Twenty-First Century Schism Man

The internet and apostolic succession were probably both mistakes.

[Content note: this piece contains extended discussion of the ongoing sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church.]

[Another note: this piece was originally published on 9/30 as part of the G.O.T.H.S. book, currently available at Amazon and Smashwords, with all proceeds being donated to three activist groups working to meaningfully change the church. If you are reading this piece in an email, it is likely truncated for length and you can link to the full piece on Substack by clicking on the title]

"I cannot think why we should be astonished at all the evils which exist in the Church, when those who ought to be models on which all may pattern their virtues are annulling the work wrought in the religious Orders by the spirit of the saints of old."
-St. Theresa of Avila, again

"It's not like any other job I know,
If you're a piece of shit, they don't let you go."
-Jeff Rosenstock, again

Every November, the full United States Conference of Catholic Bishops meets in Baltimore to debate, discuss, and vote on new teaching documents and issues in the contemporary church. These meetings, in recent years, have not gone well. I know I said that exact same thing to open the last piece, but it's worth repeating because the 2018 meeting really did not go well. This was the first meeting after the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report and Cardinal McCarrick scandal that, combined, snapped the last thread of credibility and moral leadership that the US bishops might have had. It was a scandal reaching the highest levels of the hierarchy in America, and as bad as the fallout from the Boston coverup was in 2001-2002, these new revelations showed that the bishops had learned absolutely nothing from their previous humiliation. Hundreds of priests across the state of Pennsylvania had been predators, while the bishops that shielded them were still in positions of power. One of the worst predators had become one of the most powerful people in the American hierarchy. Something had to be done. 

So, the bishops came to the 2018 conference with plans to strengthen their reporting and accountability measures: some came ready to discuss lay leadership over diocesan procedures, some came ready to discuss greater cooperation with state AG investigations and record transparency, all came with plans for doing something to respond. Bishops communicated their game plans to the diocese before the meeting and asked for prayers; one example came from Northeast Texas, where the bishop vowed to put together a response built on five pillars of accountability, following church teaching, importance of the family, consequences for immoral behavior, and proper formation of seminarians.

But, if you followed the 2018 scandals at all, you know that they did none of this. At the very beginning of the meeting, most of the bishops were blindsided by surprise direction from the Vatican not to do anything in response to the scandal during the November meeting (or, more specifically, to delay doing anything until after a planned 2019 meeting at the Vatican). This was truly jaw-dropping at the time - this was supposed to be the main thing they were going to work on for a week. Literally this was the only thing the Catholic church was thinking about for months, and the bishops all met and got their marching orders to...sit on this for a few more months. What the hell else were they going to do at the meeting? Go to a fucking breakout session on how bishops can use YouTube to reach more people? It was yet another embarrassment for the hierarchy.

Here’s the thing: while that Northeast Texas bishop did communicate his five-point reform plan to his diocese, I’m not sure he actually was committed to it, because months before putting that plan together, he had already shared a conspiracy theory with his diocese - by which I mean he mandated that his priests share the conspiracy theory in every parish in his diocese during the weekend Masses - suggesting that Pope Francis was actually involved in the scandal, conspired with all of the evil LIBERAL bishops that he appointed, and was running the Catholic Church as his own private gay sex trafficking operation. 

Here’s the other thing: the breakout session on YouTube actually did happen at the USCCB meeting, and the bishop from California running that session specifically highlighted his buddy, infamous alt-right idiot Jordan Peterson, as an exemplar of great YouTube communicators, and has specifically cited Peterson in this way at multiple USCCB meetings. Of course, he could have picked any one of a number of internet reactionaries that he had become friends with over the past few years as he cultivated his own online following, like Ben Shapiro or Taylor Marshall.

In 2020, both bishops started to reap all of this extremely dumb sowing. These two men have been hailed for years as great and tech-savvy communicators, they are two of the youngest and newest bishops in the church, and taken together, they tell a fascinating story about why no bishop should ever have an internet connection. But they also tell a story about how the USCCB is failing to rise, in the worst ways, to the current historical moment in both the church and America, and also how the American church is maybe kind of sort of lumbering towards schism, all for the dumbest possible reasons.

This is the story of Joseph Strickland and Robert Barron.

CHAPTER ONE - AN EXALTATION OF DORKS

Upon his appointment as bishop of Tyler, Texas, Vatican Radio described Joseph Strickland as “one of North America’s new generation of blogging priests”, referring presumably to Run Father Run, Strickland’s old blog about being a priest and an avid runner, which he wrote on Blogspot from 2009 to 2013. The entire blog is still up now, and reveals a key piece of Strickland’s backstory: specifically, what a huge fucking dork he is. Here’s the first entry from September 2009:

“Well friends I suppose I've entered the "blogosphere." Is that a place where you breath "blogxogen"? I hope this Blog will be a companion to my little RunFatherRun.com effort. My plan is to give you a few tidbits now and then about how my running is going. The sites I see etc. etc. Had a good run today after a stressful day of phone calls, meetings etc. etc. The running seems to feel especially good after a rough day. Did you exercise today? Make sure you start tomorrow if you didn't.”

I’m still pissed that I had to read “blogxogen”. Strickland’s posts for the first three years of RFR were all this gooberish and basically focused on construction updates for the new Chapel of Saints Peter and Paul in Tyler, and also times he tried out a NordicTrack, a la “I did have a good Nordic Track work out...I laugh because you could get the impression that I'm on contract with Nordic Track!!!!! [five exclamation points sic]” But in mid-September of 2012, Strickland’s life changed, as he explained in a post titled “It All Started With a Phone Call”:

“On Friday, September 14, at about 9:30 am I was in my office and the phone rang. I answered as I usually tend to “Fr. Joe” and on the other end of the line a rather soft accented voice said “Is this Msgr. Joseph Strickland?” I said yes and my mind began to race! I have to admit I cannot accurately tell you what the Nuncio said next but the gist of it was that he Archbishop Vigano was calling on behalf of the Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI to inform me that the Holy Father was asking me to be Bishop of Tyler. The Nuncio simply said “do you accept”. After a pause during which I was attempting to restart my heart, untie my tongue and unscramble my brain all at the same time I must have said something resembling “yes”!!!”

If you’re reading all of these G.O.T.H.S. essays in order, you'll recognize that name in the post. Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, at this point, was the Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S., which is basically the Vatican’s equivalent of an ambassador. The Pope is technically the bishops’ “boss”, but he’s not doing the annual performance reviews for the bishops of all 197 American diocese, although that is extremely funny to imagine (“well, how do you think this year went?”). The Nuncio’s office handles most of the interaction between the Vatican and the American bishops, so Vigano is the guy who made the phone calls to promote priests to bishops in the States. It’s an extremely important diplomatic post for the Vatican, priests and bishops hustle for their whole careers to get this role, and many former Nuncios in the States have gone on to become Cardinals. Vigano is not the Nuncio anymore, and we’re going to have plenty to say about him later in the piece. So will Strickland.

But there’s one more post that I want to highlight from the early days of Strickland’s RFR blog, and it came in spring 2013 and was titled “Habemus Papam”. Here’s the opening paragraph:

“I join Catholics throughout the world in rejoicing at the announcement of the election of our new Holy Father Pope Francis I.  The Cardinal Electors guided by the Holy Spirit have chosen a man from the new world, from Argentina, a Jesuit and from all reports a man of simplicity that whose lifestyle echoes the name he has chosen.  I find it to be significant that Pope Francis I was chosen after a relatively short Conclave.  It signals a unity among the Cardinals that is a blessing.  The fact that he is not only a non-Italian but also is from Latin America, the new world, is also a sign of the vitality of the Church as She is guided by the Holy Spirit.”

