Rod Dreher's Blog, page 78

Racist Riverdale

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Bion Bartning talks about when wokeness invaded his children’s posh New York City private school, Riverdale, which costs $58,000 per year to attend. Last fall, the school began to focus on privilege and white fragility. The school began teaching the children to monitor each other for “allyship” and deviation from woke orthodoxy. It began dividing parents up into “affinity groups” by race. Bartning writes:

At this point in the story, perhaps “lived experiences” become relevant. I am half Mexican and Yaqui, an indigenous tribe native to the U.S.-Mexico border region, and half Jewish. I spent the first year of my life on a commune in Berkeley, Calif. Growing up, I was aware that I had darker skin than my mother and my classmates, but I was never taught to define my identity by the color of my skin. My mixed background and ancestry made me feel like nothing more than a typical American.

My wife came to the U.S. as a refugee from the former Soviet Union. She spent the first five years of her life in an intolerant society where her “group identity” as a Jew was stamped in her passport. In school she was taught to keep tabs on friends and family, and after one particularly effective lesson, she was inspired to turn in her own father to the local police for “crimes against the state.” Fortunately, no harm came of it. But suffice it to say we are both allergic to forced conformity, especially when young, impressionable children are trained to obsess over “racial differences” and be on the lookout for deviations from orthodoxy.

We started to ask questions. I have always felt a strong connection with Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an America where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I advocate genuine antiracism, rooted in dignity and humanity. But the ideology underlying the “racial literacy” guide distributed by the school wasn’t like that. Instead of emphasizing our common humanity, it lumps people into simplistic racial groupings. It teaches that each person’s identity and status is based largely on skin color, and leaves no place for people like me, who are of mixed race or don’t place race at the heart of their identity.

After confirming that the curriculum, obtained from a nonprofit called Pollyanna Inc., was “one of many resources” the school was using, I became concerned by the emphasis on grievance over gratitude and by the stated goal of turning young children into committed activists. “By the end of the unit,” one section of the curriculum explains, “students will set commitments for rectifying current social ills, such as learning and planning how to carry out antiracist activism and/or social advocacy in their communities.”

My concerns multiplied when, going off the Pollyanna curriculum, our fourth-grade daughter and her 9- and 10-year-old classmates were given “The Third Chimpanzee for Young People,” a book intended for middle and high schoolers that covers mature topics such as adultery, self-mutilation and suicide. After we and other parents argued that it was inappropriate, the teachers backtracked and asked students to return the books. But school administrators didn’t want to hear our questions.

The headmaster eventually asked the Bartnings if their kids wouldn’t be happier elsewhere. More:

While many of us have encountered this intolerant orthodoxy only recently, it debuted on college campuses more than 40 years ago. Sensible people thought it was a joke—or at least that it would remain on campus, since it could never survive contact with the “real world.” That was wrong. Masquerading as “antiracism,” this cynical worldview is being spread like a virus by an army of paid consultants and true believers. Few people have been willing to stand up against it. At Riverdale, many parents privately express concerns but aren’t willing to speak up. They fear being called racist—or, worse, losing their coveted spots.

The real story here isn’t about Riverdale. My kids’ school is one tiny data point. This backward belief system is capturing public and private schools across the country.

He’s right. Read it all, if you have a subscription. He’s talking about an elite private school — which is important, because the kids who attend schools like Riverdale are tomorrow’s elites — but as Christopher Rufo has tirelessly documented, this stuff is going on in public schools too. If you think it’s never going to come to your kids’ school, you are deluded. You might be fortunate enough to have a school staff that is resistant to this poison, but they will have to decide to reject it — and be prepared to be denounced publicly as racist for so doing.

This is soft totalitarianism. It’s teaching children to lay the line between good and evil between races, as the Soviets did for class, and it’s teaching them to inform on each other for ideological deviation, which was common policy in the Soviet bloc countries. And if you disagree? You are sent away. What kind of country do you think we are going to have after we have educated a generation in this poison? Roll your eyes at me if you want, but I can see a future in which a racialized version of these words from Soviet secret police official Martin Latsis to his agents, quoted in my book Live Not By Lies, are said by Americans:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

If you think that’s silly, tell me, then: where do you expect the Riverdale ideology to take this country? They are explicitly educating students in race-based grievance and militant conformity (as in, rat out your friends and family). And there are still people who wonder what those who emigrated to America from Communist countries are talking about when they say the same things they fled are now coming to America.

If we don’t take uncompromising public stands now, it may not be possible to do so tomorrow.

