What did we learn, Palmer?

I guess we learned not to do it again.

A pal sent me this video from last week’s USCCB meeting: Joseph Strickland, who is apparently still invited to these things, gets up to the mic and awkwardly gesticulates through a description of a video he saw on Facebook where a gay man received the sacrament of confirmation, and expresses his hope that the conference will dedicate some time during this meeting to addressing this important issue. He is met with silence and a perfunctory “thank you” from the moderator, and you have already pieced together that the bishops did not, in fact, take up this issue during the meeting, and that none of the coverage of this meeting - there was a lot! - really mentioned this at all. We don’t really need to analyze why Strickland did this: he did this because he only understands reality as “the things he sees on his phone”. Perhaps if he had a diocese to run he would spend less time on his phone, but his diocese got taken away from him in the first place because he was staring at his phone instead of running it. Damn, this guy just can’t win!

Anyways, my response to my pal who sent the video was “look you can criticize him all you want but i personally am grateful to have him around to answer the question ‘what would it look like if the coen brothers made a comedy about catholicism’.” I thought it was a pretty good zinger, but now I can’t get that idea out of my head: you absolutely could cast a USCCB-based comedy with the Coens’ usual stable of actors and it would be great. Tim Blake Nelson would be revelatory as Joseph Strickland; he’s got the accent, he’s got the look, he’s got the pacing, this Brown-educated Phi-Beta-Kappa-honored Juilliard-trained playwright is perhaps the greatest in the world at portraying “I’m a dumb idiot from the middle of nowhere and I don’t know what I’m doing”. John Goodman could bring the tragicomic chops necessary to play Tim Dolan: he’s a big fat guy and that’s funny, but then also he’s evil or possibly profoundly ignorant! William H. Macy could play Robert Barron; they don’t look or sound alike, but nobody can play “guy who acts he’s two steps ahead of everyone but is clearly in denial about how in over his head he’s gotten himself” like Macy, and both men are also very good at making people want to punch them in the face. And Holly Hunter could win an Oscar for playing Abby Johnson; again, she doesn’t look or sound anything like her, but neither did the woman who actually played Abby Johnson in the Abby Johnson movie so who cares. Clooney can play me.

I make jokes like that because thinking about the actual USCCB meeting itself would just be a huge bummer. Coakley is the new president of the conference, and despite what certain failed-Congressional-candidates-turned-dumbass-bloggers may tell you, he’s not actually going to be your new woke bae; the guy who advises the Napa Institute and backed up Vigano in 2018 is probably going to suck, just like all of the other USCCB presidents suck (it’s not like they were sitting on an overwhelming talent pool for the conference presidency). The bishops may not have paid much attention to Joseph Strickland, but they did ban all gender-affirming care at Catholic hospitals, and despite what other dumbass writers may tell you, the bishops aren’t good by default if they carefully alternate between “one for the conservatives and one for the libs”.

Which brings us to the “one for the libs”: the bishops did actually put out a statement condemning the current administration’s mass deportation policy; their press release notes that it passed overwhelmingly and people applauded because of how good the statement was, which seems a little masturbatory even for a press release. I mean, the bishops just barely wrote this statement: it was a statement originally saying “it sucks that everyone is so mean to immigrants”, and then Cardinal Cupich had to strongarm the language about deportations in there; there still isn’t any mention that any of the current immigration policy is due to the actions of the government and not just an abstract thing that fell out of the sky. It was a pretty weak statement, a bare minimum in a moment that desperately needs more, and I would argue that this statement was so weak that it triggered an event almost unthinkable in the present era: Thomas Reese, a man whom I once said “had been writing about American Catholicism for almost fifty years and he writes every essay like it’s his first day learning about Catholicism or America (or both),” wrote a critique of it for RNS that was actually kind of pointed. Reese turns in three insightful columns a year, which would be great if he didn’t also turn in 87 dogshit columns on top of those three every year, but here he got it exactly right: the bishops criticized mass deportations and hateful language towards immigrants without making any mention of where any of it was coming from.

It’s not like the bishops couldn’t mention Donald Trump - feel free to look up statements the bishops made during the Obama or Biden presidencies to get a sense of how eager they can be to criticize presidents by name - but they chose not to mention the guy running with literal “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW” campaign signs as they said “perhaps we shouldn’t be doing these mass deportations, however they’re getting done, by whomever is doing them.” As Reese puts it:

“There are three theories on why the bishops were reluctant to publicly criticize President Donald Trump. First, many bishops approve of much that the Trump administration is doing, especially on abortion and gender issues. These bishops do not want to attack an ally and strengthen the hand of Democrats, who see these issues differently. Second, the administration eliminated government funding for the bishops’ work on behalf of refugees. Some bishops hope that the administration will restore this funding and don’t want to antagonize Trump. They, like college presidents who have also seen funding withdrawn, are afraid to poke the bear. Third, the bishops know that Catholics are divided almost equally between Democrats and Republicans. They don’t want to alienate the Trump supporters among their followers — though this has not stopped them from alienating Catholic Democrats by attacking pro-choice Democrats. Some also believe that the bishops are afraid of alienating conservative donors. It’s hard to say which was the most convincing factor in some bishops’ reluctance to call out the president by name; it’s likely a combination of all three.”

Obviously, none of us can get inside these guys’ heads, but these reasons certainly seem plausible given everything else we’ve seen the bishops say and do. But all three of these reasons, if there is any truth to any of them, are appalling and unacceptable. They suggest that holding government funding or donations hostage is enough to make the bishops abandon their obligation to the Catholics they serve. They suggest that “people being rounded up without due process and sent to foreign torture prisons” is, in the bishops’ minds, an acceptable cost to getting an executive order proclaiming that there are only two genders or whatever shit they’re on. And it suggests that there’s just a howling moral void at the center of what is supposed to be the leadership of our church, and while I think we all intuitively suspected that, it does not feel good to see that void present itself so directly.

Remember, as you watch the bishops scrape out their souls to put together the bare minimum, that you’ve watched them make a lot of political calculations over the past twenty years: we have to oppose Obama’s health care policy, we have to get more Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe, we have to push for more bans after Roe gets overturned, we have to question the 2020 election results, we have to make it clear that we’re not on the side of “Critical Race Theory”, we have to make it clear we’re not on the side of “Gender Theory”, we have to complain about pandemic safety measures closing our churches, we have to criticize Biden in the name of Eucharistic coherence, we have to not criticize Trump in the name of protecting religious freedom. Every calculation led us here: churches and schools are empty as Catholics fear government roundups, prisoners are being kept from the sacraments, and the bishops have lost their government grants. Every calculation has led us here, and “here” doesn’t seem like where we want to be. I am forced to ask, as a famous American filmmaking duo did back in 2007, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

So that’s why I make jokes about Coen brothers movies, because I don’t want to think about the actual USCCB, and I just want to engage in some escapism. Sadly, the USCCB isn’t a Coen brothers movie, it’s just a bunch of stupid old people with funny voices making terrible decisions that entangle everyone around them in misery and death, all for a little bit of money. So, you know. A completely different thing.