Rod Dreher's Blog, page 57

Dear Pope Francis

A reader in Spain passes on this open letter to Pope Francis by a Cuban Catholic called Maria Victoria Olavarrieta. Read the Spanish original here. The Google Translate version is below:

Cuban Catholics, since the protests began in Cuba, are waiting for you to raise your voice. It hurts a lot that while they repress the people who took to the streets asking for freedom, you have words to congratulate Argentina’s triumph in the Copa América, talk about plastic waste in the seas, but have not made a public prayer for the dead, the detainees, the disappeared and all those who are frightened in their homes throughout our country.

In the seas of Cuba, Holiness, in addition to plastic, lie the remains of the many Cubans who have drowned trying to escape from the great prison that the Castros turned my country into.

Our church has been persecuted, threatened, watched, penetrated by state security agents. At the moment we have a missing seminarian, Rafael Cruz Débora. If the Cuban bishops are afraid to speak out, to stand on the side of the people, I understand them, we do not know the threats that have been made to them, but you, with the immunity that your hierarchy confers on you, can speak up and defend us.

Yesterday, in Havana, they tried to recruit a young man who had already completed compulsory military service, to train him to beat up protesters. They entered his home, threatened him in front of his parents and because the boy refused, they made him sign a letter saying that he did not go where the revolution needed him, and warned him that when all this happened, he would go to prison.

That was yesterday, today they are being dragged away, without asking anything. Parents with children of military age are terrified.

You told young people:  … “Fight for your dreams, but dream big, don’t stop dreaming.” Young Cubans who were born in dictatorship, who have been indoctrinated, educated in atheistic schools, in a one-party society, who have grown up, some eating and dressing with the help of their families in exile and others in utter misery, they are dreaming of seeing their country free. You invited them to dream, and now that they are being killed for shouting their dream, you are silent.

You asked your shepherds to smell like sheep. Of the Cuban priests who have openly sided with the people, some are being beaten by the police, detained and silenced by their bishops who fear for their lives. And about the government’s harassment of the bishops, you who are the Pope should know more than I do.

How it hurts, Father, the Cuban nuns and priests with whom I have been able to speak that you look the other way. Today a Cuban nun told me that she could not conceive that you did not have a few words for Cuba at this time when the whole world is talking about the abuses of the regime. And very quietly, her voice cracking with pain, almost as if speaking to herself, she whispered: “Someday he will have to confront the Lord.”

Holiness, you know the message of the Virgin of Fatima. Communism must be very bad, when among all the bad things in the world, our Mother wanted to leave instructions on how we could prevent that evil from spreading throughout the world.

I have had many Venezuelan students, and I have seen the suffering of their parents because you kept silent when the students were murdered in the streets of Caracas. People are starving in Venezuela and you do not publicly condemn those responsible.

Blood has run in Nicaragua, and the Pope talks about everything, but you have no opinion about the crimes of the dictators of these three sister tyrannies.

Holy Father, Christendom does not need a social leader or a diplomat. We want a Pastor, a firm stone where the church can be sustained. The vicar of Christ on earth must not discriminate against his sheep. The sheep victims of communist regimes, we feel like we are their black sheep.

You always ask us to pray for you. I ask you to pray and act so that no more people die in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.

I would have liked to write to you in a different tone. In all my articles where I mention you I have always defended you. But today I want to be the voice of Cuban mothers, who are watching their children go hungry, who do not have medicine, I want to present the pain of the grandmothers whose grandchildren were shot shouting “Long live Christ the King”, the shame of the parents who cannot support their children with the fruit of their work and live badly waiting for the remittances sent by their relatives abroad.

I present the torture of political prisoners, the hatred of brother against brother that the Castros sowed, the elderly who saw the family they created depart and died without ever seeing their children and grandchildren again.

It cries out to heaven that this July 13, at the same time that we remembered the children, women and men who died drowned in the tugboat “13 de marzo” that the Cuban government sank in the high seas, we had to cure, without having anything, the wounds that the police and their dogs caused to peaceful demonstrators in many towns and cities of Cuba.

We Cubans feel abandoned to our fate. In 62 years we have not been able to free ourselves. Today we are facing an armed force, without leaders and even now, orphans of the Pope.

Pope Francis, forgive me if I have offended you, but I have had to choose between the respectful acquiescence due to a bishop and the defense of the victims of communism. It hurts me to be told that you are a communist pope. Communism destroys the morals of the peoples, their religion, their hope.

Yesterday in Miami, four Daughters of Charity came out to protest in the streets, along with the people, some of them elderly. Sister Consuelo, from Mexico and Sister Elvira, Sister Reinelda and Sister Rafaela, Cuban. Among the people I heard people say: There is no Pope, but there are nuns! Christ is with us!

Help us, Father.

I keep praying for you.

 

 

 

The post Dear Pope Francis appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pegasus And ‘The End Of Privacy’

Very big news in Europe right now:

A leak of phone data suggests human rights lawyers, activists and dissidents across the globe were selected as possible candidates for invasive surveillance through their phones.

Their mobile phone numbers appeared in leaked records, indicating they were selected prior to possible surveillance targeting by governmental clients of the Israeli company NSO Group, which developed the Pegasus spyware.

The records were obtained by the nonprofit organisation Forbidden Stories and shared with a consortium of media outlets including the Guardian.

NSO has repeatedly said Pegasus, which can access all data on a target’s device as well as turn it into an audio or video recorder, is meant for use only against terrorists and serious criminals.

The selection of activists, dissidents and journalists by NSO clients paints a very different picture, though one that campaigners will say was grimly predictable given the tool has been sold to some of the world’s most repressive regimes.

Take a look at this short Guardian explainer — it’s absolutely chilling. The reporter says that this software means the end of privacy for anyone targeted by it:

Countries in Africa, Asia, Central America took part. Also, I deeply regret to say, Hungary:

In Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s government stands accused of using NSO’s hacking software against journalists, opposition MPs said they would convene an extraordinary meeting of parliament’s national security committee to discuss the allegations.

“If any part of this is true, even half of it, it’s one of the deepest national security scandals I have seen,” said opposition MP Péter Ungár, who sits on the committee.

In response, Hungary’s deputy prime minister, Katalin Novák, said she “would not like to comment on press rumours”, while the foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, said Hungarian foreign intelligence did not use Pegasus, and he was “not aware” as to whether domestic agencies used it.

European leaders also voiced anxiety about the deployment of NSO in Europe, with one calling for MEPs to hold their own inquiry. “No more ‘deeply concerned’… the EU has a dictatorship growing inside of it,” wrote the MEP, former Belgian prime minister and longtime Orbán critic, Guy Verhofstadt, on Twitter, in response to the Pegasus project allegations. “We need a full inquiry by the European parliament!”

“Freedom of the press is a core value of the European Union,” said the European Commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, on Monday while on a visit to Prague. She said if the allegations were true, “it is completely unacceptable”.

This is terrible news for a couple of reasons. First, if true, it’s awful on its face: no government should be doing this, and certainly not a government in a free country like Hungary. Period. Full stop.

Second, the Orban government did not need this scandal at this moment, with a difficult election on the horizon, and while it’s under pressure from the EU for its entirely defensible law governing sex and sexuality information to minors.

Here is a clip (translated via Google) from a Czech investigative website, interviewing a Hungarian journalist who was allegedly spied on by his government using Pegasus:

We have published an article on how different governments are tapping mobile phones around the world. It involved fifty countries. You were one of the victims. Why you?

First of all, I would like to emphasize that there were more than one hundred and eighty journalists who were identified as victims of surveillance and wiretapping. In my case, we can talk about happiness, because my observation was not followed by any imprisonment or physical harassment. I’m really grateful for that. I read stories about what happened to other journalists who were followed by more drastic methods or ended up in prison.

Years ago, I received a ” friendly warning ” that I could be monitored from time to time because I was dealing with sensitive topics and writing articles that the government did not like. Someone in Hungary seems to have targeted me and marked me as a target for Pegasus spyware tracking.

It is quite obvious that this happened because of my journalistic work. There is also evidence that the same tracking program was used on my Direkt colleague András Szabo. Which means that the results of our investigative work have attracted the attention of someone of high rank.

You mentioned that you received several friendly warnings from your sources. Do you know exactly when the monitoring took place?

