¡Silencio! ¡No hay banda!
Did you answer ‘cause you thought that's what I wanted to hear, or did you think about what I said and answer ‘cause you truly believe that to be right?
In Mulholland Drive, David Lynch’s 2001 masterpiece about a cowboy with big dreams, there’s an important scene where aspiring actress Betty Elms goes in to audition for a movie. Betty nails it; she does an incredible job reading this part in the audition. If you’ve seen Mulholland Drive, you know that there’s a lot to unpack from this scene, but I just want to focus on this: after Betty nails the audition, three different people in the room - the director, the producer, and a casting director - all tell her that she did a really great job, and all three characters punctuate that by saying something like “and I really mean that!” The implication, of course, being that these people say stuff that they don’t mean, all of the time, just because they're supposed to say things, but this time, this time they’re actually being honest. Which, of course, doesn’t make you doubt any less that they’re bullshitting Betty right now. Betty’s an actress, but everyone else is kind of an actress, too, that’s just what life is a lot of the time. That's a recurring motif in this film: people say things not because they believe them but because they're the things that people are supposed to say in a given situation, and then Lynch draws attention to that and how artificial it feels when you focus on it, and the whole thing is very disorienting. The film is also disorienting for other reasons.
The audition scene gets complicated further because we learn, shortly after the audition, that the movie Betty was reading for was never going to get made anyways and the whole audition process is just kind of a vanity project for the producer. Later we learn that - depending on your interpretation of the film - Betty never existed in the first place. When I say “never existed in the first place”, I mean in the context of the film’s plot; obviously, “Betty Elms” never existed in the real world. Betty is not a real person, Betty is Naomi Watts, a professional actress, memorizing lines that David Lynch wrote in advance, and performing them under Lynch’s direction, on a film set designed to look like that, a reality to which Lynch also likes to draw your attention throughout the film. The whole thing is made up, because it’s a movie that you’re watching from your couch, you’re not observing real people doing real things in a real place. That’s kind of the point. Everything is a performance, including the part where you admit that everything is a performance. No hay banda.
I don’t envy the position of Pope Leo, the first supreme pontiff to know what the “Palmer House” ice cream flavor is. The man who began his papacy with a message of peace is serving in a world suffering from terrifying, rapidly escalating conflicts; he is still advocating forcefully for peace and I appreciate that, and I pray that at some point, the world will listen to him. But the crack reporters at The Pillar who believe “that serious Catholic journalism is a service to Christ and the Church - and that journalism can be done in a uniquely Catholic way, which takes the doctrine of the Catholic Church to be true, which treats people with respect, and which looks for the truth above all else, without getting bogged down in partisan agendas or mudslinging,” will not let up on Leo’s biggest and most pressing conflict, something that the holy father needs to prioritize over this bullshit about “trying not to plummet into World War III”: that’s right, the Latin Mass people in America are very upset.
The “Can Pope Leo afford to wait on ‘Traditionis custodes’?” piece by The Pillar’s Ed Condon is sounding the alarm on a still-growing rift in the church, one so serious that Pope Leo may need to step in and reverse Pope Francis’ restrictions on the Latin Mass from his 2021 letter Traditionis Custodes, based on the severe backlash to those restrictions in dioceses like Charlotte and Detroit. Two of the sources that Condon cites as proof that a divisive rift is growing in the church are, basically, the two most divisive sources anyone could pick on any topic. The first source is unhinged right-wing blog Rorate Coeli, which accused the Detroit archbishop of “obviously enjoy[ing] being a cruel anti-liturgical enforcer” and in recent days has accused the late Pope Francis of “12 years of insult[ing], belittling, [and] mocking of priests”. The second source Condon chose was Raymond Burke, The Cardinal Who Loves Getting Fired, making a public statement complaining that there isn’t enough Latin Mass going around, interchangeable with any of his other public statements over the past decade. Condon uses these as evidence for:
“...the ongoing controversy over the implementation of Traditionis custodes nearly four years after its promulgation, and the mounting hopes among TLM communities that Pope Leo XIV may revisit its provisions. But while expectations of a papal intervention mount, the pope himself has not given any public indication of any plans he may have to revisit the issue, or in what time frame he might choose to do so. In the meantime, the ongoing implementation of Traditionis custodes continues to generate pushback in some dioceses and may even be creating and exacerbating some of the pastoral challenges it was meant to address.”
