R.R. Reno, R.R. U OK?

He is not.

There is no shortage of bad political takes on the COVID pandemic - the Chinese are doing this to attack us, social distancing is a hoax, we need to re-open businesses and let some people die so the stock market can grow - and there are variants on each of these bad takes across the world of alt-right Catholicism - this is God’s punishment for our acceptance of gay people, the Pope wants this to happen, this is a conspiracy to close churches. But nobody comes close to the all-consuming self-centeredness (1) of R.R. Reno who, as you can see in the photo below, looks like a claymation character in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Easter (2). Reno is still posting a wannabe LiveJournal (3) in First Things, and his posts are turning into a solipsistic black hole so powerful that it is also draining the rhetorical structure and intelligence out of the opinion columns in numerically adjacent IP addresses (4).

While we’ve already touched on his early daily entries in his unbearable (5) “coronavirus diary”, and while all of the entries in totality make up the worst-written, least-thought-out Catholic writing I've ever seen including Randall Terry's book (6), it’s worth visiting the entry for April 3-5; presumably Reno has started consolidating his entries after the magazine told him that he couldn’t just submit this crap every day and call that his job (7). The new entry begins with another sentence fragment, since Reno not only has a terrible moral compass (8), but possesses no actual skill at writing beyond what you had when you kept an execrable blog in high school (9):

Sunday. The last few days have marked a change in my mood. A week ago, I started following daily statistics posted on the New York City Department of Health website. The data made clear that the city is not heading to an infectious disease Armageddon, as the politicians and media have been shouting for the last two weeks…Nevertheless, the trend in New York suggests a dangerous disease, not a catastrophic scenario. This means we need to begin to ask ourselves hard questions. How were we stampeded into a state of panic? What has this crisis revealed about you and me? About our society? About our churches?

Oh, and also, Reno doesn’t understand the concept of cause-and-effect, placing him behind most sentient animals (10). My sixteen-month-old daughter understands that when she drops a piece of food on the floor, she doesn’t get to eat that piece of food anymore; I don’t think Reno has quite caught up to her yet (11), since he doesn’t seem to understand how implementing social distancing measures - which he wants to reject wholesale - are contributing to a slowing rate of infections and deaths. Also, I assume that Reno still eats in a high chair (12).

No, it’s not an “infectious disease Armageddon”, but we have some limited control over how close to Armageddon we get. But why would Reno bother to take the additional five seconds and think about that when he can just shit out more half-sentences (13)? And why would he trust a doctor or public health official on a question like this when he can just trust himself, an Ichabod-Crane-looking-ass (14) motherfucker (15) with a laptop?

Also, while Armageddon is not technically happening, I feel like Reno is failing to realize that the current situation certainly isn't very good. R. R. Reno - his initials stand for “Ruh-Roh,” which is what he is currently telling the elderly and people with autoimmune disorders (16) - lives in New York, where thousands of people have died from the virus, each leaving behind a bereaved family, or a widow, or in any event a real human life that didn't have to die. While the majority of New Yorkers won’t contract the virus, it doesn’t take a large number of sick people to overwhelm the health care system and lead to a dramatic shortage of thousands of hospital beds in the city. The city is currently exploring using public parks as temporary mass graves for morgue overflow, and Reno is so callous (17) that he shrugs this off as he rides his bike around town.

Also in one of the opening paragraphs, although not quoted in the passage above, Reno refers to coronavirus as “the Wuhan virus” which is a pretty clear tell at this point for “I’m brave enough to say something vaguely xenophobic, you’re welcome” (18).

Let’s jump ahead in his column:

In a few hours I will go to an evening Mass to sit in a vast, empty church with a handful of people while the priest offers the Mass. I will not name the priest. Nor will I name the church or the borough in which it is located. This is because his sensible pastoral response to our extraordinary circumstances, if known, will bring censure…Put bluntly, a certain percent of our aging clergy (some in positions of authority) worry that they will get the disease and die. Others are concerned that they will be blamed for spreading the disease and causing the deaths of others. They insist that everyone adopt their methods of extreme caution. This horsewhipping of younger clergy into mainstream mediocrity has been going on for a long time. But enough. I am putting words into your mouths, dear readers. You can make up your own minds, as we all will need to do in the coming weeks.

