The Problem with Planned Catholic Communities

 There's a big story in the Catholic world.  A group of Catholics have announced their intention to build a new community outside of Tyler, Texas, home of Bishop Strickland.  They are planning to buy a good 600 acres.  The reason this is being done is because these Catholics, impacted by lengthy lockdowns without the sacraments, wish to have a community where that access will always be available, and they want to build a community inspired by the values of John Paul II.

I don't doubt the sincerity of these individuals, or their good faith.  I do however doubt their judgement.  Whether it was a community around Fisher Moore College, Ave Maria in Florida, or St. Mary's in Kansas, the Mother of God community, the track record of these communities isn't very good.  The initial thrill gives way to infighting, ego, and inevitably, the grift.  Those who have the means to pack up and move around the country to a new area will have means that someone can have redirected to their cause.

There is also the question of what a "Catholic community" is.  Is it just a sacrament dispensary?  Liturgical snob I am, I think there's a danger if we reduce a Catholic community to being primarily built around a church we all go to Mass at.  What are some of the other marks of that community.  Would the housing be affordable?  Would business owners in those communities pay their workers a living wage with benefits?  What would be done to help people raise the size of families they want to?  These kind of questions are just as important to the Catholic as "will the Church have Mass?"  Also, what other services will that Church provide?  How will oversight function so that this group stays true to their mission?  What is the source of that mission?  These kind of questions are seldom considered.

There is also a question about the education there.  We are told that some of the education will focus on:

The seven institutes of Veritatis Splendor will encompass a range of issues that concern Catholics in the modern world, including life, education, liberty, human rights, law, media and culture.

Liberty, media, and culture.  What kind of liberty are we talking about?  I'm skeptical we are talking about liberty as Leo XIII defines it in Libertas, in which man is free to pursue a life in Jesus Christ, and anything in society that interferes with that right is dangeorus.  This sounds more like your run of the mill American conservative understanding, where they seek to create an environment where their political values are taught.  I don't want to touch on those values right now, I just wish to point out there will be parts of a real Catholic community that differ from those values substantially.

We should probably also consider where, even if we could overcome these problems, we should actually want to.  Communities grow organically, they are very hard to centrally plan.  Communities that have been planned into existence historically often required vast sums of money and time.  In a certain sense most Catholics in America have to search a little to find a good parish.  Yet to uproot and travel across the country to one?  Even if one has the means, perhaps it could be better spent enhancing your own local community.

There has been some success with monastic communities where small towns/villages have grown around them, but this was not centrally planned.  Clear Creek Abbey was not founded to serve as the nexus of a city of Catholics, quite the opposite.  Would that individuals who have the wealth to engage in these kind of endeavors would focus on building communities around them, in their own neighborhoods, that build and foster a Catholic community.

Now some will object that you cannot have this without the Mass and the sacraments, and you need that community to have that as a building block.  Yet my dear friend, episcopal appointments are conditional upon the pope and Rome.  There will come a time when Strickland will be gone, and be replaced by someone else.  A traditional bishop can be replaced by a modernist, a servant bishop be replaced by a raging narcissist.  At this point, you will have the situation you attempted to flee from, except now you'll be out of money substantially.

Catholics need to focus more on building their local communities.  Veritatis Splendor is launching a 22,000,000 dollar capital campaign for their community.  Let's say someone is donating even a "small" sum like 100,000 dollars.  Imagine if that individual showed up at the local pro-life clinic and informed the individual that 100,000 dollars worth of diapers and formula would be provided to the clinic for expectant mothers.  That could help a mother with her first child for.... a week, but go with it.  I have a friend who is a lawyer who wanted to help setup an organization that helps people get out of the crippling credit card and other forms of usurious debt, but nobody seems very interested in that kind of Catholic community.

