Blue Hell on Earth
Fine, okay, one thing about the Dodgers.
“I was still feeling the guilt that I was going to let my parents down because of who I was. When I found out the message of the sisters was about removing stigmatic guilt and repairing people’s joy, I was like, ‘I need to do that for myself, and I need to do it for other people too.’”
-Sister Candy Cide of the Immaculate Misconception
“Early on, it surprised the heck out of us to discover that people like the joke, but they also took the nun aspect seriously. And we started to think, ‘You know, we do have a serious responsibility. Let’s live up to that and give people the truth of our hearts as well as the glitter and humor.’”
-Sister Unity
“You don’t come to this organization without understanding, without compassion and without having fought these kinds of battles before on a smaller scale. I think it comes with the calling.”
-Sister June Cleavage
On June 2nd and June 5th, groups of Central American migrants were taken from Sacred Heart, a Jesuit parish in El Paso, Texas that has been serving as an important way station for migrants and asylum seekers. The migrants were flown to California, using taxpayer dollars, and dumped at the office of the diocese of Sacramento, after being told, incorrectly, that they were getting in touch with some job placement opportunities. Florida governor Ron DeSantis planned this displacement to make a point about the Biden administration's border policy, and to spite his counterpart in California, who of course works in Sacramento and disagrees with DeSantis on immigration policy. DeSantis has been doing these surprise-relocations of migrants for several months now, and brags about them in his stump speeches as he gets his presidential campaign up and running.
So, just to spell it out: migrants have been displaced under false pretenses, by government officials. Their lives, already unimaginably hard, were made harder by powerful people, because those powerful people are trying to become more powerful at the expense of the lowly. The men and women who were deceived were targeted for that deception because they were taking shelter in a Catholic church. They were dropped off at a diocesan office in order to inconvenience the Catholic church. The person who did this did so to further his own political career, and used the personnel and resources of the state to do so. The state targeted Catholic institutions, to do as much damage, as publicly, as possible. This is what state-sponsored cruelty to Catholics looks like. But, hey, what the fuck do I know, maybe it's really Pride Night at Dodger Stadium.
I really didn't want to write about the Dodgers thing, even though a surprisingly high number of you asked me if I was going to do it. Everyone has written about it already, and most of the takes have been bad, except for this one by the wonderful Kaya Oakes over at Sojourners, and I'm not going to give you any new information or insight that she didn't already write out. But I have to write something because my best friend happens to be a season ticket holder for Los Doyers, and she was there as a few hundred Catholic protestors, led by Joseph Strickland, Texas bishop and Mr. February in my "Dipshit of the Month" calendar, lined up to protest at Dodger Stadium on Pride Night, and specifically to protest the Catholic-styled queer activist group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for being there. As my friend put it in her text, "catholics blocked an entire entrance to dodgers stadium on pride night":
So here's what you need to know about the Dodgers story: you need to know what persecution actually is. And there are a lot of Catholics, including what appear to be most of our bishops, who don't know that.
I didn't write this piece to say “the bishops who denounced the Sisters as an "anti-Catholic hate group" need to get their priorities straight” (although they do). I didn't write this piece to say "the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are actually good" (although they are). I didn't write this piece to say "taking care of sick people seems like a much better expression of Catholicism than protesting a Pride event would ever be" (although it certainly does seem like that, doesn’t it?). I wrote the piece to say, as simply and bluntly as I could, that one thing is persecution and another thing is not. Persecution is when people are hurt, physically and materially hurt. It’s when those people are shoved into vans or airplanes, when they are denied the aid they need to sleep another night or eat another meal, when they are unceremoniously dumped on someone else in an effort to drain more resources from the institutions trying to help people in this broken world. And persecution is when all of these actions are taken by the powerful people whose job it is to represent our common interest, but instead look to cynically increase their own power. Persecution is not when people show up for Pride Night at Dodger Stadium, because nobody actually gets hurt. Nobody is threatened with violence, nobody is separated from their families, nobody is treated like vermin who need to be driven out. A powerful party does not cause harm to a lowly one, in any meaningful or material sense. From the moment a Catholic arrived at a Dodgers game (middle of the second inning), to the moment he left (top of the eighth, gotta stay ahead of the traffic), he would not feel any real threat to his safety from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and for the USCCB’s leadership to call this blasphemy that demands a counter-protest or for Robert Barron1 to condemn the Sisters as an “anti-Catholic hate group” is absurd, especially given that Robert Barron looks like a man who is Perpetually Indulging in cupcakes.
There have been anti-Catholic hate groups in various chapters of American history. They blew up churches. They burned crosses2. They murdered people. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who were on the front lines of ministering to the sick during the AIDS epidemic - the Sisters held the first-ever fundraiser for AIDS organizations, and wrote the first-ever safer sex pamphlet - whose members undergo over a year of training before officially joining to continue that ministry today, do not pose any threat to the Catholic church. They are not trying to pose any threat to the Catholic church. They are not even pretending to pose any threat to the Catholic church; not a material threat, not any physical threat, not even a rhetorical threat. Nothing that the Sisters do could conceivably interfere with the operations of the church or the actions of any individual Catholic. The Sisters exist to minister to the queer community; that they do so dressed as nuns was originally to highlight the Catholic church's own inaction during the AIDS epidemic, which, of course, was real3. They were a group that, in the face of extermination, said "FUCK YOU", and still survive today, still have an irreverent sense of humor, and still work tirelessly and sincerely to help others survive. To call them a hate group is to spit in the faces of people actually enduring real, institutional hatred right now. Obviously, that includes queer Americans, whose rights many state legislatures are currently trying to take away as quickly as possible, and who are targets for the violent right-wing psychopaths that keep showing up everywhere in this current era of our country. It also includes real actual Catholic people in our country right now who are being made to suffer by the state specifically because they were in a Catholic church at the wrong time, in extremely blunt and easy-to-witness ways.