It’s hard to overstate how easy it is for Reno to practice social distancing. He doesn’t need to go to an office for his job. Even though his job would not be considered “critical infrastructure”, he can still do it from home and draw a paycheck, and, as evidenced from his output, nobody will edit him or otherwise give him constructive feedback (19). My job appears to be significantly harder than his - and I’m not exactly curing cancer over here (20) - and I consider myself very lucky that I’m able to do it from home and shelter in place with my family, and consider it incumbent on me to provide support to organizations helping those who are really at risk. The people who are more at risk are overwhelmingly the working poor and people of color, who are traveling on public transit to the jobs that are keeping civilization going right now: EMTs, nurses, bus drivers, grocery store stockers, truckers, garbage collectors, letter carriers. And those are the people who weren’t laid off or furloughed, as millions of Americans are applying for unemployment insurance and the country approaches 10% unemployment.

Reno doesn’t have to worry about any of that. He doesn’t have to worry about losing his job, about providing for his loved ones, about being put in a position where he’s forced to go out on the job and increase his risk of contracting the coronavirus. And all he has to do to help keep his city together is do his part to stay home and slow the spread of the virus. He doesn’t understand that stay-at-home orders aren’t to protect his own interest, because he is a dumbass (21). Stay-at-home orders are to protect the community, to prevent asymptomatic carriers from passing the disease along, to prohibit gatherings so large groups of people can’t all catch the virus at once. It is not a hard sacrifice to make for someone with steady employment at a magazine committed to terrible takes (22); if anything, it’s better described as a mild inconvenience.

And while Reno presents himself as a brave defiant warrior for going to Mass in secret - even though he’s a whiny bitch for whom the protection and well-being of others isn’t even an afterthought (23) - he’s trying to have it both ways by bragging on himself but also keeping everything hush-hush so his priest doesn’t get “censured”, a thing that I’ve never heard of and that, considering what priests have traditionally been able to get away with, can’t possibly be that severe.

Furthermore, even if the measures supported in the letter flatten the curve by March 31, as is hoped, there will still be people with the disease, and the bulk of the population will not yet have developed immunity. What will then be proposed? We will be in the same position as we were on March 18. Will the faithful continue to be deprived of the sacraments until a vaccine is developed? That could involve depriving the people of God the Mass for another year. If the suspension of public Masses continues, then one must ask, what good is a diocesan priest that does not sacramentally feed his flock in its time of need? It is one thing to dispense the faithful from the obligation to attend Mass; it is another to deny them Mass. 

At this point, Reno is taking the second half of his column to quote a letter from two theology professors to the archbishop, since he can’t be bothered to write a full column himself (24). Maybe I should put this in terms Reno has a shot at understanding (25): pretend all of the people getting sick and dying are unborn children. You seem like the kind of guy who would advocate for changing the laws to protect those people, right? Ok, now pretend those babies got born and grew up into people. Does that help?

Reno has already contended in earlier entries of his coronavirus diary that being “pro-life” only means being opposed to murder, not deaths from nature; this is notable for being the only instance in recorded history when someone who identifies as “pro-life” has discovered a moral gray area. But many of these pandemic deaths are preventable. Reno opened his column by laughing off the projected deaths from the pandemic, since the original forecast of 100,000-240,000 deaths may get revised down to somewhere closer to 60,000. 60,000 is still tragic and gutting, and is still a dark moment in our history. But it also means that through practicing appropriate social distancing - and who would even want to be socially close to Reno, ever (26) - there may be 40,000-180,000 people who dodged a bullet, who got to see Easter Sunday this year, if we’re just willing to do something as simple as stay home. How can we possibly shrug that off as easily as Reno does? How can a Catholic, a Christian, a follower of any religion, do that?

Reno is a practicing Catholic and an editor of a journal about the intersection of religion and political action, but the concept of sacrificing something himself so that another may benefit is completely alien to him. It’s not even a sacrifice for Reno, it’s likely more a mild inconvenience, since I’m assuming his home is spacious and adorned with insufferable works of modern art (27), and he can buy all the groceries he needs. The only “First Thing” he knows is himself (28), and everything else he thinks, all the time, derives from the question “will this make R.R. Reno happy?” What does he think Catholicism is? What was his catechism, that his sum total of thought in this moment is “I am right and everyone else is wrong”? What does he think we celebrated during Holy Week, if not a man and a God who suffered so that the poor, the meek, the sorrowful, the leper, the prostitute, the tax collector, would be saved? How does he write a new column every day asserting that the weak deserve to die and we should accept it? And this past week, how could he write a column so fucking bad that it led me, a la Cyrano de Bergerac, to write a piece in which I tried, successfully, to come up with thirty unique ways to insult him and his writing (29)?

What a turd (30).