I received several types of warnings. At the end of 2015, my closest friend, colleague and very good journalist was long blackmailed by the Hungarian secret services. They were trying to find some dirt on him that they could use to blackmail. They wanted him to work with them and divulge his resources. Which he refused and he managed to stop the pressure. That was in 2015 and 2016. Since I was a close friend of mine, I believe I was also part of this monitoring.

In the following years, there were cases where I was to meet, for example, a government source, and he sent me a message through an intermediary that we would not meet, because I was being watched and he did not want to be compromised by this meeting. Or I got a friendly warning that I should watch my phone. It even happened that my source told me that the Hungarian government can hack encrypted applications such as Signal. Only now do I really know what these reports meant. They came at a time when I was actually being watched using Pegasus software. It seemed ridiculous to me then. I didn’t know if it was true or if my sources were just very paranoid.

Your sources warned you, but didn’t you think that someone could break the encrypted Signal? 

Yes, I’m not a very technical type. (laughs) I admire people who understand technology. But what these people told me was that the only way to compromise any correspondence on the encrypted channel was to hack the terminal. And the end device was supposed to be my cell phone, which I always had with me. Therefore, I did not click on any suspicious links. Now I know it’s not enough that in the case of Pegasus software, I can’t really do anything for my safety.

More from the Czech source, on how Pegasus works:

Although the Pegasus project revealed the unfair practices of the NSO Group, it presents only one of the many players in the field of surveillance and spy technology. However, based on an annual profit of around a quarter of a billion US dollars and more than 700 employees, the company can be said to be one of the largest in this field. It was founded in 2010 by two friends with the aim of providing a paid service or hacking into mobile phones for money.

As with most private companies producing spy software, the most significant currency of the NSO Group is the so-called “zero-day exploits” – ie finding errors in the operating program of phones or applications through which it can be hacked into the phone. Pegasus and similar spy technologies are extremely effective precisely because the phone attacks unnoticed without its user having to click on a link, for example.

It is these tools that provide governments with a way around bypassing applications specifically designed for secure, encrypted communications, such as Signal or WhatsApp, that should prevent surveillance. However, as soon as the spy software gets into the phone, the customer gets access to these – normally normally secure – applications and, of course, to all other data – e-mails, photos, contacts, or even individual keystrokes. In addition, the phones have microphones and cameras that the Pegasus can freely turn on and off, making them de facto remote control recorders.

“If you want to break into encrypted communication, all you have to do is on one side, either the recipient or the sender,” explains Claudio Guarnieri, head of Amnesty International’s Security Lab technology center. And that’s exactly what Pegasus is doing. “A Pegasus can do more with a device than its own user. For example, when Signal encrypts messages, a third party can use the microphone to record or take screenshots so that the conversation can be read by someone later.

The model used by the NSO Group is so successful because the company retains a plethora of various errors and gaps in the code of mobile applications – so as soon as the application or phone manufacturer (Apple, Google, etc.) corrects the error, the company responds immediately by using other errors or using other “zero-day exploits”. In this way, companies producing spy technology always stay one step ahead of large technology companies. According to Guarnieri, such a company has a team of professionals who specifically search for systems and application vulnerabilities. In addition, various externs often work with companies, looking for potential security gaps on their own and then selling their discoveries.

Again, this has been happening all over the world. Not, so far as we know, in America — but that doesn’t mean America has nothing to do with it. From the Washington Post:

The company’s attempts to secure U.S. contracts appear to have been unsuccessful, with federal and local law enforcement agency representatives saying in emails and interviews that they balked at its Pegasus spyware tool’s million-dollar price tag.

But an influential network of Washington consultants, lawyers, lobbyists and other prominent personalities have earned money from the company, its parent company or its founders, a Washington Post review of government and company filings shows. Those beneficiaries include some of the most powerful members of the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.

Among those who’ve received payments from NSO or related companies are former chiefs of the Homeland Security and Justice departments, as well as Washington’s most prestigious law and public-relations firms, the public filings show.

These political heavyweights have defended NSO’s spy tool as an invaluable weapon against terrorists and human traffickers, and they have worked to soften the public image of a company accused in a federal lawsuit of helping spy on allies of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi before his grisly murder in 2018. Reuters reported last year that FBI agents were investigating NSO’s role in targeting Americans, though the FBI has not confirmed that report. The agency declined to comment for this article.

In a statement to The Post, NSO said it had retained “top U.S. counsels” to help support its “life-saving mission” but declined to name its government customers or answer questions about its pursuit of contracts inside the United States.

The company said its “products, sold to vetted foreign governments, cannot be used to conduct cybersurveillance within the United States, and no foreign customer has ever been granted technology that would enable them to access phones with U.S. numbers.”

NSO, however, continues to look for opportunities in the United States. In Justice Department foreign-agent filings last month, the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman said it had signed a six-month contract, at $75,000 a month, to advise NSO on “potential business partners,” “U.S. government procurement regulations” and “assistance with education of government officials about NSO’s technology.” Two law firm employees on the account, Brian Finch and Nicole Steinberg, advise clients on the Safety Act, a DHS program offering “liability protections to sellers of qualified anti-terrorism technologies.” The firm and the two attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.

These people should be driven out of business. But you know they won’t be. Let’s keep in mind that according to the Snowden revelations, the US Government’s National Security Agency already has the capability to do what Pegasus does. Pegasus makes that capability available to anyone who buys its software. It is an incredibly destabilizing technology.

Meanwhile, there is related news about the US Government’s spying on dissidents:

The Pentagon is reportedly working with an extremism analysis company that considers the web search “the truth about Black Lives Matter” and others to be signs of interest in or engagement with White supremacism.

According to Defense One, the contractor Moonshot CVE, which has ties to the Obama Foundation, is working on data that would identify which military bases and branches have the most troops searching for domestic extremist content. While that particular project’s contours are unclear, the company previously released a June report, in conjunction with the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League, on purported “White supremacy trends in the United States.”

In it, the U.K.-based company said it “monitored a list of almost 1,600 indicators of interest in or engagement with White supremacism, focused specifically on anti-Black and anti-Semitic narratives being used by extremist groups.”

As examples, it listed the search phrases “George Floyd deserved to die,” “Jews will not replace us” and “the truth about black lives matter.”

For “the truth about black lives matter,” the group said: “This search suggests that the BLM movement has nefarious motives, and is a disinformation narrative perpetuated by White supremacist groups to weaponize anti-BLM sentiment.”

You got that? To suspect that Black Lives Matter has “nefarious motives” is to signal to the Pentagon that you might be a white supremacist. More:

It’s unclear why the Pentagon chose a U.K.-based company for monitoring purported U.S. extremism. The Center for Security Policy raised concerns about the company in an article last month in which it highlighted how Moonshot CEO Vidhya Ramalingam served as a leader in the Obama Foundation’s Europe program.

She also participated in a panel hosted by the highly controversial Southern Poverty Law Center and has ties to other left-leaning organizations. As the Center for Security Policy notes, she authored a paper that acknowledged financial support from Open Society Foundation, the group founded by liberal billionaire George Soros.

This is the excuse every snoop uses: that they’re doing it for the Good.

Congress should pass a law immediately banning the sale of Pegasus software in the US, or by any US-based entity, private or public. However, I don’t think they will do it. Too many powerful interests, both left and right, wanting that Ring of Power, certain that they would use it for the Good.

Like I’ve been saying, we have to prepare to live under a soft totalitarian regime. It seems inevitable to me. In a polarized society, all you have to do is convince half the country that this technology is necessary to protect the Good People from the Bad People. I mean, look, nothing is fated, but if Snowden’s revelations didn’t marshal the public to stop this stuff, what will?

The post Pegasus And ‘The End Of Privacy’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘What Is Happening To America?’

That’s the question I keep getting in my European travels. People here are worried. It looks to them like we are losing our collective mind. It certainly seems that way to me.

I had coffee this morning at the Scruton coffeeshop with Steve Hayward and his wife Allison. We talked about the astonishing, and astonishingly swift, breakdown of our country. I told them a story I’ve mentioned in this space on a number of occasions. I’ll repeat it here, in brief, for those who haven’t heard it.