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Abortion Betrayal Is In Biden’s Character

I get withholding one’s vote from Donald Trump out of Christian principle. But I do not get supporting Joe Biden because you thought, you really thought, that a Democratic president would be anything other than a pro-abortion fanatic.

Orson Welles as Arkadin explains what happened to these Evangelical fellows:

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The Media Vs. Your Lyin’ Eyes

On the eve of jury selection in the trial of Officer Derek Chauvin in the George Floyd death, NBC News sends a reporter to Minneapolis, where everybody is worried about more rioting. The reporter goes to what some people have designated the “Free State of George Floyd,” the neighborhood surrounding the site where Floyd died:

Between these two blocks, the usual faces who live here sporadically park their cars in the middle of the road, standing guard and on the lookout for unfamiliar faces.

Frey said the city has blocked vehicle traffic, allowing a space to which all are welcome to memorialize Floyd.

Walking the blocks, however, tell a different, somewhat unwelcoming story.

Marijuana smoke fills the cold, sunny air. Traffic signals are shut off. Sidewalks are eerily quiet. And the occupants of those parked cars roll down their windows to stare at and cross-examine strangers.

Black residents and a few white volunteers enforce this gritty neighborhood, taking it upon themselves to preserve and protect the monument and Floyd’s legacy.

“No outsiders allowed,” McDade-Davis said. “On one hand, residents stood up for themselves and banded together by blocking off access to a memorial dedicated to Floyd’s legacy. However, the neighborhood has become ripe for stickups.”

For better and worse, the neighborhood has spiraled in opposite directions, said McDade-Davis, who lives five blocks from where Floyd was killed.

The two blocks in part symbolize present-day Minneapolis — a tough and loving city nearing what could be “the most significant trial” it has ever seen.

In related news, The New York Times has a piece puzzling over why Latino men vote Republican. Excerpts:

For decades, Democratic candidates worked with the assumption that if Latinos voted in higher numbers, the party was more likely to win. But interviews with dozens of Hispanic men from across the country who voted Republican last year showed deep frustration with such presumptions, and rejected the idea that Latino men would instinctively support liberal candidates. These men challenged the notion that they were part of a minority ethnic group or demographic reliant on Democrats; many of them grew up in areas where Hispanics are the majority and are represented in government. And they said many Democrats did not understand how much Latino men identified with being a provider — earning enough money to support their families is central to the way they view both themselves and the political world.

And:

Last fall, Mr. Arellano campaigned for Mr. Trump in Arizona, and this year, he narrowly lost his bid for chairman of the state Republican Party. Still, he does not fit the Trumpian conservative mold, often urging politicians to soften their political rhetoric against immigrants.

“Trump is not the party, the party is what we make it — a pro-business, pro-family values,” he said. “People who understand we want to make it as something here.”

All of this sounds familiar to Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who is deeply critical of the party under Mr. Trump, and who has worked for decades to push the party to do more to attract Hispanic voters.

“Paying rent is more important than fighting social injustice in their minds,” Mr. Madrid said. “The Democratic Party has always been proud to be a working-class party, but they do not have a working-class message. The central question is going to be, Who can convince these voters their concerns are being heard?”

But:

Some of the frustrations voiced by Hispanic Republican men are stoked by misinformation, including conspiracy theories claiming that the “deep state” took over during the Trump administration and a belief that Black Lives Matter protests caused widespread violence. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Check out the gaslighting at the paper of record! Un-freaking-believable. This shows you the mentality of our media, though. They will never, ever, ever deviate from the party line. Here’s a thought that will not occur to anyone in the NYT newsroom: Latino men want to be on the side of  the party of people who build cities, not the party of people who burn them down.

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Biden Deals Blow To Religious Liberty

President Biden today fired Sharon Fast Gustafson, the General Counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). First he requested her resignation. She sent this letter to him refusing to resign:

This morning, a White House official responded to this by firing her, effective 5pm today.

Notice Gustafson’s point about the work she convened to listen to religious people about their experiences dealing with perceived infringements on their religious liberties in the workplace. Why would the Biden administration want to axe these, if not to signal that defending religious liberty in the workplace does not matter to this administration?

I received a copy of that report. I can’t post the whole thing here, but it is a normal document. Here are the people who came in for the listening session, to share their experiences and concerns with EEOC officials:

It’s a wide, diverse collection of believers.

Here are excerpts from the report, of things that participants from these religious groups said concerned them:

Some who came to the listening sessions told the EEOC that their impression has been that the federal agency doesn’t care much about workplace discrimination against religious believers:

There’s a lot more there. Again, why would the Biden administration spike this stuff? The material quoted above, from the listening sessions, indicates points where religious liberty clashes with LGBT advocacy. Is the Biden administration not interested in all in religious liberty in the workplace, because at times it clashes with LGBT priorities?

