Still Belong There
Featuring 23 flavors of stupidity
“The righteous rage was foolish pride/
The conquerors did not divide/
The call keeps coming from inside/
I hope you let it go”
-Vampire Weekend
This past weekend I heard a homily about cancel culture, and guys? It sucked. It wasn't our regular pastor, whom I kind of like, it was some guy pinch-hitting and he was talking about how he had just read The Coddling of the American Mind (ugh) and how cancel culture really hurts people and is a serious issue and how the rejection that cancel culture pushes is exactly what Jesus and Catholicism serve as a refuge from. He wasn't even a right-wing asshole, or at least he didn't appear to be: he came across as this good-natured big dumb rube who had just heard about this new idea and wanted to tell us about it, because he thought that “speakers getting shouted down on college campuses” was something that this congregation really needed to hear about to grow in their faith.
That I didn't walk out and go home mid-homily is, I suppose, a testament to my restraint. That I didn't grab the guy after Mass and say “my friend was fired by the Arch for being gay, would you consider that cancel culture?” or “do you think Blase Cupich sitting on the names of 72 priests credibly accused of sexually abusing children was perhaps an overcorrection for cancel culture?” was probably also for the best. But I did turn to my wife at the end of the homily and say “I'm not coming back for a while,” and I'm not.
I wouldn't say that a bad homily is enough to make me leave Catholicism; a better way to put it is that I have a lot of reasons to be fed up and disgusted with Catholicism, but occasionally I hear a nice homily in my nice parish and it keeps me from leaving. In the absence of that, though, and coupled with some other terrible homilies we’ve had from other priests lately on “secular culture” or “how come nobody wants to display the Ten Commandments in a public building”…look, I need to take some time off from going to Mass.
I’m not leaving Catholicism, I’m just not going to go to Mass for a while. That’s allowed, in my opinion, if going to Mass sucks. As Saint Augustine himself once said:
I can’t imagine it’s a good idea for me, my family, my parish, my church, or God that I dedicate an hour a week to “feeling blindingly angry while participating in a Catholic ritual”. But I’m also not planning to stop “being Catholic”, I just do that in a different way than going to Mass at the local parish right now. I’m a lucky guy: it’s not like I’m someone who’s been fired by the church, I’m not a victim of abuse, I have other Catholics outside of my parish that keep me connected to my faith, I’ve never been told I was gravely disordered, or that I don’t deserve healthcare, or that I should stop protesting and go back home. If I was a less lucky guy, my relationship to the church might be different today. It’s not great right now, to be sure, but I still belong there; I just don’t go to Mass at my parish right now. The best Catholic writing on this topic is from Kaya Oakes, who provides the best Catholic writing on a lot of topics so I’m not surprised. You should probably just read her whole piece, but here are my favorite parts, on what it means to “belong” to the Catholic church, and how not going to weekly Mass because weekly Mass sucks is distinct from “deconstruction”, a word you’ve probably seen, especially recently and especially more in evangelical Protestant traditions.
“...there is sometimes a degree of smugness to people who talk about deconstruction, a sweeping away of the larger complexities of what it means to “belong” to a religion, a denomination, or a church…there are in fact many cultural Catholics out there who might pop into church once in a while, but prefer to pray largely on their own. Because let’s be honest: Catholic churches are on the whole absolutely terrible at liturgy, preaching, music, welcoming the stranger, and so on. I have been looking for a Catholic church I can feel comfortable regularly attending that doesn’t require me to travel an hour or more for eight years. And I still haven’t found one. The Catholics I know who’ve given up on weekly Mass don’t call it “deconstruction,”...The point is to get closer to God, and when church gets in the way of that for me and millions of other people, who’s to blame? There is just too much noise in my head, too many stories I’ve covered of abuse and ill treatment, too many signs that I don’t belong when I go to church these days, but I’m too invested to quit. Somehow I always find myself going back, because the rituals and the sacraments matter that much. But the church has disappointed me so many times that I can only go as an anonymous blob in the back pews…and it’s sad, but it’s also fine. It’s Christianity as survival.”
