I'm Baaack, Part 2
This is a continuation of my July 20, 2024 post, I’m Baaack…”
Where I’ve Been and What I’ve Been Up To
I am grateful to have have picked up so many new readers during my recent hiatus! Over the past five years I believe I have typically posted about 60-100K words each year on Indie Theology. I had to take a break in order to take time to finish up two poetry manuscripts. They may be an edit away from done, but they are sailing away. They are called Via Crucis — it’s a meditation on the Stations of the Cross, and Meatland a book about childhood, flesh, NYC, my Irish twin and me and the sanctity of escape and survival. Some of you who are friends know that my part-time job as an out of town academic coach will be coming to an end by May 2025. (I’m helping my son, a bright, curious, talented and charming man, of whom I am incandescently proud, to complete an Associate’s Degree in Liberal Arts.) It’s quite a thrilling ride, and not over yet; I needed to pull away from Indie Theology to do this other work.
I may, in short time, write a bit about the collaboration between my son and me here, because I am including quite a lot of my this journey of ours in an education memoir I have been working on for a long time, and because I have discovered quite lately that “shadowing” my son is a story about love, pilgrimage and justice.
When I am not muckraking as I think of it, or “skewering bishops” as one of my poet friends has called it — or sometimes when I am doing. those things! — I am, however roughly, doing theology.
I have obviously developed a weird, unofficial expertise in numerous things Catholic within the past decade and a half or so, but nearly every word I wrote here is a word in the service of talking about justice, love and creation. When I pack my bags and travel from New York to Boston to work with Jack, I sometimes feel as if I’m engaged in pilgrimage. I sometimes feel as if I am straining to correct an educational injustice correction. And I sometimes I feel like I am acting in gratitude for the crew one of my writer friends, intending no blasphemy, rather the opposite, so tenderly dubbed (their parents’) “holy trinity” many years ago. Living theology?
Coming Soon
I noted in Part 1 of these dipping-my-toes-back-in-the-holy water post, I’ve been diving back into the my close reading of the Maryland Attorney General’s Report on Clergy Abuses in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and I am reading Project 2025 which I wrote about here in March of this year— and I plan to weigh in on it more, soon.
Mostly my focus will fall on the relationship between the emerging schism in the Roman Catholic Church and its leadership’s collaboration with the authoritarian integralist and dominionist political right in the United States. The election of Harris and Walz will not put an end to this project; neither will the crisis (schism) of the Roman Catholic Church put an end to it.
I began to write about Leonard Leo, Opus Dei, the federalist Society and the Catholic dimension of things in about 2018-19 on Indie Theology. (I had a different Indie Theology platform elsewhere before creating a Substack account.)
I suppose I was early to seeing how dangerous the coalition forged by the “so-called “Right to Life” movement, the criminal character of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the determination of Leonard Leo, Tim Busch, Bishop Robert Barron, Kevin Roberts, Donald Trump, the Federalist Society, Opus Dei, the Heritage Foundation, the many Catholic and evangelical universities that are in league with them to impose their religious views on the populace, and the global Catholic television behemoth, Eternal World Television Network would prove to be.
The overturning of Roe didn’t surprise me. When I first started to notice the Jesuits’ sliding to the right; when I first went out on a limb to suggest that Cardinal Timothy Dolan was Opus Dei, when I highlighted the ways in which Pope Francis was not so progressive as his fandom made him out to be — I sometimes doubted myself. But today, to my surprise, I think I hit all that right on the nose.
As the Roman Catholic schism deepens, and the presidential election looms, I think find myself very interested in the myth of the liberal Catholic. Why do so many “liberal” Catholics apologize for, excuse, promote, fund, literally and metaphorically, the vicious transphobia, homophobia and misogyny promulgated by the teaching body of the Roman Catholic Church? Why did they not mobilize to save Vatican II? I use past tense because I think it is probably too late. I use “they” and not “we” because although I pray Roman Catholic, and am ontologically Roman Catholic, I have defected — which is to say I have, for reasons of conscience — made the sacrifice of defecting.
I’ll be looking more closely at the chauvinism that leads so many Catholics to look away from the survivors of an ongoing (still, yes!), world-wide, multi-generational clergy child rape and sexual abuse crisis and cover-up. If you love children, you want then to have food even if they are poor. You want them to have good public schools. You want to educate — not condition them.
If you love children, you don’t throw down with Project 2025, Opus Dei, you don’t forced people to give birth to children they do not want or can not care for. Forced Birth is a human rights violation. If you love children, you protect socal programs that feed, house, educate and give medical care to children. If you respect children, you see them as full people.
Is the hatred expressed through the United States Bishops’ clergy child rape cover-up connected to that hatred which leads forcing pregnant girls to give birth. I think it is. Is it linked to the clerical hierarchy’s contempt for queer kids? Yes.