EEOC Commissioner Andrea R. Lucas released this statement about the Gustafson sacking:

I find the action taken today by the White House against our independent agency to be deeply troubling, a break from long-established norms respected by presidents of both parties, an injection of partisanship where it had been absent, and telling evidence of what “unity” actually means to this President and his Administration.

In his inaugural address, the President said, “The right to dissent peaceably, within the guardrails of our Republic, is perhaps our nation’s greatest strength.” That, however, does not seem to apply to Sharon Gustafson.  And if such a principle does not apply to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—the very agency charged with preventing and remedying discrimination and retaliation—where else does it apply?   In the days leading up to the President’s decision to fire Ms. Gustafson, a report and related materials dealing with religious discrimination were removed from the EEOC’s website shortly after inauguration. Sharon Gustafson led the work group that produced that report; both she and I wrote letters that appear at the start of that report.  I argued in my letter that calls for unity “cannot come at the expense of diversity” and that we “must find a way to be unified despite strongly held disagreements, not unified through uniformity.”  I also warned that I was “deeply concerned that today, religious liberty has become a disfavored or second-class right in many areas of our society and culture.”

Sadly, today, this Administration proves my points.  The actions taken by this Administration are quite telling as to their priorities . . . and one can safely assume that combating religious discrimination—or retaliation, frankly, given Ms. Gustafson’s firing—is not one of them.  Instead, it appears that this Administration intends to achieve unity through uniformity by removing all dissenting actors, thought, and content from the federal government, the public square, and the marketplace. In the words of the Roman historian, Tacitus, “they have created a wasteland and call it peace.”

If the White House fired General Counsel Gustafson because it wanted its own person in there, that would be contestable, but not alarming. The fact that the White House has done this shortly after spiking the religious liberty work Gustafson helped lead within the EEOC is a chilling reminder of what a Democratic administration now means for vulnerable religious believers.

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Against The Instavangelists

 

Here’s a surprising NYT op-ed from Leigh Stein, who writes about how Instagram influencers like Glennon Doyle serve as substitute religious figures for women in this culture. Stein writes:

Many millennials who have turned their backs on religious tradition because it isn’t diverse, or inclusive enough, have found alternative scripture online. Our new belief system is a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology and Dolly Parton.

And we’ve found a different kind of clergy: personal growth influencers. Women like Ms. Doyle, who offer nones like us permission, validation and community on-demand at a time when it’s nearly impossible to share communion in person. We don’t even have to put down our phones.

But Stein has been thinking about it, and thinks these influencers are like TV evangelists were in an earlier generation. Stein started talking to her mother, who is a psychotherapist and a lay minister in her church.

I told her that I find myself craving role models my age who are not only righteous crusaders, but also humble and merciful, and that I’m not finding them where I live (online). Referring to the influencers who have filled the void religious faith has left for people like me, she said, “They might inspire you to live your best life but not make the best use of your life.”

I thought of Ms. Ciano, who has been following Ms. Doyle for solace during this dark period. Even though Ms. Ciano doesn’t see Ms. Doyle as a neo-religious leader, I was struck by the vulnerable comment she left on one of Ms. Doyle’s Instagram posts in which she unloaded the litany of hardships she’d experienced last year. I noticed it went unanswered. A confession without a confessor.

There is a chasm between the vast scope of our needs and what influencers can possibly provide. We’re looking for guidance in the wrong places. Instead of helping us to engage with our most important questions, our screens might be distracting us from them. Maybe we actually need to go to something like church?

Contrary to what you might have seen on Instagram, our purpose is not to optimize our one wild and precious life. It’s time to search for meaning beyond the electric church that keeps us addicted to our phones and alienated from our closest kin.

Read it all. 

It’s not just about going to church. It’s about going to a church that calls you out of yourself. My former priest Father Matthew Harrington likes to say that people come to church in pain, but not everybody wants to do what is necessary to be healed. You may be searching for a pain reliever to cover the agony, but are unwilling to undergo the pain of surgery, which is the only thing that can fix the problem. Or you might be willing to do the surgery, but have ended up in a clinic that believes in treating you by homeopathy: that is, by watering down the faith as much as possible (I got that analogy from an English vicar). That won’t work.

We are coming up on the start of Orthodox Christian Lent (March 15). Lent is a great time to come to Orthodox churches to see how we worship. During this penitential period, the chanting and the Scripture readings are deeply lamentational. It’s serious stuff, not chirpy uplift. Keep in mind that Lenten services are not how Orthodoxy is during the rest of the year, but you do get exposed to how deeply the Orthodox take repentance and fasting.

