The Reliquary: 2024
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has approved a 500 day indulgence if you can make it all the way through reading The Reliquary in one sitting
It is time, once again, to burn off all of the pieces I started in 2024 and then realized would be completely unreadable and end up alienating the majority of my audience. The purpose of this annual collection is to give you a small glimpse into my sober and measured creative process.
The Grotesque Intolerance of the Von Trapp Family Singers
I jotted this one down at the beginning of the year, as writers started leaving Substack en masse because of the c-suite’s public statements on white supremacist writers “I don’t know, always seem[ing] kind of nice when I talk to them or whatever”. As it always does, the Discourse Loop started up as everyone wrestled with what it meant to “tolerate” people with whom you disagree and what a “marketplace of ideas” is supposed to be, and it’s funny when you use, like, a New York Times OpEd-type framing on The Sound of Music:
It is clear from our history, even our recent history, that when Nazis are given a platform to spread their ideas widely and find other like-minded people, things just kind of work themselves out. Would we have found a better way forward than a world war if a family of folk singers had gone to the most powerful army in Europe, whose leaders were motivated explicitly by racial hatred, and who were planning to execute the mass extermination of an entire ethnic group, and told them “rethink this”? I like to think we would, but we'll never know now, as Europe as been a hotbed of rigid wokeness since roughly May of 1945.
Here’s another one, again, like I said up top, there’s a reason these pieces never made it to publication:
We had a true marketplace of ideas in mid-twentieth century Europe; over six million people just happened to lose in that marketplace. Although, depending on who you ask in the marketplace, the number of losers is closer to a hundred and fifty thousand.
The Jews Did Not Kill Jesus, Because The Italians Did
Speaking of Nazis. This one came out of a weird confluence of events, starting with the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passing the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” mostly to crack down on campus protests for Palestine. Several right-wing legislators (Gaetz, Greene, etc.) publicly opposed the act because it was, apparently, personally important to them to proclaim that the Jewish people killed Jesus. Harrison Butker, in his stupid commencement speech, even mentioned that “We fear speaking truth, because now, unfortunately, truth is in the minority. Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.” There’s a deep dive on this from Steven Greydanus here if you want to understand more of the details, but he’ll tell you the same thing I will1: Jesus was not sentenced to death by Jewish authorities, he was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, even I know that, that’s in the creed (both of them). And, as Pilate was, of course, an official of the Roman empire, this means that Jesus was not killed by the Jewish people, but actually killed by Italians. It is, thus, the responsibility of every good Christian to speak out against and oppose antisemitism, and redirect as much of that hatred as possible towards Italians. Especially Italian-Americans. Especially if they’re from, like, New Jersey or north.
Please Stop Sending Me Photos of Spanish Sexy Jesus
Sometimes my readers send me stories that they think I’d find funny or interesting, and I think that’s great. If you’ve done it before, keep doing it, I always enjoy it. Except Spanish Sexy Jesus, you need to stop sending me that one. Ever since the story broke in February about the Spanish artist Salustiano García Cruz creating the above icon for Seville’s Easter celebration, and then catching hell because critics thought it was too sexy a depiction of Jesus, and then trying to save it but instead making it way weirder by explaining that the icon couldn’t be sexy because the model was his own son, readers have been sending me that story and the above icon. I had like five copies of that photo on my phone, which is too many copies. The joke here was that the picture would keep popping up on my phone at inopportune moments - I’d be pulling up a boarding pass for a work trip and scroll through it by mistake, I’d drop it in to a text to my mom by mistake, my text-to-voice thing in the car would be like “YOU HAVE RECEIVED A SEXY PICTURE OF JESUS” as I was driving my daughter to school, that sort of thing.
John L. Allen Responds to Critiques of His Repeated Use of the Phrase “Pope Francis’ Jewish Problem”
Don’t love that enough things involving Catholicism’s fraught relationship with antisemitism happened in 2024 to merit three different essay ideas! A reader sent me a few articles in which John L. Allen of Crux, once again, chose the worst possible turns of phrase to make his point. Pope Francis’ public calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and sympathy for the Palestinian people had the potential to create political difficulties for him, and Allen, inexplicably, chose to not only use the phrase “Jewish Problem” to describe these political difficulties, and not only to put that phrase in the headline of the goddamn piece on his goddamn website, but to do that twice. Anyways I thought it would be fun to write as him.
The reality is that these problems are not going away for the Holy Father. He needs to address this head on, and as the crisis in Gaza worsens, Francis will be under increasing pressure to deliver a definitive answer. What he needs is an ultimate response. What he needs is a permanent fix. What he needs, in other words, is a
I would have cut it off there.