Take a mental snapshot of that block quote: it’s good that Pope Francis was elected. It’s good that he’s a man of simplicity. It’s good that he’s a Jesuit. It’s good that the bishops are unified. It’s good that Francis is from the global South. He’s going to change his mind on all of that in five years, but to be fair, a lot is going to happen in five years. In 2013, Strickland switched his blogging over to the official diocese of Tyler website, not counting his unofficial blogging on his @bishopoftyler Twitter account. The guy is pretty online, and that online presence will become more toxic as time goes on. Of course, Strickland is not the only extremely online bishop, and he’s certainly not the most online. That honor has to go to Robert Barron.

Barron is a man who has worn many hats throughout his career in the Catholic church, and became an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles in 2015. His previous roles in the church have included professorships, pastor assignments, and the rector of Mundelein seminary in the archdiocese of Chicago.

But who cares about all of that when there’s TELEVISION, BAYBEE! Barron’s production company, Word on Fire - I believe the only media production company in history to be based in my hometown of Park Ridge, Illinois - has been creating shows for television networks since 2000, originally for the Chicago-based WGN network, and then eventually expanding to CatholicTV, EWTN, and other niche outlets. In 2011, he produced a ten-part documentary series that aired on PBS, succinctly titled Catholicism. But in the 2010s, of course, he decided to start taking his content directly to viewers via social media, notably on his YouTube channel, which currently has 356,000 subscribers, which is still more than Taylor Marshall, which, as we’ll see later on, is important.

Barron’s whole thing is evangelization - he is currently the head of the USCCB’s Evangelization Committee, which I’m guessing has had a rough couple of years - and his passion is engaging with young people who are atheist, agnostic, or lapsed religious. He’s done two AMAs on Reddit to answer questions about faith and philosophy, and both AMAs were among the highest-engaged AMAs of their respective years. His countless YouTube videos cover all sorts of frequently asked questions about What Catholics Believe; between his work for television and his work on the internet, he has one of the largest audiences of any bishop in the country, and he wants broadly accessible and pleasant content to reach that audience. Word on Fire, especially in its early days and still now to a lesser extent, featured a lot of engagement with pop culture and trying to draw Christian analogies out of the plot of Whiplash or the latest album from one-hit wonder band Walk the Moon, the latter of which is not an exaggeration, as a priest staff writer posted this on the blog in a 2012 piece titled “Walk the Moon and St. Augustine”:

“But what about their message? What about their lyrics? As a priest friend asked me when I told him I wanted to write this piece about Walk The Moon, “Is there anything Catholic about them?” It all depends. What I hear in songs of Walk The Moon is what I hear in Confessions of St. Augustine before his tolle lege moment, that is, before his major conversion. There are tracks on the album named after women like “Lisa Baby” and “Jenny,” which are echoes of a young Augustine. Then there’s “Shiver Shiver,” a song that sounds like old-school Prince. Musically speaking “Shiver Shiver” is pretty terrific, but unless the song is about a married couple, the lines “Please check your clothing at the door” and “Shall we get intimate again?” are most definitely old-school Augustine.”

That’s dorky as hell, but it’s harmless, and it’s stuff like this - or posting a slick YouTube video of him attending orientation aka "Baby Bishop School" at the Vatican - that earned Barron his unofficial nickname of “Bishop of the Internet”. Barron built a personal brand around “I’m not like other bishops, I’m a cool bishop who gets social media”, and it gained him a huge following. Strickland and Barron both were considered hotshots when it came to new media, excellent communicators who would help the church engage with a new generation of Catholics, who in turn would engage with a rapidly changing country. But over the course of the 2010s, the political climate of the country got increasingly polarized; Barron and Strickland, using their teaching authority as bishops, communicated to Catholics that their engagement with American culture, and especially American politics, had to be nuanced and thoughtful and prayerful. Well, at least that’s what they tried at first.

CHAPTER TWO - A ROSARY MADE OF CANDY

American Catholic voters are, as a group, tricky to pin down. They don't constantly vote for the same party in every cycle, they're usually pretty good at picking the winner of presidential elections, and they make up core constituencies in states critical to winning the Electoral College, so they're consistently courted by presidential candidates in every election cycle. In 2016, Catholic voters broke 52-44 for Trump, although there was a clear difference in the two largest demographic groups: White Catholics decisively voted for Trump, while Hispanic Catholics decisively voted for Clinton.

There's not really one single issue that defines Catholic voters; you'd think it would be abortion, but according to Pew data from September 2020, more Catholic Republicans support building a border wall than banning abortion, so the defining issue for Catholic Republican voters right now is better summarized as "being assholes". And while it's easy to find stories of American bishops denouncing Catholic Democratic politicians or saying they should be excommunicated, most bishops don't do this; most bishops stay away from overtly partisan statements and are a little cagier when they talk about politics. You could certainly say that about Barron and Strickland in some earlier election cycles.

For at least the first half of the 2010s, Word on Fire doesn’t really engage with the formal American political apparatus at all. In fact, Barron prides himself on what he considers his political sense of balance, once famously saying “I'm happy that both extremes go after me. It shows, I think, I'm in the relatively right position.” While he’s happy to opine on moral issues like abortion, he explicitly did not engage with these issues in the context of political parties or voting, and actually tried to find a way to discuss these issues that avoided being polarizing. In October 2016, one month before a contentious presidential election, he wrote - well, he over-wrote - this in the Word on Fire blog, as he prepared to speak to arch of Los Angeles school administrators on the topic of ‘teaching Catholic morality’:

"I am not sure whether I’m delighting or disappointing my audiences, but I am not ordering my talks to address these hot-button questions [of abortion, contraception, etc.]. Indeed, it is my conviction that a good deal of mischief and confusion is caused precisely by characterizing Catholic morality primarily as a matrix for adjudicating such matters. A purely rational or deductive approach to controversial ethical choices is largely an exercise in missing the point. For to know how to behave as a Christian is a function of knowing, first, who we are as Christians. Understanding how to act is, if I can pun a little, a function of understanding what play we are in. The great Biblical scholar, N.T. Wright, has said that most of us are like actors who are dressed up for Hamlet, who have memorized all of the right lines from Hamlet, and who thoroughly grasp the thematics of Hamlet. The only problem is that we are in Romeo and Juliet. Therefore, what I am sharing with the good teachers of the L.A. Archdiocese is largely Christian anthropology, a fancy way of saying the articulation of what play we’re in and what role we’ve been given in that production."

Now, I fell asleep twice while reading that, but the idea is that Barron tried to ground moral questions in a broader understanding of what the church was called to do in the world, to say “not everything is simple and black and white, and we need to understand who we are as a church and community first”. Great, no complaints.

I also don’t really have complaints about Strickland’s behavior in early election cycles. In response to the 2012 election results, Strickland didn’t really say anything directly, but he posted a blog entry that linked to a piece at National Catholic Register titled “Here's the lesson from the election, folks!” that starts like this:

“If you're discouraged or think the world is upside down, I have something for you. Guess what, regardless of who won the election, today we still have millions of babies being aborted every year. We still have 50% of marriages ending in divorce. We still have a supposedly Christian culture that has separated sex from marriage from procreation. We still have many Americans who are more likely to vote based upon peer pressure, or how nice somebody is, or their own self-interest, or by what the media told them, or by what's socially easy than they are to vote based on their own moral or religious convictions (or any economic sense). We still have lonely and suffering people in our communities who need to be loved. Whether marriage is redefined now or later, whether our religious freedom is trampled now or in 10 years, these are not at risk because politicians are getting bolder, they are at risk because our convictions are getting colder.”

