On Christ’s Terms: Exclusion and the Anti-Reign of God
Barron Mind, a Series of Grievances
On all things wrong (and some things right) with the Catholic Church...
Jesus Christ. That’s who was conspicuously absent in much of the self-referential, culture war con artistry which consumed the Church over the past week. First, the “Catholic” League, apropos of nothing, took to Twitter to claim US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is not, in fact, married to his legally wed husband (because “gay,” I guess). Naturally, a bunch of “progressive” Catholics spent days engaging the premise of these non-canonical, not-in-charge bush league shitposters and their inconsequential bullshit. The result of this pushback? The League did ultimately acknowledge the marriage, but only as a “legal fiction.” (It’s 2023, so until the theocratic ghouls at the Supreme Court give gay marriage the Dobbs treatment, we really don’t need to explain to assholes that laws are real.)
Worse, though, was the reaction to Pope Francis’ profoundly reasonable assertion (per the Associated Press) that “being homosexual isn’t [and thus shouldn’t be] a crime.” This isn’t some hypothetical musing: as head of a global institution known for its anti-LGBTQ+ track record, the Pope must grapple with the fact that currently some 67 jurisdictions around the globe criminally punish varieties of same-sex behavior. Moreover, an increasing number of US states and municipalities seek to legislate away trans existence, and, per above, even roll back codified legal rights. Yet, in typical Catholic (and US) fashion, most of the subsequent commentary sidestepped the secular justice issues the Holy Father was actually addressing and instead debated the supposed “sinfulness” of being gay. Fr. James Martin, SJ, naturally jumped into the fray, “helpfully” pressing the Pope to reiterate what the Church already teaches (basically it’s fine, as long as you don’t do any sex stuff). Look, I will argue all day that the Church’s teachings on homosexuality are discriminatory and anti-Gospel, but when it comes to papal sentiments, absent a direct reversal of the Catechism the best we can probably hope for is the Church tacitly moving on, the way it has with cohabitation and divorce (“Yeah, sure, it’s a ‘sin,’ wink wink”).
On that count, at least, there was some hope amid the past week’s rancid rhetorical food fight, namely in the form of a sweeping op-ed on “radical inclusion” in America magazine by Cardinal Robert McElroy. But the Church giveth (hope) and the Church taketh away, for (as you might expect) it was met with swift opposition and equivocation, including by fiend of the show (and enemy of all that is holy and good) Bishop Robert Barron. And, of course, with all of this occurring amid a slew of shocking revelations regarding the murder of Tyre Nichols at the hands of police, it’s clear that the Church, as usual, remains blinkered to the Reign of God as it sprints towards its own irrelevance.
Sigh. Let’s jump in, I guess.
Term Limits
I want to address that McElroy piece first, and more specifically Barron’s characteristically obtuse, Gospel-perverting retort. I won’t try to summarize the former (you really should read it if you haven’t), but the (actually good!) Bishop of San Diego addresses a wide array of overlapping ecclesiological and secular exclusions and marginalizations—based on sexual orientation, race, and gender, to name a few—and states in no uncertain terms that “[t]he church’s primary witness in the face of this bigotry must be one of embrace rather than distance or condemnation.” His reflections take place in the context of the previously mentioned Synod on Synodality, which is also the nominal topic of Barron’s faux-curious screed. In that piece, Bishop Bob of Nowheresville (I’m sure they’re lovely, but he doesn't give a shit about them) draws a clear line in the sand: per his “mentor,” the late Cardinal George, the Church welcomes everyone (yeah yeah, sure), but “on Christ’s terms, not their own.” One would think such terms might include Jesus’ command not to judge (Mt. 7:1-2), but, as always, Barron and his ilk seem to understand little (or, less charitably, obscure much) of what “Christ’s terms” actually are.
I do want to first note that Barron almost made no appearance at all this time around. For much of the week in question (McElroy’s barn-burner was published on Tuesday, the Pope’s interview the next day), Bareknuckle Bob was notably silent. His Word on Fire Twitter account mostly posted cultural musings on topics such as pop music and artificial intelligence, and while the superficiality of this brand of “cultural engagement” is, as always, quite dull and laughable, in terms of apologetics I much prefer “lame dad who thinks he knows the score” to “asshole father who needs you to remember why you hate him.” But then, on Friday, Barron made his doof-texting case against inclusion, reframing Jesus’ radical, norm-busting table fellowship as a sort of polite contempt, whereby the Lord of Mercy may have deigned to dine among the “unclean and wicked,” but merely for the purpose of converting them to the (literal) straight and narrow.
For Barron, “repentance” is the name of the game, but only for some: the woman accused of adultery, not the crowd all too eager to stone her; the thief crucified at his side, not the military state murdering them both. He even audaciously grounds his thesis in the opening chapter of Mark, where “the first word out of Jesus’ mouth…is not ‘Welcome!’ but rather ‘Repent!’” One seriously wonders if Barron bothered to read the rest: whereas he frames Jesus’ merciful inclusion as always carrying a “sin no more” asterisk, Jesus in this very same chapter of goes on to heal a shit ton of people (and at least once on the Sabbath, a religious no-no), not to convert behavior, but just for the ever (and unconditionally) loving hell of it. Conversely, Jesus of the Gospels reserves his most righteous indignation for the rich and powerful, including pious scolds, yet Barron not only expresses few reservations about accepting them into the Church without Christ’s supposed terms of repentance, he gleefully yucks it up with the avatars of the very misogyny and intolerance which so infuriated the Word Made Flesh.
