King’s Ransom: Selling Out Jesus and Slapping “Revival” on the Box
Barron Mind, A Series of Grievances
On all things wrong (and some things right) with the Catholic Church...
I gotta say, it’s been a banner week (or so) for the TradCath industrial complex eating itself alive: Joseph Strickland, the shitposting conservative Bishop of Tyler, TX, trying to hang onto his mitre while tweeting headlong into schismatic waters; sedevacantist podcaster and New World Order conspiracy theorist Taylor Marshall announcing his run for president (thus pitting himself and his followers against Donald “Jesus II” Trump); Church Militant’s death cult ethos corroding its internal governance and leaving massive downsizing in its wake. These folks are getting so desperate amid the Joe Biden, single living pope miasma that they’re (falsely) attributing dystopian, trans-panic prophecies to Benedict XVI—privately uttered, of course, by a man conveniently no longer alive to verify their claims. (Also, sure, “gender ideology” was totally what anyone inside the Vatican would’ve been worried about back in 2014).
It’s all quite entertaining, of course. But lest watching the right wing Catholic media hellscape partially implode give you too much hope for the US’s ecclesiological future, our old, theologically pallid pal Bishop Barron is here to remind you that he, at least, isn’t going anywhere (not even to serve his own diocese). More than that, he wants you to know he’s got his grubby little hands all over the National Eucharistic Revival, that rickety “Catholics Come Home” Trojan Horse we all wish would just go away. Yes, despite being adorned in Francis-lite platitudes about Jesus’ desire “to heal, renew, and unify” a hurting Church and world, Professor Herald Schill over here went and let Schrödinger's dead-on-arrival cat out of the bag, confirming everyone’s suspicions that this is just a gussied up, reactionary hissy fit over declining doctrinal allegiances, and, as with all things Rob(ber) Barron, a total grift.
And that matters. Because whatever the Revival’s inevitable failures, the central involvement of Barron (with all his greed, abrasive polemics and clout-chasing ego) in the US Bishops’ flagship pastoral and cultural advance says a whole hell of a lot about their priorities—and where the Church is headed. [Spoiler alert: straight into the ground]
Body Politics
In promoting his new book(let), This Is My (presumably heavily muscled) Body, Barron not only takes credit for inspiring the Revival itself, but paints the whole thing as a direct response to a (much-discussed) 2019 Pew Study, which, as Turd on Fire’s website puts it, “revealed the startling statistic that 69% [nice] of Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.” In Barron’s words, this is “a spiritual disaster,” one which he himself “brought” to his “brother bishops,” thus conferring the Revival upon us all like Moses atop Mount Sinai. That is, of course, if Moses was mass marketing mini Ten Commandment tablets at $2 a pop. Because Barron, you see, wants to hock one million copies of his hundred plus page table-leveler (“brief but illuminating,” he assures us), which he “designed to accompany” the very revival he himself claims to have cooked up. (He’s currently sold out, by the way, but can we interest you in this “companion” Holy Hour collection for the low, low price of $27.96?)
At this point I feel compelled to reiterate that, on a good day, I still consider myself Catholic. “Money changers in the temple” as this all is, I can imagine a world in which the Church could actually try to “bring healing to a broken world” through the Eucharist. To understand how, you can ironically look no further than the USCCB itself (well, its lowly Justice, Peace and Human Development Office, anyway). Specifically, in The Eucharist and Social Mission: Body of Christ, Broken for the World, the JPHD draws a clear line from the Real Presence of Jesus in the Body and Blood to our wounded social reality, stating, among other things, that, “The Eucharist, celebrated as a community, teaches us about human dignity [and] calls us to right relationship with God, ourselves, and others. As the Body of Christ, it sends us on mission to help transform our communities, neighborhoods, and world.”
That’s actually pretty good stuff (I encourage you to read the rest), you just won’t find it anywhere near Barron’s shallow, “communion wafer in your face” and “monstrance in the streets” masquerade. For one thing, it speaks to an incarnational theology which Barron and his minions consistently, gleefully distort and reject.
Party Monsters
I’m not exaggerating. Just consider the latest Word on Fire email blast, provocatively titled “Do Jordan Peterson and Pope Francis Agree?” (what is it with this Peterson dude, does he have beer-flavored nipples?) and headlined by an article purportedly aimed at “rehabilitating” (re: perverting) social justice (penned by Professor Matt Petrusek, who’s past credits include “Idolatry of Idiocy”, in which he starred as the titular “Idiot”). Making the supposed “pitch” for Catholic Social Teaching (CST) to Dumpster Fire’s alt-right, theobro base, Petrusek wastes no time taking aim at the “naïve devotees of wokeism” and what he terms “LGBTQUIA+ ideology”. He has a certain label for the alleged disposition of these “wokeist” ninnies: “victimhood.” This he describes as the “incoherent sludge of relativism on the one hand” and “chauvinistic coercion on the other”:
“If an individual or group can effectively (even if deceitfully) claim to be the victim of a disembodied yet malevolent collective power (e.g., the patriarchy, systemic racism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, etc.) then, when combined with progressivism’s subjective epistemology, it can claim that ‘the system’ has a moral responsibility to do whatever we (the victim group) demand.”
Wow, those certainly are words! It’s worth noting that “The Eucharist and Social Mission” features a section entitled “The Eucharist challenges us to recognize and confront structures of sin” (emphasis mine), specifically calling out “racism, violence, injustice, poverty, exploitation, and all other systemic degradation of human life or dignity.” So not only does Petrusek parrot Barron’s own flaccid, warped perception of social justice, but his petulant mockery of systemic oppression places him in theological and doctrinal (if not practical or rhetorical) opposition with the Church itself. Not a strong start, especially considering the Option for the Poor and Vulnerable, that inconvenient principle of CST which (again per the USCCB) reminds us that “a basic moral test is how our most vulnerable members are faring.” Naturally, the bishops cite Matthew 25 (“whatever you did for the least of these”) as the scriptural linchpin.
But hey, maybe it’s too much to expect an associate professor of theological ethics at a Catholic university to be fully versed in such things. To be fair, Petrusek does at least name some issues which meet his (wholly subjective) rubric for injustice: drug overdoses, school policies negatively impacting youth with mental health issues, educational inequality, households where both parents need to work, and, of course, abortion. Real issues, to be sure, but ones which fit snugly within the Republican Party platform (“porous” borders, over-policing, school choice, “traditional” gender norms, reproductive control, etc.). None of that pesky racism, violence, poverty, or exploitation mentioned in the JPHD document.
No Justice, No Z’s
Given this is what’s being churned out by Barron’s malignant multimedia blight, we’re supposed to believe he and his brother bishops have any interest in healing the “scandal, division, disease, doubt” plaguing the faithful today? Granted, there is an internal logic to the Revival’s apologetic (as in “fuck you, I’m right,” not “I’m sorry”) thrust. A key feature of Bishop Barron’s brand is his supposed expertise in “reaching” today’s morally wayward youths, which now includes the bishop befuddling “Gen Z’s.” Along those lines, Barron has (somewhat) correctly cited waning belief as the most common factor in people leaving the faith (the latest survey from the Public Religion Research Institute simply uses the word “teachings,” which Barron presumptuously expands to include “primary doctrinal beliefs”). Of course, Barron’s far too dense (or merely disingenuous) to properly assess why young Christians might stop believing, particularly whether it could have anything to do with the glaring contradictions between what the Church teaches and how the Church behaves (see above). Or, as one friend in ministry recently said to me, “How loud do we have to yell? It’s about the justice!”
That’s what the research suggests, anyway. According to Religion Dispatches, “Though a majority of young people say they engage in acts of protest as a religious or spiritual practice, many do not believe faith groups share their interest in supporting LGBTQ+ rights, gender equity, racial justice, and more” (based on 2021 survey data from the Springtide Research Institute). The aforementioned PRRI research found that “[n]egative teachings about LGBTQ people were a reason to change religions or denominations for about four in ten religiously unaffiliated (43%) and non-Christian (42%) switchers.” There are other issues, of course. Again, per Religion Dispatches, “only 16% [of slightly religious young people] said they turn to someone from their religious community during challenging times.” Of the “very religious,” “less than half (40%)...found connecting with their religious community helpful during challenging times.”
Most young people, then, experience the Church as indifferent (at best) to their own suffering and antagonistic towards the people and issues about whom and which they care. Rather than attend to this Gospel credibility gap, Barron and the USCCB choose instead to actively exacerbate this suffering and disillusion under the auspices of “evangelization,” all while squawking about the Sunday Obligation and skulking around Twitter, YouTube and various other dying social media enterprises long since abandoned by anyone under 30.
Victim Mendacity
Needless to say, at a time when the CDC reports record levels of mental health challenges among adolescents (particularly among girls and LGBTQ+ youth), this utter contempt towards young people and marginalized groups amounts not only to pastoral malpractice, but spiritual violence. Petrusek and his ilk can feign concern for mental health and drug addiction all they want, they’re cultural impact is, quite simply, to make the lives of everyone with whom they fail to empathize demonstrably worse. And for all their whining about internalized “victimhood,” I can’t help but notice how they play the perpetual victim themselves.
That’s certainly the case with the Catholic League, which just successfully bullied the LA Dodgers out of honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a queer and trans nonprofit which dresses up like Catholic nuns (“my stars!”) and, perhaps most egregiously for the religious right, ministered to AIDS-affected patients while the Church itself turned a blind eye. The League, which currently features no less than fifteen anti-trans propaganda pieces on their website, objected to the SPI’s tongue-in-cheek religious pageantry as “anti-Catholic hate speech” (wah wah wah). Then there’s Eric Sammons, editor-in-chief of CRYsis Magazine, who bemoans the “Catholic acceptability police” and their “canceling” of conservative conference speakers. Yes, he laments, this “self-appointed group of woke busybodies'' is “engaged in a bad-faith effort to tarnish the reputation of public Catholics.” This just so happens to be an excellent characterization of Sammons himself (look in the mirror, you sniveling, glass-jawed doofus), who tried to “cancel” Fr. James Martin, SJ over his pro-LGBTQ+ advocacy (in Sammons’ words, “a heretic who should not be allowed to continue his public ministry as a priest”).
Elsewhere, First Things is now speaking up for the youths (rather than against immigrants, at least), whom they claim the Church victimizes by…checks notes…failing to meet an unmet desire “for ritual, ceremony, and all things traditional” (naming Pope Francis as “one of the great antagonists in this battle,” natch). This one I actually kind of like, if only because the stakes are virtually nonexistent and the article quite spectacularly misses the point of both HBO’s (very good, if you haven’t seen it) The Young Pope and AMC’s Mad Men. These maundering brainiacs really watched the narcissistic protagonists of each series wreak havoc on everyone around them and managed no deeper analysis than “Hey, being an asshole rocks!” But, at this point, I guess that’s basically a legitimate form of popular American religiosity.
Gilded Rage
Then there’s Barron himself, who earlier this month took to The Federalist (such a partisan hack) to wax poetic on the coronation of Charles III and, in his words, “Why Humans Gawk at the Idea of a King.” Beyond the telling dissonance of this so-called cultural curator and social media savante somehow failing to notice the coronation was subjected to brutal mockery on both fronts, Barron is again merely telling on himself here: “Though it happened demurely behind screens,” he wistfully muses, “Charles was anointed in the manner of a priest or bishop at his ordination, and afterward, he was clothed in what looked, for all the world, like priestly robes.”
Barron, you see, seeks not to serve (as Jesus did) the lowly, groveling peasants of this post-modern Babylon—he wants to Lord over them, conjoining “the sacerdotal (?) and kingly roles” à la “Old Testament figures such as Saul, David, and Solomon.” And honestly, isn’t that what the Revival is all about? Shackle Christ’s to the altar so that his princely bishops might reign in his earthly absence? Parade this bejeweled monstrance through the pluralistic, pagan streets of Chicago like a Templar’s conquering banner? Look on my Works, ye woke moralists, and despair?
It’s all so very bleak. But still, there is the Eucharist, I suppose. “The Good News we have received,” as the JPHD writes, which “should overflow into our lives and move us to mission in the world.”
If only our bishops would practice what they eat.
Despondent,
G. Fault