Phantom Menace: “Western Decline” and the Church’s Tinfoil Hat Crusade
Barron Mind, A Series of Grievances
On all things wrong (and some things right) with the Catholic Church...
Just when I’d been relieved to learn that the violent assault on 16-year-old Ralph Yarl’s life hadn’t resulted in his death (according to his aunt he is currently recovering), another white man decided to place 30-year-old Jordan Neely in a fatal chokehold for being loud, Black and unhoused on the New York City subway. You’d think the “respect life” Catholic intelli-dense-ia might have something to say about living in a world where we just get to kill people now, but as usual they’re too busy Scooby Doo-ing their acolytes away from the spooky secular world to actually give a shit what’s happening to the people living in it. (On second thought, maybe it’s better they stay out of it.)
This is certainly the case with Catholic “thinker” (I use the term as loosely as possible) Nathan Pinoski, who this month penned over 4,500 words in defense of an ignominious, rightly forgotten French novel about the spine-chilling horrors of welcoming immigrants. In a Worst Things column entitled “Spiritual Death of the West,” Pinoski laments “the West’s” imagined ideological oppression at the hands of the “non-Western ‘other’” (his actual rancid words), offering dimwitted turds of insight on “multicultural progressivism’s…subjugation and destruction” of what he deems “traditional forms of life.” (Don’t worry, he assures us, none if this is racist: the novel in question merely “emphasizes [the migrants’] vulgarity by providing lengthy descriptions of their crudeness, sexual promiscuity, and repellent hygiene.”)
I’m loathe to give undue oxygen to the racist, pseudo-literary ramblings of one of white God’s favorite idiots (who earlier brought his aggrieved revival act to the National Conservatism Conference with the more bluntly titled, “Catholicism and the Necessity of Nationalism”), but Pinoski’s brand of retrograde cultural incitement is increasingly the cause célèbre not only among rightwing Catholics writ large, but the Catholic hierarchy itself. The irony being, of course, that neither the Church nor the mythologized “West” need some outside incursion of “woke pluralistic moralism” or sub-equatorial migration to seal its ignominious fate—it’s doing a bang up job all on its own.
Let’s dig in (while the body’s still fresh).
Moral Lappes
First, a little recent history: back in 2013, two months after Catholicism began receiving uncharacteristically positive media coverage (and history) for electing the first Pope from Latin America, the pastor of a conservative parish serving military families in Washington State made a showy gambit to reclaim the Church’s bigoted bona fides. Reacting to recently enacted LGBT+ inclusion policies of the Boy Scouts of America, Fr. Derek Lappe of Our Lady Star of the Sea Church in Bremerton, WA, launched into a homophobic screed on his parish website (since removed but archived here), firing off a litany of junk science and bad faith takes, including characterizing same-sex attraction as an acquired trait (an assertion unsupported by Church Teaching) and attributing it to such factors as smothering mothers and distant fathers (who hurt you, Derek?). The incident unsurprisingly made “back in the hate saddle” national headlines. Apart from being utter horseshit, the juxtaposition of Lappe’s manly-festo with the commencement of Francis’ benevolent grandpa papacy proved an early glimpse of the fault lines which would plague the Church over the next decade.
Two months after Lappe’s logical lapses, Francis was himself in the news for LGBTQ+ issues, (shockingly, somehow) channeling Jesus’ “Who am I to judge?” comportment towards rumors of gay priests in the Vatican. But it was in late November of that year, with his inaugural apostolic exhortation, that the Pope would really rile up the holy city fathers (who cluck their tongues, stroke their beards, and talk about “What’s to be done with this Jorge Bergoglio?”). Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel) emphasizes acting with the same goodwill and compassion popularized by that aforementioned hippie love guru from Nazareth, an apparent act of heresy judging by conservative reaction. It also cribs heavily from the Latin American (re: commie Global South!) Bishops’ Aparecida document (which then-Cardinal Bergoglio helped pen), and builds upon Vatican II theological and doctrinal underpinnings which clerics like Lappe and the US Bishops had spent the two preceding papacies rejecting.
Loud Boys
Ten years later, the culminating nexus of Western cultural decline histrionics and gay panic is epitomized, per usual, by malevolent malefactor Bishop Robert Barron. In an article from tradcath birdcage liner the National Catholic Register, Bobby the Bish recently lauded Hillsdale College, a queerphobic third-rate Bible study group, as “great defenders of the Western intellectual tradition.” Like Pinoski, Barron fears said tradition is “under assault today,” blathering on about “natural law principles,” the “moral tenets of Christianity”—common dog whistles among the christofascist axis of ecumenical numbskulls. (Hillsdale’s behavioral “guidelines” strike an impressively propagandist tone of feigned intellectual inquiry undergirded by hardcore totalitarian conformity.)
Elsewhere in the Barronverse, his Word on Fire email blast recently headlined with a nigh hysterical “won’t somebody please think of the children!?” diatribe against the inherent moral decay of [checks notes] the AIDS Healthcare Foundation promoting contraception. Penned by WOF staffer Michael Adams, it’s a wild read: extrapolating from an advertisement encouraging people to glove up if they’re not ready to have kids, Adams decries the “hedonism at the root of contraception” (I swear, these guys spend as much time on the fainting couch as they do pumping iron), screeching over the ad campaign’s use of “fear to manipulate their audience.” A tactic, of course, he himself employs in rallying readers to “fight” against “the twisted reality portrayed about children and the family.”