Not really anything you wouldn’t expect from a publication that, at the time, was already very conservative, would go on to become explicitly Trumpist, and has no qualms telling people to vote against their own self-interestin the name of Christianity. I’m a little surprised that they thought Mitt Romney was going to be the guy to truly revive Christian culture and not just a private equity guy who wanted to ignore poor people and immigrants as much as he possibly could, since that’s what he campaigned on. I disagree with where the Register arrived with their reasoning, but I don’t disagree with the underlying reasoning itself: one Presidential election is not going to fix the country by itself, and more citizens need to be more actively involved in the issues they care about, outside of election cycles, in order for our democracy to be truly healthy.

Four years later, Strickland wrote his own piece on the diocese of Tyler’s website ahead of the election, expressing a similar sentiment:

“Our Catholic tradition, in regard to the election process, is that we do not endorse candidates. Instead, we urge citizens to choose the candidate who most fully embraces the deposit of faith expressed in the ancient teachings of our Catholic faith. I must say very candidly that especially in this election year this approach is a great relief for me.  I find myself unable to endorse any presidential candidate in good conscience. Certainly it would be naïve if, as Catholics, we were only willing to embrace the perfect candidate, but this election cycle presents us with candidates who are all severely flawed. This does not focus primarily on the personal failings of these candidates but rather on their ability or desire to guide our society according to the truth that God has revealed to us....As your bishop, I certainly urge you to pray, pray fervently for our nation and our world, pray for all of the candidates seeking office, and pray for whomever is elected at whatever level of government.  We must accompany our prayer with our actions, with the way we live our daily lives.”

Again, I don’t have huge problems with Strickland’s underlying reasoning. Yeah, neither major-party candidate was great in 2016, and regardless of who won the election, Catholics would need to pray and act to build a more just world. And hey, the bishops refusing to endorse a party or a candidate in an election is a good thing, because there’s not going to be any candidate that the institution of the church can endorse without very strong qualifications on that endorsement. I’m certainly glad that Strickland didn’t lean in and directly tell his flock that they had to vote Republican if they wanted to consider themselves good Catholics. That’s coming, though.

But, in this pre-Trump era, we had another political statement from a much more high-profile bishop, when Pope Francis came to Washington and addressed a Republican-controlled Congress in 2015. The speech was perhaps best summarized by The Onion, who ran the headline “House Lawmakers Brainstorming Some Good Things To Say About Poor People Before Meeting Pope Francis”, and noted afterwards that the speech contained “not even one goddamn soundbite to use in Planned Parenthood debate”. I don’t think that anybody expected the Pope’s speech to be especially partisan or polarizing, but most of the Pope’s speech, which included an emphasis on redistribution of wealth, caring for the environment, compassion for the poor and immigrants, and a strong call for abolishing the death penalty, definitely did not feel like a big political rally for the Republicans who invited the Pope to speak in the first place. A large part of the speech was focused on Pope Francis explaining what the “Golden Rule” was, and at times honestly felt like an address one would give to children; in this sense, it was the address that both parties in the 114th Congress absolutely deserved to hear.

The Congressional address was part of the Pope’s larger trip to the States, which was coordinated by the Vatican’s Nuncio to the US, who at this time was still Carlo Maria Vigano. As part of the trip, Vigano also arranged for Pope Francis to meet with Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to give marriage licenses to gay couples, and who, once again, isn’t even Catholic come the fuck on the Pope gave her a rosary and she probably thought it was made of candy. Davis said after the meeting that “just knowing the pope is on track with what we're doing, and agreeing, you know, kind of validates everything,” and the Vatican responded with “wait a second, who is she? She did what?” The Pope clearly didn’t appreciate being unknowingly used in a conservative photo op, and in response, decided that it was about time for Vigano to retire and never have a job in the Vatican again. That’s going to become important later.

Still, when all of these men speak, and especially when they speak on politics, they speak with the moral authority of the church. So when the two parallel scandals hit the American church in 2018, both Barron and Strickland scrambled to hold on to that authority, and made attempts to explain why the scandals happened, and why it was still worth being Catholic, using the communication skills that both of them had been praised for as priests. They’d each have to make the argument of their lives, and, well, they certainly both tried very hard.

CHAPTER THREE - A.B.A.B.

Barron’s booklet, “Letter to a Suffering Church”, is not an official USCCB document - he makes it very clear in his preface that he’s speaking only for himself - but it is a pretty good example of what a lot of the messaging from priests and bishops looked like in the immediate wake of the Pennsylvania and McCarrick scandals. And it’s also a good example because Barron’s response and the USCCB’s formal response to the scandals both sucked ass.

Barron divided his booklet into five chapters, ultimately hoping to convey his “conviction that this is not the time to leave [the Catholic church]; it is the time to stay and fight”. The first chapter, “The Devil’s Masterpiece”, is a summary of the recent scandals and a pretty awful attempt to chalk them up to Satan himself, which feels uncomfortably close to eliding that all of these crimes and coverups were committed by men, in possession of fully functioning mental capacity, staring down moral decisions and choosing the obviously wrong side for the sake of ease or comfort. I’m not exaggerating; as he puts it, “the storm of wickedness that has compromised the work of the Church in every way and that has left countless lives in ruins is just too ingenious to have been the result of impersonal forces alone or merely human contrivance. It seems so thoroughly thought through, so comprehensively intentional." And while Barron kind of tries to save it by clarifying that, yes, people did bad things, waving away “mere human contrivance” sounds like an awfully good way to absolve the church leadership of responsibility for thousands and thousands of crimes that occurred on their watch, that they knew about, that they covered up, and that resulted in no real consequences afterwards.

Because let’s be absolutely clear about what happened. In 2002, the Boston Globe broke open the archdiocese-wide scandal and pure villainy of Cardinal Bernard Law in covering everything up. The reporting was thorough and vetted and only burns brighter in retrospect; it is not an example of “frank anti-Catholicism on display in many of the newspapers, journals, and television stations that covered the scandal”, as Barron suggests. Bernard Law, after being outed for enabling these horrors, got promoted to a cushy ceremonial job in Italy, where he lived out the rest of his days. After the Globe report, diocese all over the country could have unsealed their own abuse records, come clean about what coverups happened when in their own jurisdictions, and make an attempt at penance and regaining the trust of lay Catholics. They didn’t. They continued to stay silent about their own abusive priests. Some diocese, including my own, finally started to release their own records in 2018, in response to State Attorney General investigations, in many cases still sitting on or refusing to release names that the AGs would later uncover in their own investigations. These were not reassuring messages to a laity that felt duped and betrayed for the second time in twenty years, and that laity is still not reassured by bishops still sitting on some of this today, by a church that is still - today! After all of this came out! - spending millions of dollars to lobby against extending criminal statues of limitations on sexual abuse cases to more easily shield themselves from charges. Barron himself has used his Word on Fire platform to advocate against California state legislation that would expand mandatory abuse reporting requirements. So it rings a little hollow, for multiple reasons, when Barron laments the monetary loss to the church from civil settlements: 

“The Catholic Church in the United States has paid out four billion dollars in sex abuse settlements. Let that figure sink in. Four billion dollars that came, in large part, from the generous donations of Catholic people; four billion dollars that could have been used to build parishes, schools, universities, hospitals, and seminaries; four billion dollars that could have gone to educate children, to heal the sick, to care for the hungry and the homeless, to propagate the Gospel.”