On September 11, 2002, I accompanied a friend to Ground Zero for the one-year commemoration of the 9/11 attack. At just the moment when the first plane hit a year earlier, a hellacious wind began to blow from the direction that plane had flown. There was a hurricane hundreds of miles offshore, which explains the source of the gale, but the timing was extremely eerie. I know the timing because I was standing there outside the perimeter of Ground Zero, looking at my watch when the wind started. Here’s a photo I found online of Ground Zero in the wind that day:

It blew ferociously all morning, as they read each name of the 9/11 dead aloud. At some point later in the morning, I went into Holy Trinity Wall Street for a memorial service conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The wind was still howling outside. During the service, we heard the bells ring at next-door Ground Zero, signaling that the final name had been read. When we went back out, the wind had stopped. I have no idea when it stopped, precisely, but I have my suspicions.

Later in the day, I received a frantic call from the friend with whom I had walked down to Ground Zero. She asked me to hurry over to her place. When I got there, she showed me into her home office, and pointed to something hanging on the wall. It was a small American flag, some sort of antique — thin, with a smaller number of stars than usual. It must have been an early 19th century artifact. It was torn down the middle.

“That tear wasn’t there this morning,” she said. She told me she had had that antique framed under glass for years. No one had touched it. When she returned from Ground Zero, it had been rended down the middle.

The obvious touchstone here is the veil in the Hebrew Temple that Scripture tells us tore in half when Jesus died. That week, I told a well-known Catholic priest about the torn flag, and asked him what he thought it meant. He didn’t venture a guess, but he did say it seemed very ominous indeed. I remember thinking at the time that it was a prophecy about God lifting his hand from our nation. But I didn’t want to believe that. We were marching towards war with Iraq — a war that I supported. Surely this couldn’t be a sign of things to come. That’s what I wanted to believe back then.

Looking back on that today, 19 years later, with our country tearing itself apart, I can’t help but see it as a prophetic sign. Our country is dismantling itself in bizarre ways. Take the NFL’s decision to play “Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing,” also known as the Black National Anthem, before all games this fall. That’s a beautiful song, but the NFL is deploying it in a nakedly political way. As I have written in Live Not By Lies, and many times on this blog, the essence of totalitarianism involves making everything in society political — and that includes cultural politics.

You can’t just play football anymore. You have to make it an occasion of racial consciousness. It becomes ever more difficult to find a part of our common life that hasn’t been infused with wokeness, either of the racial or the LGBT kind.

Rich Lowry writes:

That the NFL has swung drastically the other way is a sign that a new national identity is emerging to supplant the old. This new American identity is, of course, getting pushed by every lever of elite culture. It is defined by “anti-racism” instead of the American creed, Black Lives Matter instead of, say, the American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars, and new rituals, holidays, and heroes instead of ones that have been long established and, to this point, uncontroversial.

The national anthem? It will now compete with the black national anthem and, by implication, risks becoming the “white” national anthem.

Juneteenth is worthy of commemoration but is being set up as a competitor holiday to July 4.

1776, that most iconic year, is under pressure from 1619.

Statues of American legends such as the celebrated explorers Lewis and Clark, and Roger Clark, “Conqueror of the Old Northwest,” were removed in a single day in Charlottesville, Va., the latest instance of a remorseless iconoclasm sweeping the land.

And so on.

Why does it matter? A nation is to a large extent defined by its symbols and associations, the holidays, rituals, heroes, and history — the mystic chords of memory — that constitute its collective self-understanding. This is how a nation tells itself what it is and what its priorities should be.

We are becoming two (at least) countries, and make no mistake, this is a project being driven by American elites and their soft totalitarianism. How can these fools possibly believe that this kind of thing makes us a stronger country? Even in the most literal sense, this isn’t true:

A scathing new report commissioned by members of Congress has claimed that the Navy’s surface warfare forces have systemic training and leadership issues, including a focus on diversity that overshadows basic readiness skills.

The report prepared by Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle and Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, both retired, came in response to recent Naval disasters, including the burning of the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego, two collisions involving Navy ships in the Pacific and the surrender of two small craft to Iran.

The authors conducted hour-long interviews with 77 current and retired Navy officers, offering them anonymity to identify issues they wouldn’t feel comfortable raising in the chain of command.

The report found that a staggering 94 percent of the subjects believed the recent Naval disasters were ‘part of a broader problem in Navy culture or leadership.’

‘I guarantee you every unit in the Navy is up to speed on their diversity training. I’m sorry that I can’t say the same of their ship handling training,’ said one recently retired senior enlisted leader.

A military that is losing the ability to defend a country that elites are teaching us is not worth defending. Twenty years ago, could you have imagined it? Yet here we are.

UPDATE: Reader Dragnet comments:

The point is that they couldn’t raise critical readiness issues that are caused by excessive deference to the diversity agenda without destroying their careers—that alone explains the need for anonymity. The “much deeper problem” here is that you can’t be honest about what’s destroying readiness (ie, the woke agenda) and still advance in the armed forces.

Yes, it’s HBO’s “Chernobyl”. In the Soviet Union, nobody could talk about actual problems for fear of stepping on ideological land mines. Thus, the meltdown. We are risking the same thing here. If I worked in a newsroom today, I would fear pointing out serious problems in the paper’s operations if doing so made me likely to lose my job for being a suspected racist, homophobe, bigot, whatever. This is the mentality in corporate America now, and across our institutions. We know where this is going. When people could lose everything simply for telling the truth, you have created a system that prioritizes ideological correctness over reality. It will fail when reality catches up to it.Everybody needs to read historian Barbara Tuchman’s book The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.  It’s about how plain old human stupidity caused massive failures. Given my particular interests, the chapter on how six Renaissance popes sparked the Protestant Reformation was my favorite. She details how those popes were products of, and upholders of, a system in which they ignored signs of trouble. She writes:

Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly. While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.

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In Catholicism, Trads Are Not The Problem

From Facebook, this from a Catholic in the Diocese of Arlington, Va., which has a huge number of Traditional Latin Massgoers:

You are looking at the future of the Catholic Church in America in that photo. The TLM people are relatively tiny in number today, but let two or three more generations pass, and they will be in America as they are in France: a huge proportion of those who still go to mass; who still believe that stuff.

The late historian Robert Conquest had Three Laws of Politics. The second law was:

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

To which I add Dreher’s Religious Corollary To Conquest’s Second Law:

In this post-Christian age, any church not explicitly countercultural sooner or later dissolves.

Europe is America’s likely future in this regard. I think of what Father Cassian Folsom, then the prior of the Benedictines of Norcia, told me back in 2015, when we first met and I told him about the Benedict Option: that any family or Christian community that wants to survive what’s coming had better commit itself to doing some version of it. That is, some version of truly countercultural, disciplined Christian living. The powers of the anti-Christian culture are just too strong to resist by living as we have always done.

As I have said in this space many times, as a Catholic, I wasn’t part of a TLM community, but I was glad that they existed, because it was a blessing to have the old mass available to Catholics who preferred it. And they are some of those most committed to the faith — that is, counterculturally committed. If you’re a Latin mass Catholic, you are by definition countercultural. Yes, there’s some weirdness among the Trads, but there’s weirdness among all of us. Besides, ain’t nothin’ going on in a TLM community that can outdo the weird on display by this French Catholic priest:

I found this tweet about the power of TLM communities to transmit the substance of the Catholic faith to be interesting:

I’m an Orthodox Christian, but there are too few of us in the United States to be a significant force regarding the future of the country’s moral and spiritual health. That lies with Catholics and Evangelicals, the two largest Christian groupings. That the Catholic and Evangelical churches be healthy is is in my interest as an Orthodox Christian living as a tiny minority in a broader de-Christianizing culture. This is why it troubles me, as a non-Catholic, that Pope Francis has attacked the TLM and its adherents. It makes no sense at all, except as a spiteful last lash of the fiery whip of a destructive and dying generation of churchmen:

One of the reasons I was attracted to Catholicism as a young man was because of what I regarded as its stability. While the rest of the world was losing its mind, Catholicism was a solid rock, I thought. I was wrong, but that’s what I wanted to believe. I thought John Paul II was righting the ship. The fact that actual existing Catholicism in American parishes looked more like Mainline Protestantism than the Church I thought I had joined was something that bothered me, but I thought it could be avoided. And if things got too intolerable, there was always the TLM, somewhere. Anyway, things were looking up for the Catholic Church, after the near-miss of Vatican II.