Feign of God
Barron also neglects to include Mark’s “repentance” quote in full: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel” (1:15). That’s unsurprising, though, since the kingdom (or Reign) of God in the Gospel implies radical social dimensions far beyond Barron’s interests, preferences and frankly intelligence. Indeed, the “errant,” “relativistic” secular culture that so rankles him and others actually grapples far more seriously with the implications of the Gospel than he himself is willing or able, not only in terms of LGBTQ+ inclusion and affirmation, but on topics such as systemic racism and the inherent, oppressive violence of policing, as well.
On the latter points, a curious (and revelatory) note about Barron’s admiration for Cardinal George is that, in 2002, George released Dwell in My Love, an admittedly dated yet nonetheless groundbreaking pastoral letter on racism (which precedes the USCCB’s own, foot-dragging pastoral on the subject by sixteen years). In it, George addressed racism as a complex, interconnected web of “patterns” (“spatial racism, institutional racism, internalized racism and individual”) which persist even while formally condemning “overt” bigotry. Twenty years later, though, his mentee places the typical conservative emphasis on individualized “hatred in the hearts,” offering a trite, platitudinal rallying cry to “[l]ight the fire of love in the streets, in the halls of government, in the world of communication, in business and industry, in schools, and in the hearts of your friends and neighbors” (“we happy few, we band of brothers!”).
Notably, racism itself was largely absent from the past week’s hemming and hawing over inclusion. I don’t mean to downplay the injustices and consequences of heterosexism, both within and beyond the Church, but while much was made of McElroy’s (important) musings on LGBTQ+ inclusion, his call to “[advocate] forcefully against racism and economic exploitation,” mostly went ignored, even within progressive circles. (Because subtlety is dead, Barron himself released the above-discussed, “just asking questions” diatribe on January 24th, the same day an autopsy report revealed that Nichols “suffered extensive bleeding caused by a severe beating.”)
Faith in Faction
And that speaks to a larger plague of relative silence and omission within the Church. While McElroy alludes to the “sustained ways in which patterns of racism are embedded in ecclesial practices and culture,” the broader debates around inclusion often occur through the preemptively exclusive lens of sexual politics. It makes perfect sense: on the one hand, the elements of the Church most brazenly committed to the racist status quo do so in direct contradiction to Scripture and Church Teaching, and thus, like Barron, cannily acknowledge the existence of systemic racism while actively, (and snarkily) opposing the very thinking and activism which works to upend it. On the other hand, the white progressive Catholics who take up much of the dialogical oxygen remain, like most white USians, bogged down in their own (internalized and systemic) racial baggage, meaning they at times say and do the right things but fail to more deeply interrogate and dismantle the structures which still privilege their perspectives.
It’s not always this way, but paradoxically always kind of is. From the time Jesus’ disciples stood agape and aghast at his dillydallying with a Samaritan woman, the Gospel has stood in direct tension with the more base, tribal instincts of those charged with proclaiming it. In 1985, the Jesuit martyr Father Ignacio Ellacuría called this out explicitly: a vocal and active critic of the Salvadoran Civil War, he noted to a group of visiting Jesuits that while the mission of the University of Central America where he served as president was to “promote the reign of God…you can no longer be for the reign of God unless you are also publicly actively against the anti-reign.” He was speaking at least as much to his own Church as to the Salvadoran government which would later claim his life.
That’s because Ellacuría and his fellow Salvadoran martyrs were in many ways operating in opposition to similar ecclesiological impulses of self-preservation we see today. Like Barron, then-Pope John Paul II did openly call for peace in El Salvador, yet took a nigh-hostile stance towards the same Liberation Theology igniting the on-the-ground advocacy of his own priests, religious women and men, and lay ministers (such theology was seen as largely akin to Communism, seen then and now as a threat to “Christendom”). And though it’s tempting to lay the blame entirely on JPII’s famously conservative pontificate, even the Jesuits writ large struggled with and debated the implications of such direct political action, as opposed the sort of “trickle-down liberation theory” undergirding their efforts to educate the global elite. Indeed, the above quote by Ellacuría arrives via an account by the peace activist Father John Dear, who left the Jesuits largely over opposition to his (admittedly strident) nonviolence activism.
I don’t even wanna be around anymore…
And therein lies the soul-straining dissonance which both tethers and repels the liberation-minded Christian to the Church. Ultimately, Ellacuría would be counted among the over 75,000 deaths (and 8,000 disappearances) attributed to the war, along with five of his confreres and Elba and Celina Ramos, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, respectively. Symbolic not only of the Gospel’s radical solidarity, but also of the Church’s failures to fully embrace it. We see what’s possible, and more than that, find affirmation for our own liberative perspective on the Gospel. But the Church always seems to be second-guessing, back-peddling, or even openly warring against the initiative of the Holy Spirit, “putting the toothpaste back in the tube” as the Vatican II cliche goes, and making an unholy mess in the process.
As usual, such efforts are obfuscated by pseudo-intellectualism and “middle-ground” status quo appeals. Barron’s gripes with terms such as “inclusivity” and “welcoming” include not only some word vomit about “doctrine, anthropology, and real theological argument,” but his having “yet to come across a precise definition of either term.” McElroy, it should be noted, lays out a pretty solid outline: full participation in the life of the Church, discipleship which privileges conscience, and “a eucharistic theology that effectively invites all of the baptized to the table of the Lord, rather than a theology of eucharistic coherence that multiplies barriers to the grace and gift of the eucharist.” Again, maybe Barron simply hasn’t done the reading, but more likely just doesn’t like what he sees.
Meanwhile, people here and around the world continue to be imprisoned, tortured and murdered—as Jesus was—for being black or gay or trans, indigenous or women or children. The Church refuses to fully stand as the authentic Body of Christ against these violent indignities, and stands instead in fear—not of the cross, but of the mirror.