The Anti-Polarization Project Is a Menace
But in the context of institutional Roman Catholic parish life and politics, this orientation towards unity is a peril.
Having devoted many syllables sounding the alarm about United States unity-mad Roman Catholics who sound off on media, social and otherwise, about the need for “liberal” Catholics and fascist Catholics to come together in Christ, I was interested in the (idiotically named) March 20th 2024 “Civilize It” March 20th 2024 online program, “The Church’s Mission in a Polarized World.”
Setting aside my knowledge that the world, not even Catholic world, has never not been polarized, I tuned in.
Red flag #1. This event was hosted by the United States Conference of Bishops. That meant the performance would be propaganda.
I didn’t know much about the other two but I knew a bit about Gloria Purvis about whom I wrote a bit here.
Kerry Alys Robinson is a successful fundraiser philanthropist and prominent Catholic.
I had never heard of Aaron Wessman, the priest in the trio. He published a book on this topic recently with Focolare media outlet. The Folocare sect, nor its publishing outlet seem less “Christofascist” than many (really most) of the other Catholic publishers. Focolare appears to take seriously and to heart the obligation to enter into meaningful dialogue with one’s theological or political adversaries. This idea is certainly noble in theory.
But in the context of institutional Roman Catholic parish life and politics, this orientation towards unity is a peril. These differences (in ethics) are what have most driven Catholics from the pews because they center on the question of whether to enshrine or reject bigotry and corruption.
Why are Catholics leaving the Roman Catholic Church?
Here are some of the reasons: The failure to ordain women (misogyny, male supremacy), the Vatican bank scandals and fiscal misconduct at parish and dioceses levels, the homophobic official teaching, the clergy child rape crisis and cover-up, the mother and baby homes (misogyny), the increased awareness, courtesy of the internet to the racist, white supremacist and antisemitic history of the institutional Roman Catholic Church, ongoing racist practices at parish levels, the tyranny of the so-called “pro life” movement, the scraping the bottom of the barrel for vocations, lens louse Narcissistic priests, grifter priests and more.
The New Evangelization Project
The New Evangelization project was designed to keep Catholics from bolting, and defecting to other Christian sects. It was designed to convert the Roman Catholicism-curious, and to emphasize Catholic parents’ Catholic obligation to indoctrinate their children. Efforts like Wessman’s aim to minimize or harmonize the opposing views of Catholics within the Roman Catholic Church are part of the New Evangelization strategy.
Catholic Unity and the “Pro-Life Has Always Been Their Misnomer” Problem
This hard both sides press for Catholic unity has been around for a while. It helped to elect Trump in 2016. Many Catholics who thought Trump vile and despicable went ahead and voted for him because Trump promised to outlaw abortion, and lots of Catholic voters had been conned into believing that voting for pro-choice candidates was not only a sin, but disqualified one from being Catholic. Among less informed Catholics, the idea that being so-called “pro-life” was required of all Catholics took hold. The unity campaign helped the hold your nose and vote for the degenerate strong man who will save the “pre-born babies” and zygote children. Trump kept the promise to fill the Supreme Court with judges who would “save” the embrynic boys and girls.”
“Liberal” Catholics in the pews, out of commitment to Catholic unity, funded the so-called “pro-life” lobby. Maybe they didn’t attend the March for Life, but their dollars helped the cause. “Liberal” lens louse priests and various pundits touting unity advanced the idea that to be apolitical was to walk with Christ and their “brothers.”
The Chickens Make Nice with the Foxes. AMDG Show Me the Money !Beatitudes be damned!
Between 2015 and 2024, faint traces of unsavory alliances manifested. The lines between traditional and Vatican II bishops became blurred. The pope ordained a few Opus Dei bishops. The (once “liberal”) Jesuit media started to publish traditional and Opus Dei opinionators. When the trad and Opus Dei flavored Prayer App, Hallow, dropped, parishes with no strong (relatively speaking) right-leaning political orientation endorsed and encouraged parishioners to use these Hallow meditation programs which carry forceful integralist and softly Christofascist messaging.
Over the past two or three years, I saw a handful of full-on conservative integralist men and women religious, laypersons and seminarians with significant followings passing over and over again for “liberal.” The lines got blurred. Catholics drawn to Catholic practice by strong beliefs about social justice, ecumenism, works of mercy, and the liberative force and character of the Gospels and the Bible, began to be cast by Christofasists as Communists or Marxist apostates. This as billionaire hedge-funders took their spots in the just slightly right of center on the Catholic spectrum between the poles.
Beatitudes be damned! Under Catholic unity, the authority of Jesus gets “trumped” (pun partially intended) by the ethics of the dictatorial and belligerent ghosts of the papal states who live in the bloated bellies of the manchildren in cone-head hats and satin frocks.
The Clergy Child Rape Coverup, Creepy Vichy Catholicism and Catholic Unity
Within the past approximately five to ten years, more than 24 dioceses have used the justice-obstructing Bankruptcy ruse to cheat men and women who had been raped by priests as children all over the nation, of justice and reparations, and good Catholics in the pews have countenanced this. The anti-polarization set wants the rape victims and survivors to try harder to understand this. The good Catholics who sign off on this say they can’t withhold contributions that pay for the private detectives and lawyers who facilitate the retraumatizing of abuse and sexual assault victims, because they have no power. Much of this creepy Vichy Catholicism is the toxic fruit of the poison tree of Catholic “unity.”
The anti-polarization effort is not really about religious practices or feeling. It’s the “unity” fetish raised to a higher power. The term “polarization: implies equivalency at opposite points on the poles. Imagine it thus: a Catholic Worker at one pole and a January 6th Insurrection supporting QAnon Trumper at the other. Equally Catholic, equally worthy of dialogue. This view of things negates the teachings of Jesus. It’s a faulty continuum. Anti-polarization is a Vatican Optics hoax.
