The Reliquary

Purging my soul of all the essays I started and then abandoned over the past year.

Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, an architectural marvel and one of the final surviving structures from the 1893 Columbian Exposition (the one with the White City), contains a tiny architectural marvel within it, in the form of Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle. A treasure from the early 1900s era of "rich people building very tiny things for some reason"¹, the castle was the $7 million hobby of silent film star Colleen Moore, who spared no expense in the painstaking details of her magical dollhouse which is now on permanent display in the museum. Every tiny piece of flatware is real down to the serrations on the butter knife. Every tiny book in the library comes off the shelf and opens. And the two-story chapel not only contains the world's smallest Bible which has the full text printed inside, but also a small reliquary containing an actual fragment of the True Cross.

I don't know why this makes me laugh, but it does. You know the Vatican has to have extremely meticulous records of where every sliver of the True Cross is located, and one of the lines on the spreadsheet is "it's in the fairy castle at the science museum, 15 feet away from a Mold-A-Rama machine and one floor down from the chick hatchery." It is in this spirit that I offer you the slivers of pieces I never finished this year, ones where I could think up like one and a half jokes and then gave up, in the hope that they may connect you more closely to the divine.

I Am Not Upset That I Have Once Again Been Passed Up For The Laetare Medal And Actually This Is Funny To Me

The Laetare Medal is awarded annually by the University of Notre Dame to a Catholic “whose genius has ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the Church and enriched the heritage of humanity.” It is an extremely prestigious honor in American Catholicism, and in 2023 it went to Sister Rosemary Connelly, the former executive director of Misericordia, and a woman who is notably not me, even though my genius has also ennobled the arts and sciences, illustrated the ideals of the church, and enriched the heritage of humanity. I had planned to write a piece in which I explained that not receiving this award - and to step away from my normal ironic detachment for a second, I am well aware that it’s not an award that somebody like me would ever realistically be considered for - was not making me mad at all, as I slowly worked through all nine manifestations of being mad online:

“If I can just speak candidly for a second, we really all did find this hilarious. Me, my beautiful family, living in our house where I have a successful home life and career, we were all sitting around and laughing at how funny it was that, once again, the Laetare committee did not see me fit to receive the medal this year, after years of writing about the Catholic church. Shit. SHIT. It’s funny, it’s very funny, we’re all laughing, you’re probably laughing about it right now. Hey, I just love, you know, love seeing them give the medal to other people, just like I planned it. FUCKING planned it. This is all, it’s good. Fine. It’s fine. Very funny. Good for sister whatever, this is great for her.”

Doctrinal Note on the Moral Limits to Technological Manipulation of the Human Body But Also Teen Girls Should Have Dope Ass Tiddies, by the USCCB Committee on Doctrine

This one, admittedly, may have offended some readers, but it still would have been better than the USCCB's shitty letter from earlier this year on how transgender people aren't real. Loyola Chicago professor and member of the Pontifical Academy for Life M. Therese Lysaught dismantled the letter piece by piece with the precision of a brain surgeon who is also cleaning a gun. One excerpt from Lysaught's piece caught my eye:

"This failure [of the bishops] is compounded by further conceptual incoherence. The committee obliquely compares the WPATH [World Professional Association for Transgender Health] standards to very different types of interventions ("genetic engineering" broadly construed and "cybernetic enhancement" — which they admit only exists hypothetically). They then fail to do the hard work of carefully comparing analogous cases, which is a basic step in Catholic moral methodology and even in secular bioethical method. They do not carefully demonstrate why certain medical interventions have been considered acceptable per Catholic moral teaching (e.g., pubertal suppression in girls with mental disabilities, hormone therapy for menopausal women, breast implants for teenage girls) while the use of these same interventions for transgender persons are rejected whole cloth. With regard to cosmetic surgery to enhance the physical beauty of non-transgender patients, they simply say it "could be morally licit, if undertaken with the correct intention and in the correct circumstances" (Paragraph 10), without raising any concerns about this form of "technological manipulation" or providing any justification.