Then came the scandal, which my faith didn’t survive. If it had, I doubt it would have been strong enough to withstand this pontificate. Catholicism is better off without me, I am certain, but I do hope and pray for reunification of the churches of East and West. I find that Catholics have an unrealistic idea of how likely that is; I did, as a Catholic, until I started seeing things from an Orthodox point of view, from within Orthodoxy. There are many more difficulties than I had imagined. One of them is liturgical instability. It is impossible to overstate how important this is to Orthodox Christians. The contempt Pope Francis demonstrates for the old mass — and therefore for venerable Christian traditions — is extremely off-putting to many Orthodox (even those who are more liberal on moral questions). I reckon that Francis’s move against the Latin mass is going to make the prospect of reunion with the East, already a long shot, less likely. Plus, at some point down the road, a pope who is today a young priest will reinstate the Tridentine rite, which will be a blessed event, but one that deals another blow to the stability of the Roman tradition.

All Francis had to do was to leave the old mass alone. If it had produced no fruit, it would have died out. If it produced good fruit — like in the photo above — well, why not allow it, especially in the West, where the faith is in such steep decline?

News broke as I was writing this that Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington has reversed his earlier banning of the Latin mass, and is now going to allow them to continue pending further study:

This is good news for the people of that diocese, including at St. Rita’s Church above. I hope for the sake of Catholicism, and for the long term good of Christianity in Europe and North America, that more bishops allow the TLM in their diocese. All of us Christians need to learn how to be robustly countercultural. Among the Catholics, Trads are doing it. True, they’re not always doing it with perfect charity — but then, who among us is in these polarizing times?

The post In Catholicism, Trads Are Not The Problem appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Et Tu, Francisce?’

My heart goes out to my Catholic friends who are suffering from Pope Francis’s outrageous abrogation of the Latin mass. When I was a Catholic, I was not a devotee of the Traditional Latin Mass, but I was very glad that TLM communities were part of the Church, and I could see real fruits from them. The only people who seemed to hate the TLM communities were liberal ideologues. They viewed the continued existence of the Tridentine mass as a threat to the glorious Vatican II revolution. It made no sense to me — rather, it made no morally defensible sense to me — for the Vatican to restrict the old mass.

The TLM is growing. Look at this story about the success of the FSSP parishes, which celebrate the TLM. Francis has all but killed this.

Here are some bracing lines from the liberal Jesuit commentator and Francis backer Father Tom Reese:

And among the clergy, Francis receives his greatest support from older priests, who are dying off, rather than younger ones who are the future of the church. … Finding young candidates for the priesthood, meanwhile, who support Francis and want to be celibate is like looking for Catholic unicorns …

Traditionalist Catholic Steve Skojec says, in part:

What was done today by this pope was an act of abuse — not just by him, but by all the wheedling bishops around the world who have been clamoring for this for the past 14 years. Francis isn’t a liturgy guy, but he is very much concerned about things that affect the balance of his power and the spread of his ideology. Nobody has opposed him more fiercely than traditionalists who are seeking to stay within the Church and under his legitimate authority while fighting his agenda where it goes astray. He made sure to send a signal, issuing this instruction on the very month of the anniversary of Summorum Pontificum. He is grinding their faces in it.

I don’t know what things will look like going forward from here. I only know that they will be an even bigger mess. Chaos in the Church has become the norm.

But for the pope who uses “Hagan Lio!” as battle cry — “make a mess!” — this should come as no surprise. This is in perfect conformity with the entirety of his malignant pontificate. And as the faithful repeat, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” the abusive shepherd God has allowed to be placed over them — a man who sees himself as the harbinger of a more merciful Church — will continue the merciless beatings.

My friend Irenist, a well-educated and faithful orthodox Catholic who loves the old mass, let loose with some absolutely scathing rhetoric about Pope Francis and beyond. I link to it not to endorse that rhetoric, but to show people what some of the most stalwart Catholics I know are thinking and feeling in the wake of Francis’s decision. Irenist’s fiery blasts are typical of what I’ve been reading on Trad Catholic Twitter.

Here’s an editorial by Rorate Caeli, the leading Catholic Trad site. The boldface emphasis is in the original:

As confident as we were in our sources forecasting today as the day of reckoning for Summorum Pontificum and the traditional Latin Mass as we know it, in the back of our minds we had hoped it was merely an unfounded rumor.  After all, Pope Benedict XVI is not only alive, but fully cognizant, dressed in a white cassock while living in the Vatican gardens.  To that end, would a sitting pope be so arrogant as to publicly humiliate the 94 year old pope emeritus?

Alas, the answer is yes.  Jorge Mario Bergoglio is without a doubt the most arrogant pope in the history of the Catholic Church.  From day one, if not before, it has always been about him — whatever the subject.  Labeled “humble” by the mainstream media due to token stunts such as carrying a bag and wearing polyester vestments, Bergoglio is in reality a man of vengeance.  A pope of vengeance.  An angry bitter Jesuit settling scores through vengeance.

What ought traditional Catholics to do in response to the latest attack on the Mass and all those who love tradition?  Simply put:  ignore it.  Ignore its message.  Ignore its motivation caused by pure hatred and vengeance. Keep calm and keep on going as if it does not even exist.

How can you do that and still be Catholic? How can you defy the Pope in good conscience, as if his order was never made? I honestly don’t know how one remains Catholic if that’s what one believes about the Pope and the exercise of his authority. The only truly stable thing within Catholicism of the last sixty years has been the papacy. If you cast that aside — and that’s what Rorate is calling for in effect here — what do you have left? If you defy the Pope, even in the name of Catholic orthodoxy, how are you not a de facto Protestant? How is that remotely tenable? Somebody needs to explain this to me.

It seems to me that some Trads are in the same place I was back in 2005 with regard to the faith. I found it impossible to believe — not just unpleasant to believe, but impossible to believe — that my salvation depended on being in communion with the Catholic bishops. I came to the conclusion that I had probably been wrong about papal infallibility, and about Catholic claims to exclusive authority. Protestantism was not an option for me, for historical reasons. That left Orthodoxy. I mourned losing my Catholicism for years, because it was extremely painful, but I eventually healed, and I thank God for my Orthodox faith, which is solid as a rock — but which I will not take for granted, as I once did my Catholic faith, and which I will never allow to become a primarily intellectual thing, as I did with my Catholicism.

That said, being Orthodox helped me understand why the Traditional Latin Mass matters so much to Catholic Trads. I came into the Catholic Church with the Novus Ordo — the new mass promulgated by Paul VI in 1970. I never knew any different. I never loved the liturgy itself; I only was grateful to it for producing the Eucharist. Years later, I attended some TLMs, but it just did not move me like it did others. I was a defender of the existence of the TLM, but it did not appeal to me.

The Orthodox Divine Liturgy — the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom — is a very different thing. The Orthodox typically celebrate it in the local language. My family discovered it at St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas. I had no idea that liturgy could be so beautiful and so reverent, that it could lift you out of yourself and place you in God’s presence. (Most Eastern Rite Catholics use this same liturgy, by the way.) Discovering genuinely beautiful, heart-shaking liturgy was a revelation to me. It was also a revelation to discover how small the priest was in the Divine Liturgy. The immensity of the liturgy dwarfed the figure of the priest, in a good way. You had the impression that you were being summoned to the presence of the All-Holy. To be sure, even in the shabby Novus Ordo, you are in the presence of the All-Holy. The difference is that the words and rituals of the Divine Liturgy reveals more fully Who is actually there in the Eucharist. It’s the difference between the King coming into a room with full ritual solemnity and pomp, and the King walking into the room wearing Dockers and a Polo shirt. It’s still the King, but in one instance you have been prepared to receive him as your sovereign, and in the other, not.

Anyway, however frustrated I might ever become with the Orthodox episcopate or priesthood, I would never, ever leave the Divine Liturgy. It, and the Eucharist at its center and summit, is the foundation of my Christian life. We are very, very blessed in the Orthodox Church that the bishops never, ever tamper with the liturgy. It’s simply Not Done. Well, yes, it has been tampered with before — it’s not the case that the liturgy was delivered in its current form to us through the hands of St. John Chrysostom — but the point is that Orthodox bishops are loath to tinker around with the liturgy. This is a safeguard against what has happened to Catholics since the Second Vatican Council, and boy, am I grateful for it.

Last night, when I got the Francis news, I thought about how I would feel if the Orthodox bishops took away the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and replaced it with an ersatz, stripped-down modern liturgy, then forbade the celebration of the Chrysostom liturgy without the prior permission of bishops (which is not likely to be given). I would be incandescently angry. I would be filled with contempt for the bishops, even if it was their right to do what they did. It would call into question, in my mind, their authority. Which, to judge by what I’m reading on Trad Catholic Twitter, and on Trad websites, is what Pope Francis has done to himself in the eyes of some of the most faithful Catholics on earth.

