John Needs to Stop
Speaking out against the (spins wheel) Applejack of Catholic media
On February 4th, John L. Allen Jr. of Crux published “Pope Francis has two ‘Downton Abbey’ moments of unpredictability,” which opened with this extended metaphor:
“Fans of the epic British period drama “Downton Abbey” will recall that in the series finale, at one point Gladys Denker, maid to the Dowager Countess Lady Violet Crawley, schemes to sabotage her chief rival, Spratt the butler, by revealing that he moonlights as an advice columnist for a lady’s journal, expecting that he’ll be fired. Instead, the dowager declares herself amused, and Spratt’s job is safe. Later, Spratt says to Denker that she made a fatal mistake regarding their employer in her haste to be rid of him. When Denker asks what it was, the reply is lapidary.“She never likes to be predictable,” Spratt says. Anyone who’s been paying attention for the past decade knows there’s a fair bit of the dowager inside Pope Francis too, who also seems to recoil from the idea that someone has him figured out. Just when you expect him to zig, he’ll zag instead, seeming to take an almost perverse delight in confounding expectations. Yesterday brought a couple of these Downtown Abbey moments, in the form of a new note from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on the formula employed in administering the sacraments, and a personal letter from Francis to the Jews of Israel.”
What? Now, my “What?” certainly applies to the substance of Allen's argument, which appears to be that Pope Francis will make decisions on the contents of magisterial documents based on what will make him appear unpredictable, which is insane, and I don't think Pope Francis weighed in on the Gaza crisis because he was thinking “this oughta keep ‘em guessing”. But my “What?” applies, first and foremost, to Allen’s choice of 162-word reference to an episode of television that aired over eight years ago. This is the third time, in less than six months, that I've had to criticize Allen's choice of tortured metaphor. In October he referred to the Synod as the “Super Bowl” of the church, which made no sense beyond “there are a bunch of events leading up to it”. At the end of November, he suggested that Pope Francis had reopened the Rupnik case because Francis wanted to close the Synod with an “October Surprise”, which is, bluntly, appalling in its implications: Allen is suggesting that the Pope takes action on sexual abuse cases based on what timing he thinks going to be the spiciest, when it was pretty clear that the Pope was reacting to widespread media outrage over his personal mishandling of Rupnik's case. That “October surprise” piece revealed an unsettling insensitivity on Allen’s part; when writing about an awful (alleged) serial abuser and the gross mishandling of his case by the highest levels of the church, the tone Allen chose was “bemusement at the timing of it all”, rather than the only acceptable tone for writing about the abuse crisis anymore, “near-homicidal fury.” And we saw this insensitivity again when Pope Francis had sober words to say about bloodshed and slaughter in the Middle East and Allen’s response was “he’s just like that witty Dowager Countess!” Being as bad a writer as Allen is, and attempting to write about serious things as Allen does, can cost you your credibility, and more specifically, your ability to effectively interrogate material power over the safety of people in the church. The media did pressure Pope Francis to take action on Rupnik by asking questions and publishing stories along the lines of “what the hell were you thinking?!” rather than “oooh, I can’t wait to see if you have any tricks up your sleeve!” So I’m not really clear what service Allen thinks he’s providing through Crux, “the very best in smart, wired, and independent coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church.”
Allen is extremely bad at writing, and I can think of no better image to capture his failings than the above Crux thumbnail, where Allen inexplicably went with a smiling headshot above a genocidal chyron. Allen does such a shitty job with his metaphors that Michael Sean Winters, of all people - the NCR columnist who shouted out the fifteenth anniversary of The Devil Wears Prada in not one, not two, but three different columns all released in a single 30-day period at National Catholic Reporter - had to write into his February 7th column “John, the Downton Abbey thing was pretty stupid”:
“Is this a case of the pope merely wanting to appear unpredictable, as my colleague John Allen surmised over at Crux? There may be some of that, although the comparison of Francis with the dowager countess in "Downton Abbey" was unfortunate. Francis is not someone who simply is strict on a bad day and generous on a good one. It is a disservice to think that these decisions are primarily based on anyone's mood, or age, or background. Decisions that come through the doctrinal dicastery have to have theological reasons.”