If you want access to the Latin Mass (or any Mass), that 100,000 you setup can get you a lot in your home area.  It can help you setup a lay organization that can purchase everything needed for a liturgy readily available.  It can purchase resources to help priests and parishes learn and say the Latin Mass.  One could help subsidize a local business into paying workers better.  Will these things generate a return on your investment, or be as easy to write off in your tax forms?  Probably not!  They probably won't get you noticed by the big and powerful in your community.  You might even get viewed a sucker for throwing away that money.  Yet maybe, just maybe, you will help instill Catholic virtues around you, and become salt of the earth for those right in front of you.

Anonymous Bishops Speaking Their Mind

Over at First Things, Francis X Maier conducted several off the record interviews with over 31 bishops in the United States, where they discussed a broad range of topics.  Most commentary is focused on the fact that apparently a lot of US Bishops are annoyed with Wilton Gregory (and by implication, Blase Cupich.)  That will draw headlines, but it is nothing new.  Annoyance with Gregory has been well known, especially of late.  Part of it is political, but a lot of it also personal:  Gregory is viewed as a gloryhound who is trying to inject himself into conversation for notoriety and influence at the expense of his brother bishops.  (This view is not inaccurate.)

Others are also focusing on the fact that these bishops like Pope Francis, but are occasionally annoyed by things he does.  Not only is this well known, it is true of every single pope.  It is the very nature of governance that those at the top will annoy some of those they either govern or govern with.  I'd say this was what was most revealing:

When pressed, none of the bishops I queried could report a single diocesan seminarian inspired to pursue priestly life by the current pope. None took any pleasure in acknowledging this. 

I think this is a sign of a broken system.  Many will read this as "see, that's why this pope sucks, he doesn't inspire anybody to the priesthood."  Thing is, they are probably right.  In this country, for better or worse, men are not flocking to the priesthood over Pope Francis the way they did over John Paul II or, to a lesser extent, Benedict XVI.  These were towering men who dominated the discussion.  The former by his charisma, the latter by his towering intellect.  Francis lack of charisma has its own charm, and while not a fool, he is not primarily a theologian.

This sounds like a criticism, but it isn't.  On the list of responsibilities the Roman Pontiff has, inspiring vocations is extremely low on the list.  That isn't his job.  Unfortunately, we make it his job.  Over the last 50 years, as with so many other things, Catholics have invested in the Roman Pontiff not just final authority in matters of doctrine and a primary of doctrine, but as the Chief Brand Ambassador of Jesus Christ.  It is not enough to say he has the primacy of jurisdiction and the final say on doctrinal matters.  We view the effectiveness of a Pope by how many lives he personally transforms, and by transform, we mean how happy he makes them.  In this process, a lot of the very difficult work of cultivating vocations has been outsourced to Rome, something that even the best cannot sustain, and we are not currently served by the best.

A better question would be to ask how many seminarians view their bishop as someone who inspired them to pursue the priestly life.  The reality is that most seminarians will, when asked about their bishop, would respond "who?"  One might find a few who say their parish priest inspired them, which is all well and good.  Yet I feel we should honestly challenge this with "who cares who inspired them to become a priest?"  The issue isn't so much with inspiring someone at a particular moment in time.  With respect to our Charismatic brethren, a vocation is not about a sentiment you feel in a given moment.  Its hard work that requires a pretty substantial support network that cultivates these vocations towards the seminaries.  They involve friends, parents, support groups, and yes, individual priests overseen by a Bishop who places the formation of these individuals as among his top priorities.  The sad reality is that for the majority of US Bishops (not just Gregory or Cupich), the formation of priests is extremely low on their list of priorities.  It low on a lot of ours as well.  Let the Pope's towering presence handle that.

How has that worked out for us the last 40-50 years, as vocations have continued to plummet? In the interview, the Bishops told on themselves.

The Importance of a Realistic Lent

Quick Note:  I've been giving one form or another of this message for almost a decade now.  Yet I think it is a message worth repeating.

When Lent comes around, I do two things.  First and foremost, I make clear I'm staying on social media to be a contrarian.  Second, I don't mention what I'm "giving up" for Lent.  I avoid this not out of vainglory (not wanting to blow the trumpet), but because I think Catholicism has become obsessed with what we give up for Lent, to the point that isn't healthy.