(H/T: Caroline Jarboe)

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Rudy Giuliani’s Lost Little Girl

In 1979, George C. Scott starred in Hardcore, a drama about Jake Van Dorn, a Calvinist businessman whose daughter goes missing, and becomes a porn star. Van Dorn’s search for his missing daughter takes him into a porn theater, where he watches a film with her servicing two men. He sobs, “Turn it off! Turn it off!” when the images of his daughter degrading herself become too painful to withstand.

I imagine Rudy Giuliani feels something like that today, following his daughter Caroline’s confession in Vanity Fair that she has found bliss as a “unicorn” — someone who enjoys having sex with couples. This is ordinary smut that only found its way into Vanity Fair because of who its author’s father is. Notice how Miss Giuliani frames her perversion as liberation — the hoariest cliche there is:

“I want to watch my boyfriend bend you over” was the general tone of the sexts we had already exchanged before we met. My body coursed with adrenaline and nervous energy I hadn’t felt on a first date since I was a teenager. Now, in my late 20s, this was a new kind of first date—one with a couple. I had met them on an app where couples can seek a third partner, known as a “unicorn” because of our mythical rarity. As I nervously texted my closest friends (including screenshots of the couple’s profile, and dramatic goodbyes in case I never returned), many of them surprised me in their responses. They said they were curious about threesomes, but had never tried because navigating the world of polyamory felt like a minefield.

As a person with a comically massive reserve of anxiety, I too fear uncharted territory. Paradoxically, though, this doesn’t stop me from feeling intensely drawn to new experiences. Throughout my life, this cognitive dissonance was only further complicated by external judgment I received for my impulses to try unconventional things. I now understand that my curiosity, open-mindedness, and sense of adventure are three nonnegotiable, defining elements of my identity. But it wasn’t until I started sleeping with couples that I shed my shame about those qualities, let alone embraced them in all areas of my life. Finding the strength to explore these more complicated, passionate aspects of my personality became the key to harnessing my voice and creative spark, which in turn helped me better cope with depression, anxiety, and the lingering cognitive effects of adolescent anorexia.

Why did these revelations dawn on me between two sweaty bodies and the energy of someone else’s romantic union? When people think about three-ways, intimacy may not be the first thing to come to mind. “Kinky,” “dirty,” and “taboo” are probably top of the list. It can certainly be all of those things (she says with a naughty smile), but when a couple invites me into their bed, I not only get welcomed into the midst of their preexisting connection, but also get to forge a new one with them based on their trust that I will respect the boundaries of their relationship. This is a vulnerable position all around: for the couple in opening their connection to a newcomer, and for the unicorn in entering a power dynamic where they are the only one without an established teammate.

More:

As I scrolled and chatted, I felt a common vibe unifying many of the profiles, but the range of gender identities, sexual orientations, and diverse interests made it difficult to articulate what that commonality was. Then it dawned on me that this common thread was not a certain kink or favorite sex position, it was the commitment to embracing one’s own nonconformity, the celebration of individualism and sexuality without shame.

She talks about how she struggles with anxiety and depression, but how embracing sexual perversion has been therapeutic to her. Now, young Giuliani says, she wants to live in a world in which everybody talks about sex all the time. More:

For concerned citizens inclined to respond to my sexual liberation by reminding me to respect myself—it’s baffling how many well-intentioned, “woke” people let this kind of sexist rhetoric slip out—I hope this piece helps you understand that I do respect myself, arguably even more than I did before I started sleeping with couples.

I do respect myself, arguably even more than I did before I started sleeping with couples. That poor, poor summer child.

I feel bad for Rudy Giuliani here, and for Caroline Giuliani’s mother, Donna Hanover. What a humiliating thing for a father and mother to have to endure. I hope that this shameful disclosure will compel Rudy Giuliani to think hard, and repentantly, about the sexual humiliations he inflicted on his family, such as Caroline’s mother having to learn in a press conference that her adulterous husband Rudy was divorcing her.

For me, the shocking part is not that people do the kinds of things that Caroline Giuliani does. It’s not even that they brag about it in non-porn magazines. We have had a popular culture degraded in this way since the 1970s. The shocking thing is that there are still people, in 2021, who believe that rutting like animals is liberationist. Did these people not read or see The Ice Storm? Caroline Giuliani is in a lot of pain, and everything she’s doing now is only going to make it worse.