Wow, powerful words, hey real quick who made the decision to pay out those settlements? The American church has, historically, dug in its heels and paid out settlements wherever possible to avoid having its own priests face a jury or testify on the record, and to keep victims from going public with their stories. Did Satan create a masterpiece of sin to drain the church of resources? Maybe, but the bishops sure put together a masterpiece of navigating the court system and obstructing justice wherever they could to help Satan out.

Chapters two and three, “Light From Scripture” and “We Have Been Here Before”, run through a quick survey of church history to show that the church has always been wracked with scandal, corruption, and even sex crimes. Barron, perhaps, thought that the message of “you think things are terrible now? Rest assured that we’ve always been terrible” was more comforting than it actually reads. As he puts it, “the Church, from the very beginning and at every point in its development, has been marked to varying degrees by sin, scandal, stupidity, misbehavior, misfortune, and wickedness” and, more bluntly, "the history of the Church reveals that we have found ourselves, in point of fact, in worse situations and have survived”.

The question that immediately comes to my mind in response is this: what if we didn’t survive? Barron says that the church has endured scandals and come out stronger on the other end, but did we actually come out stronger, or did we actually come out at all, if we’re still dealing with this? Are we surviving if the people who caused all of the problems are the same ones entrusted to solve them?

Because that’s where Barron is going in his next chapter, “Why Should We Stay?” This chapter echoes a direct message I heard from my parish: even though the bishops failed us, we should stay with the church because the church is more than just the bishops, the church is the full Body of Christ and that includes all of us. I get it. It’s not nothing. Barron quotes Saint Paul describing the church as “the treasure in earthen vessels”, where the treasure is Christ, the Trinity, the sacraments, the rest of us in the Body, and the earthen vessels are our imperfect church leadership. As he puts it, “The vessels are all fragile and many of them are downright broken; but we don’t stay because of the vessels. We stay because of the treasure.” These are also powerful words, with which I can spot only two enormous problems.

The first is that the vessels are hoarding all of the treasure. Priest and pastor assignments at parishes, decisions about whether Catholic schools will force gay and trans students to undergo coversion therapy, decisions about who is allowed to receive or administer the sacraments, decisions about whether gay teachers can get fired from Catholic schools, decisions to go on television and speak for all Catholics about how great the Republican party is, these are all decisions made by the bishops without input from you. The church is not a democratic institution - and to be fair, it never claimed that it was - but to say “we are more than just the bishops” is bullshit when the only people allowed to make meaningful decisions in the governance and reform of the church are those bishops, and when those bishops have no interest in giving up any of that power. The reforms discussed - and never voted on - at the 2018 USCCB meeting were ultimately the decisions of the bishops, in some cases the bishops behind some of the worst offenses. Barron can say that the vessels are more important than the treasure and we shouldn’t count the vessels against the church, but until there is meaningful oversight of the bishops on the part of the laity, we cannot possess the treasure without going through the vessels.

The second problem, as I hinted at above, is that the “downright broken” vessels ARE STILL AROUND. The bishops who were involved in coverups are, with very few exceptions, all still involved in the governance of the church. To share one of my favorite examples, Thomas Tobin was an auxiliary bishop and general secretary of the diocese of Pittsburgh during the period outlined in the grand jury report, when that archdiocese would have been destroying records and obstructing justice. By his own admission to reporters in the Providence Journal, he was well aware of abusive priests within the diocese, but chose not to report anything to civil authorities, or take any action whatsoever, because personnel wasn’t his department. For his complicity, Tobin was promoted to bishop of Providence, RI, where he remains to this day, mainly spending his time being an insufferable moral scold on Twitter and claiming that gay pride celebrations are “especially harmful to children”, although it’s unclear whether he thinks they are more harmful to children than being raped by a priest.

Tobin, of course, is just one example. I haven’t touched Timothy Dolan, who, as archbishop of Milwaukee, restructured his diocese’s finances to shield the church from paying out settlements, and paid out money to abusive priests to convince them to retire early and save the church some scandal, as reported by the New York Times. In the years since, he’s been made a Cardinal, he got promoted to the head of the powerful arch of New York, and he can be found on TV regularly, yapping about how Donald Trump is the greatest president in the history of the Catholic church. And I certainly didn’t touch Cardinal Roger Mahony, who was head of the arch of Los Angeles and, as reported by NPR, reassigned abusive priests to immigrant-heavy communities knowing that those parishoners were less likely to report abuse, given anxiety over immigration enforcement. Mahony, for his truly heinous treatment of the flock under his care, was allowed to retire on a normal schedule and is still a bishop in good standing, he still attends and votes at the USCCB meetings, and he was allowed to vote in the 2013 papal conclave. I didn't touch Alfred Schlert, who was sharply criticized in the PA grand jury report for his inaction as a monsignor in the diocese of Allentown, but he's no longer in that role since he's been promoted to bishop of Allentown, and would have also been one of the men charged with addressing the fallout of the grand jury report, even though he’s literally one of the villains of that report. Oh, and I also didn’t touch Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Houston, who kept two priests credibly accused of abuse in active ministry, and in fact still let one of them say Mass after he was outed as an abuser in 2018, as reported by CBS News. DiNardo, of course, was the president of the USCCB at the time that the bishops had to put together a response to this. These are the men who were tasked with making sure no scandals ever happened again; Mahony even gave an impromptu speech at the 2018 conference on the importance of the bishops working together to solve this problem, which I’m assuming didn’t stick.

As skilled a communicator as Barron may consider himself, we saw those communication skills in 2018 just breaking on the rocks of an intractable and unchanging church hierarchy. This was the year everyone finally came around to the idea that there are no cool bishops, which hurt Barron’s ability to communicate through an “I’m a cool bishop” image. So that brings us to Barron’s final chapter, “The Way Forward”. Barron encourages all disaffected Catholics to stay in the church and fight, presumably using the previous four chapters to remind me of what I’m supposed to fight against:

“Fight by raising your voice in protest; fight by writing a letter of complaint; fight by insisting that protocols be followed; fight by reporting offenders; fight by pursuing the guilty until they are punished; fight by refusing to be mollified by pathetic excuses. But above all, fight by your very holiness of life; fight by becoming the saint that God wants you to be; fight by encouraging a decent young man to become a priest; fight by doing a Holy Hour every day for the sanctification of the Church; fight by coming to Mass regularly; fight by evangelizing; fight by doing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy."

There’s nothing directly wrong with what Barron has written here of course, but if I’m to “fight by refusing to be mollified by pathetic excuses”, I’m going to choose not to be mollified by “boy, this is so bad, you have to figure Satan is involved, it can’t JUST be the clergy”, and I’m going to choose not to be mollified by “don’t worry, we’re going to solve this, and technically I know we also said that in 2002, and I know that it’s all the same people who fucked this up that are now in charge of fixing it, but just trust me.” The problem rests with the men who run the church, who don’t let anyone else run the church, who do everything they can to hold on to their money and protect it from settlements, who do everything they can to protect priests from criminal charges, and who are the only people - and remember, those people include the men I just listed above, all five of them are active members of the USCCB and four of them directly oversee diocese today - that they have entrusted to address the issue and make sure it doesn’t cause any more problems. Barron can encourage me to fight, but that means that he’s encouraging me to fight him and his colleagues. Which, obviously, I’m more than happy to do; I’m referring to “raising my voice in protest” and the like that Barron describes, but yes, I also believe that I can dominate any Catholic bishop in hand-to-hand combat.