At first glance, contraception is a weird hill to die on in 2023. The author himself admits only 15% of US Catholics actually see anything “morally wrong” with its use, and both Pope Benedict and Pope Francis have ceded certain moral gray areas, particularly in cases of disease prevention (again, AIDS Healthcare Foundation). But beyond continuing the tradition of incubating the vocational Petri dish in a warm, moist stew of familial overexertion and rampant homophobia, Adams is tapping directly into the same “death of the West and masculinity” defense mechanisms preferred by Lappe (check out his parish’s insanely misogynistic dress code) and Bishop “The Wokes Are Coming for Your Morals and Manhood” Barron himself. Because the real victim, in their tearful male eyes, is not “the family” or “moral virtue,” but the power of men like them to weaponize sexuality and child-rearing against women, queer people and the other-ized poor. (Gee, I’m so glad they’re gonna start making this stuff for kids now.)
Et tu, Jorge?
I wish I could say Pope Francis was helping at this point. Instead, while this “Jesuit cardinal from Buenos Aires” is still hailed as bringing an “outsider” sentiment to the notoriously Western European Vatican hierarchy, ten years into his papacy the seams are starting to show. Specifically, for all of Francis’ “smell of the sheep,” anti-colonial sensibilities, he’s apparently not immune to a certain level of imperial nostalgia and culture war brain rot. During his recent Hungarian peace tour, for instance, he launched into a bizarre, Barron-esque aside on (deep breath) “forms of ‘ideological colonization’ that would cancel differences, as in the case of the so-called gender theory, or that would place before the reality of life reductive concepts of freedom, for example by vaunting as progress a senseless ‘right to abortion,’ which is always a tragic defeat.”
Admittedly, it’s hard to critique Francis’ argument because I’m not entirely confident I actually know what the hell he’s talking about. But whatever the Holy Father’s intent was here, his remarks go far beyond any notion of Church as “neither left nor right.” Ignoring the utter gall of a literal Roman monarch presenting his worldwide religio-social empire as the victim of some sort of reverse-colonization, his catty allusions to cancel culture, gender identity and bait-and-switch liberal progressivism echo the grumblings of his most ardent tradcath online dissenters. All of which, at the very least, further muddies his already convoluted, fence-straddling sexual ethics—especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ acceptance.
To be fair, the Pope’s highwire non-discrimination and moral judgment balancing act is fully consistent with Church Teaching. It’s just that doctrine itself is as morally bereft and intellectually disingenuous as, say, allowing for a “just” war or carving a death penalty-sized hole in the seamless garment of life. Because you can’t admit you “don’t know” where same-sex attraction comes from (as the Catechism does) yet preclude its coming from God, just as you can’t decry anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination while doing exactly that in your own Catholic schools. Unless, of course, your true intent is just to split the difference: merely project an elevated air of compassion and scientific sophistication while clinging fast to your oxidized, cruciform broadsword.
Canny Coakley
Take Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City. As reported by National Catholic Reporter, his recent pastoral letter on the “Catholic response to gender dysphoria” utilizes the explicitly Pope-y language of love, mercy and transformation to ultimately tell transgender people they’re just plain cuckoo. For instance, he evokes the Holy Father’s image of the Church as a “field hospital,” which I guess in his mind makes it somehow “pastoral” to compare gender dysphoria to drug addiction; he acknowledges a level of “suffering” in feeling “a lack of congruity between one's sex and gender,” while still falsely implying that medical transition causes the relatively higher rates of suicide among transgender people (as opposed to the bullying and familial rejection to which he later alludes yet fails to attribute as contributing factors).
Tellingly, Coakley notes that “Most of us [working in the Church] will not directly accompany someone struggling with gender dysphoria.” Which makes sense given only about 0.5% of adults and 1.4% of youth identify as transgender in the US, and most of them wouldn’t go near a Catholic Church if a comet were hurtling towards Earth. All of this, then, amounts to little more than a kinder, gentler brand of paranoid bigotry (which, to be clear, kills people). These guys don’t seem to care if the scope of the issue matches their obsessive, relentless rhetorical offensive, just as they don’t care how science or even their own intellectual tradition might instruct them in engaging. They just want to control the moral terms of a society clearly racing past them on the actual Way of Christ. (In another revealing moment, Coakley asserts that “Jesus reaffirms for us that there are two sexes designed by God” while offering literally zero Scriptural evidence to support this.)
Sins of Commission
At this point, it might help to recall Jesus’ Mark 7 admonishment regarding defilement from within as opposed to without. ‘Cause here’s the kicker: while all these holy men clutch their pearls over imagined-depravities, tilt at cancel culture windmills, and assemble their doomed gender identity committees, the Church’s actual efforts to plug the sinkhole of sexual malfeasance rotting its greco-roman columns from the core remain mired in the clerical, curial swamp.
Following a slate of high-profile resignations from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (Tutela Minorum), NCR published a scathing exposé on the current state of the Pope’s anti-abuse accountability efforts. Among other things, the article chronicles how the Commission Secretary, Oblate Father Andrew Small, maneuvered within the Vatican to secure a swanky 16th Century palazzo as the group’s offices (which he nauseatingly terms a “palace of survivors”). Small’s prior claim to fame include a decade-long stint running the Pontifical Mission Societies of the United States into the financial ground, and is here described by one former commission member as wholly unequipped and borderline incompetent. In terms of the broader endeavor, another former commission member and survivor names feet-dragging by the famously corrupt, reform-averse Vatican Curia as the primary roadblock to implementing the Commission’s recommendations.
In short, the entire project has been predictably buried in the same heaping piles of egotistical recalcitrance undergirding the Church’s aggrieved cultural derangement. And this is the true cultural and religious detritus: that entitled, ravenous quest to occupy, control and conquer every imaginable space and sphere taken to its natural, cannibalistic conclusions. It’s the hyper-masculine posturing whose perceived dissolution Barron, Lappe and a million other embittered, unsubstantial white men so bemoan: alive, unwell, and strangling people to death on the daily commute. Western decline, indeed.
Justifiably Aggrieved,
G. Fault