UPDATE: A priest e-mails:

By his own admission the Pope has made his decision  for prudential reasons, so there is no way this is an infallible pronouncement. One can dissent from his decision without committing heresy. So one can continue to hold the Catholic faith.By refusing an administrative act one could be in schism the Pope, but that’s not the same as leaving the Catholic faith.Such a situation is complicated, of course, but centuries ago there were 3 guys claiming to be Pope and yet everyone was still holding to the Catholic faith.  The Pope is visible head of the Church, but he’s not he Church or the Faith.

By the way, I changed the title to make the Latin more correct. Thanks to those Latinists who alerted me to my mistake.UPDATE.2: Amy Welborn:

It seems pretty simple to me:

A number of bishops wanted the tools to restrict celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, and Pope Francis gave it to them.

There you go.

I mean, we can talk history, ecclesiology, theology and liturgy all day long, but that’s about as basic as it gets or needs to be. I was there. Well, not literally, but I can tell you that this generation of clergy and church activists – now maybe from their late 60’s on up – were formed in a way that they cannot envision a healthy Church in which the TLM is still a part. At all. I mean – it’s inconceivable and ridiculous in that generation’s minds. It’s almost as if they can’t believe they’re still having to deal with this, amiright?

What is striking, if not at all surprising, is the, shall we say, flexible use of various concepts in this document and letter, since that flexibility is characteristic of most people in positions of power and yes, of this papacy.

In short: a papacy that, in words, emphasizes synodality, accompaniment, listening, dialogue outreach to the margins and consistently condemns “clericalism” – has issued a document that embodies a rigid approach to the issue, and then restricts, limits and directs more power, ultimately, to Rome.

And shows no evidence of actually “listening” to anyone except bishops who are annoyed by the TLM and TLM adherents who conveniently fit the “divisive” narrative.

Shows no interest in generously and accompanying those who find nourishment in the TLM and may find themselves at the margins because of it.

Shows no interest in exploring any fruits of this aspect of Catholic life or even posing the question of how the “Spirit might be moving” in it.

*****

There are a number of concerning and odd aspects to this document – but they are of a piece with what we’ve come to expect: presentism, catchphrases and a lack of engagement with theology, tradition or history at a deep level.

But perhaps the most startling is the demand that TLMs not take place in “parochial churches.”

§ 2. is to designate one or more locations where the faithful adherents of these groups may gather for the eucharistic celebration (not however in the parochial churches and without the erection of new personal parishes);

No one seems to really understand what this means. It’s pretty terrible if it means what it seems to – you’re not supposed to have the TLM in a parish church?

But it’s expressive of the gist of the entire document: push TLM goers out of the mainstream. To, yes, the margins.

(So when they are on the margins again, does that mean they can get priority? Because they’re on the margins?)

And here’s the injustice of this, really:

In the United States, at least, there has been great growth in the TLM in diocesan parishes. Not everywhere – because of course, it’s dependent on bishops – but it’s certainly there. And it’s been emphasized over and over again that this is a good thing, and it’s certainly what’s implied in Benedict’s original decree. Mutual enrichment and all that. And thousands of Catholics, many of them young with growing families, have been faithful to this – and have engaged their interest and followed their pull to the TLM by sticking with diocesan and approved religious orders’ celebrations of the Mass and communities.

And now they are being told – nice try. You did what you were told, but that actually wasn’t what we wanted all along. Keep going. Maybe you can rent out the VFW social hall and have Mass there. Or, cemeteries. Cemeteries are nice.

Because, unity!

Oh, and because, pastoral, too. Much, much pastoral.

This is another example of liberals not holding to their own principles. The American Booksellers Association is against banning books, but abases itself for having recommended an “anti-trans” book. Pope Francis is all about “going to the margins” — except when it’s time to exile Catholics he doesn’t like to the margins. It’s a scam.

UPDATE.3: A reader in England sends this from the Catholic Diocese of Clifton (Bristol):

Meanwhile, also in that diocese:

 

The fact that a Roman pontiff has effectively banned Latin masses, but tolerates LGBT masses, and celebrates the pro-LGBT ministry of his fellow Jesuit James Martin, is something that was unthinkable in the Catholic Church only a short time ago.

You really have to read Tim Stanley’s absolutely blistering response to the Pope’s action, published in The Spectator. Excerpts:

Why does this matter for Catholics and non-Catholics alike? Because it’s a lesson in how liberalism in this gerontocratic, Brezhnev-esque stage behaves – utterly intolerant of anyone who breaks from the party line. It is not enough to be quiet or even submit. You must conform.

Liberalism once promoted diversity; now it is in power, it has hardened into orthodoxy.

Francis’ case is flawed on three levels. First, he is known as the Pope of mercy, but this is decidedly unmerciful to those parts of his flock who love the Old Rite. He routinely attacks rigidity in the faithful, meaning conservatism, but can be as rigid as steel. He has pushed for a more decentralised church but is now invading people’s very consciences. And he says he wants unity, but his decree is most likely to promote schism. In short: this is a classic case of hypocrisy, of a politician being everything they accuse their opposition of.

More:

They will also leave the wider world scratching its head in confusion. Why, in the middle of a pandemic – with child abuse dogging the church and communist China suppressing religion – launch a crusade against a pretty liturgy that is said in very few places and does no harm to anyone? Because liturgical wars, like debates over art or architecture, are a cover for ideological obsession. We betray ourselves by our priorities.

Liberalism once promoted diversity; now it is in power, it has hardened into orthodoxy, a design for life that we must all follow. The conservatives used to run the Church and were often nasty with it, that’s true: but they lost the war. Now that they are out of power, all they want is the right to be left alone. Well, they can’t have it, and it’s naive to think peace is an option. The reason why what Francis has done matters is because some day the kind of liberalism he embodies will come for you — for the simple, sweet thing you were doing that wasn’t bothering anyone else but, by its mere existence, was an existential threat to the governing regime. You are next.

Read it all.He’s right: the Left today can’t stop talking about diversity, but diversity is the last thing they actually want.

The post ‘Et Tu, Francisce?’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Et Tu, Franciscus?’

My heart goes out to my Catholic friends who are suffering from Pope Francis’s outrageous abrogation of the Latin mass. When I was a Catholic, I was not a devotee of the Traditional Latin Mass, but I was very glad that TLM communities were part of the Church, and I could see real fruits from them. The only people who seemed to hate the TLM communities were liberal ideologues. They viewed the continued existence of the Tridentine mass as a threat to the glorious Vatican II revolution. It made no sense to me — rather, it made no morally defensible sense to me — for the Vatican to restrict the old mass.

The TLM is growing. Look at this story about the success of the FSSP parishes, which celebrate the TLM. Francis has all but killed this.

Here are some bracing lines from the liberal Jesuit commentator and Francis backer Father Tom Reese:

And among the clergy, Francis receives his greatest support from older priests, who are dying off, rather than younger ones who are the future of the church. … Finding young candidates for the priesthood, meanwhile, who support Francis and want to be celibate is like looking for Catholic unicorns …

Traditionalist Catholic Steve Skojec says, in part:

What was done today by this pope was an act of abuse — not just by him, but by all the wheedling bishops around the world who have been clamoring for this for the past 14 years. Francis isn’t a liturgy guy, but he is very much concerned about things that affect the balance of his power and the spread of his ideology. Nobody has opposed him more fiercely than traditionalists who are seeking to stay within the Church and under his legitimate authority while fighting his agenda where it goes astray. He made sure to send a signal, issuing this instruction on the very month of the anniversary of Summorum Pontificum. He is grinding their faces in it.

I don’t know what things will look like going forward from here. I only know that they will be an even bigger mess. Chaos in the Church has become the norm.

But for the pope who uses “Hagan Lio!” as battle cry — “make a mess!” — this should come as no surprise. This is in perfect conformity with the entirety of his malignant pontificate. And as the faithful repeat, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” the abusive shepherd God has allowed to be placed over them — a man who sees himself as the harbinger of a more merciful Church — will continue the merciless beatings.

My friend Irenist, a well-educated and faithful orthodox Catholic who loves the old mass, let loose with some absolutely scathing rhetoric about Pope Francis and beyond. I link to it not to endorse that rhetoric, but to show people what some of the most stalwart Catholics I know are thinking and feeling in the wake of Francis’s decision. Irenist’s fiery blasts are typical of what I’ve been reading on Trad Catholic Twitter.