Let’s work hard to save our families from what America has become. It means nothing to gain political power and influence if you deliver, however unintentionally, your children into the slop jar that is American popular culture. Let me warn you, readers: if you think that because you hold conservative political and religious opinions, that your kids aren’t at risk of having their minds colonized by this anti-culture, you are lying to yourself. Where do they go to school? Who are their friends? What kind of electronic devices do you let them have? What do you talk about with them?

It matters. This is what the Benedict Option book is about: building communities that practice resistance, not just theorize about it.

 

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How To Succeed In School Without Really Trying

We live in a time when people are losing faith in institutions. This story from Baltimore offers a vivid illustration of why:

A shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where a student who passed three classes in four years, ranks near the top half of his class with a 0.13 grade point average.

Tiffany France thought her son would receive his diploma this coming June. But after four years of high school, France just learned, her 17-year-old must start over. He’s been moved back to ninth grade.

“He’s stressed and I am too. I told him I’m probably going to start crying. I don’t know what to do for him,” France told Project Baltimore. “Why would he do three more years in school? He didn’t fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that’s the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn’t deserve that.”

France’s son attends Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts in west Baltimore. His transcripts show he’s passed just three classes in four years, earning 2.5 credits, placing him in ninth grade. But France says she didn’t know that until February. She has three children and works three jobs. She thought her oldest son was doing well because even though he failed most of his classes, he was being promoted. His transcripts show he failed Spanish I and Algebra I but was promoted to Spanish II and Algebra II. He also failed English II but was passed on to English III.

“I’m just assuming that if you are passing, that you have the proper things to go to the next grade and the right grades, you have the right credits,” said France.

As we dig deeper into her son’s records, we can see in his first three years at Augusta Fells, he failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days. But in those three years, only one teacher requested a parent conference, which France says never happened. No one from the school told France her son was failing and not going to class.

Read it all. You can say that Tiffany France ought to have been more on top of things with her kid’s grades, but she’s right to say that if the school was passing him, there is a basic trust that every parent has to have in their children’s school — and this school violated it.

This is how the school advertises itself on its website:

Of course, the Augusta Fells Savage Institute lied. If this kid was near the top half of his class with an 0.13 GPA, think about those lower! Does any learning happen in this school?

Clearly not, but I bet Woke Inc. can explain why. It’s probably on account of racism!

Maybe the Augusta Fells Savage Institute leaders need to rebrand themselves as at the forefront of woke pedagogy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with a number of California educational institutions, have produced Equitable Math, a guide to teach “anti-racist mathematics.” In what ways does mathematics instruction uphold white supremacy? Well, check out the guide:

Perhaps Tiffany France’s ire at her son’s school is misdirected. Perhaps the school was practicing antiracism by not holding him to perfection on his classroom attendance, and his classwork.

Sarcasm over. The thing is, sensible middle class parents of all races are not going to subject their kids to this kind of garbage pedagogy. They are going to move to school districts where their kids are taught actual math, or put them in private school. It’s going to be the children of the poor, especially the racial minority poor, who suffer the most.

 

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To Catholic Reformers: ‘Nighty-Night, Baby’

The Pope has appointed progressive Newark Cardinal Joseph Tobin to the Vatican’s bishop-making panel. Why does this matter? Phil Lawler explains:

Let’s suppose that a man you know accidentally makes public a Twitter message that was obviously supposed to be read by only one person. The message reads: “Nighty-night, baby. I love you.” The man who sent that message is not married. What do you conclude?

Right.

Now further suppose that the man in question is a celibate priest. In fact, a cardinal of the Catholic Church. Does that alter your conclusion?

Right.

After Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark sent that infamous Twitter message in 2018, and after the McCarrick scandal broke, Rod Dreher observed in the American Conservative: “At one point, giving men like Tobin the benefit of the doubt might have been defensible. Not after McCarrick.”

Right.

Oddly, Rod later seemed to ignore his own device, and displayed at least some measure of willingness to accept the cardinal’s unlikely explanation for his accidental message: “In fairness, it is possible that Cardinal Tobin was telling the truth about mistakenly direct-messaging his sister on Twitter.”

Yes, it’s possible. But is it probable?

A friend of mine, a priest who did not pull his punches, was not so willing to credit the innocent explanation. In fact my friend (who, sadly, died suddenly last year) found it difficult to understand why other prelates quietly accepted the cardinal’s story. He wrote:

All the other calls for investigative commissions and policies and forced resignations of Wuerl and McCarrick miss the point. As long as Nighty-Night Baby is kept on his feet by his brother bishops, they are all still playing “let’s pretend.” They have no true concern for the souls of their brethren nor, a fortiori, for those for whom their brethren are pastors.