That aside, it's pretty obvious that I don't think Barron's response, or any response from the USCCB so far, is adequate. The main reform the bishops eventually adopted was a third-party hotline for reporting abuse, but ultimately bishops still have the final say in how they respond to abuse allegations, and they're not required to include the laity at all in those decisions. When push comes to shove and a bishop has to decide what to do with his next abuse case, maybe he'll do the right thing, or maybe he'll do the same thing all of the other bishops have been doing for decades. Barron can try and be a great communicator, but he can’t overcome that reality. I will, however, give Barron one piece of credit on his response: it was way better than Strickland's response.

CHAPTER FOUR - STUPID ENOUGH TO BE TRUE

Archbishop Vigano, former Vatican Nuncio, guy who got shitcanned for the Kim Davis incident, who no longer lived in the States, released his own letter concerning the scandals on the evening of August 25th 2018. On the morning of August 26th 2018, Bishop Strickland put out a public statement declaring the allegations "credible" and demanding a full investigation of the highest levels of the hierarchy. I'm not the best at calendar math, but that does seem like a very short turnaround time to sign on to something so explosive. Because Vigano's letter, as we'll see, was not exactly a detailed list of evidence and credible allegations as much as it was an index-card-and-yarn conspiracy theory that strung together talking points from the worst depths of right-wing Catholic media. But Strickland mandated that all of his priests share his own statement and the Vigano letter at weekend Masses and in all official parish bulletins and social media. He was certainly the first bishop to publicly applaud Vigano's actions, and probably the most enthusiastic to embrace Vigano overall. So we should take a close look at what Strickland bought into.

The National Catholic Register  was one of the first outlets to break the story of this "extraordinary 11-page written testament"; their story details Vigano's allegations that McCarrick was given free reign by Pope Francis to fuck and suck his way through DC, and recommended other LIBERAL men for episcopal appointments, who all happen to be men with whom Vigano disagrees politically. Technically, the Vatican’s investigation into McCarrick is not yet concluded. I don’t consider Vigano very credible, but I suppose there’s an outside shot that he’s correct in his allegation that Pope Francis knew this whole time that McCarrick was an abuser and gave him free reign over the American episcopate anyway. However, that’s not where Vigano spends the majority of his letter.

I would love to do a close read on Vigano's response to the abuse crisis similar to what I did with Barron's response above, but the reality is that almost all of Vigano's letter is incoherent, and most of it is just him venting his spleen, in the wordiest and most rambling way possible, at members of the American clergy that he considers too liberal. Here he is just ranting about the Jesuits in general:

“These characters are closely associated with individuals belonging in particular to the deviated wing of the Society of Jesus, unfortunately today a majority, which had already been a cause of serious concern to Paul VI and subsequent pontiffs. We need only consider Father Robert Drinan, S.J., who was elected four times to the House of Representatives, and was a staunch supporter of abortion; or Father Vincent O’Keefe, S.J., one of the principal promoters of The Land O’Lakes Statement of 1967, which seriously compromised the Catholic identity of universities and colleges in the United States. It should be noted that McCarrick, then President of the Catholic University of Puerto Rico, also participated in that inauspicious undertaking which was so harmful to the formation of the consciences of American youth, closely associated as it was with the deviated wing of the Jesuits.”

Remember what Strickland wrote in 2013? It was good that a humble Jesuit became the Pope. Well, now it turns out Strickland's pal thinks the Jesuits are majority "deviated", and Strickland broadcasted that to churches across 33 counties in Texas. In the same letter, here's Vigano talking about James Martin, a Jesuit priest and media personality who dares say things like “maybe we should actually treat gay people with dignity”:

“Father James Martin, S.J., acclaimed by the people mentioned above...appointed Consultor of the Secretariat for Communications, well-known activist who promotes the LGBT agenda, chosen to corrupt the young people who will soon gather in Dublin for the World Meeting of Families, is nothing but a sad recent example of that deviated wing of the Society of Jesus.”

And then here he is talking about Chicago archbishop Blase “The Soup” Cupich, who refuses to use the cool nickname I thought up for him and, well, I don’t even know if you’d consider him liberal, but he doesn’t have a monomaniacal focus on abortion and gay people every time he speaks, so in Vigano’s mind he must be a gay heretic, and I’m going to just include Vigano’s full paragraph, see if you can get through the whole thing:

“Regarding Cupich, one cannot fail to note his ostentatious arrogance, and the insolence with which he denies the evidence that is now obvious to all: that 80% of the abuses found were committed against young adults by homosexuals who were in a relationship of authority over their victims. During the speech he gave when he took possession of the Chicago See, at which I was present as a representative of the Pope, Cupich quipped that one certainly should not expect the new Archbishop to walk on water. Perhaps it would be enough for him to be able to remain with his feet on the ground and not try to turn reality upside-down, blinded by his pro-gay ideology, as he stated in a recent interview with America Magazine. Extolling his particular expertise in the matter, having been President of the Committee on Protection of Children and Young People of the USCCB, he asserted that the main problem in the crisis of sexual abuse by clergy is not homosexuality, and that affirming this is only a way of diverting attention from the real problem which is clericalism. In support of this thesis, Cupich “oddly” made reference to the results of research carried out at the height of the sexual abuse of minors crisis in the early 2000s, while he “candidly” ignored that the results of that investigation were totally denied by the subsequent Independent Reports by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2004 and 2011, which concluded that, in cases of sexual abuse, 81% of the victims were male.”

This letter is technically translated from Italian, so I guess I’ll excuse a few of the more unusual turns of phrase, but still come the fuck on. The bigger “come the fuck on”, of course, is that Vigano is willfully misreading the John Jay study, which I referenced in my earlier piece on Rick Heilman, and which had as its takeaway, in big bold letters, that sexual orientation was not correlated with whether a priest was an abuser, and to assume that an abuser was gay because of his victims would grossly oversimplify the pathologies that led this scandal. Vigano absolutely knows this. He was the Nuncio, the guy who oversaw the American bishops, after the initial study was published, and when it was updated in 2011. This report was on his desk.

Through all of this, Vigano is asking you to make a very basic cognitive leap that contradicts any empirical understanding of human sexuality: in Vigano’s head, if someone’s a pedophile, that means they’re also gay. These liberal priests and bishops, up to Pope Francis, all seem to want you to think that being gay is okay. Why would they do that, unless they themselves were secretly gay, and, thus, also pedophiles themselves and directly responsible for destroying your church and fucking your children? I’d call it the transitive property, but I doubt Vigano is a fan of any word that begins with “trans”. Still, through all of this, remember that Vigano used to be on the fast track in his career, and after pissing off the Pope during the visit to the States, he is now 79 and will likely never be a Cardinal, and he's likely pissed about that, especially as he sees other men he doesn't like get promoted up the ranks more quickly. As he keeps posting increasingly weird letters alleging increasingly weird scandals, he comes off more and more as a disgruntled employee who loves attention.