A reader once called what I did “deconstruction”, but, like Oakes, I’d also reject that label for what I do. There’s some very good Christian deconstructionist writing out there - I read a great book earlier this year and even got to talk to the author and he was a very nice and cool guy - but that’s all very different from the way I think about Catholicism. What I do is not deconstruction as I understand it, because that would involve unwinding the things I was taught in the Catholic faith, and I’m actually quite happy with what I was taught in the Catholic faith. My parents, and my teachers at various Catholic schools, and the people who mentored me or spiritually directed me, they were good, conscientious people, who taught me things that I still value today. I learn more about my faith every day, but I’m adding to the foundation I got growing up, not taking it apart. I still belong there. Deconstruction, as I understand it, is when you look around in your church and say “oh no, I was sold a lie either in the actual tenets of my faith or the culture surrounding it, and I need to step back and rethink what I actually believe.” I’m in my church, I know what I believe, but I’m looking around and asking “hey what are all these assholes doing here?”
There’s this comedic idea I’ve been playing around with a lot in the past few months of essays, like this one or this one or this one or this one. I usually call it “business idiot voice”, but it’s where I write as someone else, and the “someone else” is usually a powerful person in Catholicism who, in the joke, talks like a business idiot, talks like someone who says “okay, we need to circle back to what happened last week and the items we put in the parking lot (or on the flip chart, or fill in whatever stupid thing you want to put here)”, and then that person uses that measured office tone and bland jargon to narrate their way through just a jaw-dropping level of incompetence and ignorance. The HBO sitcom Veep is an easy recent example of exploring this comedic idea through dialogue. I’ve been taking this “business idiot voice” approach to writing G.O.T.H.S. a lot lately for a few reasons: I find it entertaining, it’s a voice that I’m very comfortable writing in for reasons I’ve explained earlier, and, well, it is how the Catholic church actually works.
The Pillar just spoke with the organizers of this year's Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis. The bishops have been working on this for years, and I've talked about this event before - I still think they have time to book Trump as the keynote speaker - and how it seems kind of stupid and like a bad use of fourteen million dollars and how it might just turn into a Republican rally because it kind of was that the last time the States hosted the Eucharistic Congress. But The Pillar's story focused on the changing attendance expectations for the Congress, and I am trying to parse the below passage any other way than “nobody in the multi-year planning process looked up the capacity of the stadium until right now”:
“While the number of expected attendees is fewer than organizers initially projected, Congress leaders say that the event’s venue, Lucas Oil Stadium, can hold fewer people for the event than was initially thought…While Congress organizers had until recently projected that 80,000 U.S. Catholics would attend the Eucharistic Congress, CEO Tim Glemkowski told The Pillar last week that projection has been adjusted as logistical details for the event shape up. ‘Lucas Oil Stadium holds 62,000 people for a football game. And by the time you start putting in staging and different seats that get blocked off, the maximum capacity of the stadium at any one time is going to be closer to 50,000. So this, I think, is part of the experience of not having done a [Eucharistic Congress] in 81 years in the U.S., learning what venues can actually hold for this event by the time you do all the production stuff. I think one of the lessons was that the hoped-for projections of what the stadium could support have been lowered, by the time everything was said and done.’”
I'm not crazy, right? The only explanation for estimating that you could fit 80,000 in a stadium built for 62,000 is “you made a very bad guess”. It's not like you went “oh once we account for sightlines to the monstrance we have to knock out a few seating sections”, you were off by 18,000 people! There are only three NFL stadiums in the country that seat over 80,000, and Indianapolis ain't exactly the biggest media market! Lucas Oil is the 21st-largest stadium in the NFL and you thought 80,000 would just fit there! Do you know how I learned all of these fun facts about stadium capacity? I typed it into my phone and spent ten seconds looking it up! You can also do the same thing to look up how long ago the last Eucharistic Congress in the States was: it was in 1976 in Philadelphia to coincide with the bicentennial, so when the CEO of the whole thing says that there's been an 81-year gap since the last Congress, he's not just wrong about the stadium, he’s also wrong about a second, equally obvious thing.