The problem is not, how can we keep bishops from committing crimes. A branch of the military service in need of techniques to keep its members from criminally punishable treason would have ipso facto lost its reason for existence. But Tobin has announced to the world (by accident, true) that he currently has a lover, that he refuses to repent and turn from his state of sin (shown by the preposterous lie offered in lieu of the true explanation), and is in fact defying his brothers to call his bluff—which, if they thought elemenary sexual continence a necessary condition of priestly ministry, they would have done.

And which they can do any moment. No papal action necessary. No petitions or open letters. No committees or canonical trials. Just a couple man-to-man phone calls, with a promise to make the substance of the call public unless Tobin did so first.

As long as Tobin has a miter, nothing whatsover will have changed.

Read the whole thing.

To clarify, I was saying back then that Tobin’s explanation was possible — which it is. But the idea that it’s probable, or even close to probable, is not only laughable, it’s positively guffawable.

Cardinal Tobin later called the Catholic Catechism’s language on homosexuality “very unfortunate.”

So, this is the kind of made man that Pope Francis wants to be on the committee that decides who gets to be a bishop. Lawler says that for Catholics who were hoping for reform in the hierarchy, the pope’s move with Tobin sends a clear message: “Nighty-night baby.”

Meanwhile, did you see what the new Catholic Substack newsletter The Pillar posted yesterday about the small fortune the Archdiocese of Washington gave last year to retired Cardinal Donald Wuerl, to support his “ministry” that year? Excerpts:

The Archdiocese of Washington has allocated more than $2 million for the “ministry activities” of retired Cardinal Donald Wuerl.

The archdiocese, which has pledged in recent years a commitment to financial transparency, has not responded to questions about the details of Wuerl’s continued ministry, the costs associated with it, or the source of the funds allocated for Wuerl.

According to financial records of the Archdiocese of Washington, $2,012,639 was designated for “continuing ministry activities for [the] Archbishop Emeritus” during the 2020 fiscal year.

The amount is a 35% increase from the $1,488,059 allocated to Wuerl’s ministry in the 2019 fiscal year reports.

According to audited financial statements from the archdiocese, the funds for Wuerl’s continuing ministry were allocated from “net assets without donor restrictions.” That means the money was not given to the archdiocese explicitly for Wuerl’s use, and could have been deployed for other purposes at the discretion of the archdiocese.

The archdiocesan 2020 financial statement includes an unfunded priest retirement liability of at least $35 million, which has grown from $23.5 million since 2015.

The statement also includes a 30% drop in funds earmarked for “Archdiocesan charitable giving” in the 2020 fiscal year, which decreased to $401,136, from $651,136 in fiscal year 2019.

The amount allocated to “formation of priests” also declined, from $1,102,500 in 2019 to $1,000,481 in 2020.

Read the whole thing (and subscribe to The Pillar, which is run by the solid Catholic journalists J.D. Flynn and Ed Condon).

This is stunning. Wuerl resigned under pressure from those who believed, with reason, that he covered up the dark deeds of his predecessor, Theodore McCarrick. And yet, Wuerl still gets two million dollars of the faithful’s money to support him for a single year — for what?

The Pillar reported that the ADW would not answer its questions about this. A furious Catholic friend of mine texted when he saw the report:

I make 3% of what [Wuerl] makes a year in retirement.

I work.

I don’t have sex with guys.

I don’t cover up for guys who have sex with guys.

I try to support my family and raise my kids…for what? These creeps?!

I bowdlerized this text. The friend dropped f-bombs in the original. He is incandescently angry.

It’s extremely perverse how those who run the Catholic hierarchy do not perceive the threat to their own organization from this kind of corruption. In my final year as a Catholic, I decided that my family’s tithe would not go to my local diocese, or even my local parish. I gave it all to the St. Vincent de Paul, because I was tired of supporting a system that would not change. I was in particular tired of the lavenderization of the Catholic clergy, and a system in which these guys look out for each other.

I have two Catholic friends now, both quite orthodox, who are at the end of their ropes with the Church. They are struggling to figure out how they are going to go on, despite the persistent corruption, and despite the seeming hopelessness of meaningful reform. These are both family men who are outraged that this is how the church’s senior leadership behaves.

This brings to mind one of the moments when I was most proud of my wife. Back in 2010, we were living in Philadelphia. We discovered evidence that the then-head of the Orthodox Church in America, Metropolitan Jonah, had given some very soft punishments to priests and deacons who had crossed major lines regarding (homo)sexual propriety. I can’t remember the details, but it was troubling. We knew Jonah personally, and knew that he no doubt thought these men deserved harsher punishment. Why was he waffling?