Now, this new piece came after multiple essays from The Pillar claiming that the kind, pious, and attractive Latin Massgoers in Charlotte were being victimized by their evil, modernist, and ugly bishop as he tried to implement Traditionis Custodes. According to OSV, Latin Massgoers in Charlotte make up about 1,000 people in a diocese of over half a million Catholics. But in a two week period, The Pillar ran seven different pieces on the implementation of Traditionis in Charlotte, which directly affects literally four churches in a major American city, so naturally you’d assume that you’d need about seven full essays to cover this change and how much everyone hates the bishop for making it:
May 30: “The bishop has faced in the last week a firestorm of criticism, both in his diocese and among Catholics across the nation, after he promulgated an interpretation of Traditionis custodes widely panned as unnecessarily draconian.”
May 31st, fourth day in a row now: “While Bishop Martin has said the new diocesan policy is being implemented to address divisions in the Church, the young Catholics who spoke with The Pillar said they hadn’t experienced division over liturgy among Charlotte Catholics.”
Wow, sounds like things are awful there. I don’t know anything about the diocese of Charlotte, but based on the reporting in The Pillar, there’s a draconian tyrant running the place and he’s ruining a new person’s life every day, and in fact he’s decided to make it his life’s work to hurt people who just love Latin too much. Anyways, on June 1st, The Pillar took a day off from writing about Charlotte. Then it got spicy.
June 2nd: “Bishop Michael Martin of Charlotte has indicated that he will assess whether to return to ministry a priest who has been accused of both boundary violations and sexual abuse of a minor.” That doesn’t actually appear to be what Martin said - his statement was kind of vague, but it didn’t indicate that the priest in question would be returning to ministry anytime soon - but hey have you noticed that this guy we’ve been criticizing a lot lately probably also loves pedophiles and would leave your child alone with one if given the chance?
June 3rd: “The Charlotte diocese had previously insisted the changes would go ahead as announced, insisting that Martin was following the intention of Pope Francis’ 2021 motu proprio, and that it is the intention of the Church to see less attendance at Traditional Latin Masses, despite their reportedly growing popularity among many younger Catholics in the U.S. and other Western countries.” That right, he loves pedophiles, and he hates popular things, like the Mass you love.
Mike Lewis has also tracked a lot of this bullshit here. But if you’re the editor of a publication that you want people to take seriously, and you run all seven of those stories in quick succession, and then a week and a half later you run another piece saying “wow maybe Pope Leo should do something about the Latin Mass, don’t you think things have been getting more divisive?”, you shouldn’t say that you’re running a publication that does straight reporting “without getting bogged down in partisan agendas or mudslinging”. Because the “pushback”, the “pastoral challenges”, the “expectations of a papal intervention”, the only reason that any of these things could matter or even exist in the first place is because of outlets like The Pillar who choose to publish stories like these, based on decisions affecting miniscule percentages of these dioceses and pull quotes from publicly recognized assholes. Again, in Charlotte, we’re talking about approximately 1,000 people, less than one-half of one percent of the diocese, that will be affected by the reduction in offerings of the pre-1962 Mass. This has merited multiple pieces from The Pillar, including an accusation - founded on very little - that the bishop of Charlotte is going to bat for a pedophile, and eventually this “analysis” piece suggesting that Pope Leo probably needs to prioritize the issue given the growing tensions, carefully eliding that one publication seems to be working very hard to grow those tensions.
Now let me make this absolutely clear: maybe bishop Martin of Charlotte is a huge piece of shit! I don’t know anything about the guy, but he’s a Catholic bishop so it’s certainly very possible that he is! But The Pillar isn’t writing about the bishop of Charlotte because he’s a piece of shit, they’re writing about the bishop of Charlotte because they have a point of view on Pope Francis’ Traditionis Custodes that they want to share with their readers. As I wrote back in 2021, The Pillar sucks, and their pitch that they are an unbiased news source is bullshit:
“[The Pillar] promised to only give us facts and necessary context. Opinion and sensationalism would never be part of it. But opinion is always part of it. The opinion “this is worth writing about and people should read it” informs the decision to start writing in the first place. The opinion “this is the most important issue and people should read about it” informs the decision to cover one story and not another. The opinion “this context is the most helpful for understanding the facts” informs the decision of what to include in a piece and what to cut. And The Pillar is a site that has a clear point of view and is making clear choices in what they want to cover and how they want to cover it, but it’s marketing itself as the last truly unbiased Catholic news source you can trust.”
The Pillar continues to make clear choices in what they want to cover, and what they want to identify as important issues to their readers. Everyone who writes, and puts their writing somewhere where others can read it, does this. Take a close look at how this outlet is identifying this issue as important: when The Pillar chooses to seriously cite an unhinged right wing blog and Cardinal Burke - who hasn’t had a literal job since 2023, actual responsibilities since 2017, and a non-mascot position in the Catholic church since 2014 - that tells you something about the message they’re trying to get out and the audience that they’re trying to reach, the audience that they know will set up recurring payments if they just write out the things that they want to hear.
This isn’t to say that Catholics can’t care about their favorite kind of Mass being harder to find. I get that. But it’s very easy to answer the question “when will Pope Leo finally do something about this?” with “I THINK HE IS MORE CONCERNED ABOUT OTHER SHIT RIGHT NOW”. Perhaps the chin-stroking folks at The Pillar, the ones who told you that they are more thoughtful and sharp and discerning than the folks at other media outlets, will be able to piece this together someday. But until they do: when they publish pieces like this, is it “serious Catholic journalism”, or is it a performance for an audience? And is it meaningfully different from the kind of performance we would get from Lifesite or Crisis or Church Militant (rest in power)? Lifesite published a piece in May saying that “Pope Leo needs to prioritize giving Joseph Strickland a job and this will be an important sign that he will be a Good Pope”; my conclusion was that the people who run that site didn’t really believe that was a serious possibility, but they make money when their audience gets worked up, and that’s the business model they’ve been following for years. The Pillar’s piece is about how “Pope Leo needs to abrogate Traditionis Custodes and this will be an important sign that he will be a Good Pope, and I really mean it this time”. The Pillar’s piece has better copy editing than the one at Lifesite, but strikes me as identical in purpose: to get the readers - the same ones that read Lifesite, by the way - riled up and clicking “subscribe”, without any need for sincerity or objectivity. Those things are just illusions. No hay banda.
For a few months, I’ve been trying to put together a piece about E-Knock. E-Knock is a “traditionalist Catholic rapper”, obviously the kind of thing that would be right up my alley in terms of subject matter, especially since he posts stuff like this:
That said, I was never able to get the full piece together and title it “The Taylor Marshall LP” - great title, I still got it - and the main reason for that is…well, E-Knock is not very popular and I can’t give you a real reason why you should care about him at all, and writing a piece that’s just saying “hey look at this idiot nobody’s ever heard of” is too mean, even for me. But I would like to take a look at one of his tracks from earlier this year because I think it’s going to be a useful illustration for what I’m trying to say here. So let’s listen to “One Body”, one of the recent singles off 2025’s Book of E-Knock.
We’re all asking the same question: can a sensitive white boy restore the traditional Latin Mass through the power of hip hop, an art form invented by teens in the 1970s Bronx? Not really, no, but let’s look at the track anyways. As you saw from the thumbnail, “One Body” is not just a track, it’s “a letter to the Catholic bishops”. “One Body” is, in fact, epistolary - you know, like “Stan”, but “Stan” was produced by Dr. Dre’s best student and the mix on “One Body” is, theologically speaking, ass - with the first verse set up as a letter to the Catholic bishops and the second verse set up as a letter to the Catholic “faithful”. Let’s dive in to the first verse:
“dear bishops across the country
this is an open letter
I’m here to inform you
most of us Catholics are really fed up”
Okay, I’m tracking so far. I am fed up! The bishops do piss me off! All right! I’m sure this is going somewhere that makes sense!
“every heretic with a collar can say or do whatever
but you silence every good Priest
rocking a Cassock and a Beretta.”
Oh, he’s losing me fast.
“change the gospel and think your conscience can hold you
won’t even consecrate Russia
even when Fatima told you
you all seem more concerned with money and selling off our heritage
this new springtime looking dark this is really embarrassing
all we asking for is something sacred and supernatural
you respond with a kick and push this Luce fiasco
then hand us a pamphlet, stamp it with some weird language
then ask for money in exchange for some rainbow felt banners
and reduce mass to some banquet
communion in hands and
lock the faithful out of church’s funeral for trans and
why you always pandering to those who can’t stand us
your downfall’s so drastic, you deserve less money in baskets.”
Ok, first thing I’m going to say: “Luce fiasco” is a very good play on words. Like, putting aside the content of the lyrics for a moment, how would I evaluate E-Knock’s flow? It’s not actually bad, I suppose. He does sound a lot like he listened to an Aesop Rock album and tried to do that himself, and he’s definitely not as good a writer as Aesop Rock, but he’s also not embarrassing himself in terms of skill.