Yes, I give up something for Lent.  Yes, I've cosplayed as an Eastern Christian before with my Lenten discipline.  Yet what is Lent a season of?  It is a penitential season, yes.  But it is also a season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  Fasting without the other two is just a diet, and I had a pretty successful diet a few years ago.

There is a real risk, especially online, of turning Lent into a "how hardcore of a Catholic are you" gimmick, where we take turns one-upping each other on discipline.  These kinds of disciplines are great, provided they serve a proper end.

What end should they serve?  Nothing less than preparing the body and soul to partake in the Resurrection.  This is why traditionally Ash Wednesday focuses on the reality and inevitability of death.  (The modern liturgy, in one of its many inexplicable changes, downplays this understanding significantly.)  Only by accepting this reality can one enter into the Resurrection, which is the victory over death.  Prayer focuses the soul towards God, fasting trains the will towards God, and almsgiving is the culmination of the former two:  to live at the service of others.

We don't talk about almsgiving as much anymore.  Sometimes we rationalize this by saying "I already tithe every Sunday at Church", but that's not necessarily what we are talking about here.  Maybe this Lent you can help keep a food bank stocked.  People really need food during this pandemic.  Many grocery stores have gift cards you can purchase where the goods go to the local food bank, if you cannot drop the food off yourself.  Maybe you see someone hungry and pick him up some goods.

Sometimes it doesn't even need to be money.  Do you have a family member struggling with sickness?  Call them more often.  Someone dealing with depression?  Try to help them realize they matter, and always be available for them.  Make a conscious decision to spend more time with your spouse and children, or other members of your family.  Then make a decision to spend that time profitably.

Most importantly, make sure your Lent is done in accordance with your station in life.  I suppose you could do a bread and water fast after your wife gives birth to a child for 40 days, but I'm pretty sure you won't be of much use to them.  You could spend hours a day reflecting on one of the spiritual classics, but what good is that if those hours interfere with your job or your obligations as a parent?  One of those great spiritual classics used to make that point often.  In The Spiritual Combat (one of the great classics of Western Spirituality), Lorenzo Scupoli said the following:

For whoever has the courage to conquer his passions, to subdue his appetites, and repulse even the least motions of his own will, performs an action more meritorious in the sight of God than if, without this, he should tear his flesh with the sharpest disciplines, fast with greater austerity than the ancient Fathers of the Desert, or convert multitudes of sinners.

It is true, considering things in themselves, that the conversion of a soul is, without doubt, infinitely more acceptable to the divine Majesty than the mortification of a disorderly affection. Yet every person, in his own particular sphere, should begin with what is immediately required of him.

Large penances and heroic displays of discipline are great.  Yet sometimes we are called to master smaller things, and this is infinitely better.   During these 40 days of Lent, don't ask "what should I give up?"  Ask "what is immediately required of me?"  Do that.  What's blocking you from doing it?  Work on that.  You will often find that you can give something up to help you achieve that goal.  You can also find it might be something pretty small.  Do it quietly, do it joyfully, and you'll find this lent profitable.

The Dangers of Kayfabe Catholicism

 As the twitter handle implies, I love professional wrestling.  Its not a "guilty pleasure" so much as entertainment I unironically love.  "Kevin, how can you watch something that is fake?" This is a question I am asked at least 4 or 5 times a year as I bury my head in the TV on Wednesday nights.  My answer is always the same:  wrestling is not "fake", anymore than a fight scene in a movie is "fake."  It is a series of choreographed maneuvers done that tell a story.  The really good ones aren't just great exhibitions of athleticism, but stories about the nature of the human spirit itself.

"Kevin, what on earth does a bunch of jacked dudes doing punches and flips have to do with being Catholic online?"  WAY MORE THAN YOU WOULD EVER HAVE GUESSED!  You see, professional wrestling isn't just about two people choreographing combat in a ring.  It is a world where everyone involved does their part to promote a match and the company, and they do so through what is known as kayfabe.