Oh, Inverted World
It’s summer 2005, and in another month, we’re all going to be off to college. We say we’re always going to be best friends, but we all know in our heart of hearts that it’s not true, that this is the last ride before we get off for good. We’ve seen our parents, we’ve seen our older brothers and sisters, we’ve seen them grow out of old friendships too, and we’re not going to fool ourselves by thinking we’re different. We’re not different, but we’re young, and we’re here, and we’re alive, and that’s what we’re holding on to tonight.
I’ve finished my shift as a math tutor at my local community college and am driving up to Skokie in my dad’s Camry; the party tonight is at my buddy Adam’s house. I’m going there instead of home, because home? Home doesn’t feel like home anymore, not two months before college, two months before all of our lives change forever. You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden even though you have some place where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people that miss the same imaginary place.
I get there and the usual gang is already on his couch, looking through his DVD collection and figuring out what to watch. A new guy is there, one I haven’t seen before, wearing big headphones, seeming kind of zoned out from everything else going on. “Oh, Tony,” says Adam as I walk in, “this is JD, friend of a friend, he’s visiting from Ohio.” I wave at him, he notices me and takes his headphones off.
“Listening to anything good?” I ask, making small talk.
“You gotta hear this, man,” he says. “It’ll change your life, I swear.” He jumps up and puts the headphones over my ears. They’re weirdly sweaty, I didn’t think ears could sweat. He stands two inches away from my face as I listen.
“Is this just Coldplay?” I ask.
“It’s the soundtrack to Garden State, have you seen it?”
“This is just ‘Don’t Panic’ by Coldplay, right?”
“Incredible movie,” he continues, “Zach Braff is a genius. That’s why I started going by JD, it’s an homage to his character on Scrubs.”
“Okay,” I say. I take a step back because he still hasn’t.
“I think I’m gonna be the first trans vice president.”
USCCB Announces Plan to Donate Box of Diapers
So you probably can guess where this one was going, “Our commitment to new mothers remains a top priority,” that sort of thing, the bishops would announce their plan to spend tens of millions of dollars on PACs opposing ballot initiatives for reproductive rights and, in addition to that commitment of resources, donate one 100ct pack of size 3 Aldi-brand “Little Journeys” disposable diapers (retails for $14.29) to a women’s shelter in Gainesville, FL. One joke. Not really enough to write a full essay. When I was in sketch-writing class thirteen years ago, one of my teachers had worked at The Onion and described the grueling exercise of having to write one hundred headlines a day; I feel like this could have fit as an early cut in a batch of one hundred headlines for the Catholic version of The Onion, which is a publication that doesn't exist and if it did only four people would read it.
The 100 Greatest Catholics of the 21st Century
This is based on the New York Times book list which inspired plenty of thinkpieces on its own, but I was just going to rank Catholic people based on how much I liked them (well, mainly arbitrarily in the order that I thought would produce the best comedic effect). Rihanna and Kendrick Lamar would have both made it in because they’ve both dressed as the Pope in various endeavors. Both the Christian Bale and Lego (Will Arnett) versions of Batman would have made it in, as well as Hellboy. Pope Francis would be number 11, that’s a joke by itself. These were the top 10:
10. Rarity (unicorn, haute couture designer)
9. John Darnielle (lead singer/songwriter, The Mountain Goats)
8. Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (student)
7. Rogelio de la Vega (renowned telenovela actor)
6. Sonia Sotomayor (Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court)
5. Kendall Roy (unemployed)
4. Nadia Vazquez (voice actor)
3. James M. McGill (attorney)
2. Gerard Way (lead singer/songwriter, My Chemical Romance)
1. Tony Ginocchio (junior associate editor, Grift of the Holy Spirit blog)
Retvrn to Cookie Mountain (or, The Zone of Pinterest)
This one was about tradwife influences, who were having a moment or something. The joke here was going to be that I was going to announce that for all of the posting that these influencers do about traditional standards of beauty and femininity, no writer had yet been brave enough to actually critique these women on their own terms: that is, to provide a fully superficial ranking of Catholic tradwife influencers by hotness. And the joke of the piece was that I was going to build up this whole “you guys better watch out! Tony’s going edgelord-mode for this one!” and then the second I started writing about these women I would get too creeped out and quit because too many of them looked like they were twelve years old. I only found three explicitly Catholic accounts that fit the profile I needed for the joke, and I wanted a fourth one to really drive the pattern home, and I didn’t think the bit was funny enough to justify poking around any longer on Instagram.