We had been through a lot of this in the Catholic Church: bishops who were probably not personally compromised, but who couldn’t bring themselves to take a bold, necessary stand to defend the Church, which entails the whole community. It’s easy to get the idea as a Catholic that bishops and clergy think that they are the entire Church, and the laity are just spectators. This is called clericalism. Metropolitan Jonah’s move stunk of clericalism to us.

My wife, of her own initiative, got on the train behind our apartment in Chestnut Hill, rode to Center City, took the Amtrak down to DC, cabbed over to the Metropolitan’s residence, walked in, and read him the riot act (he confirmed this to me later). She told him that there were moms like her all over this country who are working very hard to raise Orthodox children, and they have a right to know that the bishops have their backs. I don’t know what precisely she told him, but it amounted to, “Man up!”

He did. He rescinded the orders. Of course he didn’t last much longer in that Metropolitan role, but that’s another story. The point is, having to deal with an angry Orthodox mom brought the Metropolitan back to reality. (And to his credit, he was accessible, agreeing to see her. He later thanked her for what she did, because he knew that it came from a good place.)

For Catholics, I don’t know what to say. My angry friend is meditating on the powerlessness of the Catholic laity, and on how there’s nothing else he can do but figure out how to keep taking it, and taking it. The only alternative is to leave. He feels that the Pope and the bishops of the Church are grinding the faces of laity like him in their own humiliation.

The historian Barbara Tuchman, in writing about the six Renaissance popes who provoked the Reformation, said:

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.

UPDATE: The Pillar has just put out a new story on the Wuerl mess, and is not letting the Archdiocese off the hook. Excerpt:

The Archdiocese of Washington on Thursday said that more than $2 million allocated for the “continuing ministry activities” of emeritus archbishop Cardinal Donald Wuerl was given by donors to cover Wuerl’s living and travel expenses, along with charitable gifts given on behalf of the cardinal.

But while the archdiocese said the donated funds were given with the stated purpose of funding Wuerl’s “expenses and ministerial needs,” the financial statements of the archdiocese categorize the money allocated for Wuerl as “net assets without donor restrictions,” rather than as restricted funds.

Hmm.

UPDATE.2: A Catholic scholar who requests anonymity writes:

Just read your Nighty-night Baby blog post on Tobin and Wuerl. I guess I’m beyond anger with these characters. I could go on and on about it. You and I know all about who these guys are and what they have been doing for decades in the Church.

Here is what really galls me. We pulled out kids from the public schools last fall and they are in our parish Catholic school. That had always been the plan, but the pandemic made the decision that much easier. While our public school is just going back in person after a whole year, our Catholic school has been in person since September. This has been a real moment for Catholic schools around the country as they have showed how to safely re-open schools and teach children, while public schools have mostly fiddled around.

But Catholic schools are desperately in need of money for basic operations (and maybe they could pay their teachers a bit more). If there is going to be any kind of Ben Op or resistance to work culture, parents need to have strong Catholic and classical Christian schools. So why are wealthy Catholics and/or the DC Archdiocese giving 2 million to Wuerl? Wouldn’t that money be better spent supporting Catholic schools? Think of all the money that conservative Catholics waste for pointless causes and politics. Why not put the money where it’s going to do the most good, in educating children and trying to pass along the faith?

Do you think Wuerl or Tobin care about this? Of course not.

The post To Catholic Reformers: ‘Nighty-Night, Baby’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Idols, Identity Politics, and Other Lies

I want to let you all know about an important event coming up this month that you can all access live via Zoom:

 

Joshua Mitchell has a new book out about identity politics that I’ve just started, and it’s very powerful. About the recent book by Daniel Mahoney, who is the nation’s top Solzhenitsyn scholar, I tweeted last year:

Just started Dan Mahoney’s “The Idol Of Our Age,” about politics and theology, and only two chapters in, I want to shout from the rooftops, “Everybody read this book!” It pierces the Kultursmog like a klieg light. @EncounterBooks

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) February 2, 2019

Here’s more information about what we’re going to be discussing, and how you can register for it. 

Each of us is going to give a lecture, and then we’re going to have a panel discussion. We three are going to be in person at Patrick Henry College, but most of the audience will be online. You know what I’m going to be talking about, but here’s what my colleagues will address:

Schedule here:

Please register at this site.

The post Idols, Identity Politics, and Other Lies appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Discussions

The thinness of Progressive Twitter’s skin can be measured in microns. The strength of the spine of organizational leaders accused of bigotry by Progressive Twitter can only be measured in terms not of tensile strength, but of viscosity. That’s the conclusion I draw from a planned discussion that Veritas Forum, the thoughtful Christian organization devoted to talks and speeches on campuses, was planning to have about race and reconciliation, until its leaders freaked out and cancelled.

