The Strickland Investigation: What You Need to Know
Your theological and ecclesial questions, answered.
In light of the news this week that the Vatican completed an Apostolic Visitation of the diocese of Tyler and Tyler’s outspoken bishop Joseph Strickland, I felt I could provide some insight into the process and history of this very eventful week in the church, and collect a comprehensive list of questions my readers might be asking. I hope you find these answers useful.
Is this funny?
It's extremely funny.
Was there any way Joseph Strickland could have avoided this?
There are like two hundred possible ways Joseph Strickland could have avoided this, which is, to direct you back to the first question, what makes this funny.
Does this mean Joseph Strickland is getting fired?
No, that's not always how these things end. Sometimes there are additional policies put in place, sometimes a co-administrator is installed to help run the diocese, there are a variety of possible outcomes to an Apostolic Visitation.
Plus, it’s not like Strickland has ever explicitly dared the Pope to fire him, in a conversation which was recorded and posted publicly, right?
Well, he actually did do exactly that in an October 2020 interview, I think with James Altman (NCR referenced the interview but did not link it). Which, again, makes this all extremely funny.
That sounds really bad, but how about this: do Apostolic Visitations ever end with the Vatican saying "we just wanted to visit this diocese because we heard everything was going great here and it turns out that's true"?
They do not.
Wasn't another American bishop in Tennessee recently forced to resign as a result of the same process?
No: Two American bishops in Tennessee were recently forced to resign after receiving Apostolic Visitations. Martin Holley of Memphis lost his job in 2018, and Rick Stika of Knoxville just lost his job this week.
Why did these guys lose their jobs?
Well, they appeared to be extremely bad at doing them. In both cases, the Apostolic Visitations apparently arose as a result of the priests of the diocese petitioning the Vatican and asking for relief from having a terrible boss. They had abrasive and authoritarian management styles that grated against the actual people who had to run parishes. Stika is also alleged to have covered up for sexual abusers in his diocese, which is far worse than being a bad boss, but he was also a bad boss.
Does Strickland appear to be similarly bad at doing his job?
It's starting to look that way. A comprehensive rundown of Strickland's post-2018 downward spiral comes from Mike Lewis of Where Peter Is (and his Substack has some good historical background on Strickland’s worst posts), who notes that Strickland is not just a guy who spends all day making terrible posts on Twitter, but someone who has apparently been getting other right-wing Catholic weirdos, including an openly schismatic sister who got her order kicked out of her original diocese, to move to East Texas and work in the diocese and school system. The Pillar also interviewed a priest in the diocese who claimed that Strickland has removed two diocesan financial officers in his tenure before the end of their terms, which is a little unusual, and looks terrible when placed next to, say, Strickland using church money to fly to Los Angeles and protest at Dodger Stadium so he can build his brand as a right-wing media darling.
If you're a bishop, you can't get in trouble just for being an asshole (one has to assume). But you can get in trouble for being bad at your job. I would be far more shocked that Strickland was in trouble for posting inflammatory tweets than I would be if he were in trouble for just being a terrible administrator, hiring bad people, and making the money disappear.
Did America magazine really run a piece this week on the "Grimace's Birthday" promotion at McDonalds?
Yes; that's not really relevant to the investigation of Joseph Strickland, but they did do it, and it did include the line “The Grimace Shake phenomenon has affirmed my hope that most humans fundamentally seek connection, not division” . Every Catholic magazine has to run an occasional pop culture piece to keep the lights on, I guess.
Is Grimace Catholic?
As is the case with all McDonaldland characters, Grimace is canonically Bahá'í.
Could Joseph Strickland possibly have seen this Apostolic Visitation coming and tried to head it off?
According to a May report from RNS, the Apostolic Nuncio Christophe Pierre - the Vatican's ambassador in the US who assists in the Vatican's management of the local bishops - took Strickland aside at the November 2021 USCCB meeting and admonished him for the open defiance of papal teaching - notably on COVID vaccination - that Strickland regularly displayed on Twitter. That would have been a good time for Strickland to start posting less. However, since being told directly by the guy who has the power to end his career that he should stop posting so much, Strickland has used Twitter, where he has six figures worth of followers, to publicly accuse the Vatican of blasphemy, assert that Pope Francis was deliberately "undermining the deposit of faith", and call the Pope a "diabolically disoriented clown". Also he converted to Falun Gong.
Wait, so Strickland has been given every opportunity, for years, to bail himself out of this, and he's ignored all of them, and now he's screwed, like genuinely screwed to the point where he might actually lose his job as a Catholic bishop, an incredibly hard job to lose, all because he's kind of a Twitter-addicted idiot?