Studio 60 on the Shithead Strip
In a year that gave us many terrible takes from America magazine, one really flew under the radar: the Jesuit Review of Faith and Culture felt a need to weigh in with the opinion that comedian and “guy fired from SNL because he kept saying slurs” Shane Gillis is good, actually, and has “something substantive to say about American society”. While I don’t have a problem with edgelord comedy, which is very funny when done well (Cum Town was appointment listening for me back in the day, but Fr. Sawyer at the magazine keeps turning down my pitches for an Ignatian-style retrospective), Gillis ain’t it. Since America’s positive review of his standup special, Gillis has continued saying substantive things about American society, like how he thinks Muslims are disgusting, and homeless people should be exterminated, and the UN is engineering viruses to usher in a one-world government (also Haitian immigrants are eating your pets). Seth Simons continues to do good reporting on awful people in the comedy world, and points out that these don’t really appear to be bits - they just appear to be what Gillis believes and happily talks about at the first opportunity with some other awful people:
“...there is a popular narrative in comedy that ever since his firing from SNL, Shane Gillis has risen past the misguided decisions of his past—namely, telling lots of racist jokes—and proven himself to be a truly great comic…I have yet to see anyone who believes in Gillis’s supposed transformation reconcile it with his continued support of unequivocal bigots and conspiracists—not only Million Dollar Extreme, but also the podcasters behind War Mode, a pair of Holocaust deniers who believe Sandy Hook was a hoax and Pizzagate was real. In their most recent episode on Patreon, where (partly thanks to Gillis's support) they have nearly 14,000 paying subscribers, they proclaimed that the entire Covid-19 pandemic was fake and that Barack Obama is a Satanist.”
This is where, I assume, I’m supposed to pray the Suscipe of Saint Ignatius.
A correction from earlier
An essay I wrote earlier this year suggested that Taylor Marshall’s middle name was Alison. This was a mistake; Alison is the middle name of Taylor Swift, not Taylor Marshall. Taylor Marshall’s correct middle name is ʻAbdu'l-Bahá.
The Gayest Shit Ever
I made a few different attempts to put together an essay on Pope Francis’ ongoing struggle to reclaim the f-slur before eventually getting to “I Want The Buildings”, which ended up being written very quickly and very emotionally and thus contained far more typos than the already-high number of typos in the average G.O.T.H.S. piece. In my early attempts I did collect some really outstanding riffs from tumblr, here they are:
Also, on May 29th, right around the time all of this was happening, the Wordle was actually “Papal”:
Bring the Pain
This was another early variation on this same theme, but here I tried to connect the whole slur thing with the comedian summit that happened at the Vatican shortly after. This was written in sketch format:
INTERIOR, DAY - APOSTOLIC PALACE, VATICAN CITY
POPE FRANCIS, the head of the global Catholic church, is seated at his desk. Two of the officials from the Vatican communications office, RONALDO SPAGHETTI and ANTONIO MUSTACHE, enter and FRANCIS stands up to greet them.
SPAGHETTI: Good morning, Holy Father.
MUSTACHE: Good morning, Holy Father.
FRANCIS: Good morning! How are plans coming together for the June 14th meeting?
SPAGHETTI: Very well, Holy Father. Comedians from multiple countries will be visiting the Holy See and you'll have a chance to speak to all of them.
MUSTACHE: Whoopi Goldberg will be there-
FRANCIS: I met her last year, just wonderful to talk to.
MUSTACHE: [Continues] Stephen Colbert will be there-
FRANCIS: Great man, great voice for Catholicism.
SPAGHETTI: Jimmy Fallon, as well, he'll be there-
FRANCIS: Fever Pitch was such a charming film.
SPAGHETTI: [Continues] And, of course, Chris Rock will be attending.
FRANCIS: What an absolute legend. He’s just made so much great comedy for so long. I am just so thrilled to shake his hand and tell him-
MUSTACHE: [Interrupts] Wait, what…what are you going to tell him?
FRANCIS: [Continues] I am just so thrilled to shake his hand and tell him “my favorite joke of yours is where you talk about the difference between black people and n-”
SPAGHETTI AND MUSTACHE: [Simultaneous] NO!
SPAGHETTI: NOOOO! NO NO NO!
MUSTACHE: Holy Father, we absolutely cannot have you say a second slur.
SPAGHETTI: [Covering face with hands] We have worked so hard to try and get past the last thing you said, I’m not even going to say what it was, we all know what it was-
FRANCIS: You mean when I said the seminaries were getting too faggy?