But simply, kayfabe is the "fake" world created in professional wrestling, and is used to help build an authentic experience.  In kayfabe, everyone has a character to play.  Some are the brash and arrogant bad guys, the "heels."  Others are the scrappy underdogs standing for truth and justice, the "babyface."  Sometimes you are somewhere in between, and sometimes, you think you are one thing, but the crowd has decided you are another.  In the end, the crowd is who you are performing for, and you use kayfabe to try and manipulate the crowd into reacting a certain way.  Sometimes you even try to get them to act against their intuition  You know that babyface that has "come from behind" to win in every match for the past decade?  Kayfabe builds an environment, outside of that match, where you think he is always the underdog, despite the scorecard telling a clearly different story.

A downside of kayfabe is that if you aren't careful, you can forget the fact its all a charade.  Some of your biggest names in wrestling historically have been utter narcissists who long ago lost the ability to distinguish between the character they play in the world of professional wrestling, and everyday life.  (This understanding briefly reached the mainstream when Hulk Hogan gave testimony in court and he had clearly lost the ability to tell the difference between Hulk Hogan the character and Terry Bolea, the man who played him.)  In the case of wrestling companies, they become so obsessed with the alternative reality they have created, they begin to think that they can control everything in wrestling, including how the crowd will react, something which has been the death of many promotions when taken too far

I think this has a lot to do with the way a lot of Catholic individuals and communities are online.  We've created a kayfabe where not only is every Catholic a theologian who sits around and reads your favorite philosopher, we've become convinced that these are the marks for being a Catholic.  People develop parts of their persona that stand out, whether it being the insufferable nag, the connected journalist, the sophisticated professional theologian, the pugilist who relishes in combat, whatever the heck a "retrograde" is that we develop rules for, etc.  I hate to be the one to tell you this, but its not real.  Its a Fugazi, a world created for the entertainment of the consumer, who is often asked to donate to those individuals putting on the show.  That patreon or substack ain't gonna fund itself with boring prose!

The purpose of this alternative reality is to promote combat.  Nobody is giving a damn about Massimo Faggioli if he's a boring professor writing about boring church movements unless you are a credentialed academic.  Yet people will pay him good money to tell you about the danger of traditionalists, and how at every step of the way, they must be combated.  By him, preferably.  Give him money, buy his book, put him on your show, and everyone can watch him take it to the trads.  If you can't afford someone who knows what they are talking about and have a more low-brow audience, you book Mark Shea.

The problem is a lot of these individuals have lost perspective of the fact that the online experience is one primarily of entertainment, not of substance or growth in holiness.  In the world we live in, settling things like they do in pro wrestling is absolutely bizarre, where brawls happen throughout stadiums because someone looks the wrong way, or says they are better.  (Think of the Trump era in politics on steroids.)  Most of the stuff that happens online isn't about deepening prayer life, increasing mass attendance, increasing what you get out of mass, or of giving Catholics a sense of ownership in being part of the body of Christ.

If one wants to get really jaded, you could say we've created this kayfabe because for the most part we have no ownership in our role as part of the body of Christ.  Whatever your partisan leanings, it is a popular refrain that the Church doesn't serve us.  Likewise, pro wrestling is at its best when it taps into the spirit of disillusionment and abandonment.  Hence, Hulk Hogan was the American fighting increasingly bigger and nastier foreign foes during a time when Americans wanted to feel patriotic.  Stone Cold Steve Austin beat up his boss on TV (making said boss a billionaire) during an age where middle class america collectively hated their office jobs.  Daniel Bryan's "YES!" chant entered the pop cultural consciousness in the era where people were tired of hearing they didn't fit the corproprate conception of what success was, and they saw a 5'8 scrawny kid in a world full of giants and identified with him.  Only a Church that has failed its members so completely and abysmally is a world where you see truthtellers, radicals, retrogrades, and grifters (sometimes all of these things!) flourish.  They use that kayfabe to help promote their bottom line.

So how does one stop it?  To do that would probably require a structural shift in the Church that is beyond the scope of this article, or our abilities.  Yet to combat it?

