Foolish Gains: The US Church Is Losing More than the Plot
On all things wrong (and some things right) with the Catholic Church...
Barron Mind, A Series of Grievances
First, a disclaimer: I care very little about JD Vance. I care even less for him. Ever since he backtracked on his increasingly prescient comparison of Trump to Hitler, it’s been glaringly apparent that his primary ideology and raison d’etre is self-advancement. As a political figure, he’s mostly a sideshow. Sure, he does genuinely seem to resent women and has no qualms with disseminating malicious lies about nonwhite immigrants, but this is par for the course for any Trump toadie. His ties to Silicon Valley and billionaire backing are, perhaps, politically and morally instructive, but whatever subtext or implications we might draw from these connections are made viscerally textual and menacing via Elon Musk’s reign of terror over the federal budget and workforce (not to our lives).
In short, Vance is a loser: a parasitic sycophant whose political fortunes owe largely to the misjudged sympathies of self-conscious center-left pols and pundits, and the fact that Trump deigns to grant him quarter as some sort of hybrid victory lap/humiliation ritual. That this intellectual, political and manifestly theological lightweight briefly became the focal point of global Church discourse is at least as obnoxious as it is illuminating. Even the unprecedented response from the Pope himself, inserted into a refreshingly pointed letter to the US Bishops, was essentially a dismissive aside: “Sit down, JD, the grownups are talking.”
Distorto Amoris
The inciting incident—his “me, me, me” perversion of ordo amoris (and, you know, the Gospel notion of loving thy neighbor)—honestly strikes more as pathetic than provocative, a “debate me, bro” shitposter who didn’t do the reading because he’s only here for the likes and shares. Actual “dumbed-down Catholicism,” to invoke friend of the blog and female athletics enthusiast Bishop Robert Barron. Except, in this case, Barron’s Word on Fire outfit quite publicly whiffed its own analysis. If there’s anywhere these blowhards should get it right, it’s credibly explicating Latin theological terms credited to the Big A medieval saints.
Yet, in a “day late, brain cell short” defense of Vance’s ordo abhoris, Dr. Richard Clements (psych major), giddily defends Vance’s “pithy and persuasive” owning of the Catholic Left. Sadly for him (yet much more fun for us), he gets it so wrong that, had his article not actually been published after Francis’ letter, you’d wonder if the Holy Father wasn’t rebuking him instead of Vance himself. Clements claims that the “proper ordering of love is…based on the closeness of the connection between ourselves and the potential recipient of our love,” Francis says that “true ordo amoris” is “the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception”; Clements describes love as “concentric circles radiating outward from ourselves,” Francis says, explicitly, that, “Christian love is not [emphasis mine] a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”
Oof.
Hillbilly Effigy
Still, this is par for the course for Word on Fire, which has always been much more concerned with sounding smart than actually being it. More disappointing is the National Catholic Reporter’s Michael Sean Winters cheaply dubbing Vance’s anti-Gospel smarm as “hillbilly theology.” It’s also an unfortunate distraction from an otherwise salient takedown of the USCCB’s lack of urgency, proportionality and seeming interest in the Administration’s ethnocentric assault on the life and dignity of the human person. Not only is the “hillbilly” epithet a predictable, insipidly classist jab which affords Vance undue populist credibility, it fundamentally misunderstands him as a person. Moreover, as American conservatism is taken to its inevitably anarchic conclusions, this undercooked analysis largely eschews the much more interesting and urgent tension Vance’s tortured logic represents for the religious right.
On the personal side, Vance’s striving, self-humiliating ascendancy is built implicitly on rejection, mockery and internalized disdain for his nominal Appalachian roots. As Aja Romano writes in a July 2024 Vox piece, “...Hillbilly Elegy paints a portrait of a man obsessed with status — and brimming with contempt for just about everyone he meets,” beginning with the community he supposedly represents (Vance grew up middle class in Ohio). Again, per Romano, “Though he seems to hate his community full of deadbeats, drug addicts, fat people, and ‘welfare queens,’ we’re supposed to read his portrayal as enlightening and empathetic because he’s constantly feinting briefly toward gentleness.”
Perhaps there’s something to explore here in how all this aligns Vance more with MAGA’s middle class, white male base than its actual power players, but even that reifies his role as undercard to American conservatism’s populist duck-and-weave. After all, Trump and Musk, natal elites, also hate poor and working-class people, and are seemingly doing everything they can to harm them. This includes attempting to eviscerate funding allocated to disaster relief, school lunches, broadband equity, pension plan termination insurance, and child care. Which leads us to the aforementioned theological conundrum: How do you reconcile a faith which calls for self-sacrifice on behalf of the common good with a social, political and economic movement devoted to sacrificing the common good to base self-interest?
