Rod Dreher's Blog, page 605

Disintegrating America

Reader Pacopond made a great comment on the Trump and Other Shady Types thread, which is already too long; I quote Pacopond here because I don’t want his comment to get lost on the other thread:

 Rod says, ” I’ve had over the past few years with middle-class, economically secure Republicans who watch a lot of Fox and listen to talk radio, who believe really nutty things about the government, and who refuse to have their views challenged. It’s total emotivism — the concept that if you believe it strongly enough, it must be true. I don’t actually believe this is merely a GOP phenomenon; rather, I think it’s generally true of our contemporary culture (MacIntyre called it nearly 40 years ago), but it has a particular manifestation on the Right today.”

Well, I have a meta-political point to a political posting. Yesterday I listened to a 16-year-old girl giving an oral presentation of a persuasive paper she had written. Hers was on how we all should be more accepting of gender fluidity, and not resort to “binary” classifications.

She said this in a semi-private venue instead of in front of the class. A friend was with her. They were both white girls with metal studs and rings in their noses and lips. I later saw my student smiling and holding hands with a boy in the halls.

But the point that struck me is that she said that self-expression is a fundamental human right, that the right to one’s identity is basic an should be protected.

I proceeded very carefully. Explaining that I’d been a philosophy major in grad school, and that it’s good to test your own opinions, I asked her what identity meant. Ultimately, she said, it’s how you feel.

I asked–taking care not to be argumentative–if personal feelings were sufficient to establish identity. I proposed the case of a white person who “identified” as a black person. Her response to “blood-line” led me to caution her that such arguments were too redolent of racist rhetoric, and we backed away from that.

She said that identity is distinguished from persona (our representation to the world) because our feelings tell us who we “really” are.

I reminded her that words like “really” deserve deeper investigation. It was a cordial exchange. I didn’t want to make her defensive, because defensiveness closes the mind.

On the other hand, I had a conversation with my brother about climate change. My usual strategy is to eliminate all talk about policy and politics, putting those issues into abeyance until we can establish what the truth is, and how we know it, and how certain we should be about our knowledge.

Didn’t work. He’s spent many years with talk radio and Fox news. Ultimately he said the reason that the scientific consensus on climate change is fraud is because of something Nancy Pelosi said about the need to pass Obamacare.

And he said nothing could convince him otherwise.

He’s a bright guy who is a chiropractor and knows a great deal about anatomy and physiology, therapies, and nutrition. He has been an avid hunter and fisherman since his early teens, and I would love to know the names of the plants and animals that he does, and the ways that fish and game live.

But he’s a non-reader. He has no idea of what’s in The American Conservative, The New Criterion, The Weekly Standard, The Claremont Review, etc., not to mention the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Nation, and so forth. Yet he’s very confident that he’s right. His conservatism comes from Rush and Fox and that ilk, and he believes that arguments are all about working up to zinger one-liners.

What do these two anecdotes have in common? Well, I think there is an appeal to emotion as the validating principle for personal and political identity.

And emotion is necessary but not sufficient for guiding ourselves, whether through dark woods or bright sunny uplands.

When people in a society cannot even accept that some things are really real, apart from how we feel about those things, what holds that society together? What can hold it together?

We are disintegrating. Coming apart. Losing our hold on reality.

 

The Trump Chastisement

An extraordinary article by Rusty Reno, who says he believes Trump is a dangerous figure, but who admits that the rise of Trump has taught him about his own errors of judgment. Trump, says Reno, reveals that the Republican Party is no real friend of Main Street and traditional American values. Excerpts:

In the last couple of years, it has become obvious that this acceptance has real-world consequences. Jan Brewer vetoed a religious freedom bill in Arizona, as did Asa Hutchinson in Arkansas. This week, South Dakota governor Dennis Daugaard in South Dakota vetoed a bill designed to stymie the most radical efforts of transgender activists. And, of course, there was the national spectacle of outrage over the Indiana religious freedom law. These setbacks did not come about because of left-wing outrage. It was the result of key elements of the Republican establishment joining forces with Democrats to support the agenda of the Human Rights Campaign.

Trump has said nothing about gay rights to indicate he would do otherwise. But his habit of ignoring political correctness—and in some instances fighting back and winning—seems to inspire frustrated voters. They feel defenseless against the relentless re-characterizations of their concerns as moral failings—xenophobia, racism, populist rancor, gullibility, and more. They may not regard Trump as someone who agrees with them on every issue. But they’re gratified that he is not cowed.

Moreover, voters seem to be making a connection. The same corporate titans who champion the free flow of labor, capital, and goods are the ones who strong-arm Republican governors to conform to the dictates of political correctness. His supporters like Trump because he threatens today’s economic elites, who are also our cultural elites, promising to bring them to heel just as often as he promises to strong-arm the Mexican government.

Boy, is that ever true. Reno goes on to say that for a long time he was indifferent to the immigration debate, and that he bought the GOP globalist free trade dogma, not noticing how these economic upheavals affected working class people. And he confesses that he has always been against political correctness, but he did not fully appreciate how it humiliates people who disagree. More:

In each instance Trump’s successes at the polls have forced me to acknowledge a degree of blindness. A great number of people in America no longer feel at home, a greater number than I imagined. They’ve been pushed aside by our global economy. A liberalized immigration regime has changed their hometowns. When they express their sense of loss, liberals denounce them as racists, which is equivalent to saying that they have no moral standing in our society. Increasingly, conservative leaders let those charges go unanswered or even agree. Then, when they cheer the idea of making America great again, they’re written off as crude nationalists rather than recognized as fellow citizens who want to do something.

Read the whole thing. It’s important.

A reader who teaches politics at a major university e-mailed this morning to say:

There is no chance I’ll vote for Trump, if only because I think at least a modicum of virtue is a prerequisite to be President.  I’m perhaps less apocalyptic about the whole thing than you are, because I can imagine a likely scenario that is not so bad in my eyes: Hillary beats Trump badly, and the Republican party is finally forced to do some serious soul-searching and to recast itself in a way that makes it of broader appeal.  Some good might come of that.

It’s a thought.

 

Donald Trump & Other Shady Types

I’ve been pretty explicit in this space for some time about how I think the Donald J. Trump phenomenon is based in something real. I mean, the grievances to which he speaks are not phantoms. What I find impossible to accept is that Trump is anything other than a voice of resentment. If he offered some kind of way to redress those grievances, to do something concrete about them, things would be different. If he had the moral probity and personal character to lead others to solutions, things would be different. I keep wanting to think he does, and have been trying to give him the benefit of my own severe doubts about him. But after last night’s deplorable show on state in Detroit, it could not possibly be clearer that Trump will deliver for nobody. If he wins the presidency, he is going to betray the people who believe in him. That’s who he is. 

Longtime readers will know that I carry no brief for the GOP establishment. I haven’t voted Republican for president since 2004 (or Democratic), and formally left the GOP to register as an independent back in 2011. I am a more or less traditionalist conservative who has no faith in the Republicans, and even less in the Democrats. Again, I am sympathetic to many who are drawn to Trump, because the GOP has done very little for them.