Here’s an editorial by Rorate Caeli, the leading Catholic Trad site. The boldface emphasis is in the original:

As confident as we were in our sources forecasting today as the day of reckoning for Summorum Pontificum and the traditional Latin Mass as we know it, in the back of our minds we had hoped it was merely an unfounded rumor.  After all, Pope Benedict XVI is not only alive, but fully cognizant, dressed in a white cassock while living in the Vatican gardens.  To that end, would a sitting pope be so arrogant as to publicly humiliate the 94 year old pope emeritus?

Alas, the answer is yes.  Jorge Mario Bergoglio is without a doubt the most arrogant pope in the history of the Catholic Church.  From day one, if not before, it has always been about him — whatever the subject.  Labeled “humble” by the mainstream media due to token stunts such as carrying a bag and wearing polyester vestments, Bergoglio is in reality a man of vengeance.  A pope of vengeance.  An angry bitter Jesuit settling scores through vengeance.

What ought traditional Catholics to do in response to the latest attack on the Mass and all those who love tradition?  Simply put:  ignore it.  Ignore its message.  Ignore its motivation caused by pure hatred and vengeance. Keep calm and keep on going as if it does not even exist.

How can you do that and still be Catholic? How can you defy the Pope in good conscience, as if his order was never made? I honestly don’t know how one remains Catholic if that’s what one believes about the Pope and the exercise of his authority. The only truly stable thing within Catholicism of the last sixty years has been the papacy. If you cast that aside — and that’s what Rorate is calling for in effect here — what do you have left? If you defy the Pope, even in the name of Catholic orthodoxy, how are you not a de facto Protestant? How is that remotely tenable? Somebody needs to explain this to me.

It seems to me that some Trads are in the same place I was back in 2005 with regard to the faith. I found it impossible to believe — not just unpleasant to believe, but impossible to believe — that my salvation depended on being in communion with the Catholic bishops. I came to the conclusion that I had probably been wrong about papal infallibility, and about Catholic claims to exclusive authority. Protestantism was not an option for me, for historical reasons. That left Orthodoxy. I mourned losing my Catholicism for years, because it was extremely painful, but I eventually healed, and I thank God for my Orthodox faith, which is solid as a rock — but which I will not take for granted, as I once did my Catholic faith, and which I will never allow to become a primarily intellectual thing, as I did with my Catholicism.

That said, being Orthodox helped me understand why the Traditional Latin Mass matters so much to Catholic Trads. I came into the Catholic Church with the Novus Ordo — the new mass promulgated by Paul VI in 1970. I never knew any different. I never loved the liturgy itself; I only was grateful to it for producing the Eucharist. Years later, I attended some TLMs, but it just did not move me like it did others. I was a defender of the existence of the TLM, but it did not appeal to me.

The Orthodox Divine Liturgy — the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom — is a very different thing. The Orthodox typically celebrate it in the local language. My family discovered it at St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas. I had no idea that liturgy could be so beautiful and so reverent, that it could lift you out of yourself and place you in God’s presence. (Most Eastern Rite Catholics use this same liturgy, by the way.) Discovering genuinely beautiful, heart-shaking liturgy was a revelation to me. It was also a revelation to discover how small the priest was in the Divine Liturgy. The immensity of the liturgy dwarfed the figure of the priest, in a good way. You had the impression that you were being summoned to the presence of the All-Holy. To be sure, even in the shabby Novus Ordo, you are in the presence of the All-Holy. The difference is that the words and rituals of the Divine Liturgy reveals more fully Who is actually there in the Eucharist. It’s the difference between the King coming into a room with full ritual solemnity and pomp, and the King walking into the room wearing Dockers and a Polo shirt. It’s still the King, but in one instance you have been prepared to receive him as your sovereign, and in the other, not.

Anyway, however frustrated I might ever become with the Orthodox episcopate or priesthood, I would never, ever leave the Divine Liturgy. It, and the Eucharist at its center and summit, is the foundation of my Christian life. We are very, very blessed in the Orthodox Church that the bishops never, ever tamper with the liturgy. It’s simply Not Done. Well, yes, it has been tampered with before — it’s not the case that the liturgy was delivered in its current form to us through the hands of St. John Chrysostom — but the point is that Orthodox bishops are loath to tinker around with the liturgy. This is a safeguard against what has happened to Catholics since the Second Vatican Council, and boy, am I grateful for it.

Last night, when I got the Francis news, I thought about how I would feel if the Orthodox bishops took away the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and replaced it with an ersatz, stripped-down modern liturgy, then forbade the celebration of the Chrysostom liturgy without the prior permission of bishops (which is not likely to be given). I would be incandescently angry. I would be filled with contempt for the bishops, even if it was their right to do what they did. It would call into question, in my mind, their authority. Which, to judge by what I’m reading on Trad Catholic Twitter, and on Trad websites, is what Pope Francis has done to himself in the eyes of some of the most faithful Catholics on earth.

The post ‘Et Tu, Franciscus?’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

ABA: ‘We’re Book Banners — But For The Left’

From the website of the American Booksellers Association, a trade group of independent bookstores (ABFE is a subsidiary):

The American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE) is a sponsor and advocate for Banned Books Week, which celebrates the freedom to read by encouraging readouts, bookstore displays, and community activities designed to raise awareness of the ongoing threat of censorship. Held each year during the last week of September, it highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores, and libraries. More than 11,300 books have been challenged since 1982, according to the American Library Association.

The theme of this year’s event is “Books Unite Us, Censorship Divides Us.” This year’s motif is a pair of hands sharing a book, superimposed on a globe. The 2021 theme is intended to be inclusive, emphasizing the ways in which books and information bring people together, help individuals see themselves in the stories of others, and aid the development of empathy and understanding for people from other backgrounds.

Look, they even have a swell graphic:

More:

“Um, Dave? Yeah, I’ve got a free speech emergency here. The bad guy is in the house.”

They’re talking about Abigail Shrier’s massive bestseller Irreversible Damage: How The Trans Craze Is Harming Our Daughters.

 

 

Let me remind you that this is the trade association of independent booksellers, yet they believe that simply mentioning a popular book that offends against woke dogma is “a violent incident.” They are abasing themselves FOR MENTIONING A BOOK THAT IS FOR SALE!

These are the same people who squawk on self-righteously about Banned Books Week. They are advocating banning books (“banning” by their standard). You can’t make this up.

See, this kind of thing is why I’ve become more radicalized this summer. I don’t believe that the leading voices of the Left have any confidence in traditional liberal principles anymore. They — or at least their organizations, like ABA — are illiberal leftists. I would like to be wrong, but this is a perfect example of what Wesley Yang says of wokeness: that it’s the “successor ideology” to liberalism. A liberal American Booksellers Association would never have put out that kind of cringe, disgraceful tweet. Woke ABA would, and did. They remind me of this great line from Annie Hall:

 

The post ABA: ‘We’re Book Banners — But For The Left’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Black Lives Matter: Commies

When people tell you who they are — and BLM has been saying from the beginning that they are Marxists — believe them. This, from the official BLM Twitter account:

There you have it: Black Lives Matter — which raised $90 million last year — endorses the brutal repression of the Cuban Communist regime, which is shooting its own people in the streets as they protest for vaccines, for food, and against their own deep poverty.

I am not in favor of US military intervention in Cuba (but any other help we can give the people, let’s do it!). But for God’s sake, the Cuban people are suffering terribly — and these BLM dirtbags stand with their persecutors! It’s infuriating. Read Antonio Garcia Martinez’s account of going to Cuba on a reporting trip, and see the conditions Cubans are living under in that Communist hellhole. This is what BLM defends. BLM did not have to take a public position on Cuba — but it did.

Here are 18 companies that gave money to Black Lives Matter. They include Amazon, Nabisco, 23AndMe, Dropbox, Unilever, Microsoft, and DoorDash. If they don’t repudiate the BLM organization, they are complicit in the crushing of the Cuban people.

I’m sick of the free pass these BLM Marxists get in this culture. Everybody needs to call them what they are. No more silence. Going forward, anyone who takes the knee is kneeling on the neck of oppressed Cubans.

The post Black Lives Matter: Commies appeared first on The American Conservative.

