Brain Titans: Genius Bishops: Masters of Politics

Watching Cardinal Dolan suck up to Donald Trump is unbelievably sad.

Crux reported on Monday morning about a call this past weekend between Donald Trump and the USCCB, ostensibly about funding for parochial schools during the COVID pandemic, but it quickly devolved into an episode of the miniseries Brain Titans: Genius Bishops: Masters of Politics with some truly hilarious back-and-forth between the leadership of the bishops’ conference, the literal dumbest man alive who happens to be the President of the United States, and two other intellectual luminaries from the executive branch, Betsy DeVos and Ben Carson.

Catholic schools are in a heap of trouble right now - like pretty much every school across the country, Catholic schools are switching to remote learning during the COVID pandemic. Unlike most schools across the country, Catholic schools serve disproportionately low-income families and charge those families tuition. So, in an environment where unemployment is soaring and the economy is crashing, diocese everywhere are scrambling to prove that 1) paying for our schools are worth it, and 2) you're going to have money to pay for those schools. Barring some big changes, most of Catholic education is on the verge of collapse (it wasn't in great financial shape before the pandemic, either). Donald Trump, I can only assume, fully understands all of the complexities around this issue, which is why he made the conversation about how he should be the bishops’ all-time favorite president.

I’m paraphrasing, of course; the exact words were “best president in the history of the Catholic church.” His entire fifteen-minute opening statement was full of bangers like that, including emphasizing his love of school choice and the pro-life movement - the latter of which he described his commitment to as “at a level that no other president has seen before, according to everybody” - and his repeated assistance that the bishops openly support him in the 2020 election, or as he called it, the “situation coming up on November 3, the likes of which have never been more important for the Church”. He kept rambling about how a Trump loss would mean “you’re going to have a very different Catholic church” - an insight that no doubt will be valuable, coming from such a powerful brain with a famously formidable knowledge of the history of Catholicism - and Cardinal O’Malley of Boston eventually had to gently redirect him back to education. Our brain titan president then went on to say how much he supported school choice, and once again that’s a reason why the bishops should support his re-election, as “what a similarity we have and how the other side is the exact opposite of what you’re wanting so I guess it’s an important thing to remember.”

In terms of sheer stupidity, though, nothing compares to the full-on verbal handjob that Trump got from former USCCB president, current Archbishop of New York, and perpetual disappointment Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Dolan joked that he talks to the president more often than he does his mother (it’s a pandemic, Your Eminence, call your fucking mom), and reassured everyone that “never has the outlook financially looked more bleak, but perhaps never has the outlook looked more promising given the energetic commitment that your administration has to our schools”. He called Kellyanne Conway a “champion” for the church, and thanked Trump for his “courageous insistence that the nonprofits, faith communities, and our schools be included” in the COVID stimulus bills.

Trump even told Dolan that he felt close to the Catholic church because he grew up near one; given that Trump grew up in Queens in the middle of the twentieth century, this is about as impressive as bragging that you grew up near a post office. After Trump tweeted that he would be watching the stream of Dolan’s Mass on Sunday morning, Dolan carved out what must have been multiple minutes of his Mass to thank the president for his leadership, pray for him, shout out the “former neighbor worshipping with us”, and wish Melania a happy birthday. There’s no way in hell Trump was watching, as he spent his weekend claiming two of his dumber outbursts (drinking bleach, Noble prize) were actually “sarcastic”, and complaining about hambergers (spelling sic). But Dolan, whom I’ve been told is a canny political operator, went out of his way to do this.

So maybe we should take a minute and run down Dolan’s politics, starting with presidential politics. In 2004, Dolan took it upon himself to speak out against retired clergy that endorsed John Kerry for president against the torture-doing war-starting George W. Bush. In 2009, Dolan spoke out against the University of Notre Dame giving an honorary degree to Barack Obama, given Obama’s stance on abortion. When asked why he never said anything when the same university gave an honorary degree to George W. Bush, he offered this simple answer:

“Where President Bush would have taken positions on those two hot-button issues that I'd be uncomfortable with, namely the war and capital punishment, I would have to give him the benefit of the doubt to say that those two issues are open to some discussion and are not intrinsically evil. In the Catholic mindset... that would not apply to abortion.”

See, when a Democrat does something that the church says is wrong, it’s bad. When a Republican does it, it’s acceptable. It’s got to be a huge relief for Dolan that things just happened to work out with his personal politics, and that this also allows him to be such a big cheerleader for Trump today, through a pandemic and a massive failure of the federal government at every point, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.

You know what, I kind of get sucking up to Trump, though, if you need to get your schools funded, education is important. How is Dolan at managing diocesan funds, anyways? Well, you’re not going to believe this, but he’s had some problems with it in the past! The New York Times detailed his 2007 attempt to shield $57M in diocesan assets from sexual abuse victims as archbishop of Milwaukee, and his work in the same role to pay out $20,000 severance packages to abusive priests to get them to retire quietly. You know, I always wonder where the money went in the Catholic church, and then I remember that it’s managed by guys like these, who read garbage from Bill Donohue and the Catholic League, and call the Survivor Network of those Abused by Priests a “phony victims group”.

Part of the reason Catholic schools struggle is that they have only existed this long by paying their teachers and staff criminally low wages (in Chicago, where I live, you can easily make twice as much teaching in public schools as you can teaching in the Arch. Where do you think the most talented teachers are going to want to go?). When teachers try to organize or unionize to, you know, be able to keep working their jobs but also make enough to have kids or buy a home, Catholic institutions, almost uniformly, will do everything to prevent them from organizing, despite church teaching on the dignity of work and the right to organize. Dolan’s actually unique here, in that teachers in the Arch of New York actually have a union (they’re a local of the OPIEU), and that union went on strike to protest school closings and get a better contract in 2015. Dolan responded by spewing the same anti-union bullshit you would find from any boss, even if that boss was supposed to have read Rerum Novarum at some point.

Look, this isn't a guy navigating the complicated world of American politics with the even more complicated tools of Catholic moral theology. This is a Republican. That's it. I can tell because he loves Donald Trump, hates unions and abortion, and knows more than one sex criminal. If the church wants to hve a more adversarial relationship to those in power, I welcome it. If the former president of the USCCB is clearly fine with one party using that power, that's different, even if you're able to put aside the horrifying things the Trump administration has done with that power over the past four years.

Dolan, as well as many of his fellow bishops, has built a brand on being an adversary to Democrats and a dear friend to Republicans. Now, the largest network of private schools in the country, and the American inheritance of an educational tradition dating back to at least Saint Ignatius of Loyola, hinges on Dolan's ability to keep Donald Trump focused on a topic that does not directly involve how great Donald Trump is. Dante could not have imagined a better fate for Dolan than this, and it's hilarious to see a stupid man debase himself like this for another stupid man. But the ones who will really suffer are the families served by Catholic schools, and the teachers sacrificing too much to serve them. So fuck him.