What was the problem? Well, here’s how the event was advertised:

 

According to a report in Christian Post:

The Veritas Forum, a nonprofit group that explores truth and life through various disciplines, including religion and science, apologized Monday and canceled a discussion on critical race theory after critics pointed out that one of their featured speakers was not a leading expert on race and Christianity.

Willie James Jennings, an associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale Divinity School, and Neil Shenvi, a blogger with a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry, were set to discuss whether a secular worldview like critical race theory can address racism or if Christianity provides a unique response.

While Shenvi has discussed critical race theory on several panels and written a number of articles on the issue, he has no academic training in the subject matter. The event, which was set to take place virtually on March 4, describes both speakers as “leading experts on the topic of race and Christianity.”

Shenvi (website here) is an apologist who became a Christian while at Berkeley getting his PhD in theoretical chemistry. He’s an extremely well educated scientist who quit his academic career at Duke University after a cancer scare. He now homeschools his children. It is likely true that this chemist is not a “leading expert on the topic of race and Christianity,” depending on how you determine who are experts, and who are the leading ones. It was sales pitch hyperbole. But the idea that Shenvi, who is nonwhite, has anything useful to say about race and reconciliation is offensive to certain progressives on Twitter, who claimed this pairing was a racist insult to Prof. Jennings. A black pastor complained:

Shameful? The arrogance and pride of academic credentialism is what ought to shame Christian ministers. Let the people who come to hear these two men discuss decide who has something useful to offer. My thought would be that these two Christian men, both well educated men of color, could complement each other’s take. But then, I don’t sit around waiting to be offended. I presume good will unless given reason to think otherwise.

Well, Veritas Forum did what organizations always do when a woke person accuses them: it folded.

Prof. Jennings is a grown man. He agreed to join the forum to debate with Dr. Shenvi. Presumably he was fine with it. But not Kyle J. Howard, who is black. According to Howard’s biography, he has only an undergraduate seminary degree in Biblical Counseling. But he has some relevant hands-on pastoral experience regarding racial trauma and racial reconciliation. Should he not have been considered for this panel because he doesn’t have advanced degrees? Shenvi, however, does have advanced degrees, and he has lectured on the topic. How does Howard know what Shenvi does and does not know about the issue? Shenvi’s father is Indian, and it stands to reason that his brown-skinned children might face academic discrimination getting into universities because though they are not white, they will be required to pay a price, as other high-achieving students of Asian heritage are, for the sins of white Americans generations ago. Given that Critical Race Theory stands to affect his non-white/non-black family negatively, I would be quite interested to hear his thoughts, in fact.

Or is this really about Pastor Howard rejecting in advance Neil Shenvi’s criticism of Critical Race Theory, and invoking an allegation of racism to take Shenvi out?

Was Prof. Jennings’s dignity offended by the Shenvi pairing? What did he have to say about it?

I’m disappointed that Veritas cancelled, but maybe there were some local factors that made it impossible to continue. But they should not have apologized for anything other than exaggerating Shenvi’s credentials — hardly a crime.

This sounds to me like another example of class war fought through identity politics. This week, I was on a panel discussion about Dante with three academics. I had been invited on as a passionate, well-informed amateur. The academics treated me with respect and kindness, and we all complemented each other, I think, with our perspectives. Neither was offended that they were paired with someone who is not trained in literature at the academic level.

When academics of the Orthodox Left in the US tried to get my talk at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary cancelled, one of the strategies they used was wailing but he’s not even an academic! Well, they’ve got me there; I’m no St. Silouan the Athonite either, but by their snotty standard, one of the great modern saints of the Orthodox Church wouldn’t have been invited to give the lecture, because not only did he not have academic degrees, he could barely read. Anyway, a graduate of that seminary who watched my talk on Zoom told me later that so many of those past lectures were dry-as-dust academic affairs where you fought to stay awake. Whether or not you liked what I had to say, at least I was talking about the real world that these seminarians are actually going to live in, not the pristine, hermetically sealed environment of the academy, where one rarely finds opposition to one’s progressive beliefs, and where well-intentioned Christians collapse in the face of progressive indignancy.

Seriously, though, how are we supposed to have any kind of conversation about racial reconciliation when progressives go to pieces over penny-ante invented slights, and the kind of people who ought to be telling these sectarian shriekers to take a hike instead fall all over themselves to appease them?

Here is a lecture Dr. Shenvi gave about Critical Race Theory and Christianity. Watch it for just a few minutes. This is a topic the man has clearly thought about a lot.

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