The bishops are not the first to misstep in this specific way - if you look at the stats on gender affirming top surgery for minors (203 surgeries in 2020), the numbers are far behind something like cosmetic breast augmentation surgery for minors (3,200 surgeries in 2020) by an order of magnitude, and you'd think bishops making arguments about bodily integrity would have something to say about that. It is, obviously, reasonable to conclude from this discrepancy that the bishops are genuinely opposed to gender reassignment surgery, but equally encouraging of high school sophomores everywhere getting absolutely dope ass tiddies bolted on to their willowy and coltish frames. So the approach to this piece was basically to copy the bishops' letter in verbatim and then add in the foulest stuff I could think of:

The human person, body and soul, man or woman, has a fundamental order and finality whose integrity must be respected. Because of this order and finality, neither patients nor physicians nor researchers nor any other persons have unlimited rights over the body; they must respect the order and finality inscribed in the embodied person. God DAMN did you see when Billie Eilish did that photo shoot in the corset? God DAMN. HNGNGHNNGH. I wanna BUST on them. Pope Pius XII taught that the patient “is not the absolute master of himself, of his body, of his mind. He cannot dispose of himself just as he pleases.” The Pope went on to affirm that, with regard to the faculties and powers of one’s human nature, a patient “is the user and not the owner” and thus “does not have an unlimited power to effect acts of destruction or of mutilation of a kind that is anatomical or functional." Damn girl what do you got there, Ds? What did you think about Ms. Erickson's geometry test?

This Episode of Bluey is Called "The Legacy of George Pell"!

After Cardinal Pell’s death, and the revelations that he was, as many suspected, a huge asshole who was constantly trying to undermine Pope Francis for not being outwardly conservative enough, I was thinking about writing a piece on how he might have ended up posthumously destroying his legacy. But, because Pell was Australian, I quickly abandoned the idea of writing a serious essay and instead turning to writing a spec episode of the popular children’s television show Bluey where Bluey and Bingo attempt to smear their cousin Muffin, and their dad Bandit - who would be the only character whose dialogue was written phonetically in an Australian accent - would step in to teach them a valuable lesson.

INT. DAY - HEELER HOUSE

BLUEY and BINGO are playing with their stuffed bilby dolls on their kiwi rug.

BLUEY: Bingo have you heard?

BINGO: What is it, Bluey?

BLUEY: Muffin is having colon surgery! She's probably going to die and then we'll get a new, more conservative cousin!

[BLUEY jumps up and starts flossing]

BLUEY: I'm going to write an anonymous letter about how bad she is!

Also this:

BLUEY: But daaaad, I just thought Muffin was destroying our family and I wanted to stop her!

BANDIT: Nauuur, Bluey, ma lil vegemite, you’re acting like a petty cartoonish little bitch! And that’s okay, luv, because you’re a dog on a children’s television program. But if you’re a Cardinal - a Caaaaaahdinal - then being a petty cartoonish little bitch makes you look bad!

Also this was the art:

Imagining a Blogger Asking Thomas Paprocki to Eat His Entire Asshole

So this started with Springfield, IL bishop Thomas Paprocki's original essay in First Things, titled "Imagining a Heretical Cardinal". The essay, which did not mention San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy by name but quoted his words directly, was basically Paprocki wanting to say "I hate my colleague and I don't like that he's more important than I am," but having to word it as "hoo boy, it might be really dangerous if a Cardinal was a heretic, wouldn't you think? If a Cardinal was a heretic, we'd definitely want him to stop being a Cardinal". Paprocki was prompted to write his piece after McElroy gave a talk suggesting that gay people were human beings who possessed dignity, and Paprocki's essay, even by the standards of what an asshole he has always been, was a pretty stunning breach of the bishops' supposed public collegiality.

A week later, CTU Professor Stephen Millies wrote an essay for NCR titled "The Problem with (hypothetically) Bishops Calling One Another Heretical", which did not mention Paprocki by name but went with this:

"If a Catholic bishop were to insinuate in a public forum with roundabout accusations that a cardinal was a heretic, I would be inclined to think that it was an act of bad faith. In fact, if a Catholic bishop did that without even naming the cardinal while quoting directly from a cardinal's remarks, I might conclude it was cowardice. If a Catholic bishop did that, of course. I am not saying that one did. And even if I were to say that one did (which I am not!), of course I would have enough good faith and courage to name the bishop I was writing that about."