What I find hard to understand is why nothing Trump says or does shakes their faith in him. I wish he were the populist tribune that he claims to be. Why do people need so badly to believe that he is?

I think it’s despair, of several kinds. And I think we are in a much more dangerous position than many people understand. As somebody in Texas said to me tonight — someone who said he doesn’t like Trump — “I’m so tired of these people who hate Trump so much they refuse to even think about why people support him.”

Tonight in Texas I was talking to some folks about the Trump phenomenon, and one of them said something particularly interesting. He talked about a relative of his who has a high school education, who works a physically demanding job in a rapidly collapsing field, who lives in a bleak part of the country with his girlfriend, who is addicted to drugs and who has kids by different men. You get the picture. This guy is totally on board with Trump. He listens to InfoWars and believes in conspiracy theories.

“Trump is talking to people like him, not people like you,” said this man. “He’s talking to people who feel like their lives are about to blow apart.”

I guess Trump is talking to people like the reader who left this comment on the “GOP RIP” thread:

After last night’s debate, and seeing Trump switch on the H1B issue, I feel gutted. People like me are drowning and we simply don’t know what to do. All I see are competing theories, but feel that there is nothing tangible upon which to base my hope. All I know is that the best I can do is to find one or two jobs that pay 8.25-10.00 an hour. This reality has triggered significant depression within me and many fellow working-class millenials. There is no hope. No wonder the suicide rate is so why among white, working-class Americans.

However unreasonable this may sound to some, but I feel particularly betrayed by Conservative Incorporated. Why? Well, I’ve spent my twenties advocating (by way of volunteering on campaigns) for GOP candidates who defended free-market solutions which would ostensibly trickle-down to help me and others in my situation. But this doesn’t appear to be the case. Bush Republicanism seeks my permanent ruin and I’ve had it. I don’t care that my reasoning is entirely emotive, but I desperately wish to see the GOP die. If I’m going down and I want them to burn in Hell with me. [Emphasis mine — RD]

There are those people, and they’re real, and there are a lot more of them than middle-class people like me can imagine, because they are invisible to us.

But that doesn’t explain all of Trump’s support. In Louisiana, which votes today, the voters I know who have come out for Trump, and those I have seen on TV at his rallies, do not look like desperate people. A friend of mine, a prosperous man, is voting Trump because he’s disgusted with “Washington”. Trump is anti-Washington. Case closed.

It is hard to argue from the Right — well, from my corner of the Right — that the Republican Party, at least, is not due a hard takedown. There’s the foreign policy debacle of the Bush Administration, but for me, Maggie Gallagher hits on another very important thing in her National Review column: that the Republican Party is owned by Big Business, and pays lip service to social conservatives. Excerpt:

The really grave fissure in the GOP, and the one that has catapulted Trump to power, is the chasm that has emerged between Chamber of Commerce Republicans and the rest of us. Hat tip to Ben Domenech for noticing this important insight from Angelo Codevilla:

America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.

[More from Codevilla, not included in Gallagher’s column: “This class’s fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate.”]

From my front-row losing seat in the gay-marriage wars, I saw this emerge time and time again: the capacity of the Left to affect GOP elite opinion, to punish and stigmatize gay-marriage dissenters, and to get the GOP to shut up and back down, while polls still showed a majority of Americans on our side. Now, when the battle is against the Left’s massive new effort to redefine the traditional understanding of marriage as hatred and bigotry, to be punished by the government as such, you can see the dynamic even more nakedly at work.

My own “burn baby burn” moment regarding the GOP was learning last fall from Congressional insiders that the party’s leadership had no plans for religious liberty legislation post-Obergefell. They don’t want to have to be told by the media that they’re all bigots. And, plainly, their deep-pocketed donors are embarrassed by the church people who give the Republicans their votes. So, screw us, is the thought.

I understand that Republicans cannot achieve, post-Obergefell, what people like me would like to see them achieve in terms of protecting traditional marriage. That ship has sailed. The culture has shifted. It’s unreasonable to expect the moon.

But for pity’s sake, when the Republican Party cannot bring itself to defend religious liberty, and the right of church people who don’t sell their Christianity out to be left alone, what bloody use are they? You think Marco Rubio, who has as a big donor Paul Singer, a Republican gay rights crusader, can actually be trusted to stand up for religious traditionalists? Or Ted Cruz, despite his rhetoric? I do not. So when people say they don’t trust Trump on these issues, I share their skepticism, but their skepticism often does not go far enough.

We are also watching the ongoing dispossession of people in this country of their history, at the hands of progressives — and the forces of political conservatism are saying nothing about it., a report about a move underway to purge the campus of all references to St. Junipero Serra, a Catholic missionary who was a pivotal figure in California history. Excerpt:

Leo Bird ’17 introduced the resolution in the ASSU senate.  Bird, who prefers to be referred to by the gender neutral “they,” said that they were motivated by what they saw as the discrepancy between Serra’s actions toward Native Californians and his legacy on Stanford’s campus.

“It really started out of conversations that I started to have my freshman year at the Native American cultural center,” Bird explained. “I started to get involved with Bay Area activism and started to recognize that there was this historical figure [Serra] that was represented that was sort of praised, honored, in a way that I felt really did a disservice to a lot of the California Native community as well as to my own identity, being here at Stanford.”

“They.” Good lord. This is the kind of person who triumphs, over and over, because our universities and the elites they serve have gone corrupt and insane. Who stands up to this? They win and they win and they win. If people conclude that they are being dispossessed in their own country, and the Republican Party is effectively colluding with the dispossession, then who can be surprised by a backlash that takes the form of support for Trump? When the left wages culture war, as it constantly does, it should not be surprised that at least some conservatives see the only one on their side who brings any kind of fight to the battle is an extreme vulgarian named Donald Trump.

I’m not defending Trump. I’m trying to explain his appeal. Believe me, my heart wants the Republicans to be spatchcocked and grilled, but my head says that the country would take an unacceptable risk with Trump in the White House.

But. I still don’t think that this kind of thing is the pro-Trump despair that accounted for economically secure middle-class people voting for him. What I’m seeing is rage from people who have been imbibing right-wing media rhetoric for so long, rhetoric meant to delegitimize governing institutions. I can’t tell you the number of conversations I’ve had over the past few years with middle-class, economically secure Republicans who watch a lot of Fox and listen to talk radio, who believe really nutty things about the government, and who refuse to have their views challenged. It’s total emotivism — the concept that if you believe it strongly enough, it must be true. I don’t actually believe this is merely a GOP phenomenon; rather, I think it’s generally true of our contemporary culture (MacIntyre called it nearly 40 years ago), but it has a particular manifestation on the Right today. If establishment Republicans can’t figure out why so many GOP voters believe Trump’s crazy rhetoric and allow their votes to be determined by it, I would invite them to review the past two decades of the communications culture the Right has created. Back in 2009, John Derbyshire wrote in TAC about how talk radio is destroying the Right. Excerpt:

Why engage an opponent when an epithet is in easy reach? Some are crude: rather than debating Jimmy Carter’s views on Mideast peace, Michael Savage dismisses him as a “war criminal.” Others are juvenile: Mark Levin blasts the Washington Compost and New York Slimes.