Michael Sean Winters, a man whom I have been told by reliable sources unironically wears a beret in public, a man who thinks the current iteration of Saturday Night Live is legitimately brilliant comedy, had to step in and be like “John, come on, you look like a fucking idiot.” And I never thought I’d write this, but I agree with everything Winters has to say on this issue.
Look, I’m an amateur writer. This is not my day job. I do not have professional training or experience as an opinion writer, and the G.O.T.H.S. pieces that I am most proud of writing had no chance of ever running in an actual Catholic publication of repute. But I am better at this than John Allen (I am also better at this than Michael Sean Winters, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make here). This isn’t to say that every metaphor or simile I use is perfect, but they’re at least a little funny and they reference cool stuff and they tend to make sense. There are writers in the world of Catholic media that I think do a good job of interrogating power and presenting their ideas in interesting ways; John Allen is not one of them. I am also not necessarily one of them, but I absolutely, without question, rank ahead of John Allen in terms of writing ability. Because of this, I am releasing the below list of comparisons, metaphors, and images that Allen is welcome to use in his future writing. Not only do they make more sense than his recent work, not only are they more concise, but they all reference cooler shit than “the concept of an October Surprise”. I would kindly ask Allen to credit me if he uses any of these lines in his work.
In the final scene of Justified, Raylan admits that he will never truly be able to forget his friendship with archfrenemy Boyd Crowder because, after all, “we dug coal together”. Such is the way to understand Pope Francis’ ongoing relationship with Cardinal Fernandez through his various media missteps.
Reverend Toller, the protagonist of Paul Schrader's First Reformed, contemplates walking into an event for coal industry executives and detonating a suicide vest, in the hope of saving God's creation. Such is the radical hope that Pope Francis puts forward in Laudate Deum.
Mia Khalifa rose to prominence by wearing a hijab in a pornographic threesome film, earning her condemnation from Lebanese religious authorities, as well as ISIS. Though Khalifa has since left the adult film industry and become a broader social media influencer, her critics cannot move beyond her career's salacious beginning, much as Pope Francis’ critics are still stuck on Amoris Laetitia.
Despite a successful reunion tour and the release of their 2022 single “The Foundations of Decay”, pop-punk icons My Chemical Romance have yet to announce their highly anticipated fifth album. Fans are left to wait on an indefinite timeline, much as the Women's Ordination Conference is left wondering if any of their goals will be accomplished through the Synod.
Despite several recent festival sets that have all featured new material, Joanna Newsom has yet to announce her highly anticipated fifth album. Fans are left to wait on an indefinite timeline, much as the Women's Ordination Conference is left wondering if any of their goals will be accomplished through the Synod. [NOTE TO ALLEN: only use one of the previous two examples, NOT both.]
Singer-songwriter John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats shook up the literary world in 2013 when he published his debut novel, Wolf In White Van, and almost immediately became a finalist for the National Book Award. In much the same way, Pope Francis is showing that Cardinals from the “peripheries” can also shake up the staid bureaucracy of the Vatican.
The short stories of George Saunders consistently present absurdist but moving critiques of a profit-driven society slowly sapping us of our collective humanity. Pope Francis seems like he would like that?
Raymond Burke believes that he should be Pope, but he never will be Pope, and in many ways this makes him the Kendall Roy of the Catholic church. But Burke is the Kendall Roy of the Catholic church in another very important way: he’s a whiny little bitch and even his own family hates him.
Understanding the various Vatican dicasteries as members of the Mane Six from the “Friendship Is Magic” iteration of the My Little Pony universe (corresponding roughly to the 2010-2019 period), the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith under Francis had, until recently, been seen as the meek and soft-spoken Fluttershy; this was in clear contrast to the JPII and Benedict eras of the Dicastery, which was loving, but often judgmental and overly obsessed with appearance, much like Rarity. But with new bombshell documents like Fiducia Supplicans, and new leadership appointed by Francis, the DDF is now racing ahead and crashing through the opposition, just like the indefatigable Rainbow Dash; I think we can all agree that the Catholic Church has become 20% cooler as a result. And when Applejack says “you’re more nervous than a worm in an apple on cider-makin’ day”, she makes more sense than John L. Allen Jr. ever has.