Look, I don’t have a new essay for you right now, I’d keep writing about David Lynch but I’m currently 18th in line for my library’s one copy of The Elephant Man blu-ray. That said, there are five other recent good things you may find worth your time if you are the kind of person who often says to yourself “I like Tony’s writing, is there anyone who writes on the same topics but much more effectively?”
If anything, I hope this list helps to illustrate that Catholicism, while often made up of awful bullshit, is not entirely made up of awful bullshit. There are people who take Catholicism seriously and are using it to engage seriously with that awful bullshit and maybe build a version of our world and our church that is a little less reliant on that awful bullshit.
1 - Disordered
I listened to all five parts of this new podcast miniseries in a day, and found it so compelling that it disrupted my normal podcast routine of alternating between Doughboys and Blank Check (I am a serious intellectual). Disordered is a response to Catholic teachings on gender and sexuality. Each episode slices out a different angle of the church’s most harmful teachings: Matt Fradd on feminism, Mike Schmitz on homosexuality, Jason Evert on trans identities, religious authority impact on trauma, and Catholic attempts at conversion therapy/SOGICE. The whole show is a blazing example of “how to be right” when arguing against the awful things The research is incredibly thorough - the host, Theo, has a background in studying theology, and everyone on the podcast will go deep into the real material consequences of what Catholic communicators, and the institution of the church, are doing to queer people. All of it is shot through with righteous fury, which you all know I respect a great deal, especially the final episode on SOGICE with Willow Sipling.
2 - Leading a Catholic Organization with and for LGBTQ+ Populations
While CTU recently reposted this on their Substack, so this was a set of lectures that actually happened in September of last year and that I wrote about for my earlier essay “How to be Wrong” (these lectures were not the example of how to be wrong), but the video finally got posted. The first lecture was by former DePaul president Fr. Dennis Holtschneider, who attempted to make DePaul a welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ students, staff, and faculty, which was, obviously, a high-wire act for the president of a prominent Catholic university, but he does a good job talking about why he did it and why it was important to him. My writing focused on the second lecture, by Loyola Chicago bioethics professor M. Therese Lysaught[Who, I should probably say, is now a friend of mine.], which is about how “pastoral” Catholicism is not some sort of “lesser” version of the “doctrinal” Catholicism that we water down when we need to make exceptions. The third lecture is by local pastor Fr. Michael Trail and how he puts these into practice at the parish level. All three lectures are good and exhaustively draw on the teachings of the church and theology as it is meant to be practiced: in real life.
3 - Kevin Kijewski’s Immigration Tunnel Vision
Look, we all know Crisis magazine is bad, and while they are often bad in an entertaining way, they did publish a horrifying essay on immigration by Michigan State AG candidate Kevin Kijewski, which amounted to “oh, you care about immigrants? Have you forgotten that being ILLEGAL means you are LITERALLY COMMITTING A CRIME? Do you support these CRIMINALS now?” Kudos to seminarian John Brundage for his piece, again, pulling apart Kijewski’s arguments by being right, by actually looking up what the church teaches, showing it to us, taking it seriously, and exposing how hollow Kijewski’s thinking is.
4 - An Examination of Conscience for Immigration Enforcement
Back in April, Evelio Menjivar, an auxiliary bishop of Washington DC, urged Catholics involved in the Trump administration’s deportation efforts to “reclaim your conscience. What you are doing is worth nothing if it is stained with unjust cruelty. That is not what America stands for. You too can and should speak out against this terror and infliction of suffering on people. You can refuse to be involved in oppression and these grievous assaults on human rights and dignity…it might even mean losing your job”. I have never heard a bishop talk like that about politics in my lifetime. This week, theologian Matthew Shadle has been publishing multiple essays on the conflicts of conscience that Catholic government agents would face, what the church actually teaches on the specific actions that the government has taken recently, and what all of our responsibilities are as a “community of conscience” to enable everyone in our communities to make the right moral decisions.
5 - We Must Be Ready for the Long Haul (and also Bishop Michael Pham)
You should just read Roundtable anyways, that’s the Substack that kind-of serves the Catholic Worker community, although it’s not an official publication of the Catholic Worker, because, again, the Catholic Worker doesn’t have an “official” anything. This particular issue, however, was the one that informed me about the new bishop of San Diego, Michael Pham - the first bishop in the United States appointed by Pope Leo - who went to the local immigration courthouse on Friday to pray on World Refugee Day. That by itself is very nice, but the interesting thing here is that “Several outlets reported that their presence caused the ICE agents assembled to scatter. Perhaps, the presence of the clergy, who lift up the Body of Christ in the form of the bread and wine at Mass, lifted up the presence of Christ in the asylum seekers and immigrants in that courthouse.” This isn’t really the same “how to be right” piece that the other four recommendations are, but I just thought it was interesting that the people in charge of detention and deportation will do their jobs aggressively and zealously unless they think that God is watching them, at which point they become terrified. Probably merits a followup.