But for all the bullying bluster of conservative talk-show hosts, their essential attitude is one of apology and submission—the dreary old conservative cringe. Their underlying metaphysic is the same as the liberals’: infinite human potential—Yes, we can!—if only we get society right. To the Left, getting society right involves shoveling us around like truckloads of concrete; to the Right, it means banging on about responsibility, God, and tax cuts while deficits balloon, Congress extrudes yet another social-engineering fiasco, and our armies guard the Fulda Gap. That human beings have limitations and that wise social policy ought to accept the fact—some problems insoluble, some Children Left Behind—is as unsayable on “Hannity” as it is on “All Things Considered.”

I enjoy these radio bloviators (and their TV equivalents) and hope they can survive the coming assault from Left triumphalists. If conservatism is to have a future, though, it will need to listen to more than the looped tape of lowbrow talk radio. We could even tackle the matter of tone, bringing a sportsman’s respect for his opponents to the debate.

I repeat: There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. Ideas must be marketed, and right-wing talk radio captures a big and useful market segment. However, if there is no thoughtful, rigorous presentation of conservative ideas, then conservatism by default becomes the raucous parochialism of Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, and company. That loses us a market segment at least as useful, if perhaps not as big.

Conservatives have never had, and never should have, a problem with elitism. Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?

Notice what Derbyshire is doing here. He’s not saying conservative talk radio is all bad, but he decries how it has been allowed to set the agenda for conservatism. Washington Republicans were pleased to encourage and to benefit from crude, lowbrow right-wingery from talk radio when it benefited them and energized the base to come out against the Democrats. But now it has been turned on them in the form of Donald Trump, who is the perfect right-wing talk radio candidate: all tabloid bluster. Rush Limbaugh is probably the only national conservative figure who stands a chance at standing athwart the Trump train and yelling “Stop!” without getting flattened. But that’s a small chance. A very small chance.

And the Republican Party did this to itself.

I wonder, though, if the secure middle-class people who are going hard for Trump really understand that the man has no governing principles, and because of his combative nature, could not get things done if elected. For people not driven by a sense of economic desperation or profound cultural alienation, a vote for Trump seems to be a manifestation of a much deeper decadence than we realized was there. It appears to be a perhaps more sophisticated version of the same longing for a magic man, a savior who will come to set things aright. Whether Trump is consistent or credible does not matter, any more than whether or not something that someone prefers to believe is true. Again, this is not just a phenomenon of the Right. For example, the fact that Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, did not die as some kind of martyr of police brutality has mattered not one whit to those enamored of the Black Lives Matter narrative.

We have become a nation unmoored. We think we can recreate reality by force of will, or by some kind of magic, or magician. The late Jacques Barzun believed that the West was decadent, and he defined decadence like this:

All that is meant by Decadence is “falling off.” It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

It will be asked, how does the historian know when Decadence sets in? By the open confessions of malaise, by the search in all directions for a new faith or faiths.

And:

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label.

Futility as normal. The absurd as normal. Welcome to America 2016.

In the past week, in person and in e-mail, I have been struck by the number of people who have expressed to me their newfound belief that the Benedict Option, of which they had previously been skeptical, is the only constructive path going forward. That is, they say they had previously been skeptical, but that the Trump apocalypse — “apocalypse” in the strict sense of “unveiling” — has made them realize that things are much further gone in American culture than they thought. These are not, I think, people who are satisfied with the Republican status quo, but they had a sense that things were essentially on solid ground, and we could muddle through. They don’t really think this anymore. Cue Uncle Alasdair:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.

I’ll leave you with this excerpt from a piece Caleb Stegall wrote back in 2006, as part of the National Review Online discussion of Crunchy Cons, recalled by Caleb in this Front Porch Republic post from 2009. Excerpt:

I see the authentically conservative posture of man towards reality as one of those natural things that becomes highly unnatural and potentially turned against itself when articulated.  The problem seems especially acute among traditional economic, cultural, and religious communities in a highly mobilized, mechanized, and secularized state in which they have become conscious of what they have lost or are rapidly losing. Attempts to compensate, renew, or restore—whether given a leftist or rightist spin—increase the problem of over-articulation. Everyone has a theory and everyone chases the latest theorist.  I do not have a high degree of hope for any version of movement conservatism, towards which I remain skeptical. I put much more stock in what amounts to monasticism, in the broadest sense, which includes all of the crunchy virtues Rod discusses and more, though in a very natural and inarticulate way. This would include the many lay movements in the Church, local economic coalitions, and various traditional cultures that do much more doing than speaking and theorizing. One does not need to theorize how to view and engage secular modernity if one daily concentrates on self-sacrifice, prayer, and simply doing the work of God and disciplining the body and mind to order themselves according to their place and heritage. [Emphasis mine — RD]

That last line is a perfect description of what the Tipiloschi, the Chestertonian group of Catholic laity in San Benedetto del Tronto, are doing, and how they approach life. They have not theorized the Benedict Option, not really. They are living it, and doing so in a fruitful, joyful, effective way. They are resilient and eminently sane, and they are going to be resilient through the days to come. According to their website, the Tipiloschi, co-founded by Marco Sermarini (see above) exist as “a friendship founded radically in Jesus Christ, through which to judge the events of life, and to help us in everyday circumstances — a friendship that does not remain closed in upon itself, but that generates works and widens to all the people you meet, taking care and helping them in their daily necessities. We want to live a faith that has to do with life.”

Theirs does — and believe me, they are not deceived about the nature of our post-Christian time. These Italians are the happiest, friendliest countercultural radicals I have ever seen. It’s incredible. “Tipiloschi,” the name they call themselves means, in English, “shady types” — a sign of their sense of humor. They think of themselves as Catholic hobbits. I can hardly wait to tell you more about them, in the book I’m writing. They are models for us Americans. The Tipiloschi are authentic conservatives, according to Caleb’s definition. I agree.

My point in bringing them up at the end of this long, rambling, depressing post is only this: Don’t despair. There is a way to live virtuously, happily, and well in these times, come what may. It’s not easy, but it can be done. I’ve seen it — and I’m going to show it to you.

Dallas Has A Saint

Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas (1923-2011)

Above is an image taken today of the incorrupt body of Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas. He died in the summer of 2011, and was buried unembalmed, according to Orthodox tradition. On Friday his body was disinterred for transferral to his new tomb in St. Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral in Dallas, which was his own. When the cemetery personnel opened his coffin, they found Vladyka Dmitri incorrupt.

That is to say, his body had not decayed. He has been buried for four and a half years under the Texas ground, and his body looks like it did the day he died.