The bishops have placed a staggering number of chips on this Eucharistic Congress. They panicked when they saw that Pew Research respondents might not fully understand the church's teachings on the Eucharist, and decided to ascribe all of the church's failings to the perceived ignorance of the laity. The entire 2021 debate over whether to excommunicate Joe Biden fell apart, and the bishops tried to frame it up as a teachable moment on Eucharistic theology, which they then attempted to segue into this event. As a result, this event has become so important to the institutional church that nobody knows the correct date of the last one and they guessed the capacity of a building whose capacity has been public knowledge for years and they were off by 29 percent.
What I do isn’t deconstruction, it’s not me waking up and saying “oh no, what I’ve been taught, what I’ve held close to my heart, what I’ve believed is all a lie.” It’s me, as an adult with a basic level of administrative competence, asking “these guys? These are the guys? Are you sure?”
I don’t have any new hot takes about Dignitas Infinita, the new document from the Vatican Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith affirming that all human beings possess dignity but also trans people are wrong and shouldn’t exist. There’s a chunk near the end of the document where the Vatican rails against the evils of “gender theory”, but that chunk also avoids explaining what they mean by “gender theory” or quoting or even naming a single gender theorist, I guess in the interest of being succinct. One good take on the document came from Fr. Dan Horan, who wrote that “the text fails to directly engage any specific theorist, philosopher, theologian, or other scholar who works on the subject of gender ostensibly under consideration here. Not a single citation points to any source this text intends to critique. Instead of accounting for real research, this document constructs a strawman called “gender theory,” whose tenets represent no actual theory or study with which I am familiar. The vagueness of the concept is presented at once as a catch-all and an ominous threat.” Another good take came from Stephen McNulty, who wrote that “Dignitas Infinita uses the term "gender theory" seven times, but not once does it refer to "transgender" people. To this end, it is a syntactically strange document, one that bends over backward trying to ascribe "gender theory" with a mystical agency of its own: "gender theory" prescribes; "gender theory" intends; "gender theory" advances. It seems that "gender theory" here is a code-word for talking about transgender people and their allies. This begs the question: Is the Vatican afraid of trans people and therefore takes pains to erase any direct mention of them from a document about trans issues?” While I have an educated guess on the answer to McNulty’s question, I want to get to the best take, and the one that gets to the heart of what I want to address, which comes from Colleen Dulle:
“The section concludes with the assertion that, ‘biological sex and the socio-cultural role of sex (gender) can be distinguished but not separated. Therefore, all attempts to obscure reference to the interminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.’ This argument is incoherent: What distinction between sex and gender can be made that cannot be interpreted as an “attempt to obscure reference to” sexual difference? If I cut my hair short or wear my husband’s jeans and hoodie, is that too far? What if I do “men’s work” like changing the oil in my car or fixing a leaky toilet?”
The text of the document reads “all attempts to obscure reference to the interminable sexual difference between man and woman are to be rejected.” At all times and in all places, you must openly display the biological differentiators of your sex, you must not hide anything that shows your sexual difference. There are only so many ways I can make the “Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body But Also Teen Girls Should Have Dope Ass Tiddies” joke - like, here was me making the same joke three months after I made it the first time - but what the hell other joke am I left with here? There is, according to the church, only one acceptable visual way to be a man or a woman; did nobody drafting the document think about what that could imply, in a document that also states that each person is loved by God because of how unique they are? Going back to my one joke, what is the minimum amount of cleavage the bishops think a woman should display at all times to alert everyone to the fact that she is a woman? What is the plan for dressing every Catholic like the clip art bathroom symbols? When my daughters put a crown on me because they want to play princess, how quickly should I declare them anathema? Okay, I guess I thought of a second and third joke, but still.
