I Have Decided to Become a Doctor of the Church

I can promise you I'm better than another guy currently under consideration

I'm about to start the third year of the G.O.T.H.S. project, and one of the challenges that I like to give myself is to make sure that I'm pushing the project in new and interesting directions, and thinking about things that other outlets might not be thinking about. For example, I don't want to do a deep dive on a subject like "the history of EWTN, that TV network that the Pope just called the work of the devil" when there are already good reporters that you should be reading on that topic instead of my foulmouthed emails. And while I found a sort of niche early on talking about "conspiracy Catholicism" and how it sure seemed to be lining up nicely with the overt white nationalism of a major political party, mainstream outlets eventually started covering that, too.

So I need to figure out what my next challenge is going to be, I don't just want to make this a newsletter about stupid Twitter beefs with clergy, although those pieces are often very fun to write. But I think I've landed on a good personal goal for Year Three of G.O.T.H.S.: I have decided to become a Doctor of the Church. 

Admittedly, this is a very aggressive personal goal. While there are over ten thousand saints recognized by the Catholic church for their lives of personal holiness and miraculous accomplishments, only thirty-six of them, in two thousand years, have been named Doctors of the Church for their scholarly contributions to Catholic theology and doctrine. The list includes revered theologians like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Catherine of Siena. Of the thirty-six Doctors, a full third of them lived in the fourth century, and the youngest Doctor overall is Therese of Liseux, who died in 1897; given how much tradition you're up against, you can assume that it would be very difficult today to make a lasting contribution to theology that shapes the doctrine of the world's largest Christian denomination. The Doctors of the Church are an incredibly exclusive group, and all of the members are distinguished by their extensive writings and prayerful lives. I have decided that I will be named the thirty-seventh Doctor of the Church, and assume that since I have also written a bunch of stuff about Catholicism and also happen to interview very well, I should be able to secure that title at some point over the next twelve months. I will begin the application this week, as soon as I can locate the form on the Vatican's website.

And I'll be honest, everyone: I feel very good about my chances here, because if you check out the competition, it looks like I’m the most qualified person currently being considered. This past week, the church celebrated the feast of Pope Saint John Paul II, who, of course, shaped the post-Vatican-II church for almost three decades. In 2019, the bishops' conference in JPII's home country of Poland submitted a formal request to the Vatican to recognize him as a Doctor of the Church, and while there hasn't been a ton of movement on this yet, the EWTN-owned Catholic News Agency just ran a piece titled "Could St. John Paul II be declared a Doctor of the Church?". The piece cites JPII's prolific writings and role as a major player in church and world politics, but to answer the question in the headline: no. He can't. I can. I'm going to get his spot. It’s mine now. If you compare me with Pope Saint John Paul II, it becomes obvious very quickly which of us is better suited to join the most exclusive group in the Catholic church. Here are my advantages:

I did not enable some of the worst sexual abuse scandals in the history of the Catholic church.

This one feels like a really big selling point for me compared to John Paul II. My plan is to really lean on this hard in the interview. As we learned about a year ago with the release of the Vatican's report, JPII was warned that one of his top bishops in the States, Ted McCarrick, was probably a serial rapist. JPII chose to ignore the warnings and promote McCarrick to the head of the Washington DC diocese anyways, which looked like a pretty awful decision years later when it came out that McCarrick definitely was a serial rapist. JPII was unwilling to accept that a guy he liked was a threat to the Catholics he was supposed to be serving, and because of that, the church is still stuck in a scandal that I want to call “generation-defining”, except that my generation has seen like three of them. And all of these scandals in America were caused by men that JPII trusted with positions of power, men who saw negligence and willful ignorance at the top, and men who chose, every time, to protect the image of the church instead of protecting people from abuse. Oh, and men like Bernard Law of Boston, whom JPII transferred to a cushy position in the Vatican to shield from extradition after the 2001 abuse crisis broke. Oh, and other men who weren't American and causing scandals in other countries while JPII deliberately looked the other way; Marcial Maciel and the Legionnaires of Christ would be the most egregious example.

As for me? I have never enabled a single sexual abuse crisis. If you do some research into “global sex abuse crises with massive implications for the accountability of one of the most historically powerful institutions on the planet”, you will not find my name attached to a single one, which is a pretty significant advantage for me over JPII. The formal criteria for being named a Doctor of the Church are eminens doctra (you have good doctrine), insignis vitae sanctitas (you lived a very holy life), and Ecclesiae declaratio (the church proclaims you a Doctor). Now, I’m not one hundred percent sure which of those “not letting a sex abuse crisis happen” falls under, but I feel like I’ve got a very big point in my favor somewhere.

I did not create Theology of the Body, inadvertently spawning a cottage industry of authors ruining sex for everyone.