SPAGHETTI: [Face still covered] Jesus Christ.
FRANCIS: Come on! Don’t talk like that in front of the Pope!
MUSTACHE: Holy Father, it was too much. It was exhausting. We can’t go through this again.
FRANCIS: How is it a slur if I’m saying he’s a good comedian?
SPAGHETTI: Just DON’T DO IT! PLEASE DON’T DO THIS!
FRANCIS: Didn’t you do all the damage control and stuff?
MUSTACHE: Nobody’s buying it, Holy Father.
FRANCIS: Just say I don’t speak Italian very well, wasn’t that the story we decided to go with?
SPAGHETTI: [Almost to himself] You’ve lived in a place where everyone speaks Italian [deep breath] for the last eleven years.
FRANCIS: Just say it’s out of context.
MUSTACHE: Nobody likes that, Holy Father.
FRANCIS: I was using it in a different context! That happens all the time!
SPAGHETTI: [Shouting] WHAT CONTEXT. WHAT CONTEXT MADE IT OKAY TO TALK ABOUT FAGGOTRY.
FRANCIS: Somebody else said it first!
SPAGHETTI: [Still shouting] WHAT, SO YOU WERE JUST LIKE “THANK YOU, FAGGOTRY, THAT’S THE WORD I WAS LOOKING FOR”? FOR GOD’S SAKE!
FRANCIS: [Also shouting] DON’T TALK LIKE THAT!
MUSTACHE: Look, it’s behind us now, okay? The important thing is that we prevent this from happening ag-
FRANCIS: Just say I didn’t know what the word even meant!
MUSTACHE: Holy Father, that is, somehow, such a specific slur in Italian that it appears to be only used semi-ironically within the gay community here, which makes it even more baffling that you would have said the word in the first place.
FRANCIS: Did you publish the letter I wrote to the gay guy trying to get into the seminary, where I was like “go get ‘em, pal?”
SPAGHETTI: That’s just caused way more problems!
FRANCIS: I said I was sorry that he didn’t get into the seminary!
MUSTACHE: Holy Father, you’re literally the one keeping him out of the seminary.
SPAGHETTI: We have to cancel the comedian summit, this is going to be a disaster-
FRANCIS: We can’t cancel! Not now! This wasn’t even my first choice of event!
SPAGHETTI: Your first choice of event was- [opens folder, pages through] “Have Tyler the Creator do a concert in Saint Peter’s Square but insist that he only perform songs from before 2013”?
FRANCIS: That would rule!
MUSTACHE: [To SPAGHETTI] What if we still held the event but didn’t let him speak to any comedians one-on-one?
FRANCIS: Were you guys able to get Shane Gillis?
SPAGHETTI: No! Why do you keep asking us about Shane Gillis! Why do you even know who Shane Gillis is!
A Series of Norm McDonald-era Weekend Update Jokes About the Collapse of Church Militant
I only came up with a few. I was able to write a full piece as Jim Gaffigan, but the Church Militant scandal died down before giving me enough material to write more than two jokes:
Church Militant reporter Christine Niles said that she first suspected something was wrong with Voris when he stopped praying with the Church Militant staff. She was further put off when Voris repeatedly said “hey everyone I can't pray with you right now, I'm off to have sex with another man!”
After being publicly humiliated and losing control of the company he had run for eighteen years in a trial for which he was unable to afford an attorney, Voris put a gun to his head and announced “I think I need to give myself one of those popular post-birth abortions!”
Saturday Night in Chicago
It’s getting dark, and me and the boys - Ulysses, X.J., and the Zoop - are ready to own the night. We suit up and roll out, heads turning as we walk up to the door ready to dominate the club. All dressed up with nowhere to run, and we don’t need to run because tonight we’re infinite. We’ve pulled out the black cards at the bar, and the women in the club are all turning to look at us, all dressed in our matching proposed Mass Uniforms of the Legion of the Sancta Lana, the militia that ran a full-page ad in the bulletin for a Missouri parish asking for young men ages 18-29 to begin training in military operations and hand-to-hand combat.
Should Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez Cancel His Annual “Fuck a Fan” Contest?
I mean, should he?