It’s not just that this document is exclusionary, it’s that it’s dumb. The on-paper sentences are dumb. They are saying things that are unreasonable and absurd, not after deep contemplation, but at an immediate first glance. There’s not an argument for the exclusion that the church continues to preach, there are just a bunch of buzzwords being thrown around, as if a bunch of middle managers on a Zoom call were sweating it out saying “shit shit shit we have to think of something to say here, let’s go with ‘gender theory’”. The USCCB’s attempts to put these “teachings” - I’m using that term very generously - into their own terms is, somehow, built on even lazier arguments, as we examined last month.
What I do isn’t “deconstruction” because there is not even anything to deconstruct. This is not my unwinding a toxic teaching, this is my pointing at a stupid person and saying “they’re too stupid to even try.” The problem is that the stupid person has power - power to exclude people, to fire people, to deny people healthcare, to expel them from schools and churches - and nobody else is able to check that power.
In the past few months, I’ve made a couple of passing jokes at the expense of Father Mike Schmitz, a Duluth priest who has a big online following and a close, apparently paid, partnership with the Hallow App, and we checked in on those guys last month to see what their deal was. According to reporter Sara Scarlett Wilson, Schmitz apparently wrote his entire Lenten homily series - this is a guy whose day job is being a priest on a college campus - to tie in directly with one of the programs on the podcast. Which is kind of weird, that a priest is possibly getting paid by a for-profit app company, and then that priest is recommending the app to his sizeable social media following, and he’s literally writing homilies that will drive people back to the app, the whole thing just strikes me as something that priests probably shouldn’t engage in.
I was drafting a longer piece where I would write as Schmitz, and I ended up scrapping the piece, but the idea was that he was going to surprise-write to me as a ‘fellow online Catholic evangelist’ and be unexpectedly diplomatic to me, being all like “I know you’ve made fun of me, but we’re really not that different. We’re both trying to reach people who are looking for any sort of connection to a church that doesn’t always feel like home to them. You and I may disagree on what the best message is to reach them, but you can’t deny that those people are out there, that they’re looking for connection, and that you and I are looking for connection to. So - and this may come as a surprise to you - I want to thank you. I want to sincerely thank you for the message of comfort and the laughter that you bring to people. I have no doubt that your audience finds it refreshing, almost as refreshing as the taste of an ice-cold Mr. Pibb”. And then this would go on for several paragraphs, during which the references to Mr. Pibb would increase in frequency, making it blindingly clear that Schmitz was just riding a full sponsorship deal with Mr. Pibb, “experiencing same-sex attraction isn’t a sin by itself, no, but acting on it, of course, is gravely disordered, just like thinking Dr. Pepper would be an acceptable beverage to have with lunch is distinct from actually drinking it,” that sort of thing. Figuring out the funniest soft drink name to plug into the punchline is the challenge. It might honestly be Sprite, but Mr. Pibb is definitely a contender (it’s worked before). You need to climb down the ladder of references until you find something that is familiar enough to be broadly recognized, but obscure enough that it’s unexpected; it’s not unlike reading an alethiometer. Honestly I might still write the piece, I think I could probably pull it off.
What I do isn’t deconstruction, it’s trying to make you laugh. Humor is, of course, a useful tool for observing and better understanding the gap between what is and what should be. But even if it wasn’t that, it makes people feel good and it passes the time.
What I do isn’t deconstruction. What I do, as theologian Kaya Oakes wrote, is Christianity as survival. What I do, as noted not-theologian Renata Adler wrote, is just shuffling and dealing out the solitaire cards, and then they do or do not come out. Maybe I’ve got a red seven in one of the above bits that fits on your black eight, and maybe that can give us both a little bit of hope that we still belong somewhere. But what the hell do I know anyways.
On the plus side, the new Vampire Weekend album is very good. I think this is the best song they’ve ever made: