Lies, Damned Lies and Apologetics
Barron Mind, My First Series of Grievances
On all things wrong (and some things right) with the Catholic Church...
Sheesh, I had actually been inclined to lay off Bishop Barron this week (christofascism is an ethos, after all). But, as it happens, the ornery, ortho-bro chuckleheads on Catholic Twitter recently parroting his April 2021 assertion that neither St. Oscar Romero nor Servant of God Dorothy Day are in any way “woke” offer a nice entry point into the Church’s obfuscation of its own social teaching (Barron also lumps in Mother Teresa, but I’ll actually give him that one). I’ll admit Day’s political journey and its intersection with a traditionalist, hierarchical orthodoxy don’t not fit neatly into contemporary political schemes, but in 1936 she described the movement she founded as both “anti-capitalist” and opposing “the concentration of productive power in the hands of a few…” And as for Romero, among other things he publicly impelled “the National Guard, the police and the military” to cease the violence against their marginalized citizens and “stop the repression” (and was promptly killed for it).
Sounds pretty “woke” to me! Even Barron von Steubenville (comically) concedes that, “if you want to define ‘woke’ as simply being alert to social injustice and passionate about addressing it, then sure, they were ‘woke.’” But, of course, apropos of no actual expertise, he has another definition tucked away in his Wokepedia. Because when you make a mission (and, in his case, an episcopal career) of displacing the notion of conscience with supposed obedience to Magisterial authority, you need to assimilate any compelling counter-narrative into your didactic and dualistic dogmatic paradigm. In this case, as Carlos X. Colorado recently pointed out, Barron merely “define[s] wokeism negatively in order to condemn it.”
The funny thing is, Barron’s definition is kind of rad! He inadvertently highlights how the Gospel is actually woke as hell, and concurrently throws steaming heaps of shade at his own Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
The Gospel according to Bob
In the Angelus News interview where these comments were made, Barron outlines six “principles” he ascribes to “‘woke’ ideology,” which, he claims, stand in opposition to “our biblically based and deeply wise social teaching tradition…” Hey, I know I joked a few issues back about Catholics not reading the Bible, but in Barron’s case it may actually be true. Let’s take a look at how his anti-equity antics stack up against the man/God he claims to follow (and with whom he competes in his flair for the dramatic and claims to divine authority):
“First,” Barron says, the wokes “advocate a deeply antagonistic social theory, whereby the world is divided sharply into the two classes of oppressors and oppressed.” Yeah, so did Jesus, that’s why the oppressors hated him. He even began his public ministry by stating that the Lord anointed him to “bring glad tidings to the poor” and “let the oppressed go free” (Lk. 4:18).
“Second, they relativize moral value and see classical morality as an attempt by the ruling class to maintain itself in power.” Jesus repeatedly berated religious authorities for using moral absolutes to do just that: “Hypocrites! Does not each one of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger and lead it out for watering? This daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now, ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day from this bondage?” (Lk. 13:15-16)
“Third, they focus, not so much on the individual, as on racial and ethnic categories and hence they endorse the idea of collective guilt and recommend a sort of reverse discrimination to address the injustices of the past.” Okay, this is getting silly: Jesus’ most famous commentary on God’s judgment, Matthew 25 (which is also anti-poverty and anti-carceral) is entirely collective, a judgment of the nations based on their comportment towards the marginalized. He was also basically the (heavenly) king of “reverse discrimination,” chiding the privileged to “sell what you have, and give to the poor” (Mk. 10:21) and telling a whole parable about a man going to hell simply for being rich (Lk. 16:19-31).
“Fourth, they tend to demonize the market economy and the institutions of democracy as part of a superstructure defending the privileged.” This is a simple one: capitalism is a pro-hoarding, anti-human abomination to God and nature; Jesus isn’t. Ditto for certain “democratic” institutions, like the Supreme Court. Barron could have at least pulled out a specious “render unto Caesar” (Mk. 12:16) reference, but that would put him at odds with his rich donors who hate paying taxes. (It’s also especially galling since this statement arrives after the right literally invaded Congress in an effort to overturn an election.)
“Fifth, they push toward equity of outcome throughout the society, rather than equality of opportunity.” Jesus Christ…literally. He told another whole ass story about people receiving the same wages whether they worked all day or just showed up at the end, and the people griping about equity were the villains. (Mt. 20:1-16)
“And finally, ‘wokeism’ employs divisive and aggressive strategies of accusation that are contrary to the Gospel demand to love our enemies.” Like flipping over tables (Mk. 11:15)? How about going on a thirty-eight line rant about the elites being hypocrites and murders (Mt. 23)? Seriously, how can this purveyor of atheist antagonism denounce “strategies of accusation” with a straight face? And not for nothing, but such claims were made directly against Romero in his day, such that he felt the need to explicitly refute those who accused him “of forsaking the Gospel for politics.”
“Suffice it to say,” Barron concludes, “that Catholic Social Teaching stands athwart all of this.” I guess we’ll have to take his word for it, since he doesn’t really bother to “suffice” his assertion with evidence, other than weaponizing “love your enemies” against the downtrodden and using fancy pants words like “athwart.” (Suffice it to say that none of this bodes particularly well for Barron’s Word on Fire-branded Bible, which purports to “[elevate] the experience of reading God’s Word to draw out truth…”)
Assassin’s Creed
Despite his air of detached intellectualism, in other venues Barron can’t help but tip his ideological hand. In the foreword to Word on Fire’s 2021 Vatican II Collection, he states that, “I and Word on Fire stand firmly with Vatican II and hence against the radical traditionalists. And we stand firmly with the Wojtyla-Ratzinger interpretation of the council, and hence against the progressives.” In the context of the current right wing anti-Francis fervor, his call out of traditionalists is an obligatory kissing of the papal ring by a careerist bishop. In Barron’s case, it’s also somewhat personal: there is a vocal online trad element who considers his “Musclemen Fetish” (so dubbed by CleanTheChurch dot com, which somehow manages to suck even more than Barron himself) a little too “disturbing” (re: “gay”). More telling is how he aligns himself with the two previous popes (who spent much of their papacies trying to undo Vatican II’s scope and impact), offering a thinly veiled rejection of Pope Francis’ interpretation of the council, the actualization of which is arguably his primary papal agenda.
That agenda seems to align with Romero’s, as well: in the same sermon where he goes all fire and brimstone on state-sponsored violence, Romero notes that he is “trying to bring to life the message of the Second Vatican Council…” And, like many Catholic heroes and martyrs of the latter 20th Century, that message naturally led him into biblical resistance of Western imperial aspirations, not only those of the US Government (which in many cases trained their eventual assassins), but of the institutional Church. In Central America, these heroes include not only recognized priest, religious, and lay martyrs, but countless local civilians unnamed by the Church, whose very existence and inherent dignity in the face of Cold War colonialist oppression stood in stark and inconvenient opposition to an anti-Communist agenda enthusiastically cosigned by Pope John Paul II (who, along with Benedict XVI, famously dragged their feet on Romero’s canonization).
Canon Fodder
A great way to seem right about everything is to pretend the things you’re wrong about don’t exist, and in days gone by someone like Barron (and his online fans) might have simply ignored Romero entirely. But in 2018, Pope Francis went ahead and canonized the dude, bequeathing this saint by popular demand with the giant capital “S” of the Holy See. So they now seek to retcon his legacy, lest those no longer losing libs invite scrutiny over why he died in the first place, and how well the broader Church stood behind (or against) his cause.
And Barron isn’t the only one guilty of this GOP Jesus-style rebranding of radicals and rabble rousers. Let’s get back to Dorothy Day, a homegrown Catholic heroine with continued worldwide reach even forty-plus years following her death in Manhattan. A laywoman whose life of austerity and service was deeply connected to the rituals and worship of the Catholic Church, Day founded a global anti-poverty coalition known as the Catholic Worker Movement, in which (usually young) adults live and serve in solidarity with economically marginalized communities. In his 2015 address to Congress, Pope Francis counted Day among the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Merton as great Americans who “offer us a way of seeing and interpreting reality,” tying her “social activism, [and] her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed” to his own call in Laudato Si’ for “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”
But Day, a non-violent direct action activist who strove to live the Gospel to its logical conclusions, is another holy witness with whom the US hierarchy shows a deep discomfort and distrust. In his homily concluding the Archdiocese of New York’s 20-year inquiry into whether she should be recommended to the Vatican for sainthood, Cardinal Timothy Dolan reportedly emphasized her early story as supposed sinner (sex! Communism!) turned convert, largely glossing over her radical, Gospel-modeled anticapitalist ministry. (Anyone familiar with the miscasting of Mary Magdalene as a converted former sex worker would find it unsurprising that Dolan downplayed Day’s role as Christian moral leader.)
Empire of the Son
This all makes perfect sense, of course, because when it comes to the issues which most terrify the aging white men of whom the USCCB is predominantly comprised (gender and sexual politics, economic justice, anti-racism), they already face the admittedly cliched yet nonetheless troublesome question, “What would Jesus do?” Justice is deeply rooted in Scripture, bolstered by Catholic Social Teaching and (yes, Bob) Vatican II, and Day and those like her are protagonists not merely of the faith, but of the revolutionary faith most closely aligned with the historical Jesus himself. His is a socio-religious and political project which has stood in bitter tension with the institutions nominally bolstering it since the days of Constantine, whose Roman Empire long ago co-opted and poisoned it with the fumes of expansionist, white supremacist heteropatriarchy which continue to choke out the Spirit today.
Church (and societal) power players like Barron and Dolan proffer privilege itself as their rebuttal to the universal dignity of not only secular but Catholic social justice, because to lift up as Christ’s holy disciples the most kinetic figures in modern Christian life would only cast in a harsher light the moral decay at the heart of their own agenda. That, or they simply cannot admit to themselves that true illumination of the Gospel and Church teaching is found not in the status-driven grievance politics of white Christian men, but in the people spiritually aligned with the current, intersectional fight for equity and equality.
Especially Aggrieved,
G. Fault
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