I am happy to notice increased awareness, at least, among Catholics of the incursion of the institutional Roman Catholic Church into secular life and the public square, and will be looking closely at that on the coming weeks.
I am grateful that the sentient news-consumers now knows Samuel Alito is thief and a traitor, and that “devout Catholic” graft-sniffing hound Clarence Thomas should be impeached.
For quite a few Roman Catholic families I know, the vicious attack on queer kids presided over by the United States Bishops proved to be the final straw that led them to leave the Roman Catholic pews. It is one thing to disagree with the teaching and quite another to know your offertory donations may be used to lobby the federal government to outlaw same sex marriage or deny your trans child their medical rights.
It will get harder and harder for decent Catholics who oppose bigotry, greed and the depravity and criminality of the United States bishops to remain in the pews, and still more difficult to expect that their children will rear families in the Roman Catholic Church.
As I have been predicting here on Indie Theology for five years: it’s the traditional and conservative Catholics’ schism to lose.
Pope Francis in the past decade has not done as much as many progressive-minded Catholics hoped he would. That big, slow-turning Vatican II bus, which might have given us women priests, official changes in misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic teaching has been going in the wrong direction since 1978. The deaconess thing has been a bust, as I have predicted, every time, it would be. The LGBTQ+ optics have been in part important, but in part, a kind of sadistically manipulative. The goal should be to change the church is deep and essential ways into a church that is not a hate crime. Instead the short end money — and it was very much money! — went to making the hate crime a little more cozy for queer Catholics. The manipulations in this project were in many ways obscene, so shaped around career-making, it seemed, and on keeping LGBTQ+ Catholics in the pews, tithing, bearing scorn, accepting the Saint Sebastian arrows with grace. One week we have the pope saying gay Catholics should have ersatz weddings, the next week, we have the Pope of poem talking about “faggotry” frociaggine.
Gonna go out on a limb here and say that if Jesus came back to earth tomorrow, he’d be happily turning water into wine at queer sacramental weddings.
The clergy rape crisis and cover-up continues to hang over the Roman Catholic Church. The number of Catholics who still honor bishops who pimped out children is nauseating to any Catholic not well swaddled in denial. The next pope will care even less than the current one does. Vos Estis was Vatican Optics at its best! It looked like a bit of hope. All that glitters is not gold applies.
I am still looking closely at the “anti-polarization” / “Civilize it the “unity”/ “Here comes everybody” campaign to keep people tithing against their own interest —and against Christ — as they pay for “New Evangelization” Public Relations Campaigns, bankruptcy attorneys, bishops’ mystery slush funds, lawyers to challenge Statute of Limitations reform in child rape cases, and pump millions into the so-called “right to life” programs, Knights of Columbia etc. In this three part essay, I write about the way the so-called “Pro life” effort became a kind of Trojan Horse for funding the neofascist, Integralist effort. The woman-haters and usurers slipped it past the Kumbaya Catholics in the pews, and now we have abortion bands, bounties, finks and girls and women bleeding out because they can’t obtain abortions.
We have Catholics like (allegedly stealth Opus Dei) Timothy Dolan to thank for inviting scrutiny of the way the men who own and operate the Roman Catholic Church use outlets like Knights of Columbus and so-called “Right to Life” groups to entrench neofascism. Dolan has been so hateful towards queer folks in the shadows, while cheerily pocketing their donations and encouraging a “Love the sinner, hate the sinner.” welcoming of them and their financial contributions in the pews. A little over a decade ago a kicking and screaming Dolan hammered President Obama and squandered $15 million pewsitters’ dollars on fighting marriage equality in D.C.
Just around the time I left off writing posts for Indie theology, in April of 2024, in the wake of Cecilia Gentili’s funeral at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Timothy Dolan again showed what a sadistic, spit-in-Christ’s-face homophobe brute he is. Cecilia Gentili was a deeply beloved trans activist, undocumented and abused former sex worker who overcame being trafficked, addiction, poverty, and harnessed her wisdom and experience to work as an activist who served a large queer community. A baptized Catholic, Gentili spent the last years of her life engaged in works of corporal mercy. She spent her last years ministering to queer folks at the margins. The day after her funeral service Dolan desecrated the memory of Gentili by presiding, along with rector of Saint Patrick’s, over the re-consecration, spiritually “saging” of the cathedral. I haven’t gotten to write about it much yet, but will.
I’m back.
Finally, although the manuscript is not ready, yet, I have chapter outline, a draft of a pitch, and a few hundred pages of relatively clean copy for a Catholic book. If you have leads on editors or publishers for this work, here’s my signal: mmsnypoet@gmail.com
Wishing you peace,
MMS
September 14, 2024