To be blunt, the person who most effectively undercuts the arguments of 2018 Vigano is 2020 Vigano, who, since the original letter came out, has blurbed Taylor Marshall’s Infiltration and written a fawning letter to Donald Trump. Vigano’s original theory from 2018 was that Pope Francis reversed Pope Benedict’s alleged “sanctions” on McCarrick; in other words, Benedict Good and Francis Bad. But if Vigano is endorsing Infiltration, that means that he now thinks that both Benedict and Francis, as well as several other popes, are all illegitimate and the product of a sprawling conspiracy by Communist Freemasons to take over the church. And if he’s writing love letters to Donald Trump - who himself might not be the best exemplar of Catholic sexual morality - it sure seems like he just likes being close to power and acting out of spite. But you can decide which seems more likely: that a massive ring of low-level clergymen in the U.S. found each other through their mutual love of child sexual assault and united to promote themselves up the church hierarchy since it appeared to be the easiest way to spread moderately liberal ideas that were already widely prevalent in American culture, or that there’s an old man in Italy who hates his boss.

I talked about the bishops who attended the 2018 meeting, and how several of them were men who were involved in earlier coverups. Well, Strickland was there too, and while he’s not connected to any abuse scandals, he attending the meeting having just told everyone in his diocese that he believed several of his coworkers were part of an evil gay subculture that had gotten a stranglehold on the church. So I’m not sure how effective he thought this meeting was going to be. Remember what else he wrote in 2013: it's good that the College of Cardinals was unified during the latest papal election. Well, he probably doesn't want the College of Cardinals to be unified anymore if it includes a bunch of secret gay sex criminals.

I don’t know why Strickland jumped on this letter so quickly, why he thought this was the response to the scandals that he should communicate to his diocese. I mean, I would buy that Strickland was just refreshing the homepage of his favorite conservative Catholic website on a Saturday night, a website that he had been reading for at least six years that had become increasingly reactionary over that period, and came across a letter from his pal, the guy who made him a bishop back in 2013, and just decided "okay that sounds good". That, to me, does sound stupid enough to be true, and I don’t think we can eliminate it as a possibility.

But I think the story becomes more clear when we look at Barron and Strickland after the disastrous USSCB meeting. We have two bishops who are clearly thrown by the new scandals in the church, and clearly working hard to reassure their flocks that the Catholic church is still good and worth listening to on the topic of how to morally engage with the world. These are two men with passion for evangelizing, men who clearly love being Catholics in public life, but the moral authority of their office had been completely gutted, making it damn near impossible for them to effectively engage with American culture and politics using the approaches that had worked before. They didn’t have their own authority, so they needed to borrow it wherever they could find it, leaning on other communicators and Catholics in public life that they considered morally credible. In doing so, both of them made basically every single possible decision incorrectly.

CHAPTER FIVE - I’VE SEEN FOOTAGE, I STAY ‘NOIDED, I’VE SEEN FOOTAGE, I’VE SEEN FOOTAGE

Strickland’s blog posts after the 2012 election indirectly expressed disappointment in Obama’s re-election, but didn’t really go much farther than that, and we saw in 2016 that he wasn’t especially pleased with either of the candidates. Well, he’s changed his tune in 2020, basically encouraging Catholics to vote on abortion and abortion alone, all but directly urging the diocese of Tyler to re-elect Trump. He’s started a new series on his blog on the official diocese website titled “Morally Coherent Catholic Citizenship”, which so far has focused on four issues that he considers key to deciding how to cast a vote in 2020. First, of course, is abortion, and I don’t think it’s because his list is alphabetical. Next is the “right to religious freedom”, followed by “marriage and the family”, followed by, of course, another key issue we all know and love from the Catechism, “school choice”. You already know what these pieces say, they’re not even worth quoting as they just regurgitate talking points you can hear on Fox and Friends every morning. He’s not the first person to do this; in every election cycle, you can find some organization telling Catholics that certain moral issues are ‘non-negotiable’ and require Catholics to vote for the Republican party uncritically. Strickland doesn’t bring up healthcare, or capital punishment, or the minimum wage, or immigration. Why would he bring those up? That might lead his parishoners to think they shouldn’t vote Republican.

Strickland also took a strong stance at the very beginning of the COVID pandemic, and, as you would expect, it was the wrong stance. On March 11 - the day that the NBA cancelled its season and we all went “oh shit, the virus is a real thing now” - Strickland defied guidance from national health authorities and mandated that every parish in his diocese have a Eucharistic procession after Mass that week, an action for which he was praised in, of all places, Church Militant. It appears that he later reversed course on this, as he suspended public celebration of Mass in his diocese on March 17 (notably weeks later than many other diocese in the country, many of whom suspended public Mass shortly before March 11, and almost all of whom did by March 11). Of course, it also appears that he reversed course on this again, tweeting on March 21 that “I plan to stand at the busiest intersection in our city this evening with a deacon, vested in a cope & bless the people of God with the Real Presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ in His Blessed Sacrament. I urge every priest to do the same in their city. Bring the LORD to His people!” But then he reversed course for a third time on April 1, putting out a statement urging parishoners to stay home and obey public health guidance. But don't worry, he reversed course for a fourth and final time in May, when he signed on to a letter written by - you guessed it - his old buddy Archbishop Vigano asserting that the entire pandemic was a hoax meant to create a one-world government and banish religion off the face of the Earth, which was a nice “fuck you” to all of the sick and dying people out there.

None of these examples, are, of course, direct electoral endorsements of Donald Trump or the Republican party, although it’s pretty easy to predict how Strickland plans to vote in November. The reason it’s easy to predict, of course, is that he also has made a direct electoral endorsement of the Republican party on his Twitter account, sharing and endorsing - literally using the words “As the Bishop of Tyler I endorse…” - an insane video by an insane priest in Wisconsin named James Altman, who does not appear to be related to the dude who directed M*A*S*H*. Altman’s video is weird and rambling, uses the score from The Passion of the Christ as background music, attacks James Martin for being gay (he isn’t), Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory for being a Marxist (he isn’t), the DACA program for supporting “criminal illegal aliens” (it doesn’t), and the Democratic party platform for being “absolutely against everything the Catholic church teaches” (it’s not), and Catholics who vote Democrat for being doomed to hell (I mean, maybe yes, but for completely unrelated reasons). The title, and overall message of the video, is “You cannot be a Catholic and a Democrat. Period.” That’s where Strickland decided to go after the USCCB’s authority eroded past the point of no return: to be more pointed in his political engagement, and to share whatever content he found that supported his viewpoint, without really vetting it.

Barron’s area of expertise, however, is social media and especially YouTube, so he cozied up to people who had hit it big on that platform. Again, he has repeatedly cited Jordan Peterson - who has been embraced by the online alt-right over the past five years thanks to his denunciations of “neo-Marxism” and “identity politics” in academia - to the other bishops as an example of a great communicator who can reach young people, but was careful to emphasize that he “was not really interested in the content of Peterson’s thought”. Still, I assume there’s a reason that he picked Peterson’s videos and not makeup tutorials as his examples for the bishops, and he eventually sat down with the man on Peterson’s podcast. He also sat down for a podcast with Ben Shapiro, a four-foot-eleven former Breitbart editor building a YouTube brand off of open racism and “defeating liberals with logic and reason”. And, of course, Barron sat down for a podcast with Taylor Marshall, Catholicism’s pre-eminent conspiracy theory grifter, who thinks he’s going to defeat the Pope with logic and reason. Barron and Marshall met in the pre-Word-on-Fire, pre-Infiltration days, when Marshall came to Mundelein Seminary to give a guest lecture and Barron worked there as a priest. Barron actually cited one of Marshall’s early books on Thomism in a 2015 post on Word on Fire and sat down with the guy on Marshall’s podcast, back when Marshall’s podcast was relatively boring and innocuous. After Marshall published Infiltration in 2019, Barron distanced himself from him, not wanting to give a platform to a guy saying the Vatican had been fully taken over by the secret gay Freemasons. But it doesn’t change the fact that Barron was generally not discriminating, for most of his career, in who he chose to give a platform to, just as long as they were good at YouTube.