This is a miracle. In Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianity, it is seen as a sign that the deceased was, and is, a saint. If you read The Brothers Karamazov, you may remember that whether or not the deceased Elder Zosima was incorruptible was a feature of the narrative.

In Dallas today, they found their incorruptible. I don’t suppose a soul who knew Vladyka Dmitri is surprised. I knew him in the last five years of his life. What a dear and holy man he was. He had an important part in my own coming to Orthodoxy. In the summer of 2005, broken and grieving over years of scandal and corruption in the Catholic Church, my wife and I began attending St. Seraphim Cathedral. We did not intend to convert to Orthodoxy; we simply wanted to be in a place where we could be confident the real presence of Christ was in the Eucharist (Catholic doctrine recognizes the validity of Orthodox sacraments), the liturgy was reverent and beautiful, and we could worship without being so overwhelmed by anger.

After a couple of visits, we received an invitation to a party at the Archbishop’s house, after the Dormition feast. I felt divided about this. For one, I didn’t want to go to a fancy archbishop’s house. For another, I had had enough of bishops and archbishops, men who had wrecked the Catholic Church. I didn’t want to get mixed up with an Orthodox one.

But we went anyway, showing up on a rainy August afternoon at the address on the card. It turned out to be not a palatial residence, but the modest two-story woodframe house behind the cathedral. Could this house, with the paint peeling, really be where the Archbishop of Dallas and the South lives? I knocked on the door, and in we walked, with our kids.

The house was jammed with people from the congregation. There were Russians and other Slavs, and Americans too. You could hardly move for all the people. Every inch of counter space in the kitchen was filled with dishes bearing up Russian food. At the far end of one counter was a gorgeous flan, made by Vladyka Dmitri himself. He loved to cook.

There he was, sitting at the table, his long, Gandalf beard resting on his black cassock. His eyes twinkled. He greeted us kindly. Later, we watched him remove himself to a side room where kids were playing, sit down on a low couch, and talk to them like they were his own children. He was 82 years old then, and was to those children a kindly grandfather figure.

“Come see this,” Julie said, pointing to Dmitri among the children. That’s not something we were used to seeing.

A short while later, in the kitchen, a Russian and a Ukrainian poured vodka shots for themselves and for me, and raised a toast to the Archbishop. “To Vladyka!” we said, then downed the vodka. Meanwhile, the ceiling began to leak in the poor old house. We chose to ignore it, because it was time to bless the food. Everybody became quiet as Vladyka turned toward the icon and began to pray.

It was a family dinner. That’s how it struck us. Archbishop Dmitri, born Robert Royster in Teague, Texas, was the opposite of everything I had come to expect in a bishop. He was humble and kind and gentle. He loved his people, and his people loved him. I remember thinking how good it would be to be led by such a man.

One day a few years later, after had become Orthodox, we were at Forgiveness Vespers, the pre-Lenten ritual that all Orthodox parishes do in which each parishioner must ask each other for forgiveness, and then offer it in return. Watching that tall, elderly archbishop bow before our three year old daughter Nora and ask her forgiveness — it took my breath away.

Nora did not know it at the time, but it was a saint of God who did her that honor.

Here’s what will happen today in Dallas:

On Saturday morning, March 5th, 2016 His Beatitude, Metropolitan TIKHON, will preside at the Divine Liturgy in St Seraphim Cathedral at 9:30 AM. Following the Divine Liturgy a Pannikhida will be served, after which we will solemnly process around the cathedral carrying the coffin of Archbishop Dmitri and place it over the prepared crypt in the Memorial Chapel. After the final litany, we will lower the coffin containing the body of Archbishop Dmitri into his final earthly resting place.

Holy Dmitri of Dallas, pray for us. I am sure that official canonization procedures will soon be underway. What a blessing he was to all of us who knew him.

A saint. Our Vladyka. What a gift.

The World of SJWs

Here’s exciting news from the world of Social Justice Warriors:

Three black women attending the University of Albany who say they were the victims of a “racially fueled” on-campus attack in January by fellow white students now stand accused of assault in connection with the incident.

Asha Burwell, 20, of Huntington Station, N.Y.; Ariel Agudio, 20, of Huntington, N.Y.; and Alexis Briggs, 20, of Elmira Heights, N.Y., each face a charge of assault in the third degree, a crime punishable by up to a year in jail. Burwell and Agudio also face other charges including falsely reporting an incident in the third degree.

The women sparked a massive campus anti-racist movement, but it turns out that they probably started the fight themselves. Video evidence indicates that. They may have been willing to lie and stir up racial hatred for selfish ends. If they are guilty, I hope the judge throws the book at them.

Meanwhile, the completely mature students at Pitt took to the fainting couches when confronted by speech they didn’t like:

Yiannopoulos, a controversial conservative writer and activist who tours colleges to speak about the need for free speech, spoke at Pitt Monday evening to a crowd of about 350 students, some of whom protested the lecture. The Board had allocated funding to Pitt College Republicans, who had invited Yiannopoulos to campus.

During his talk, Yiannopoulos called students who believe in a gender wage gap “idiots,” declared the Black Lives Matter movement a “supremacy” group, while feminists are “man-haters.”

The Board said in a release earlier on Tuesday that it understood and empathized with students who were offended by Yiannopoulos’ talk, but that it had a duty to “fairly represent the voice of all students in the allocations funding process.”

In the release, the Board said it must follow the precedent set in the U.S. Supreme Court case Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth, saying a student governing body must “operate under the principle of viewpoint neutrality.”

According to Board member Jack Heidecker, when SGB considers funding for allocations, it must take a neutral stance and cannot consider the content of the speaker. Despite its legal binding, the Board apologized to the students who were hurt from the speech.

“Just because we have to be neutral with our funding doesn’t mean we’re personally neutral — we feel strongly about these things,” Heidecker said. “I hurt yesterday, too.”

“I hurt yesterday too.” One day, Jack Heidecker will be a grown man, and he will be extremely embarrassed by this remark. If he’s lucky.

Moving on, Episcopal priest Anne Fowler has signed an amicus brief testifying that her abortion allowed her to go on to the Episcopal Divinity School, affiliated with Harvard, and then to a thriving career as a minister. From the brief:

In 1981, in her second year at Divinity School, Anne accidentally became pregnant. She believed her partner would not be a suitable parent; their relationship ended soon after the abortion.

Already solely responsible for her daughter, Anne knew she could not complete Divinity School and pursue a career as a priest if she did not have an abortion. She has never regretted her decision and is grateful that she did not have to travel far, which would have caused her additional stress and financial hardship while she cared for her young daughter.

Anne graduated from Divinity School in 1984. She served for 21 years as a priest at St. John’s Episcopal Church, an urban parish in Boston. During her tenure, the parish grew into a vibrant community.

Oh, vibrancy! Turns out that Anne not only killed her unborn child, she also tanked her parish. 

