we assume we're so special as to have completely different problems than every other institution and group? Why would we expect complexity or intelligence to be behind our problems, instead of the same mind-numbing idiocy that causes these same problems everywhere else? And, again, if we find ourselves with very familiar and universal problems, are they really problems that we need a theologian to solve, or is there another way?
So I just finished reading People Get Ready: Ritual, Solidarity, and Lived Ecclesiology in Catholic Roxbury, the excellent new book by Emory theologian Susan Reynolds4. The book is a chronicle of St. Mary of the Angels parish in Boston’s poor- and working-class Roxbury neighborhood, which has basically never received meaningful resources from the arch - the bishop barely knows they exist, and the parish goes for multi-year stretches without a pastor in residence - and is so neglected by the institutional archdiocese that the actual church building, described by Reynolds as “a basement with a roof”, is still unfinished today. But through various waves of migration into Boston, St. Mary’s becomes a vibrant and active faith community, one tightly woven in to a neighborhood suffering from gang violence and the kind of neglect that most municipalities show to their poorest neighborhoods. Reynolds starts with a discussion of the kind of parish that the Vatican II reforms were trying to create, and shows - successfully, I think - that St. Mary’s is exactly that kind of parish, one that values its diversity without flattening it out, one that believes strongly in lay leadership and vests its parish pastoral council with significant material power, one that takes very seriously its material responsibility to the rest of the community. Most of the parishoners are not theologians, though - just like at any parish - and the ecclesiology of the parish is not one of understanding and reclaiming magisterial documents, but rather practicing encounter and solidarity with their fellow parishoners and fellow Roxbury residents every day. And that’s clearest in the final chapter of Reynolds’ book, set in 2004, when the arch of Boston decided to close St. Mary’s.
2004 was after the "Spotlight" reports on the sex abuse coverup in the arch of Boston. The archdiocese had run out of money, and the time had come to consolidate parishes. St. Mary found itself on the chopping block along with many other parishes. Archbishop O'Malley had the power to close them down, and he wasn't doing it because he had missed something from the Vatican II documents, he was doing it because he thought St. Mary’s would be an easy parish to close5.
They weren't and aren’t. St. Mary’s is still open today. It's worth looking at how they pushed back against O'Malley's power. Importantly, the strategy did not hinge on conferences of theologians or discussions on reclaiming the proper ecclesiology of Vatican II. St. Mary’s didn't have time for that. Once the decision came down to close the parish, this is where St. Mary’s started:
"They began by mounting a pressure campaign, flooding the chancery with letters and local media with the voices of parishioners and their advocates. To do this, they tapped into the diverse religious and secular ecologies within which St. Mary’s existed. At the first committee meeting, someone taped a large piece of sky-blue poster paper to the wall. Attendees listed every community leader, media outlet, local organization, politician, and public figure they could think of: The Boston Globe and the Jamaica Plain Gazette and Spanish-language newspaper El Mundo, National Public Radio and local Spanish-language stations; then mayor Tom Menino and City Counselor Felix Arroyo, State Representative Liz Malia and former representative John McDonough, parish house resident-emeritus Paul Farmer and Egleston YMCA Director Will Morales and local police officer Sixto Merced, a former youth group kid and gang member whose life was transformed by Fr. Jack. They listed longtime neighborhood partners like affordable housing association Urban Edge and bilingual Rafael Hernández School across the street and every Egleston Square neighborhood association in existence. Boston College and Harvard were on the list, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and Jewish Memorial Hospital. They named every parishioner who had received the archdiocese’s prestigious Bishop James Augustine Healy Award, an honor given annually for service to the Black Catholic community in Boston. When they ran out of space on the front of the poster, they turned it over and kept writing."
The objective was not just to persuade, it was to pressure. St. Mary’s had to flood the local media with their narrative about how much this parish - and by extension the Catholic church - was doing for the community, and what O'Malley was depriving the city of - not just the Catholics that attended Mass, but everyone in the neighborhood that the parish worked hard to serve - by shuttering the parish. The solution was to call in every favor and pull every string with every community organization to have the entire neighborhood speaking with one voice and taking control of the story from O'Malley. The solution was to have every paper, every television station, every community advocacy group asking O'Malley how he could dare take so much away from a neighborhood that already had so few resources. They had a neighborhood-wide Mass and march and public demonstration, and then a twenty-four hour prayer vigil in the church and got everyone in Boston media to put this in the center of their stories about the arch-wide closures. It worked:
"What was distinctive about the campaign St. Mary’s mounted was that it was not, ultimately, about resistance alone but about solidarity. The [coalition] assembled a community coalition that intentionally downplayed individual sentimental connections to the parish and instead demonstrated its decisive stabilizing role in the social and cultural ecology of the neighborhood. The coalition’s ecumenical, interreligious, and secular composition helped to defuse the temptation to make the campaign a referendum on the credibility and moral authority of the Catholic hierarchy, at least not explicitly. Ritualizing the relationship of mutuality between church and neighborhood, and strategically using media in English and Spanish to open these rituals of solidarity to multiple publics, the community successfully demonstrated that the parish was too vital to the peace and survival of Egleston Square to shutter. In the end, it was solidarity that saved St. Mary’s—both the solidarity that bound together the fates of parish and neighborhood and the elusive, hard-won solidarity that united parishioners themselves."