Barron also isn’t very discriminating in the political figures that he chooses to give a platform to, even though he used to pride himself on his sense of political “balance”. On September 24th of this year, he gave a keynote address at the (virtual) National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, which is not an actual organ of the church but another conservative group led by judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and his pals. Trump spoke for a few minutes, but the main honoree at the event was Attorney General Bill Barr, who received the "Christifideles Laici" award for service to the church, and I don't need to tell you how awful that is. Multiple archdiocese and Catholic organizations denounced the Breakfast for honoring the man who restarted federal executions, and the USCCB, in an uncharacteristically not-Republican move, put out a pointed statement in advance of the Breakfast, calling on Barr and Trump by name to halt those executions.

Barron rose to the occasion in his address, during a grossly mismanaged pandemic, ongoing protests for racial justice, wildfires consuming the West Coast, and a president openly trying to steal an election, when he spoke in no uncertain terms about the biggest issue facing Americans: it's bad that people want to tear down statues.

I'm not joking: Barron's speech focused on the lives on Junipero Serra and Thomas Jefferson, and his horror that activists thought their legacies might be somehow tainted by, you know, the slavery and murder stuff. He lives in Santa Barbara now, so some statues of Serra at the old California missions in his backyard are getting torn down. His speech focused on how important they both were to America's history, and how we should follow their example to bring our faith into the public square, and how they are absolutely people we should embrace, not tear down. 

Now, hurting our beautiful important statues is part of the justification the Trump administration has used for sending unmarked federal agents into Portland or designate certain cities as "anarchist jurisdictions". I don't think Barron said what he said because he agrees with Trump and Barr on this, but I do think he's dumb enough not to know that this political issue is being used as a rhetorical bludgeon to justify the ongoing violent crackdown on protests. He’s dumb enough to think that in September 2020, statues are the issue on which the teaching office of the church needed to speak out. When Barron is faced with any problem, be it the political climate, the church abuse scandal, or his recent focus on toxic online “rad trad” Catholics, he comes to it with no real ability in terms of discernment or perspective. He’s hailed as a great communicator for the USCCB, but we have to seriously consider if the only reason for that is because he’s the only bishop who bothered to learn how to upload videos online.

This all gets dumber.

CHAPTER SIX - ECHOING STUPIDITY

When Strickland shared Fr. Altman’s weird “You Can’t Be a Catholic and a Democrat” video, I don’t know if he was expecting a ton of backlash to land on Altman. But that’s exactly what happened: a bishop with a decent online following tweeted out the video, and Altman found himself at the center of a lot of media attention, which doesn’t appear to have thrilled his bishop in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Altman’s bishop has recently put out a public statement explaining that he is trying to gently correct Altman, but also threatening that “Canonical penalties are not far away if my attempts at fraternal correction do not work. I pray that Fr. Altman’s heart and eyes might be open to the error of his ways and that he might take steps to correct his behavior and heal the wound he has inflicted on the Body of Christ.” Altman, for his part, is now going on Taylor Marshall’s show and posting bizarre memes in his parish bulletin of a COVID mask with a lock on it symbolizing our slavery and submission, and the same fake “USA crime stats” meme that Donald Trump posted in 2015, calling out made up numbers on the percentages of “whites killed by blacks” versus “blacks killed by blacks”.

Altman’s bishop may be distancing himself from Altman, but the entire church - even the conservative parts - is working hard to distance itself from Vigano, who refuses to stop posting. The National Catholic Register ran his original letter in 2018, and they won’t touch him in 2020, when his letter to Donald Trump ran at the much jankier and Canadian-er LifeSiteNews. The Register recently ran an editorial suggesting that in his rejection of Vatican II as a “devil’s council” (which is also a term for a church council with two dudes and one chick) and his increasingly hysterical posts, Vigano is flirting with formal schism with the church, or is possibly just an old man whose mind has gone:

“Has Archbishop Viganò come to a new and radical appraisal in his retirement of long-standing and settled issues? Or is there another explanation for his increasingly inflammatory and erratic interventions? Some people, even former admirers, think he may have become a bit unstable, yet rendering an accurate assessment has been near impossible, given that he has been in hiding since 2018. His writings are all we have. And now, even Father Weinandy questions whether they are truly authentic. Priest, curialist, diplomat, nuncio, administrator, reformer, whistleblower. Is it possible that, at the end of it all, heretic and schismatic would be added to that list?”

These are the men with whom Strickland has decided to proudly align himself. The man who was so excited for a new Pope in 2013, the man who was so excited to become a bishop, holds an office with no moral credibility or authority, thanks to repeated scandal on the part of his colleagues. So, instead of whatever it is he’s supposed to be doing, he’s now using his episcopal office to spread the good news from senile old men who think COVID is a cover-up and the papacy is a psy-op.

And, as dumb as all of that sounds, it gets dumber when we turn to Robert Barron. As much as I hate seeing old friends have a falling out, it's worth taking a look at what happened between Barron and Taylor Marshall, who got into a pissing match over the summer; I was excited to learn the details of the fight, and in retrospect should have known going in how empty and stupid it was going to be. The story is detailed by Marshall in two podcast/YouTube episodes dated 6/24/20 and 7/8/20, which - mercifully! - are each less than an hour long.

When protests broke out in response to the murder of George Floyd, some statues of Saint Junipero Serra were torn down in California, presumably to provoke a reckoning with Serra's place in California's history of colonialism and subjugation of indigenous peoples. These attacks on statues of a saint infuriated Marshall - or, at least he said they did, whatever - and he called on Barron and the other bishops in California to take decisive action to protect statues of Serra. In Marshall's words - his stupid, stupid words - Barron and the other bishops needed to coordinate efforts to "talk in person with Antifa and Black Lives Matter" and set up guard duty around the statues. 

Barron, as you might expect, demurred when Marshall asked him to do this on Twitter. Marshall got frustrated - or said he did, there's a 90% chance this is all kayfabe - because he thought the bishops should be taking a stronger stance on the issue than he was. As Marshall put it, “he has a much bigger platform than I do! They have a full videography team! They could have put out a twenty-part series by now!” Barron’s response to Marshall was that bishops aren’t the group that does direct action, the laity are, and I’m inclined to agree with him on this.

But Barron cited Vatican II as the justification for his thinking, and that set Marshall off, or Marshall pretended to be set off because that’s supposed to be his brand. In the first podcast episode, Marshall describes Vatican II as a “joker card” that bishops use to get out of taking a strong political stance; this also serves to illustrate just how absolutely twisted Marshall thinks Vatican II was.To Marshall, hiding behind Vatican II is just “like a little ace of spades in your cassock”, because he can’t even stick with one metaphor for a full minute. So Marshall responded on Twitter that Barron needed to show him where in Vatican II it says that the laity are in charge of defending statues of the saints, a true masterpiece of logic and argument sure to defeat Bishop Barron, who got tired of this shit and blocked Marshall, who in turn was so Not Mad about it that he dedicated two different podcast episodes to the incident.