Must be something in the air around that Divinity School. Here’s a report on some SJW sisters and their man-free safe space:

Sara Sentilles, MDiv ’01, founded WomenCircle almost 15 years ago. Then known as WomenChurch, Sentilles said she established the group because she needed it.

“I needed a space where language was being used that I could hear myself in—a feminist, queer, anti-racist, politically engaged space. As a feminist in graduate school preparing to be a priest, I struggled in classrooms and in churches. It felt like I was being asked to leave parts of myself (body, politics, sexuality) at the door.”

Ten years later, this need for a supportive community of women continues to be felt.

“Even though it is casually mentioned in class, we don’t always acknowledge how patriarchy has been harmful or how we can begin to repair that damage,” Otero explained. “One of the most common comments I hear during WomenCircle is that our members don’t feel like they have a female space—a women-affirming space—anywhere else.”

More failed congregations to come, no doubt.

Tomorrow, two Bowdoin College student government leaders face impeachment proceedings. Why? They went to a tequila party where some people wore miniature sombreros:

Within days, the Bowdoin Student Government unanimously adopted a “statement of solidarity” to “[stand] by all students who were injured and affected by the incident,” and recommend that administrators “create a space for those students who have been or feel specifically targeted.”

The statement deemed the party an act of “cultural appropriation,” one that “creates an environment where students of color, particularly Latino, and especially Mexican, students feel unsafe.” The effort to purge the two representatives who attended the party, via impeachment, soon followed.

Others involved with the party have already faced school sanctions, including being kicked out of the dorms. Now, I ask you: who in their right mind would choose a college (or send their kids to a college) where things like this happen? Where your college education would be suddenly at risk because you happened to go to a party where people wore funny hats? It’s berserk.

Finally, from my neck of the woods, organizers of a triathlon event at Angola State Penitentiary cancelled the race after SJW threats. According to a press release put out by organizers:

It saddens us deeply that we have to take this action, but in light of recent events, we do not feel like we can offer a safe environment for our athletes coming to compete. The personal attacks and threats being made against us as individuals is also too much to bear. It’s just not worth it.

SJW protesters believed that it was racist, or insensitive, or something, to have a race at a prison — this, even though money raised from it was going to benefit programs for inmates and the prison’s museum.

The war for social justice never ends…

Italian Invasion of Austin

Hey Austin, Texas, come hear me talk about two eminent Italians today: St. Benedict of Nursia and Dante Alighieri.

At 11:45, join me at Hill House, a Christian study center, for a reflection on the Benedict Option. I’m going to make the case that the most important work Christians can do now is build small, local, thick communities of faith capable of riding out the storm, and of being a lighthouse to ships lost at sea. Come hear about the inspiring things I saw in Norcia last week, at the Benedictine monastery, and in San Benedetto del Tronto, where a group of committed Catholic laity are living out the Benedict Option joyfully. Details on the lunch meeting here.

Later this afternoon, it’s Dante time.

Donald Duce

If you watched tonight’s GOP debate and are still confident in your decision to support Donald Trump, then you and I live on the same planet, but in different worlds. Tonight was a disaster for Trump. There can no longer be any doubt of these things:

1. That he is a thoroughly untrustworthy character. The Trump University debacle was devastating to him tonight. He had no plausible answers at all for the damning facts against him, just bluster and name-calling. Rubio and Cruz were merciless against Trump on his hypocrisy on foreign workers and American jobs. Plus, he looked comically evasive on the question of the New York Times off-the-record transcript. He plainly told the Times editorial board off the record that he doesn’t mean what he says on immigration. If you believe otherwise after tonight, you will believe anything.

2. That he will say anything to get elected. I am not sure if this is intentional. I think he says anything that comes to mind.

3. That he comes across as temperamentally unsuited to hold the presidency. He can’t take criticism, and can’t answer his critics with anything but the heat of a flaming gasbag. How can we trust someone so unstable with the power to start a war? When Rubio rattled him, he called him “Little Marco” — a remark that did not make Rubio look small, but rather Trump.

None of this is new, of course. But all of it came through with such force in tonight’s debate that it was finally impossible to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. He fell apart under attack.

The decisive moment for me, though, was when Trump insisted — and later repeated — that if he gave an illegal order to the US military, that they would follow it. He was proud of this! This is a man who cannot be counted on to respect the rule of law, and would even be willing to cause a constitutional crisis over it.

As regular readers know, I have a lot of sympathy for people who like Trump, and I have been grateful to Trump for some of the things he has done in this campaign (most especially for breaking the ridiculous GOP taboo on criticizing the Iraq War). I do not pity the Republican Party its travails over Trump, because it deserves to be cold-cocked over its misrule. Here’s the thing, though: there are millions of people who believe in Donald Trump, and who believe that he will do the things he says. Many of them have been let down by life. They’re scared of the future, and they have reason to be. They don’t believe that the Republican Party has their back, and they’re probably right about that.

What happens if Donald Trump is elected president, and can’t deliver on his gaudy promises? There’s no way he’s going to be able to do the things he says. Being president of the United States is not like running your own company. Trump doesn’t even know his own mind. Every time he got in trouble in tonight’s debate (which was a lot), he quickly retreated to Trumpenprinzip: the obnoxious assertion that Trump is the best leader because he’s got the best polling numbers. He’s a man who believes that the truth is what he says it is. If he becomes the next president, and if — no, when — he betrays all the people who voted for him believing he was a man of his word, a man who would be for them, things are going to get very ugly, very fast in this country.

What a ridiculous spectacle the Republican Party has become. Watching tonight’s debate in front of a hooting mob of goons was to witness genuine decadence. Read John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece — written before tonight’s debate — about why he thinks the GOP establishment’s #NeverTrump efforts are going to fail. Excerpts:

In rallying disaffected Republicans and independents, he has identified a set of internal contradictions in the G.O.P. that no amount of negative advertising can conceal. And rolling out somebody like Romney only highlights these contradictions.

For decades now the Republican Party has been appealing to low-income and middle-income whites while promoting an economic agenda that runs contrary to their interests: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, free trade, deep cuts to entitlement programs, and so on. Trump, who is hawking a tax plan that he appears to have ordered up at short notice from Art Laffer or Larry Kudlow, can be accused of adopting the same bait-and-switch tactics, but taxes aren’t central to his campaign. In promising to end illegal immigration and impose hefty tariffs on good from countries like China and Mexico, he can, at least, claim to be pursuing an agenda that would boost American wages and save American jobs.

Would his strategy work? Probably not. But in talking about safeguarding Social Security, forcing pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices, preventing people who don’t have health insurance from dying in the streets, and eliminating tax breaks that favor hedge-fund and private-equity managers (such as Romney), Trump is using the language of economic populism in a manner that none of his Republican rivals can match. Beholden to their campaigns backers, they are forced to confine themselves to the standard guff about cutting taxes, loosening regulations, and encouraging enterprise. At this late stage, many none-too-affluent G.O.P. voters appear to be smelling a rat.

He goes on to quote reformist Republican Reihan Salam’s recent piece saying that the GOP really hasn’t done jack for working-class people, and that it needs to make substantive policy changes to “reinvent itself as the champion of America’s working- and middle-class families.” Cassidy is skeptical that Republican politicians can do that because it would require them to go against the interests of their deep-pocketed donors.

And there’s this:

As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait commented on Twitter on Thursday, “#NeverTrump, at its core, is people satisfied that the Republican Party is fundamentally sound.” And that, in the final analysis, is why they are unlikely to be able to see off Trump’s insurgency.

Read the whole thing. If you watched that bizarre spectacle in Detroit tonight and believed that the Republican Party is in any way sound, you should consider that Trump voters aren’t the only Republicans prone to magical thinking. Consider: after doing an effective job showing that Trump is a reckless mountebank who would threaten American democracy, Cruz and Rubio agreed at debate’s end that they would support him if he’s the nominee — thereby massively undermining their argument.

Trump, with his remarks on being willing to deliver illegal orders to the US military, and expecting them to obey, revealed himself to be a man in search of a balcony. They would campaign for Donald Duce? Really? That being the case, how bad do they really think Trump is? Or does party matter more than principle? It’s crazy — just think of how much good either Rubio or Cruz could have done for their candidacies by refusing to support nominee Trump. They’re trying to convince Republican voters that Trump is a mortal threat to the GOP and to America itself … but in the end, they’ll fall in line behind him, if he gets the nomination.

That’s leadership?

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias makes a good point:

But for all their attacks, they are not really joining the argument that Trump started over the proposition that the GOP should ditch elements of free market ideology and embrace populist nationalism instead.

Trump’s rivals don’t want to engage in this argument for the same reason that Trump has rocketed to the polls — most rank-and-file Republicans agree with Trump. So instead, they bite at him over secondary issues — old campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton, Trump University — or try to point out problems with Trump that also apply to the other candidates. It was shocking, for example, to see Fox News anchors pointing out that Trump’s tax plan isn’t remotely paid for. This is entirely true, but it’s equally true of every other GOP tax plan of the past 15 years and it never seemed to bother Fox before.

These are real knocks on Trump but they don’t explain the GOP establishment’s rage against him. That stems from the divide over the role of populist nationalism in the conservative movement. And whether the establishment candidates want to talk about it or not, the delegate math has now reached a point where a major intra-party blowup is essentially inevitable.

 

Donald Il Duce

If you watched tonight’s GOP debate and are still confident in your decision to support Donald Trump, then you and I live on the same planet, but in different worlds. Tonight was a disaster for Trump. There can no longer be any doubt of these things:

1. That he is a thoroughly untrustworthy character. The Trump University debacle was devastating to him tonight. He had no plausible answers at all for the damning facts against him, just bluster and name-calling. Rubio and Cruz were merciless against Trump on his hypocrisy on foreign workers and American jobs. Plus, he looked comically evasive on the question of the New York Times off-the-record transcript. He plainly told the Times editorial board off the record that he doesn’t mean what he says on immigration. If you believe otherwise after tonight, you will believe anything.

2. That he will say anything to get elected. I am not sure if this is intentional. I think he says anything that comes to mind.

3. That he is temperamentally unsuited to hold the presidency. He can’t take criticism, and can’t answer his critics with anything but the heat of a flaming gasbag. How can we trust someone so unstable with the power to start a war? When Rubio rattled him, he called him “Little Marco” — a remark that did not make Rubio look small, but rather Trump.

None of this is new, of course. But all of it came through with such force in tonight’s debate that it was finally impossible to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. He fell apart under attack.

The decisive moment for me, though, was when Trump insisted — and later repeated — that if he gave an illegal order to the US military, that they would follow it. He was proud of this! This is a man who cannot be counted on to respect the rule of law, and would even be willing to cause a constitutional crisis over it.

As regular readers know, I have a lot of sympathy for people who like Trump, and I have been grateful to Trump for some of the things he has done in this campaign (most especially for breaking the ridiculous GOP taboo on criticizing the Iraq War). I do not pity the Republican Party its travails over Trump, because it deserves to be cold-cocked over its misrule. Here’s the thing, though: there are millions of people who believe in Donald Trump, and who believe that he will do the things he says. Many of them have been let down by life. They’re scared of the future, and they have reason to be. They don’t believe that the Republican Party has their back, and they’re probably right about that.

What happens if Donald Trump is elected president, and can’t deliver on his gaudy promises? There’s no way he’s going to be able to do the things he says. Being president of the United States is not like running your own company. Trump doesn’t even know his own mind. Every time he got in trouble in tonight’s debate (which was a lot), he quickly retreated to Trumpenprinzip: the obnoxious assertion that Trump is the best leader because he’s got the best polling numbers. He’s a man who believes that the truth is what he says it is. If he becomes the next president, and if — no, when — he betrays all the people who voted for him believing he was a man of his word, a man who would be for them, things are going to get very ugly, very fast in this country.

What a ridiculous spectacle the Republican Party has become. Watching tonight’s debate in front of a hooting mob of goons was to witness genuine decadence. Read John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece — written before tonight’s debate — about why he thinks the GOP establishment’s #NeverTrump efforts are going to fail. Excerpts:

In rallying disaffected Republicans and independents, he has identified a set of internal contradictions in the G.O.P. that no amount of negative advertising can conceal. And rolling out somebody like Romney only highlights these contradictions.

For decades now the Republican Party has been appealing to low-income and middle-income whites while promoting an economic agenda that runs contrary to their interests: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, free trade, deep cuts to entitlement programs, and so on. Trump, who is hawking a tax plan that he appears to have ordered up at short notice from Art Laffer or Larry Kudlow, can be accused of adopting the same bait-and-switch tactics, but taxes aren’t central to his campaign. In promising to end illegal immigration and impose hefty tariffs on good from countries like China and Mexico, he can, at least, claim to be pursuing an agenda that would boost American wages and save American jobs.

Would his strategy work? Probably not. But in talking about safeguarding Social Security, forcing pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices, preventing people who don’t have health insurance from dying in the streets, and eliminating tax breaks that favor hedge-fund and private-equity managers (such as Romney), Trump is using the language of economic populism in a manner that none of his Republican rivals can match. Beholden to their campaigns backers, they are forced to confine themselves to the standard guff about cutting taxes, loosening regulations, and encouraging enterprise. At this late stage, many none-too-affluent G.O.P. voters appear to be smelling a rat.

He goes on to quote reformist Republican Reihan Salam’s recent piece saying that the GOP really hasn’t done jack for working-class people, and that it needs to make substantive policy changes to “reinvent itself as the champion of America’s working- and middle-class families.” Cassidy is skeptical that Republican politicians can do that because it would require them to go against the interests of their deep-pocketed donors.

And there’s this:

As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait commented on Twitter on Thursday, “#NeverTrump, at its core, is people satisfied that the Republican Party is fundamentally sound.” And that, in the final analysis, is why they are unlikely to be able to see off Trump’s insurgency.

Read the whole thing. If you watched that bizarre spectacle in Detroit tonight and believed that the Republican Party is in any way sound, you should consider that Trump voters aren’t the only Republicans prone to magical thinking. Consider: after doing an effective job showing that Trump is a reckless mountebank who would threaten American democracy, Cruz and Rubio agreed at debate’s end that they would support him if he’s the nominee — thereby massively undermining their argument.

Trump, with his remarks on being willing to deliver illegal orders to the US military, and expecting them to obey, revealed himself to be a man in search of a balcony. They would campaign for Donald Il Duce? Really? That being the case, how bad do they really think Trump is? Or does party matter more than principle? It’s crazy — just think of how much good either Rubio or Cruz could have done for their candidacies by refusing to support nominee Trump. They’re trying to convince Republican voters that Trump is a mortal threat to the GOP and to America itself … but in the end, they’ll fall in line behind him, if he gets the nomination.

That’s leadership?

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias makes a good point:

But for all their attacks, they are not really joining the argument that Trump started over the proposition that the GOP should ditch elements of free market ideology and embrace populist nationalism instead.

Trump’s rivals don’t want to engage in this argument for the same reason that Trump has rocketed to the polls — most rank-and-file Republicans agree with Trump. So instead, they bite at him over secondary issues — old campaign contributions to Hillary Clinton, Trump University — or try to point out problems with Trump that also apply to the other candidates. It was shocking, for example, to see Fox News anchors pointing out that Trump’s tax plan isn’t remotely paid for. This is entirely true, but it’s equally true of every other GOP tax plan of the past 15 years and it never seemed to bother Fox before.

These are real knocks on Trump but they don’t explain the GOP establishment’s rage against him. That stems from the divide over the role of populist nationalism in the conservative movement. And whether the establishment candidates want to talk about it or not, the delegate math has now reached a point where a major intra-party blowup is essentially inevitable.

 

George Foster, Hero Of Faith

This week, a Pennsylvania grand jury released its findings from a two-week investigation on the cover-up of sexual crimes committed by Catholic priests of the Altoona-Johnstown diocese. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s report:

“These findings are both staggering and sobering,” said the grand jury report. “Over many years hundreds of children have fallen victim to child predators wrapped in the authority and integrity of an honorable faith. As wolves disguised as the shepherds themselves — these men stole the innocence of children by sexually preying upon the most innocent and vulnerable …. ”

Much of the abuse happened between the 1940s and 1980s, according to the report, but many of the victims came forward in more recent decades to report the priest to the diocese.

The two previous bishops leading the diocese — James Hogan, who served from 1966 to 1986 and died in 2005, and Joseph Adamec, who served from 1987 to 2011 and is now retired — “took actions that further endangered children as they placed their desire to avoid public scandal over the well-being of innocent children,” the report said. “Priests were returned to ministry with full knowledge they were child predators.”

The grand jury found evidence of sexual abuse by 50 priests, spanning the decades, of the small diocese of 120,000. More:

The report includes extensive testimony from a key aide to Bishop Hogan, Monsignor Philip Saylor, who said a Blair County president judge, sheriff and other law enforcement officers let the diocese handle abusive priests internally, rather than prosecuting them.

The grand jury said there was an apparent reason for this deference — that the diocese had political boss-like powers in central Pennsylvania. Monsignor Saylor said a mayor of Johnstown sent candidates for police and fire chief to him for interviews, and he would tell the mayor whom to pick. “That happened in Johnstown and Altoona,” he said.

The grand jury report quoted former Altoona police Chief Peter Starr as crediting his own appointment to such arrangements and saying that the “politicians of Blair County were afraid of Monsignor Saylor,” who was editor of the diocesan newspaper.

With such influence, “Hogan saw no obligation of faith or law to the children of his parishioners,” the grand jury report said.

Can you believe that? The mayor and the police were afraid of the bishop. There’s a line in Spotlight where a character says, of the conspiracy of silence and indifference among Boston Catholics, “It takes a village to abuse a child.”

The story goes on to say that the grand jury found that the review board set up by the diocese after 2002 were more interested in investigating alleged abuse victims to prove that they were frauds than in finding out what really happened.

Inside the story you can read an embedded version of the grand jury report. No amount of familiarity with these kinds of things can reduce the shock. The grand jury had a search warrant executed on the small Pennsylvania diocese’s headquarters, seizing its records related to the sexual abuse of children by priests. The report notes that they didn’t find a few files, but rather filing cabinets and boxes “full of details of children being sexually violated by the institution’s own members.”

I spent some of this morning reading those details. It’s demonic. There’s no other word for it. Unless you are certain you can’t handle it, I strongly suggest you read at least some of the report. It’s crucial that you understand what exactly these priests did to children, and what these bishops facilitated. Words like “abused” and “molested” do not begin to convey the gravity of these acts. A priest of the cathedral, for example, raped a teenage boy inside a hearse. That’s not even one of the worst ones. The bishop knew about this, but did nothing — in fact, the grand jury found that he tried to obstruct the police investigation by denying cops access to the cathedral.

The cover-ups involved more than the diocese. State and local authorities facilitated them too. In the early 1980s, then-Bishop Hogan worked out an arrangement with the Pennsylvania State Police to avoid consequences for one serial molester priest. When the priest re-offended, for punishment, the bishop sent the abuser for a six-week “retreat” to Orchard Lake — a boy’s school.

Perverts, the lot.

To this day, I still cannot understand why so many men — fathers, brothers, uncles, cops — in these communities didn’t stand up to these priests and beat the hell out of them for what they did, and were doing, to the community’s children. Reading the report this morning, I was reminded of this passage from Christopher Caldwell’s report on the Muslim immigration crisis in Europe:

Even in France, building a winning coalition out of feminism and national security will be hard to pull off. The New Year’s Eve sexual attacks by migrant men on German women in the main square of Cologne have shaken France to its core. The episode grows more significant and unsettling as the weeks pass and new details emerge. The number of discrete attacks appears to have been closer to a thousand than to a hundred. The post-Cologne revelation that a similar mob sex attack had taken place at a concert in Sweden in the summer of 2014 raised the specter of ideological taboos resembling those in a totalitarian state. It is not just that the government has worked hard to silence inconvenient facts, as Germany’s did in the aftermath of Cologne. It is that the European public has been disciplined into suppressing its own thoughts.