The actual embarrassment here, I think, is the mismatch between the medium and the message. This song is set up as a tirade. In the video, E-Knock is rapping into his mic in the studio on one half of the screen, while a bishop, who is also played by E-Knock, is reading the “open letter” in real time. If you were able to get all of the bishops in a room together and yell at them, what would you yell at them about? Would it be “you’re too mean to priests who wear cassocks?” I wouldn’t be yelling about that, and of course you wouldn’t expect me to be yelling about that, but also I don’t think a lot of conservative Catholics would be yelling about this; it certainly would surprise me if it was the first thing they chose to yell about. Even Taylor Alison Marshall, perhaps the single laziest writer I have ever read for this project, attempted to blame the Second Vatican Council for the sexual abuse crisis; it was incredibly cynical, but he at least went with “an objectively bad thing has happened, and I am choosing to blame something I don’t like”. E-Knock is blaming something he doesn’t like for…well, for purely aesthetic problems. Priests aren’t allowed to wear hats anymore. The felt banners are too rainbow. And apparently there’s a rash of churches locking faithful Catholics out so they can host funerals for trans people; far as I can tell, that only happened once, and it’s because Tim Dolan was asleep at the switch.
Now, maybe E-Knock didn’t have time to get to the bigger problems in just one short track, but we’re talking about a man who has released four LPs of traditional Catholic rap, including songs like “Married Young” and “(Long Live the) Patriarchy”, both off of 2022’s Deus Vult; I think it’s safe to assume that E-Knock has near-complete creative control over his project, and this is what he wants to prioritize, what he wants to direct his rage towards, what he wants his listeners to be angry about. The Pillar does this too with their very different project. Everyone who writes, and puts their writing somewhere where others can read it, does this.
But with E-Knock, the problem is not just the lame message, it’s how the message is delivered. I don’t know how else to say this, but: hip-hop was invented after the second Vatican council. I do not think you make a convincing case for returning to sixteenth-century traditions if you’re making that case over 808s. I don’t know who any of E-Knock’s catalogue is for. Who is looking for sick beats but also thinks sick beats should be eliminated in favor of Gregorian chant? Who wants to hear “Contraception”, a rapped imagined dialogue between a couple and a priest in marriage prep class, which is not only anti-contraception but appears to also be anti-NFP which was not a configuration I even thought was possible among traditionalist Catholics? What is the occasion for playing that song? Who thinks a rap song is the right way to cover that topic at all? If you played that for a Catholic high school sex ed class, how would you not get laughed out of the room? What would I relate to in that, what deep emotional string would that pluck inside of me, hearing that imagined conversation rapped at me? Overall, this music is too didactic to be entertaining or on in the background, and too weird and angry to sell the reverence that E-Knock claims to care about. It could maybe work during a witness talk on the saddest men’s retreat of all time.
Now, to be clear, I don’t think E-Knock is insincere in his concerns, I just think E-Knock kind of dim, mainly because he reads Taylor Marshall and he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t know how to spell “seder”:
So you've got this guy who wants to be a “traditional Catholic rapper”, and he’s using his music to say the things he thinks he’s supposed to say, and he’s doing so poorly, and he reaches more people than I do with this blog I guess, but not a lot more. I suppose that the ultimate point that I’m trying to make is that this E-Knock guy seems pretty lame and bad, and JD Flynn and Ed Condon of The Pillar are, somehow, far lamer and more bad, but with broader reach and with worse consequences for the environment of Catholic media. So while they present themselves as unbiased and thoughtful journalists, you should treat them with slightly less respect than you would an independent rapper who reads Taylor Marshall. They are saying the things that they think they are supposed to say in order to keep their project afloat. The Pillar has been, for about five years now, a performance for a very sad audience.
What about me? I write stuff and put it online, am I performing? At least a little bit, I guess. I write about the stuff that I want to write about, but I certainly would prefer that the people who read my stuff actually enjoy reading it and don’t think it’s a complete waste of time, so I do keep that in mind when I write. Take that for whatever it’s worth. I do think understanding these idiots better may be helpful for understanding what actually does matter in our church, and what sort of vision for a church we can work towards. I think that it’s helpful to know when someone’s trying to make you mad about something stupid, and why it’s okay to ignore them (which people seem to already be doing with E-Knock).
And it’s okay to ignore me, too. I pick and choose what I want to write about and how I want to write about it, so you don’t have to read me if you don’t want to, I guess; sorry to put that near the end of the piece. But I don’t make money off of this, that’s something I have over The Pillar. And I think I’m angry about the right things, so that's something else I have over them. And, of course, I have great taste in film and can easily dissect a complex work like Mulholland Drive, which is, again, about a cowboy with big dreams. I don't know if the hacks at The Pillar have even seen Mulholland Drive, but if they ever do, I hope that the message they take away is “¡SILENCIO!”