But, all of this - all of it, all of it - is just so unbelievably dumb, because if you read the previous chapter you know that Barron took a strong anti-toppling-Junipero-Serra-statues stance in a speech he gave just two months later to the Attorney General of the United States, who was already using it to justify a brutal crackdown on protestors. So they’re fighting over something they already agree on, and will likely never figure that out. I wanted to see one of these guys get defeated in the Arena of Logic and Reason, and instead it was like watching a couple of one-legged men fighting for a chance to hump the same doorknob.

As a result of all of this, and as a result of getting harassed by Marshall's acolytes on Twitter, Barron seems to have taken a stronger stance against “rad trads”, recently denouncing the extremely online Catholic right that rejects the validity of Vatican II. Unfortunately, one of the venues for his denunciation was the 2020 Napa Conference, an annual meeting of archconservative Catholics run by a wine tycoon looking for old men to bitch about identity politics and the 1619 Project. Barron refuses to share a stage with Marshall today, but he’s willing to share the stage with these guys:

• Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell, who sounded the alarm about “the presumption of identity politics...that man, or rather the white heterosexual man, is guilty.”

• Louis Brown, executive director of the Christ Medicus Foundation, who complained about Black Lives Matter hijacking the civil rights movement, unjustly demonizing police, and not focusing enough on abortion

• Australian cardinal and accused sex criminal George Pell, who said that Brexit was good

• Bishop of Springfield, IL Thomas Paprocki, who sharply criticized the government for closing churches during the COVID pandemic, calling it “imposing unduly burdensome and extraordinary means. While some people may voluntarily adopt such means, only ordinary means that are not unduly burdensome are morally required to preserve life both on the part of individuals as well as society as a whole,” which I’m sure is the same stance he’d take on a nationwide abortion ban

• Tim Gray, president of the Augstine Institute, who affirmed that “Our role is to make the American project faithful to God...We cannot capitulate to a secular mob...Are we willing to stand up to say that marriage is between a man and a woman? Are we willing to say Merry Christmas?” Yeah, we got war on Christmas shit here folks!

• Former senator and presidential candidate, and current Catholic cryptocurrency investor (that is real) Rick Santorum, who urged bishops to speak out strongly during the election season on abortion and gay marriage, but please don’t speak about anything else. As Santorum put it, he didn’t want the bishops to “get involved in agriculture programs and economic development projects and the morality of all of those things. I think that's highly problematic and inappropriate. I think too often the bishops' conference gets wrapped around the axle on issues that frankly that are not moral absolutes and are areas of prudential judgment...Once they go afield on a variety of other issues like nuclear proliferation treaties, you just weaken the soup and make it ineffective.” In other words, the bishops need to speak out on issues that are going to drive Catholics to support the Republican party, and then kindly shut the hell up on everything else

Barron can say he is worried by radical voices in his church, but he’s got no problem sharing wine and cigars with these shitheads - who share about 95% of their worldview with Marshall - and giving a giant Republican grievance-fest the stamp of approval from the episcopate. The man who was so excited to rep Catholicism on TV, now holds an office with no moral credibility or authority, thanks to repeated scandal on the part of his colleagues. But he stuck with New Media because he was good at it, and he got in good with other folks making a name for themselves online, and it got him here. Barron's passion is evangelizing to agnostic and atheist young people, but he seems to keep finding himself in the same room - or the same YouTube video, or the same Zoom call - as some truly appalling people, which, as Barron fails to realize every day, can perhaps also tarnish the image to the institutional church to both members and non-members.

Barron and Strickland are two relatively new, relatively young bishops who are celebrated as excellent communicators on new media, they’re faced with world-historical problems right now, and it turns out they’re both huge fucking idiots who are completely overmatched by the moment. These are the men the hierarchy chose to lead us through the 2010s, they're relatively untainted by scandal, they're probably the best we've got in terms of bishop credentials, and they're still fucking embarrassments. Both of them uncritically embrace and give legitimacy - the legitimacy of the official teaching authority of the church - to a wave of far-right psychos sharing increasingly horrifying content, and they press forward with formal support for the Trump regime. This is certainly not to say that Barron and Strickland, or the other clergymen like them, are coordinating a big misinformation or propaganda campaign, or that they're working together on anything at all. But it should be clear from this piece that neither of them really has any idea what they're doing, and if you’re a Catholic, or even if you’re not and you’re just interested in the outcome of the upcoming presidential election, you should know about the stupidity echoing across the diocese of a church that both major political parties are courting heavily at a time of significant political strife and needless suffering, a church run by hundreds of men who are either exactly like this, or way worse.

EPILOGUE - GRIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

The history of the Catholic bishops in America, in many ways, mirrors the history of the people in America who had the most power. When America was a colonial project, the church was colonial, setting up missions and coercing indigenous people into conversion. When America was tearing itself apart over slavery, the church was the largest institutional slaveholder across multiple states, and the bishops willfully ignored the Vatican’s denunciations of slavery in the early 19th century. When the nation was segregated and violent towards Black Americans, the church fought hard to maintain and celebrate that segregation. When social movements and civil rights activists fought for a more equal America, the American church dug their heels in, just like they were doing - and are still doing - in response to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council meant to more fully empower the laity. When the Republican party aligned with the religious right in the 1980s in order to further the interests of capital, Catholics - like first-ever G.O.T.H.S. subject Tom Monaghan - helped support that union and cement it around one political issue.

But now, the story of the people in power in America - and therefore, the story of the church in America - is a story of decrepit old men, using every last tool possible, to maintain their musty view of white capitalist patriarchal supremacy, which a toxic media ecosystem has convinced them is good and right and under attack. The President of the United States spends all day watching One America News or reading Breitbart and half-asses executive orders based on what people on the internet tell him; well, your bishops are reading Taylor Marshall or Church Militant or LifeSite or EWTN and making pastoral decisions based on that, decisions on how to fix the ongoing sexual abuse crisis, decisions on which bishops get to keep their jobs, decisions on which teachers can’t work at their schools because of sexual orientation, decisions on who deserves the sacraments or which politicians Catholics should vote for. Barron and Strickland are just two guys, but there are hundreds more like them running the church, and as long as they’re in charge with no way for the laity to exercise meaningful oversight on them, the church will continue to rot away from the inside. The church isn’t being infiltrated, it hasn’t become too liberal, it’s not too secularized, it’s getting bilked by a bunch of grifters trying to sell books, get speaking gigs, and rack up YouTube clicks, with no regard for the impact to the church or the rest of the world. And the church is especially vulnerable to this because the people who make the decisions are all old men who don't know any better and won't let anyone else be in charge. The apt analogy isn’t an evil bishop with a “Vatican II Joker Card”, it’s your grandpa giving his social security number to a cold caller with an unplaceable accent who just told him he won a gift certificate.

I don’t know what happens next for the church, because I don’t know what happens next for America. If the people who are powerful right now stay powerful, I don’t feel great about where things are headed. I see signs of hope in the mass collective action in the streets, in ongoing protests against state violence, in a labor movement slowly rebuilding itself, in people with a real interest and commitment to making the powerful less powerful, and making the powerless a force to be reckoned with - or, as Dorothy Day put it, "to make the rich poor and the poor holy". The Catholic church, institutionally and historically, has not been on the side of these movements, and the bishops, exemplified by men like Strickland and Barron, decide every day to make themselves irrelevant in every version of this world that doesn’t end in fiery collapse. But if the rest of us in the church are willing to fight with and risk our comfort for the other powerless people in our country, regardless of what side the bishops are on, then we might have a shot at steering this country and this church into something good, and - this is something worth praying for - something guided and animated by the Holy Spirit.

Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.

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