Putin’s Bachelor Party

I ran into these three wild and crazy Czech guys on the street in Budapest today. They are here for a bachelor party, and, well, here they are:

 

If you are too young to get the joke, Czech (ahem) out this clip from the first season (1975) of Saturday Night Live. Here’s Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin:

 

The post Putin’s Bachelor Party appeared first on The American Conservative.

Taxonomy Of Christian Intellectuals

Boy, do I have a lot of blogging to get caught up on! I’m on the train back to Budapest from Prague, which brings my summer travels with my son Matt to a close. Regular blogging recommences starting now. Here’s a link to Ross Douthat’s new taxonomy of conservative Catholic intellectuals, which appears in the new First Things. It’s a rich, thought-provoking essay. Here are the highlights:

First, there are the populists, who regard many Trump-era shifts in conservative policy as congruent with Church teaching, and a welcome corrective to the libertarian errors they associate with figures such as Paul Ryan. The populists tend to champion a corporatist turn in economics, seeking strategies to recreate a family wage through industrial policy or family subsidies or some mixture thereof. They generally favor immigration restrictions to protect domestic workers and rebuild social solidarity; they are amenable to antitrust actions against Silicon ­Valley behemoths; they seek a more aggressive culture-war strategy, a counterattack after a long retreat, on issues such as transgenderism and internet pornography. And though they are divided on Trump’s capacities and morals, they mostly regard his rise as salutary and his presidency as at least the lesser evil, and probably a good.

Philosophically, the populists are often described as post-liberals or anti-liberals, and sometimes they describe themselves that way. But it’s not clear that the label fits. The Catholic editor of this ecumenical journal, R. R. Reno, speaks for many populists when he argues for populism as a solidaristic and religious corrective within the liberal order, rather than some kind of alternative to American constitutionalism. One can assume that the politicians who have championed policy ideas associated with this populism—including the Catholic Marco Rubio, the Protestant Josh Hawley, and the Mormon Mitt ­Romney—would wholeheartedly agree.

More:

This idea of populism as a corrective within liberalism separates populists from the next group, the Catholic integralists, for whom liberalism is beyond correction because it was rotten from the start. The integralists are the heirs of Triumph, L. Brent Bozell’s disputatious magazine, and further back of the ­nineteenth-century popes and their ringing anti-liberal anathemas. Like King Josiah (who lends his name to the leading integralist website) recovering the lost book of the law, they believe that they are calling Catholics back to the true and only Catholic politics, obscured for a time by fond delusions and Americanism, but now, amid the crisis of liberalism, visible as an alternative once again.

The integralists align with the populists on pro-family economics and industrial policy (Gladden Pappin, an integralist editor at the journal American Affairs, publishes regularly on those themes), but they are more divided on other aspects of the new right-wing politics: immigration restriction, ­climate-change skepticism, and the idea of the nation as something worthy of loyalty. The integralists ultimately believe in Catholic empire, not Catholic nationalism, and they regard some of the leftward elements of Pope Francis’s magisterium as implicitly integralist­—­particularly the ecological encyclical Laudato Si’, whose admonitions and prescriptions do not feature prominently in populist politics at the moment.

Despite this critique, the integralists tend to look favorably on nationalist politicians, from Trump to Viktor Orban. They prefer illiberal nationalism to liberal internationalism, and they believe that ­nationalist-populist uprisings provide an opening for a Catholic insurgency within the West’s elite.

Because this insurgency is not exactly visible as yet, the practical impact of their ideas remains uncertain. But the integralists are engaged in at least two real-world projects: pushing Church officials toward a more vigorous assertion of the Church’s legal rights and juridical power over the faithful, and pushing both populist and neoconservative Catholics toward a more fully Catholic politics and a more aggressive use of state power. They believe, above all, that the conditions for a reinvigorated Church and a Christian revival in America can come about only if there is a revolution from above.

More:

In this, they make a stark contrast with the third group, the benedictines, meaning not the religious order but those Catholics who accept Rod Dreher’s diagnosis, in The Benedict Option (2017), of the near inevitability of continued secularization and continued Christian retreat—who agree with Patrick Deneen’s conclusion, in Why Liberalism Failed (2018), that local experiments are the key to revitalizing our once-Christian culture—and who are particularly interested, with writers like Brandon McGinley and Leah Libresco Sargeant, in internal renewal as a precondition for any new form of Christian politics.

Of course, Deneen has shown strong sympathy for both populist and integralist arguments, and ­McGinley recently co-authored an integralist-tending book with Scott Hahn—proof that these categories are unstable and overlapping, not settled or fixed. But though some benedictines may vote for populist politicians or endorse integralism at some level, and others may have more left-leaning sympathies, they are generally skeptical about national political solutions and doubtful of the prospects for any kind of top-down Christian restoration, preferring to pour their energy into institution-building from below. Their watchword is Joseph Ratzinger’s famous admonition:

[The Church] will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. . . . As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members . . . [it] will be a more spiritual Church, not presuming upon a political mandate, flirting as little with the Left as with the Right.This means that benedictines are often more ecumenically inclined than integralists, with sympathies for anti-political Protestant figures such as Stanley Hauerwas and Wendell Berry and communities like the Bruderhof. It means they prefer Alexis de Tocqueville to Carl Schmitt, and strategies of ­community-building and evangelization to ­strategies of power. And it means their cultural influence waxes and wanes depending on the apparent prospects for Catholic politics at the national level: The marginalization of religious conservatives in the late Obama years made the benedictine option more attractive, whereas the seeming widening of political possibilities in the Trump era pushed their ideas into ­abeyance. They may return, should a Biden presidency usher in a long liberal age.

The fourth group Douthat calls “tradinistas,” who are supposedly traditional on theology and morals, but socialist on economics. More:

Even if it lacks the direct political influence of the populists or the ambitions of the integralists, tradinismo nonetheless has a clear political theory: The conditions for Christian renewal depend on breaking capitalism’s chains, and thus to ally with secular socialists may be to seek the good of the Church in the long run, notwithstanding the gulf between a figure like Bernie Sanders and Church teaching on just about every non-economic issue. And to the extent that they participate in some small way in the larger revival of socialist thought, which in turn participates in some way in the Biden presidency’s ambitious economic agenda, these “LeftCaths” can claim at least a modicum of remote influence over our second Catholic president.

All of these categories, again, are unstable and shifting. One could easily subdivide them further, and it’s possible to move from one camp to another, or simply straddle them. One can be an integralist-tradinista for whom socialism is the political economy of the integralist state, or a benedictine drawn to populism because it promises political protection for the local and experimental, or an integralist who turns tradinista out of distaste for Donald Trump. (I can identify writers who have made versions of these moves in just the last few years.)

Read it all. 

What do we make of this? I appreciate how Douthat talks about how these categories overlap. I am about two-thirds benedictine (small b, note well) and one-third populist, because as Douthat says, it promises political protection for the local and experimental. I have no faith at all in American elites; the unwillingness of the John Roberts-led SCOTUS to take up the Arlene’s Flowers case and the trans bathrooms case signals to me that in the end, most conservative judges will not be traitors to their class on social and cultural issues. Of course all the other institutions are by and large lost. Politically, I see the only real hope that people like me will be left alone is in strong and competent populists willing to use the power of the state against elites. But even if that were to happen, it will mean nothing if we don’t renew the faith, the family, and institutions of civil society — which is where the Benedictine part comes in. My dispute with the integralists is that I think their project depends on the basic spiritual and moral health, and theological orthodoxy, of Catholic/Christian communities, which I strongly doubt.

Let me ask you readers: what would a taxonomy of contemporary US Protestant intellectuals look like? Of contemporary American Jewish intellectuals (by which I mean those who identify as religious)? Help me understand those worlds, would you?