It’s very, very bad to have bishops thinking that the wrong thing is persecution and the other thing isn’t worth saying shit about. It is unclear to me what the purpose of the Catholic church is, or even could be, if the men who are given so much power to run it can't seem to understand who is on the receiving end of power and cruelty today. Has God sent us to bring glad tidings to the poor, set the captive free, and bind the brokenhearted? Does our God lift up the lowly and cast down the mighty from their thrones? Well what the hell do we do if the guys running the place don’t know who’s captive, who’s poor, who’s lowly and who’s mighty? How can a bishop be a bishop if he is desperate to explain to people that the police are an oppressed class and the people murdered by the police are just a distraction? How can a bishop be a bishop if he thinks that children dying from gun violence isn't a problem worth the church's money, time, or even words? How can a bishop be a bishop if he sees direct mass action as a tool of Satan? How can a bishop be a bishop if he sees the Sisters as a hate group? These are the shepherds? Who are they shepherding? Where are they shepherding them to?
I try not to get hung up on - or really look at, or where possible even allow - comments or feedback on my writing, especially on social media. But last year I got one comment that I think illustrates this overall point really well. Last year, a friend of mine shared my piece “Robert Barron and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” on Twitter. Obviously, a perfect piece, from the title down, impossible to give any notes, and it was about Barron’s inability to, like, look up anything about his guests before inviting them on his YouTube talk show, like whether they had called for the summary execution of Black Lives Matter activists (Sohrab Ahmari) or whether they had built their career harassing trans people and doodling in the margins of Jung textbooks (Jordan Peterson) or, as I focused on in my essay, whether they were currently on trial for violently sexually assaulting their ex and had chose to let Mel Gibson mentor them as they prepared to enter the Catholic church (Shia LaBeouf). Somebody responded to my friend on Twitter, and I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of “Ginocchio reminds me of the Pharisees judging Jesus for sitting down with sinners.”
So let’s all take a second here. There are three parties in the New Testament cinematic universe that this critic was trying to reference:
The Pharisees - religious authority of the time, lot of material power, liked to criticize Jesus and try to trap him in contradictions because they didn’t understand his message
Sinners - people that Jesus ministered to, not good people but people who were trying to get better and saw hope in Jesus
Jesus - literally God, without sin, perfect human being, emptied himself and took the form of a slave, through him the fault of Adam is mended and humanity is saved for all time
And, if I’m mapping this anonymous critic’s metaphor correctly, that would line up the three contemporary parties as such:
Tony Ginocchio - dumbass with computer, has free blog that some people read but most people don’t, possesses no formal authority on Catholicism whatsoever - corresponds to the powerful and authoritarian Pharisees who could persecute the people with whom they disagreed
Shia LaBeouf - star of Lars Von Trier’s five-hour 2013 film Nymphomaniac, which has good acting but is definitely no Melancholia, was entangled in a civil suit for sexually abusing his ex-girlfriend and fighting the accusations - corresponds to the sinners welcomed by Jesus and called to conversion and a new life in Christ
Robert Barron - literal religious authority, lot of material power, hires and fires people in the church, decides who gets educated in diocesan schools, founded a large new media organization with sizeable following among Catholics - corresponds to Jesus Christ the risen Lord
Maybe you’re starting to see where the problem is here. Robert Barron is a religious authority in real life, that’s his honest-to-God job. But he’s not the religious authority in the metaphor, the religious authority in the metaphor is me - who is not an authority on anything except perhaps MCR lyrics - who is apparently persecuting Robert Barron, which I wasn’t. I was making fun of him, which is not actually persecution, as I’m not a powerful person, and making fun of Robert Barron doesn’t actually cause him material harm, or physical harm, or even rhetorical harm. That piece got far fewer hits than anything on Word On Fire would. I couldn’t even mildly inconvenience Robert Barron if I wanted to, and I don’t want to, I just want to make fun of him. And, as that particular piece explained, making fun of clergy is a tradition going back centuries, and an important tradition that helps us laity feel less alone and less afraid when facing down the mighty who run our church, control its resources, and speak for us.
It is not hard to know who is lowly and who is mighty. That is not some mystery that we Catholics spend our lifetimes trying to crack. We can find suffering in our world very easily, and it is on us to respond to the suffering and, if we’re brave, maybe do something about the causes of that suffering. Perhaps one of the most pressing issues facing the American church right now is that powerful Catholics seem willfully blind to who is actually lowly and who is actually mighty.
It’s incidents like Pride Night that make me feel like there is no future for the church that includes these bishops. Lifting up the lowly is on us. It’s hard work, but it’s on us to recognize the suffering in front of us and respond to it even if others are chasing some stupid shiny thing at the ballpark. Casting down the mighty, that’s also on us, and I think the Sisters are telling us that that’s supposed to be the fun part.
Mr. March in the Dipshit of the Month calendar.
Some of them, presumably, were the same that worked forces.
"But some Catholics did minister to AIDS patients!" Great! Way more of them refused, and the institutional church definitely refused! You can read the recent book about Catholic ministry during the AIDS crisis by journalist Michael O'Loughlin titled Hidden Mercy, and contemplate why he might have chosen to go with that title and not Famous Out-In-The-Open Mercy That We Easily Associate With The Catholic Church.