- Remember that what happens online is a very small sample of the wider Church
- Remember that what happens online is often deliberately turned up in intensity with the purpose of selling something.
- Understand that everyone is marketing themselves as something
- When it comes to anything that happens in social media, one of the biggest aims is conflict.
- If someone is soliciting funds, be discerning before you click the donate button.  How are they soliciting funds?  How much of it is original work, something of substance, and how much of it is about seeing them feud with others?

There's nothing wrong with enjoying a good clash!  You can learn a lot through them.  Just remember that clash can only tell a glimpse of reality, it should never be your reality.

Beware "The Narrative"

 Cardinal Cupich had a meeting with the Pope recently.  Everyone wants you to believe it was in relation to the USCCB.  Which maybe it was. If so, allies of Cardinal Cupich would want you to believe he and the Pope were bashing the USCCB, and angling a preparation for Cardinal Cupich to bring them in line with the "progressive vision" of Pope Francis.  Critics of Cardinal Cupich (but friendly to the USCCB) want you to believe this was the Pope reeling Cardinal Cupich in line, telling him to knock off the publicity stunts.  Traditionalists, as is our way, use this as an opportunity to tell you how terrible both Cardinal Cupich and Pope Francis are.  You might even get someone who uses this as an opportunity to knock both of them, and dismiss the USCCB as pointless.  (Okay, that someone is me.)

One of these opinions may be correct.  Yet there's also a simpler explanation:  either the Bishop of Rome or the Cardinal requested the audience to talk about the matter, they talked, and nobody decided anything, because a decision wasn't the point.  There's an overwhelming urge to tie someone into an overarching narrative, that because of this or that issue, this means that they think x or y on every other issue.

The problem is that people don't actually work that way.  Traditionalists, at least in practice, favor some of the most radical decentralization of anyone in the Church.  Despite being progressives who the narrative says aren't in favor of rigid ideology, Cupich and his allies have a deeply authoritarian and centralized vision:  everyone must do what the pope is doing, and we will be the ones who tell you what the pope is really doing.  The Pope, despite owing his papacy to powerful German prelates, has resisted those same prelates in their attempts to form a vision of a radically decentralized Church where everyone else does their thing, and Germany does theirs.  Yet this pope has also talked of the need to decentralize the Church and embrace synodality.

There is a belief, particularly online, that everyone's ideology is rigid, and that this ideology is predictive on everything else.  It makes a certain intuitive sense... if the Church was limited to a manual of theology or a bunch of nerds who read whoever your favorite philosopher is.  This isn't Catholicism.  People are products of their environments.  We are (or at least should be) united in a set of doctrines, but the things we have to conform on are shockingly small and mostly irrelevant to the day to day experience of most Catholics.  There's a certain learned experience, even among those who practice a certain ideology, but are careful on what to emphasize based on what they've learned attracts, and what repels.  There's also a realization that concepts like "populism" or "decentralization" can serve traditional and progressive ends, just as centralization and a preference for elites can serve both ends, and have throughout history.  Conservatives can be radicals or pragmatists in how/what they aim to conserve.

Then there's the reality that people are just flat out inconsistent in their beliefs, and we should probably be grateful they are.  It is why Pope Francis can be an individual who is clearly progressive, but not only act against type, but routinely violate his own standards.  We can complain about that, and sometimes rightly, but any ideology that doesn't account for this reality will find itself unable to comprehend how the Church works.

Be comfortable in your general ideology, but don't look at things through that prism. Instead, focus on the particulars of certain questions, and then think about how that question can be understood through a variety of different experiences.  I'm a traditionalist.  That means that I, as a general rule, look to the timeless, and treat with great skepticism and prejudice the idea that our present age is more enlightened than previous ages (as a general rule), or that certain leaders today, because they live in this age, are able to solve what centuries have not.  Yet this preference has its limits: sometimes a schism really can be solved now when it couldn't before (such as with the SSPX), among other things.

So yes, think about how things fit into a larger ideological outlook.  But also think about how they don't, and how sometimes an audience is really just that, an audience.