The media and the letters and the unified voice and the narrative did not let up. Everyone in the city, every day of the campaign, was made to see a diverse and vibrant parish, tied to every major and minor institution in the city, that was irreplaceable in its neighborhood, and irreplaceable to Boston. The solution to the closure threat did not hide behind the complexity of conciliar documents, but behind the mind-numbing, obvious clarity of power. The solution was not to argue over ecclesial theology, or even to theologically appeal the closure to the Vatican (which other Boston parishes attempted, unsuccessfully). The solution was simply to make O'Malley's decision to close St. Mary so unpalatable that he'd have to change course. St. Mary’s had built the power to do exactly that over their decades of serving Roxbury.
The funny thing, of course, is that this is all theological, without being explicitly about reclaiming Vatican II. None of what St. Mary’s did contradicted any of the proposed solutions that Faggioli laid out in 2022; honestly, what they did was right in line with everything Faggioli said in his keynote. But St. Mary’s figured all of this out (at least) eighteen years before Faggioli gave a lecture proposing those solutions and the historical context behind them, and they did it without a theology PhD. Reynolds frames this parish as one that really exemplifies the Vatican II vision precisely because they understand the material realities and lines of power in their neighborhood and city, and they shape their work, as a church, around that understanding. St. Mary’s plan for saving the parish wasn't easier than proposing a more academic argument - St. Mary's approach was very difficult and labor-intensive, and they wouldn’t have pulled it off without decades of building themselves up in their community - but it was a solution that addressed the real issue, which was power and pressure, not theological misunderstanding. St. Mary's understood Vatican II on a practical - and more immediately useful! - level because they understood the power that they had, power they had built over decades of praying together and serving their neighborhood, the power to shape the narrative about the archdiocese, and the power to allocate and give their limited resources of money and time and labor.
The church, of course, runs on the money and time and labor of the laity. When people work collectively to decide where those resources go, they can have a tremendous amount of power in the church. Those are the laity's resources to give, and those are also, as it turns out, the laity's resources to withhold.
I want to return to a story I've told before in an earlier G.O.T.H.S. piece: the 2015 fight between Salvatore Cordileone and the teachers in the archdiocese of San Francisco, which happened seven years before the best theological minds in the country said “we need to figure out an approach for addressing these polarized bishops”. Cordileone was about three years into his tenure as archbishop and had decided to tell all of his teachers that being gay, or otherwise engaging in any sexual activity that Cordileone found unseemly, was going to be grounds for termination with cause. This was a stupid man on a power trip. It was an action that was going to do nothing to make the arch’s schools better, and it was a blatant culture war move that was certainly out of step with the pastoral direction in which the Vatican had been trying to direct the church. But it was something that Cordileone, in theory, had the power to do. He didn’t end up doing it, because his teachers convinced him not to, and it’s very important to understand how they convinced him.
There are, of course, San Francisco teachers who have read Gaudium et Spes and other Vatican II documents; there are more of them who may not have read all of the documents cover-to-cover but certainly understand the gist of what kind of church Vatican II was trying to create. These were people who had dedicated their careers to serving the church and the students of San Francisco. They could have sat down with Cordileone and told him “this is not the church we are, this is not a good pastoral way to run your school system, have you seen what the Magisterium has written?” They didn’t do that, because they assumed, correctly, that it would have been a waste of time. Of course Cordileone knows what’s in the Vatican II documents, he just doesn’t care. If people told him “you’re supposed to be less cruel than this,” he would have just said “no, I actually like firing gay people, it makes me feel important,” and that would have been the end of it. He’s not someone waiting for the right intellectual argument to convince him; presumably at some point in his life, somebody also told him “hey don’t drive drunk when your mom is in the car,” which is a good message for obvious reasons, but that one never stuck with him either.
So the teachers didn’t say “Mr. Bishop6, you should know that this is out of step with the ecclesiological tradition with the church”. When it came to the Magisterium, the teachers didn’t care about the message or the rules they make. Instead, the message that the teachers gave Cordileone was much simpler: “if you do this, we will shut your schools down.”