Titles of other “guest” op-eds where I didn’t get any further than the title
“Why are you all mad at me when I have made it very clear that you should instead be mad at my stupid bitch wife?”, by Justice Samuel Alito
“Oh yeah? Well, if I’m ‘gay’, how come I’m so good at critiquing other men’s fashion choices?” by Harrison Butker
“The real reason I bought an electric car is not because of emissions but because it's very quiet so it makes it easier for me to recreationally murder pedestrians”, by Tuscon bishop Edward Weisenberger
“In all fairness, I never thought they would start burning our crosses”, by Winona-Rochester Bishop Robert Barron
I did not write any in-depth pieces on JD Vance because plenty of other people have written about JD Vance in more depth than I would be able to but I wanted you to know that if I had written an in-depth piece on JD Vance I would have titled it
Shōgoon.
In Re Cox
This one was almost ready for primetime in January; the reason I didn’t run it was not because it was extremely crude and explicit, but because I ran a different extremely crude and explicit piece instead and I didn’t want to stack those two so close to each other, so “In Re Cox” - the title is a fun little pun, see if you can spot it! - got bumped and became less immediate. But here it is in full:
G.O.T.H.S. is proud to present an exclusive first look at the below forthcoming statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
To the faithful: in the past year and a half since our victory at the Supreme Court, we have been inspired by the many stories of hope in our new pro-life nation. In particular, the recent story of Kate Cox in Texas, a woman carrying a pregnancy with a fatal fetal diagnosis. Thanks to her dedicated state officials, Cox was told - eventually by the Texas Supreme Court - to carry her pregnancy to term and deliver a dead or dying fetus, despite the risk to her own life and ability to bear children in the future. Thanks to the compassionate witness of public servants like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Cox was kept from attaining an abortion, and hospitals and courts were even proactively notified by the state not to treat her.
We've received a lot of questions on this particular case, and how it squares with our pro-life witness, especially given that this is the direct result of policies for which we've openly advocated for decades and are in fact still openly advocating, and how everything that abortion rights advocates have been warning us about for decades has come true in the most literal ways possible, and that this is all going to keep happening over and over and over. In short, we've been asked what our response was when we heard the story of Kate Cox. Our response was simple: we all pulled out our penises and masturbated to completion. We each did that separately; it wasn't gay or anything.
Now, our response may strike you as unexpected. You may not have expected us to hear the story of a woman facing unimaginable suffering and immediately start stroking our veiny, rock-hard shafts, each surrounded by thickets of white pubic hair. But why do you think we pursue these policies in the first place? Do you think it's to protect the unborn? No, we like when women have to give birth to a corpse, that's hotter than the “Houdini” music video2. Do you think that when we do things like hold our state's Medicaid expansion hostage so that we can spend millions on a failing campaign to amend a state constitution, a course of action to which we can reliably attribute at least 1,500 deaths, we're doing that to save lives? Do you think that after decades of doing this over and over and over and failing, at least one of the 271 bishops in the United States (this total excludes Joseph Strickland) would have tried one thing differently, at least once? Why do you really think that never happened? Test every other possible reason why we would possibly do the things we do, and every single one of them fails except one: we derive intense sexual pleasure from seeing women suffer and grieve. If there were literally any other reason we pursued the policies that we did, we obviously would have changed course by now, as any rational person who can think more than sixty seconds into the future would have done a long time ago. But when we think more than sixty seconds into the future, all we see are ropes of reproductive fluid shooting out of our urinary meatuses at record speeds. Do you really think, based on everything you've seen in the past eighteen months, that we've made our decisions, and continue to make our decisions, based on “life” or any understanding of compassion? We obviously want this to keep happening, and the only reason left for why we'd want this to keep happening is because it makes us cum hard.
When we hear the story of Kate Cox, who is a literal MILF in the best possible way - you know, someone who needs to end a pregnancy to be alive but is being pussy-blocked by her state government - we are hopeful for the future, and specifically hopeful that the future will provide us with more stories like this, stories that make us want to hold our breaths and tie our balls up with a shoelace as we're stroking off. People are coming to us with stories like these thinking that they will somehow convince us to change our ways. Catholics think that we will somehow be moved by stories of women going into sepsis, or the organs of the state - “organs” here meaning “institutions” and not “our penises” - and we are moved. Moved to start crankin it, that is.
You show us these stories and ask if this is what we really wanted: of course it's what we really wanted. We were told time and time again that our actions would lead to stories like these, and we took those actions anyways, because stories like these get our balls a-boiling. And Cox did eventually get her abortion procedure by leaving the state, but if Cox returns to Texas and faces prosecution for what she did? We're gonna start sticking stuff in our ass.
Up to the end of this sentence, to be clear.
This refers to “Houdini” by Dua Lipa; at the time I wrote the piece, Eminem had not yet released the completely different video for the completely different track “Houdini”.