So you get the joke here, Millies is parodying Paprocki's praeterition to make a point about what a dick Paprocki is. Paprocki swung his hammer, Millies took out a scalpel, I attempted to then whip out a hilariously large Looney Tunes-style mallet and start whacking:

Millies proposes an interesting, if broad, hypothetical, and I would propose another one. Again, without going into too many specifics: suppose that I called the diocesan office in Springfield Illinois at 217-698-8500 to inform them that I would shortly be arriving and demanding that the bishop of Springfield, Thomas Paprocki, eat my entire asshole. Suppose further - and I apologize that I have to keep this intentionally vague - that I took my Chevy Malibu onto Interstate 55 and drove down from Chicago to 1615 West Washington Street in Springfield, burst into the office of Thomas Paprocki on August 5th of this year, which would also be his 71st birthday, and then unbuckled my belt and pulled down my jeans and underpants, all of which are Kirkland Signature brand, spread my butt open, sat on Paprocki's face, and then said "let's get to rimmin'! Less Humanae Vitae, more asshole-ay eat-ay!" Admittedly, many of the details here are fuzzy, but there is still much to consider.

BREAKING: Father Mike Schmitz Experiences Brief Moment of Self-Awareness

This was mostly a reference to this piece in OSV in which Schmitz, about to lead a Napa-institute-funded Eucharistic procession through New York, briefly wondered if this was actually a good idea for evangelization or if it would end up doing more harm than good for the image of the Catholic church. I don't have any jokes beyond the headline.

Earlier this year, a friend sent me a video of one of Schmitz's talks and said "you should write about this guy". The video was called "More Than Just Gay", and I didn't get far into it because I got the message at 4am while I was staying at the Newark Airport Marriott; half-asleep in a strange city watching the beefiest man imaginable kick off a video called "More Than Just Gay", the only thing I could think to say was "wait so is he saying he's like…turbo-gay?"

Transcript of Whoopi Goldberg’s Conversation with the Pope in October 2023

WHOOPI: Your Holiness, it’s so good to mee-

FRANCIS:I always wanted to ask, in your movie Sister Act, why would the Reno local police be in charge of managing a witness protection program across state lines when that would clearly be the purview of the US Marshal service?

WHOOPI: I’m…I’m sorry, how do you mean?

FRANCIS: Dolores sees a murder in Reno, and so the local Reno cops move her to San Francisco? Their jurisdiction would end at the city limits, I just feel that realistically, you’d manage that case at the federal level. Your thoughts?

WHOOPI: (stammers) I…I think we were just trying to make a fun family comed-

FRANCIS: And then, in Sister Act 2, they ask you to come back and teach at the school, but then they make you disguise yourself as a nun again? There’s literally no reason for the nun disguise in the second movie?

WHOOPI: Well, it’s…the movie is called Sister Act.

FRANCIS: Are you and Lauryn Hill friends in real life?

WHOOPI: I mean, we don’t talk much. It’s not personal or anything, we just run in different circles.

FRANCIS: Hmm.

[Very long pause]

FRANCIS: Ghost is real, by the way.

WHOOPI: What?

FRANCIS: The afterlife as depicted in Ghost? That’s real. God showed me.

Dingus Ex Machina

On Monday, October 9th, Michael Sean Winters headlined his NCR column "Halloween Comes Early to Washington as GOP Selects New Speaker", which is awful and dumb and hacky, but still miles ahead of his headline one week earlier, "Ringling Bros. Has Nothing On GOP-Led Circus in Congress". Not only is this the dumbest fucking headline by an unreadable columnist who writes like Fancy Nancy from the Fancy Nancy books and who has somehow managed to keep himself employed in Catholic media for deacdes, but it is the exact punchline of a joke from the 1995 Simpsons episode "Bart Gets An Elephant", in which two talk radio DJs are threatened to have their jobs replaced by a robot who just repeatedly says this:

Michael Sean Winters, whose next column will be titled "if con- is the opposite of pro-, isn't Congress the opposite of progress?", is a terrible writer. He should not have a column in any publication, should not be allowed to keep shitting out pieces titled things like "I Call Her Lauren Boob-ert Not For Sex Reasons But Because Of What A Boob She Is". So this essay was going to take the form of a letter to the editor of National Catholic Reporter; I was going to see if I could get ChatGPT to write at least three passable installments of Michael Sean Winters' "Distinctly Catholic" column (possible topics: "Catholics need to oppose wokeness if Democrats are to win elections again", "Police unions show us the ideal of Catholic social teaching on solidarity", "It's tragic what's happening to trans people but I do think they should stop whining about it because they really are kind of gross"). I would then offer to submit one of these columns every business day to NCR for publication for $1 apiece, 50 weeks a year (allowing 2 weeks off for Christmas), for a total cost of $250 per year, which I would report as 1099-NEC income so they wouldn't even have to deal with the taxes on their end. In return, they would have to agree to fire Michael Sean Winters, which would net them tremendous savings as it is. $250 is also more than the total amount of royalty payments I've received on all of my fiction writing, total, from 2016 through 2022, so it's a win-win-win proposition.