I don't think I said "kind of".
But he's stopped posting now, right? Knowing that it's directly harming him professionally?
He is posting more than he has ever posted before.
Are…are the posts contrite?
I know a thing about contrition, and I'm going to say "not really".
In this same week, did Strickland also post a Fox News video clip of what purported to be a Pride Parade and call it a "wonton evil", presumably intending to use the word "wanton" but instead naming the soup that you get at a Chinese restaurant?
No, my understanding is that the use of the word "wonton" here is intentional, and meant to draw attention to the Hot and Sour stench of evil emanating from gay men who dare to Egg Drop any pretense of sexual purity. Crab Rangoon, things of that nature.
Do you remember that scene in The Young Pope where Jude Law takes a Cardinal he doesn't like and turfs him to Ketchikan, Alaska?
Awesome scene. Although I still don't understand why Law had to do a Brooklyn accent.
Could that happen here?
It doesn't seem likely. Strickland would probably be more amenable to retreating into some sort of right-wing cult compound, which he tried to do already and the whole thing fell apart because his co-founder was apparently using the money to fund her polycule that she met in a home-schooling network.
Don't you bring that up every time you talk about Strickland?
Yes, because - again - it's extremely funny.
Are there other bishops that believe the same things Strickland believes, in terms of 2020 election conspiracy theories, anti-vax misinformation, and the responsibility of Catholics to be dedicated members of a white nationalist political party?
There are probably more of them than we'd like to think! But most of them possess, if not particularly sharp intellects, enough self-awareness to keep some opinions to themselves. Strickland does not.
Do you think that, between this investigation of a bishop you've repeatedly criticized and the recent new apostolic letter on the legacy of your favorite theologian Blaise Pascal, we finally have conclusive proof that Pope Francis has been reading G.O.T.H.S.?
Yes.
Isn't there a risk that Strickland could style himself as a sort of martyr if he loses his job and ratchet up his online notoriety even more?
There are three things I've been thinking about when it comes to this question.
The first is that whatever bad thing you're worried about Strickland posting in response to getting reprimanded, he's already posted it. What is he going to say, the Pope is trying to destroy Catholicism? Did that. You can't be a Catholic and a Democrat? Signed onto it. Stories from The Remnant or Church Militant or The Epoch Times? Has been regularly sharing them for years. The vaccine is a lie? He made that his whole thing for a year. His coworkers are really gay pedophiles? He put it in every bulletin in his diocese. He is currently sharing in the suffering of Christ and is really a Christlike figure when you think about? That appears to be what he's going with now.
There's a bigger issue here than posts, which is the second thing I've been thinking about. Strickland could, of course, buckle under this kind of professional pressure and take out his frustration on the people who work for him and pray in his dioceses: teachers, parish workers, catechists, seminarians. That's actually a problem, because he controls how the diocese spends its money and how they teach their students and who gets to work and learn and receive the sacraments there. That's real material power, and that power is something he has repeatedly proven himself unqualified to handle. So it needs to be taken away from him: I see that as a bigger priority than worrying about what his image will turn into after this.
And that brings me to the third thing: if you don't have real material power over Catholics and church institutions, I don't really care what you post about. The prime example, of course, is archconservative Cardinal Raymond Burke, who used to hold a lot of power in the Apostolic Signatura (the Vatican’s judicial branch) until Francis became Pope and told him "you know what would be a great new job for you? Being a mascot for the Knights of Malta". Burke has been in that mostly-ceremonial role for almost a decade, in what was very obviously a demotion. Throughout Burke’s tenure in his worthless job, he has blogged and posted constantly, repeatedly questioning Francis' sincerity as a Catholic and legitimacy as a Pope. He's arguably more prolific than Strickland in this genre, and certainly more articulate (fewer typos). And you know what? Nobody cares! Nobody reports on it! Nobody gives him a second thought! Because nobody works for Burke, Burke doesn't have any church money to spend, he doesn't control a school system or a network of social services, he just uses his writing to piss directly into the wind all day. He does not have real material power in the church, so his internet-poisoned mind is not a meaningful threat to the witness of the church or the people of God.
Burke hits retirement age this year, by the way, so his position is about to come open, if we’re looking for somewhere to put, say, an unhinged bishop from Texas.
What would Grimace have to say about all of this this?
Grimace would tell us that God's various Manifestations throughout history reveal us to be one fundamentally united and equal human race, progressively learning God's true nature through all religions, which all serve to bring us to the same divine truth, and that when viewing the divine aided by the teachings of Baháʼu'lláh, any idiot can tell that Strickland is terrible at this.