A second question: to what extent are these religious intellectuals relevant to the broader public debate in a rapidly secularizing America? The whole Neuhaus-Colson project of Evangelicals and Catholics Together really meant something in its day, but I think Christian intellectuals now are fairly marginal. If you haven’t seen it yet, Michael Hanby’s terrific 2014 essay about “The Civic Project Of American Christianity” is a must-read. Here’s how it begins:

According to Hans Jonas, the birth of modern science was bound up with the advent of a radical new view of reality, a “technological ontology” that conflates nature and artifice, knowing and making, truth and utility. This metaphysical revolution has set in motion a perpetual historical revolution, whose interminable machinations continually threaten to overwhelm the revolutionaries themselves. Confronting the obvious question of how a perpetual revolution could be recognized or measured from the “inside,” Jonas offered for consideration the span of an ordinary man’s life:

If a man in the fullness of his days, at the end of his life, can pass on the wisdom of his experience to those who grow up after him; if what he has learned in his youth, added to but not discarded in his maturity, still serves him in his old age and is still worth teaching the then young—then his was not an age of revolution, not counting, of course, abortive revolutions. The world into which his children enter is still his world, not because it is entirely unchanged, but because the changes that did occur were gradual and limited enough for him to absorb them into his initial stock and keep abreast of them. If, however, a man in his advancing years has to turn to his children, or grandchildren, to have them tell him what the present is about; if his own acquired knowledge and understanding no longer avail him; if at the end of his days he finds himself to be obsolete rather than wise—then we may term the rate and scope of change that thus overtook him, “revolutionary.”By this measure, there can be little doubt that we live in revolutionary times, even if this revolution is the full flower of seeds planted long ago. What availed as the common wisdom of mankind until the day before yesterday—for example, that man, woman, mother, and father name natural realities as well as social roles, that children issue naturally from their union, that the marital union of man and woman is the foundation of human society and provides the optimal home for the flourishing of children—all this is now regarded by many as obsolete and even hopelessly bigoted, as court after court, demonstrating that this revolution has profoundly transformed even the meaning of reason itself, has declared that this bygone wisdom now fails even to pass the minimum legal threshold of rational cogency. This is astonishing by any measure; that it has occurred in half the time span proposed by Jonas makes it more astonishing still.

Such are the logical consequences of the sexual revolution, but to grasp more fully the meaning of its triumph, we must see that the sexual revolution is not merely—or perhaps even primarily—sexual. It has profound implications for the relationship not just between man and woman but between nature and culture, the person and the body, children and parents. It has enormous ramifications for the nature of reason, for the meaning of education, and for the relations between the state, the family, civil society, and the Church. This is because the sexual revolution is one aspect of a deeper revolution in the question of who or what we understand the human person to be (fundamental anthropology), and indeed of what we understand reality to be (ontology).

All notions of justice presuppose ontology and anthropology, and so a revolution in fundamental anthropology will invariably transform the meaning and content of justice and bring about its own morality. We are beginning to feel the force of this transformation in civil society and the political order. Court decisions invalidating traditional marriage law fall from the sky like rain. The regulatory state and ubiquitous new global media throw their ever increasing weight behind the new understanding of marriage and its implicit anthropology, which treats our bodies as raw material to be used as we see fit. Today a rigorous new public morality inverts and supplants the residuum of our Christian moral inheritance.

This compels us to reconsider the civic project of American Christianity that has for the most part guided our participation in the liberal public order for at least a century. Encompassing the Social Gospel movement of the early twentieth century and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops at the beginning of the twenty-first, this project has transcended the historical and theological division between Catholics and Protestants. This has been particularly the case as Protestant adherence to divisive confessional commitments has declined and Evangelicals, filling the void left by the decline of mainline Protestantism, have found common ground with Catholics on moral and social issues in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade. Though popular imagination identifies this project in its latter stages with political conservatism, it also transcends the division between the Christian left and the Christian right, which ­partly explains why their opposing arguments so often appear as mirror images of one another.

Of course, for Protestants, the fate of the United States and the fate of American Protestantism have been deeply intertwined from the very beginning, so adherence to the civic project must stem not simply from confidence that American liberty was generally hospitable to the flourishing of Christianity but from a deep, if inchoate, conviction that the American experiment itself was the political outworking of a Protestant sense of “nature and nature’s God.” For Catholics, whose experience in this country was at least initially very different from that of Protestants, common commitment to this project is testimony to the long shadow cast by John Courtney Murray. Catholics generally find his argument for the compatibility of Catholicism with the principles of the American founding convincing because they believe that the argument has been vindicated by the growth and assimilation of the Church in the United States and by the apparent vitality of American Catholicism in comparison with Catholicism in Europe. Rarely do political or theological disagreements penetrate deeply enough to disturb this shared foundation. Liberal or conservative, postconciliar Catholicism in America is essentially Murrayite.

Broadly speaking, we may characterize the civic project of American Christianity as the attempt to harmonize Christianity and liberal order and to anchor American public philosophy in the substance of Protestant morality, Catholic social teaching, or some version of natural law that might qualify as public reason. George Weigel articulated one of the assumptions animating protagonists on all sides of this project when in Tranquilitas Ordinis he wrote that “there is no contradiction between the truth claims of Catholicism and the American democratic experiment.” This assertion rests on some form of Murray’s familiar distinction between articles of faith and articles of peace. This view defines the state as a juridical order that exists principally for the purpose of securing public order and protecting our ability to act on our own initiative. It therefore renounces all competence in religious and ontological matters. This ostensibly modest view of government opens up space that is then filled with the Christian substance that animates civil society.

One needn’t be ungrateful for the genuine achievements of American liberalism in order to question the wisdom of this project and its guiding assumptions. First, a purely juridical order devoid of metaphysical and theological judgment is as logically and theologically impossible as a pure, metaphysically innocent science. One cannot set a limit to one’s own religious competence without an implicit judgment about what falls on the other side of that limit; one cannot draw a clear and distinct boundary between the political and the religious, or between science, metaphysics, and theology, without tacitly determining what sort of God transcends these realms. The very act by which liberalism declares its religious incompetence is thus a theological act. Its supposed indifference to metaphysics conceals a metaphysics of original indifference. A thing’s relation to God, being a creature, makes no difference to its nature or intelligibility. Those are tacked on extrinsically through the free act of the agent.

Liberalism’s articles of peace thus mask tacit articles of faith in a particular eighteenth-century conception of nature and nature’s God, which also entails an eighteenth-century view of the Church. Moreover, liberalism refuses integration into any more comprehensive order over which it is not finally arbiter and judge. It establishes its peculiar absolutism, not as the exhaustive dictator of everything one can and cannot do—to the contrary, liberal order persists precisely by generating an ever expanding space for the exercise of private options—but as the all-encompassing totality within which atomic social facts are permitted to appear like so many Congregationalist polities, the horizon beyond which there is no outside. Hobbes’s thought aspired to this kind of sovereignty, and Locke’s thought more effectively achieved it, but it was Rousseau who really understood it.

Basically, Hanby, a Catholic philosopher of science, says that the institutionalization of the Sexual Revolution in American law and custom, most definitively with the affirmation of homosexuality, is the Waterloo of Christianity as a philosophy guiding public reason. This is because of the ontological grounds upon which the legitimization of homosexuality has to be built:

Whether this is the logical outworking of the metaphysical and anthropological premises of liberalism or a radically new thing—and Hans Jonas’s analysis would suggest that these are not mutually exclusive alternatives—it marks a point of no return in American public philosophy. And it effectively brings the civic project of American Christianity to an end.

This is not to say that Christians should disengage or retreat, the usual misinterpretation of the so-called Benedict Option. There is no ground to retreat to, for the liberal order claims unlimited jurisdiction and permits no outside. We do not have the option of choosing our place within it if we wish to remain Christian. We cannot avoid the fact that this new philosophy, once it is fully instantiated, will in all likelihood deprive Christians of effective participation in the public square. Hobby Lobby notwithstanding, appeals to religious liberty, conceived as the freedom to put one’s idiosyncratic beliefs into practice with minimal state interference, are not likely to fare well over the long haul as these beliefs come to seem still more idiosyncratic, as religious practice comes into conflict with more “fundamental” rights, and as the state’s mediation of familial relations becomes ever more intrusive. And attempts to restore religious freedom to its proper philosophical place, as something like the sine qua non of freedom itself, presuppose just the view of human nature and reason that our post-Christian liberalism rejects from the outset.

To say that the civic project of American Christianity is at an end is not to say that it will simply cease, however. There will no doubt be those who continue to fight on, like Japanese holdouts after the Second World War, unaware that the war is over. And they should carry on in some fashion, doomed though the civic project may be. Religious freedom is worth defending after all, even in its flawed liberal sense, and Hobby Lobby shows us that it is still possible to win some battles while losing the war. Moreover, if liberalism is indeed absolute, so that there is no longer any outside, then a contest of rights is really the only ground on which liberal public reason will permit itself to be publicly engaged.

Read it all.

Do you readers have any idea of how Christian intellectuals can be influential in public debate in this post-Christian era while remaining authentically Christian (instead of Christian-ish)? I’m struggling to see it myself.

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