The reflection has lately taken a darker, more anthropological turn. Elisabeth Lévy, editor of the controversy-sowing monthly Causeur, was the first French writer to ask a troubling question: Where were German men in all of this? The Russian writer Maria Golovanivskaya, too, wondered why she had seen no “battered male faces” among the victims. The Polish writer Adam Soboczynski even put in a good word for pre-feminist ways. “The patriarchal society,” he wrote, “which remains alive and well in other parts of the world, was never one in which a woman could be humiliated for sport.” He noted, with a certain Polish mischief, that the young men he saw in the German subways hardly seemed up to the task of being protectors. “They were very sweet and very slender,” he wrote, “and it would have made a very very politically incorrect parlor game to guess which of them were gay and which of them were only acting like it.” Elisabeth Badinter, the French feminist doyenne, was simply bleak: “That about a thousand men,” she wrote, “should take possession of a public space and, along with it, all the women there is unthinkable. I have no memory, in my entire life, of anything similar.” Of course not. You would have to go back to 1945 for that.

Had the laity of Altoona-Johnstown been disciplined into suppressing their own thoughts? It seems clear that they had been.

George Foster is one local Catholic who didn’t suppress his thoughts. What he did is a model of faith and courage. Here’s the story:

As a small-town businessman, George Foster has immersed himself in civic causes over the years, serving as president of the Rotary, as a director of the Blair County Arts Foundation and as an advocate for Catholic schools at risk of closing.

But his greatest community service may be his dogged, 14-year-long crusade against sexually abusive priests. According to a grand jury report Tuesday, the Altoona businessman became a “novice detective” who painstakingly kept files on priests suspected of sexual abuse, hounded church officials who were reluctant to address abuse claims and, in 2014, turned over his trove of material to state investigators.

“His efforts to expose the conspiracy of silence within the diocese are nothing short of heroic,” said the report, which Attorney General Kathleen Kane released in laying out what she described as a half-century-long scandal involving the abuse of hundreds of minors by priests in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese.

Mr. Foster, 55, president of a foundation set up to promote the Catholic faith through a radio station and television ads, put it this way: “God allowed the curtain to be pulled back because this is his church, and he’s trying to clean it up using us.”

In 2002, he wrote an angry letter to a local paper demanding a “throw ’em out” policy to sexual offenders in the clergy. People started calling and writing him telling him their own clergy abuse stories. He began investigating these things himself. Cops would call him with tips. More:

Before long, according to the grand jury report, Mr. Foster “found himself in an avalanche of humanity … claiming that priests were molesting young boys.” He gathered letters from the accusers, interviewed victims, studied civil court records, built files on suspected abusers, took his evidence to the diocese, publicly criticized the church’s inaction and shrugged off those who said it was dangerous to be outspoken.

“I only answer to God. … Bishops don’t bother me,” he told the grand jury.

In 2014, Foster, sick of his diocesan authorities doing nothing about the crisis, turned over all his investigative records to the state. And now the truth is out.

I only answer to God. … Bishops don’t bother me. Said the grand jury report: “A concerned Catholic businessman did what so many hadn’t; he built cases against monsters to protect children.”

Here’s a quote from Foster’s grand jury testimony:

But as a Church militant, we have something they (the clergy) don’t know about. Now, people talk about simple stuff. ‘Oh, they don’t know what it’s like to have sex.’ Well, they obviously do here, but I’m saying they don’t know what it’s like to raise children. When you’re a parent, you know what’s right and wrong. We bring that to the Church. There is not a lay parent I talked to that had a question about what you do with a child molester. No one, no one sat there and said, ‘Oh, I’d just be real confused on how to handle this.’ Every parent knew the answer, and that’s the gift we bring. But we’re the Church militant. We’re supposed to get things done.

That right there is a Christian man who has his priorities straight.

Help This Wendell Berry Film

Wendell Berry, at his writing desk (Photo courtesy www.theseerfilm.com)

Gang, Julie and I recently got to see The Seer, a new documentary about Wendell Berry by Austin-based filmmaker Laura Dunn and her husband Jef Sewell. It is an astonishing work. We sort of know Laura and Jef, and I’ve known for a while that she’s been working on this Berry doc. Berry is her favorite writer, and she is passionate about family farms and agrarianism. I had seen Laura’s earlier film The Unforeseen, which played at Sundance, and knew what she was capable of. I’ve been eagerly awaiting The Seer, which Laura and Jef have been working on for seven years (they have six kids, by the way).

It does not disappoint. The texture of the film is rich, the tone poetic. In fact, it feels less like a documentary than a visual poem. Dunn and Sewell do in film what Wendell Berry does with poetry. I can’t wait to watch it again, and am thrilled to think of how The Seer will be received around the country. The film is in part a portrait of Berry, but more an exploration of his prophetic vision of America and its land. If Terrence Malick had made a documentary about Wendell Berry, it would look and feel a lot like this one. In fact, Malick is a friend of the directors, and an executive producer (with Robert Redford) of The Seer, but the work is all the young couple’s. I bring Malick’s name into it to give you a sense of the high aesthetic level at which Dunn and Sewell are working in this film. It’s simply a gorgeous, gorgeous movie.

Here’s a recent story from Modern Farmer about the movie. Excerpts:

The film, “The Seer: A Portrait of Wendell Berry,” directed by Laura Dunn and Jef Sewell (also the producer) and executive produced by Robert Redford and , is as much a love letter to family farmers and the rural country, where Berry has deep family roots, as it is a straight-ahead portrait of the author.

Dunn, 40, felt a documentary about Berry needed to be more than a traditional head-on interview, interspersed with B roll. Early on, she was inspired by Berry’s 40-pane window for a way to present her subject. Like the painter Chuck Close’s portraits, which are made up of small abstract units that together create a subject’s likeness, Dunn focused her camera on the landscape, people, and past to give us a deeper understanding of Berry’s life and works—so it’s not so much about Berry himself, but instead, what he sees around him.

The film is shot “across four seasons in the farming cycle … [and] blends observational scenes of farming life, interviews with farmers and community members with evocative, carefully framed shots of the surrounding landscape, according to the film’s website. In an unusual move for a documentary about a living person, the camera is never turned directly on its subject.

“It was clear to me through my conversations with Wendell—and reading his texts about computers, screens, and media—that this is a person who is very skeptical of screens, and as a filmmaker that’s a challenge,” says Dunn. “If you want to draw a portrait of someone, what you’re trying to do is capture in some small way some reflection of the essence of that person. With Wendell, it occurred to me early on that this couldn’t be a biopic. That wouldn’t capture the complexity of him in my mind.”

Found out that Laura and Jef just launched a Kickstarter campaign to pay for final post-production costs before the film launches at South by Southwest this month. If you love Wendell Berry and what he stands for, please considering donating. Trust me, you won’t regret it. The whole thing was filmed in Henry County, Kentucky, in its fields and woods, and among its farm families. Tanya Berry appears on screen, as does her and Wendell’s daughter, Mary. I don’t want to diminish the considerable aesthetic achievement of The Seer, but for Berry admirers, this movie is one for the heart, a portrait of an artist by artists, and a tribute to an American visionary by a couple half his age whom he taught to see straight and true.

Even if you don’t plan to donate, go to the Kickstarter page to hear a short excerpt of one of Laura’s interviews with Wendell Berry, in which he talks about the age of divorce and dandelions. 

Tanya Berry (Photo courtesy www.theseerfilm.com)