Dead Letters
It’s a question you’d have thought the US Bishops might have bothered to wrestle with prior to, you know, now. Instead, they for decades served as moralizing cover for the Republican Party, forming a tenuous alliance around issues ranging from abortion, LGTBQ+ discrimination and school choice, all while offering mild, dispassionate critiques on social issues like immigration policy. This was clearly the playbook USCCB President Timothy Broglio was following when he issued his January 22 commentary on Trump’s opening salvo of contemptible Executive Orders. While labeling actions related to immigration, international aid and the death penalty “deeply troubling,” Broglio, in the same breath, praises the Administration’s anti-transgender discrimination as “positive” and “recognizing the truth about each human person as male or female.”
In subsequent weeks, his “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” assertion that the bishops’ conference “is not aligned with any political party” rings even more hollow. As Michael Sean Winters points out, when it comes to the Administration’s attacks on migrants (and programs serving them):
“It is the lack of national [Catholic] leadership that has been shocking. There have been no press conferences. At the national level, there have not been any ‘all hands on deck’ conference calls to make sure our ministries are equipped to shield migrants from these arbitrary and unjust roundups of migrants. There has been no nationwide second collection to fund the work of the office of migrant and refugee services. There have been no lawsuits to seek an injunction against Trump's unlawful stoppage of monies appropriated by Congress or his abrogation of contracts already signed.”
To that final point, the USCCB did, at last and after mounting criticism, file suit against the Administration over the freeze on refugee resettlement funding. But, in comparison to their mobilization around abortion and anti-trans legislation, the conference has been dragged kicking and screaming into the fraternal fray. In Broglio’s formal response to Francis' letter urging the US Bishops to take action, he mostly offered platitudes around serving “the least of these” and financial appeals to bolster the Church’s charitable outreach. All well and good, but compare this to his pugnacious, policy-driven rebuke of Biden and “the evil of abortion” just two years prior. Here, he doesn’t hold back: “The Catholic bishops of the United States are united in our commitment to life and will continue to work as one body in Christ to make abortion unthinkable…Taxpayer funding of abortion would force people of good conscience to participate in this grave evil against their will.”
When it comes to abortion, the bishops are “united” and “committed,” because “Our nation is better than that” (yes, he actually says this). Mass deportations, though? “We all turn to the Lord in prayer…”
Friar Suck
The joke of the USCCB, of course, is that it’s never been more evident that they’ve been played. The freeze on USAID funding presents an existential threat to Catholic Relief Services; the targeting of federal loan programs risks the free meals and Title services afforded to thousands of Catholic school students; the politicization of nonprofit status subordinates the Church’s advocacy efforts to the whims of the Federal Government; attacks on migrants tear apart Catholic families and parish communities…The list goes on. Even on abortion, the Republican Party has seemed mostly to abandon the coveted golden calf of a federal ban. But hey, at least they get the satisfaction of making life demonstrably worse for the less than 0.005% of the population that identifies as transgender…
And, the thing is, people are starting to notice. In a gloriously scathing editorial for NCR (I can’t believe I didn’t think of using “extinguished”), John Gosso notes that Bishop Barron, who is ostentatiously vocal on everything from Star Wars to Pride Night at Dodger Stadium to the song selection at President Carter’s funeral, has been glaringly silent on the issues of the day. “With two notable exceptions,” though: “Trump's executive orders on banning gender-affirming care for transgender children and banning transgender women from women's sports.”
Call him the liability in the coal mine. Barron’s shamelessness and ironically pitiful media savvy may have him languishing on the outskirts of Minneapolis, but he holds the ignominious mantle of avatar for the USCCB’s culture war myopia, as well as its principal purveyor. Much like the Republican Party, he’s promising his brother bishops and an army of aggrieved, digital rubes a road to God, gold and glory, though decidedly not in that order. And like said Party, as well as any other middle-aged man with a stalled career and a YouTube channel, he’s already finagling his exit strategy: establishing an order of priests, presumably to attain some measure of the prestige and influence denied him by the Vatican.
And that, I suppose, is the only note of optimism I can offer. Because whatever Church this represents, it’s not the one Francis has been painstakingly building through his writings, synods, curia assignments and episcopal appointments. On the US side, bishops like Seitz, Cupich and McElroy have been leading the subtle revolt against their own conference. Will it be enough? Time will tell. In the meantime, we’re all praying for the eighty-eight-year-old pontiff’s attenuated health.
Grieving,
G. Fault