BREAKING: Joseph Strickland Executed on the Altar of St. Peter's Basilica

Participants in the Vatican’s October “Synod on Synodality” were stunned this past week when Pope Francis interrupted the normal proceedings to announce the execution of Tyler, Texas bishop Joseph Strickland. Strickland was led into Saint Peter’s Basilica and fastened to the main altar, above which Francis had already hung a banner reading “THE EVIL GAY CHURCH OF SIN”, which is of course Francis' proposed name change for the Catholic church; as reported, the main topic of discussion over the course of the four-week Synod meeting was whether to finalize this name change.

And:

“Posting on the Internet remains the greatest threat to my agenda,” Pope Francis continued. “If I were to allow you to keep spreading your message, Joseph, Catholics might learn the truth: that they are each the main characters in a cool Sound of Freedom-type action movie about fighting heresy and they should see themselves as the only people that matter in that narrative. But once I silence you, I can continue to spread, without any remaining obstacles, my insidious and foul lie: that modern life in the Western world is grinding and messy, and that the direct mandate from our faith is to recognize and respond to the suffering of our brothers and sisters in the world as best we can within this difficult environment, and perhaps we should also consider taking steps to make the planet not completely inhabitable for future generations.” Francis then made a noise described by onlookers as "the most evil laugh of all time".

Also:

Pope Francis then announced “I will offer you one last chance, Joseph: publicly announce your support of My Gay Agenda and I may spare your life.” Strickland, without hesitation, defiantly responded. “Yes, I am GAY. Gay for my WIFE. My wife who is the CHURCH.” Francis appeared shaken by this for a moment, but then recovered, announced “gather round, piggies,” and pressed a large red button at the lectern labelled “MURDER BUTTON”. At this point, a laser beam that synod participants described as “like the James Bond one” began firing from the top of the basilica duomo.

Taylor Marshall: The Eras Tour
OR
G.O.T.H.S. Investigation: Has Taylor Marshall Left His House in the Past Six Months?
OR
Icon of a Campaign: The Paladin's Mantle: The Marshall 2024 Journey: Slaying the Vote Dragon

I thought it would be funny to, for at least a few weeks, just convert the entire newsletter over to ongoing coverage of Taylor Marshall's presidential campaign since Marshall appeared to try to do the entire campaign on Twitter without leaving his house or filing FEC paperwork, he decided to kick off his campaign not by launching a platform but by asking "well what do YOU think my platform should be", and overall the campaign was going to best-case play out like Randall Terry's 2012 mess. I kind of wanted to play it straight, just keep bringing up all of the absurd failures in his career that others brought up in dismissing his campaign and keep saying "but I'm not going to focus on all of that", that sort of thing.

Here's a paragraph:

Dr. Marshall, naysayers in the mainstream Catholic media have dismissed you as cynical, as lazy, as desperate for anything that will bring in more money and attention. They don't appreciate you in the way someone like me, someone who has spent a lot of time in your corner of the internet, can. I see you for what you really are: the John Lennon of traditionalist Catholicism, you are a visionary ahead of your time. Yes, it took you some time to find your voice and find your audience, but once your YouTube show ramped up in 2018? That was Rubber Soul, that was Revolver, that was pushing the boundaries of what the faith could do. Your book Infiltration was the Sgt. Pepper of the true Catholic church, a coherent artistic peak that influenced an epoch of media and is well-known for how much sense it makes when read with any level of scrutiny. Yes, there were some hard times when you bet heavily on the Trump campaign and then continued doubling down on it long after it was clear you were picking the losing side, but John had hard times during the Let It Be sessions, too, and he went on to have a celebrated solo career. And I don't exactly remember what happened after John's solo career, but whatever it was, I have no doubt that this campaign will have a very similar effect on your career. Godspeed.

1. The Thorne Miniature Rooms, on permanent display at the Art Institute of Chicago, is another prime example. Also, I don’t know why, but it's very easy for me to imagine Taylor Swift spending all of her spare time doing something like this.