“Theology of the Body” refers to a series of lectures and homilies early in JPII’s papacy, most famous for their teachings on marriage and sexuality, as well as for their consequences that have been a disaster for the human race. The issue here is less the content of JPII’s actual lectures and more the ensuing books by authors like Christopher West and Gregory Popcak, whose attempts to “simplify” the Theology of the Body teachings have led to almost Puritanical understandings of sexuality and marriage getting integrated into Catholic marriage prep curricula nationwide. As it turns out, if you want to sell some books, it is very easy to distort Catholic teaching and come to the conclusion that marriage is only about sex, and sex is only about babies, and the way you know that God loves you is if the sex you have with your spouse is real real good and makes lots of babies, and if your sex is ever not real real good or making lots of babies, maybe you're doing something wrong and sinful. Popcak wrote the overwhelming statement that “The Church teaches that every time a Christian married couple makes love, they are physically restating their marriage vows and recommitting themselves to all the promises they made at the altar,” and specifically, he wrote it in this cringey 2008 book that the weird girl in your college philosophy class now recommends to everyone on Facebook:

Earlier this year, Rachel Amiri of Where Peter Is wrote a very good critique of the pop-theology understanding of Theology of the Body, which is summarized well here:

“In some Catholic circles, sex is instead built up to be something of a pinnacle—extra special, possibly sacramental. This leads to the reinforcement of the (frankly strange) idea that sexual performance (e.g. “holy sex”) is directly tied to the reception of grace in the sacrament of marriage. It’s the elevation of sex—as if there aren’t other “channels,” or as if other ways don’t channel quite as much grace—that’s a problem. Perhaps our catechesis for married couples just doesn’t go on long enough to really hit the tough years...to consider the real suffering that spouses will inevitably encounter...Putting the marital relationship on a pedestal—where it is second only to the soul’s relationship to God as we experience in Eucharistic communion—suggests to the unmarried that their experiences of intimacy with God or with others will always fall short. This is all to the detriment of a realistic view of marriage and our ability to share realistically about its joys and struggles.”

We can’t entirely fault JPII for this, but he did create Theology of the Body as a Catholic conservative response to the sexual revolution, and a warped, unrealistic, idealized view of marriage and sex is still being taught to Catholics everywhere, in his name, and that’s not something we should be looking for in a potential Doctor of the Church. As for me, nobody has written terrible sex books based on lectures that I’ve given, so I once again find myself ahead in the race for Doctor-hood.

I did not make Thomas J. Tobin a bishop. 

Given how long JPII was Pope, he named many bishops worldwide throughout his papacy, and obviously they can't all be winners. But you have to think that he could have found someone, anyone, better suited for the job than the current bishop of Providence, who spends all day on Twitter begging for followers when he maybe should be following up on abuse allegations. Anyways, I did not name Thomas J. Tobin a bishop, and if I were ever presented with an opportunity to name him a bishop, I would simply decline. I would also look into the possibility of taking away his access to the internet.

Other people I did not name to the episcopate that JPII did: Charles Chaput, Thomas Paprocki, Robert Morlino, Timothy Dolan, Raymond Burke, Jerome Listecki, I mean I can keep going if you really want.

I can talk about women in the church like a normal person.

The church's position on women's ordination has always been flimsy at best, but JPII turned it into a full-blown embarrassment. The "flimsy" position is best articulated by Inter Insigniores, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1976 under Pope Paul VI:

"The priest is a sign, the supernatural effectiveness of which comes from the ordination received, but a sign that must be perceptible and which the faithful must be able to recognise with ease. The whole sacramental economy is in fact based upon natural signs, on symbols imprinted on the human psychology: “Sacramental signs,” says Saint Thomas, “represent what they signify by natural resemblance.” The same natural resemblance is required for persons as for things: when Christ's role in the Eucharist is to be expressed sacramentally, there would not be this “natural resemblance” which must exist between Christ and his minister if the role of Christ were not taken by a man: in such a case it would be difficult to see in the minister the image of Christ. For Christ himself was and remains a man."

I don't think enough Catholics know this, that a key part of the official argument against ordaining women is "the priest has to physically look like Jesus, otherwise the faithful will get confused during the sacraments and be like 'what? What's going on? Who is that? Where am I?'" As arguments go, I'd rank it slightly below a fourth-grader impersonating his dad's voice to call himself out of school. It's insulting to the faithful, it reads like a group of men desperate to protect their own power (which it is), and it doesn't even make sense. Most priests don't physically resemble Jesus except for the basic structure of their genitalia; without even bending the logic of Inter Insigniores, you could easily argue against admitting white men to the priesthood since they are a different ethnicity than the person of Jesus was, and that honestly looks like a better idea with each passing day.

But all of these critiques of the argument are completely invalid according to JPII, creating another important church teaching in his 1994 apostolic constitution Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: "please shut up about how bad our argument is".

"Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church's judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful."

In other words: look, please stop talking about this. You just believe this now because I said so. Only men can be priests because they look like Jesus, and thankfully every man and zero women look enough like Jesus to count. But stop talking about it.