The teachers, who are members of the American Federation of Teachers, threatened to withhold their labor, as a union. Then, they told everyone in the community they served, and that community rallied around them as well. There are plenty of great quotes I could pull from church teachings on the importance of unions and why Catholics should want workers to have control over their working conditions, but none of them drive the point home quite like a good old-fashioned strike threat in response to the boss being an asshole. Cordileone does not understand much (e.g. how to be a good bishop, how vaccines work, what the legal blood alcohol limit is in California), but he understands power, and all of a sudden, as a third-year archbishop about to find himself without a school system, he was on the wrong end of that power, and he not only backed off of his original morality clause, but ended up giving the teachers a significant raise for their troubles.
Vatican II ecclesiology is not my area of expertise. And if that’s not your area of expertise, either, I bet you still were able to figure out who won these two fights and how.
I said in the sub-head of this piece that you “don't send a theologian to do a normal person's job”. That sentence seems to suggest that I don’t think theologians are normal people, because I am suggesting that, and also my suggestion is correct. Theologians are not normal people, and I say that with great affection for the field and as somebody who, believe it or not, once earned an undergraduate degree in theology. Theologians went to schools - usually multiple schools - with great humanities programs and spent all their time in the library and wrote dissertations on papal documents and for their day jobs they do deep thinking and write articles and give lectures. Their experience of the church is not common, and certainly not in line with the experience of people in the growing areas of the church. Which doesn't make theologians bad people at all, but it does mean that they're not going to be the ones to solve the problems of power in the church. If their job is generally to overthink things, it's possible that when presented with the problems of today's church, they would treat them as mysteries to be solved, and not very obvious imbalances of power that need to be addressed and realigned. They might assume that the people behind the problems are as intelligent and rational as they are, and they would be making a mistake. You can even tell that the theologians messed up by who they pulled in to solve the problem: they said "There's a problem with the church, we should talk to some of the good bishops", which is a little like seeing a car on fire and trying to reason with the flames furthest away from the gas tank.
That's probably why I look back on this year-old conference, which was so important and groundbreaking that it had to be kept super-secret and under a rule that nobody had heard of, and wonder if it actually accomplished anything. There do not appear to be any material changes on the part of any of the attendees to address any of the issues identified in the conference. There are no new policies or pastoral approaches from the American bishops. There have been no public statements from the bishops to address any of the issues that have arisen since the conference, and most of the public statements I’ve seen from the bishops on anything seem to be moving in completely the opposite direction. If the conference was just an exercise in showing off that you could say all the right words and then take none of the right actions…well, that would be consistent with the blueprint laid out by prelates like Blase Cupich.
To say the same thing over and over again: the problems we have are not ones just of theology, but of power. Put as many layers on top of it as you like, but at the core there is just blunt, obvious, stupid power. The solutions to the power imbalances in the church will not come from summits of theologians and bishops. They will come from mobilized parishes, lay groups, unions, and, more broadly, people who have been on the receiving end of the bishops' power and give enough of a shit about each other to start doing something about it. And you can actually be that kind of Catholic regardless of the number of conciliar documents you’ve read.
The church does not need bishops to get closer to theologians, it needs power to get further away from the bishops. It needs power - real, material power, over things like hiring and money and political action and abuse investigations - to move to places that the church has traditionally not been super-comfortable letting power go. Theologians can do important work to help the church if they are willing to talk about material power directly; Reynolds did a great job of this in her book. And the laity can move material power further from the bishops and closer to themselves if they’re willing to collectively fight for that, and I think that many of them are willing to fight for it. I certainly hope so; as Reynolds explained in her big takeaway from St. Mary’s, “people only fight to save what they love”.
Looking back on the piece, I will say I definitely made it longer than it needed to be, and I also incorrectly referred to Carlo Maria Vigano as a Cardinal when he’s an archbishop. Still think I got the takeaway right.
Robert Barron looks like a giant Playmobil figurine draped in raw pie crust.
I did like this movie a great deal, but to be fair I have two young kids and have only seen two movies that came out in 2022 (the other was RRR, which I merely think is one of the greatest movies ever made).
As I disclosed in an earlier piece, Dr. Reynolds happens to be a friend of mine from college. I read the book because she’s my friend, but even if she’s not your friend, it’s still a very good book.
I’m oversimplifying a lot that’s in the chapter and in the book - which, again, is really good! - like how O’Malley assumed he could just shunt the Spanish-speaking parishoners off to another Spanish-speaking parish, when all of the different language groups at St. Mary’s were tightly integrated in ritual, social, and governance aspects of the parish.
I believe this is the correct form of address.