That's JPII's contribution to theology right there: to tell the faithful to shut up, stop asking questions, and accept this on my orders. Other Doctors of the Church were reformers, great scholars, people who challenged power and asked the tough questions. As for me? Well, at least I think women are neat, and that it's worth thinking about a better church than the one we have now, one that maybe looks little more like the Body of Christ it's supposed to be serving. Maybe that doesn’t automatically make me a Doctor of the Church, but it puts me ahead of this stupid bullshit.

Sinead O'Connor did not tear up a picture of me during a Saturday Night Live performance.

It’s weird to think about how big a deal this was, considering how absolutely stupid and empty SNL is now (this is a point on which I disagree with a prominent Catholic columnist). But it made the newspapers in 1992 when Shuhada Sadaqat, then known as Sinead O'Connor, used a live on-air performance of her song "War" to allege that JPII and the church hierarchy were covering up widespread child sexual abuse across the global Catholic church, which turned out to be 100% correct (sorry to keep referring to global child sex abuse scandals, but it turns out that when you look into JPII's legacy, they keep popping up).

Tim Robbins, who was hosting that week, was offended as a Catholic and refused to acknowledge O'Connor in the show's goodnights. The following week, also-Catholic Joe Pesci hosted the show, taped the infamous photo of JPII back together to audience applause, and shared the touching Catholic sentiment that "I would have given her a smack" if the incident had happened while he was hosting.

Zero SNL musical acts have accurately criticized me for abuse of power that has devastated generations of families on a global scale. And, for what it's worth, Joe Pesci has never threatened to smack me, either. I'm good on both ends of this one.

I am not a Pope, which is good. 

It feels like the fastest path to sainthood today is becoming the Pope first, much like the fastest path to winning an Oscar is playing the Joker in a movie. That's not a message I love hearing: that the people today recognized by the hierarchy for leading lives of extraordinary holiness are...well, are the men who run that hierarchy. As Mollie O'Reilly wrote in her Commonweal argument against canonizing all the Popes, "if the modern church really has managed to elect an unbroken string of papal saints in the past century, well, that’s impressive, but considering that the pope is the one who gets to make that call, it’s also a bit...suspect."

The church needs to show a willingness to grow beyond their insular clerical selves, which means that Catholics need new role models from outside of the clerical in-crowd, and I volunteer myself. Instead of Popes getting all the recognition from the church, I would invite you to consider a new model of holiness: me, a dumbass from the computer. You got a lot more Catholics who are dumbasses on the computer than you do Catholics who are the Pope, so I think you should be focusing more in recognizing this area of the church. My newsletter reaches literal tens of people across Catholicism, and has inspired many of them to say "yeah I guess this is okay but it sure seems like there are a lot of swears." Just something to consider, Vatican. 

I am also not an evil fake Pope installed by the Freemasons to destroy the Catholic church. 

To be clear, I don't think JPII is either, but some people do and I gotta cover my bases, I don't know who makes the decisions on handing out the Doctorates.

I have stronger academic credentials than John Paul II. 

This one, admittedly, is a tougher sell than the others, given that JPII earned two PhDs and I just have my lowly BA in theology and repeatedly fell asleep in my dorm room trying to get through St. Augustine's Confessions. But I have one thing that John Paul II never had: a certificate in improvisational comedy performance, proving that I have the quick-thinking and stage presence to truly be a great Doctor of the Church. And before you say "ugh, of course he's an improv guy", I want to clarify that I was an improv guy in Los Angeles in 2012, when everyone in the city was an improv guy, so you have to let me skate on that, just like we let Benedict XVI skate for being in the Hitler Youth as a boy.

I am not struck by a meteor in the opening credits of the 2016 HBO series The Young Pope.

The Young Pope is Paolo Sorrentino's ten-episode series where Jude Law plays a callous American reactionary who suddenly ascends to the papacy through some botched conclave politicking, but then, through powerful experiences of conversion, comes a step closer to starting to grasp the mystery of God's mercy. It's a good show, and Sorrentino's visual style and music taste are deliberately surreal and over-the-top, and the show has inspired many stupid-funny memes from the moment the trailer dropped. This means that the opening credits sequence features Jude Law walking in slow motion while a hard-rockin' cover of "All Along The Watchtower" plays, before Jude Law winks at the camera and a comet strikes a statue of John Paul II, right when the drums really kick in. 

It honestly kind of makes you wonder what Sorrentino knew about JPII before we did.

In the history of Catholicism, there have been maybe three good theologians. One is Teresa of Avila, one is Blase Pascal, and one is Tony Ginocchio, who is me (two of the theologians are shown in the photo above). The Catholic church is hurting right now from abuse scandals, from political polarization, from an epidemic of misinformation during the more literal kind of epidemic. Will naming me the thirty-seventh Doctor of the Church in history fix any of that? Yeah sure, why not. It's more likely to fix those problems than giving it to the other guy.

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of new installments.