Several clerical orders & dioceses in the US are in fiscal trouble. Payouts for Catholic Clergy child Rape judgements, costs for lawyers dioceses use to design strategies for cheating and thwart survivors in search of justice, and the exodus of anti-bigotry Catholics from the pews have taken a big toll on the diocesan coffers. Anti-polarization is first and foremost a schism prevention tactic. It aims to use the “Here comes Everybody” approach to keep everyone donating and doing their part to increase the fold.
Right wing Catholic diploma mills with 95% acceptance rates & Christofascist/integralist curricula are cropping up as legitimate Catholic universities lose money and access to top applicant and scholars because scholarly millennials are increasingly less likely to throw down with church so committed to promulgation of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia. Anti-polarization aims to neutralize the bigotries and dismiss the imperative of cleansing the temple.
Now that a chance — by no means a certainty — that Roman Catholic women all over the US will use their ballots to forge a path for federal protection of abortion rights, the clerical hierarchy at all points on their left to right spectrum, are jittery. The United States Bishops have been using abortion for five decades to sell a complementarian worldview.
Anti-polarization minimizes actual fascism. The Anti-polarization project is a full-on menace designed to defend against schism.
The Bishops know the plan to use Opus Dei and Leonard Leo and the rest to buy the Supreme Court of the United States so they could overturn Roe was dunderheaded, and dangerous for both pregnant people who need abortions — and for the bishops themselves who have squandered the dregs of what moral authority they might once have had in the eyes of conscientious “liberal” and progressive Catholics. For fifty years the men who own and operate the Roman Catholic Church and their proxies have been calling called women who have abortions “murderers.” They now recognize that this misogynist idiocy was expensive. Thanks to anti-polarization re-branding, the bishops can be nicer to murderers.
In some ways, while Catholics were still calling it “Catholic unity,” “anti-polarization” tactics worked well with the bishops approach to keeping LGBTQ in the pews. Paving over serious conflicts and bigotry kept queer Catholics with one foot out the door remaining in a church that continues to operate as part-hate crime. If an anti-polarization “love the sinner, hate the sin” strategy can work with “the gays,” why not with the “moms” who “kill” their own “children”?
“Anti-polarization” minimizes actual fascism. It creates fertile “anti-polarization” ground on which decent Catholic people with intact moral compasses to see the most viciously racist, homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic, pro-Trump, pro-Putin, QAnon, white supremacist, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, anti-queer, Nationalist, anti-democracy fascists as fellow Roman Catholic stakeholders in one beautiful messy church.
The “Anti-polarization” project is also full-on menace designed to defend against schism.
The USCCB’s March 20th Virtual Anti-Polarization Program. Anti-polarization is about erasure.
I’d like to talk a but about the USCCB presentation. There were some technical difficulties. The priest began the talk by discussing a facet of polarization he called “sorting” — he suggested (at the 10 minute mark) that Catholics have divided themselves into two groups — the Catholics in places and cities on the coasts and those in between the coasts. If this sounds like he was alluding to to coastal elites, it is because he was alluding to coastal elites.
In my own experience as a coast-dweller (New York City) I don’t see this division as the the priest does. The politics of my fellow Catholics in Chicago, for example, seem more like my Catholic friends and me than do my Baltimore Catholic friends and relations. What most vexed me about this particular virtual conversation program was that a person knew nothing at all about the contemporary Roman Catholic Church were they to be audience to it, they’d hear commentary that sounded friendly and nice.
In other words: If a priest from a Catholic tradition (e.g, the Episcopal Church in the Unite States) that ordains women, and a moderator with an interest in racial justice in the United States not aligned with the white supremacist Catholic right were conducting this conversation with a Catholic Charities CEO, I’d have been cheering them on. But the show is sponsored by a the USCCB —a bastion of right wing politics! (Check out the priest’s trad-ish Twitter feed and follow/followers list!) Anti-polarization is about the worst kind of political harmonizing, normalizing integralism, and erasure of the criminality of the institution that sponsored this talk.
Nowhere in this talk about the splendor of its diversity is mention made of the deep bigotry towards women in the Roman Catholic Church.
The institutional Roman Catholic Church of bigotry towards women every single day — every time a cleric vests in preparation for celebrating mass! — Yet this vicious discrimination and the male supremacist leadership were not mentioned despite that they are at very root of the polarization the participants in this talk were examining.
The glory of the “gift” of diversity as Robinson (properly, in my view) characterizes it— genuine diversity IS glorious!— did not, for example, include discussion of bigotry that targets LGBTQ Catholics. The prevailing “hate the sin, love the sinner” ethos keeps some gay Catholics in the pews forking over their offertory tribute dollars, but the matter failure of the Roman Catholic Church to consecrate their marriages does not arise. “Anti-polarization” calls for the paving over that part, thus enabling the elimination of that item from the conversational docket.
Nor did the vile racist history of our church founded on slave trade and white supremacy come up in the talk. (Purvis did made some vague and, unfortunately, not entirely intelligible remarks about racism. This commentary was scant and appeared pro-forma.)
Nor was the fact that Black and brown Catholic parishes and schools in cities in the United States are generally the first targeted for closing. the least supported, the most likely to be staffed by inexperienced sub-par teachers— all of them grossly underpaid. “Anti-polarization” has the capacity to set that aside. ‘There’s good on both sides’ is the big idea. ‘Don’t judge.’ ‘Even white supremacists walk with Christ.’ Only they don’t. They don’t.
And of course there was no mention at all of the alignment of the United States Bishops to whom all of the folks in the “anti-polarization” conversation (in various degrees) answer. (Catholic Charities receives some support from the institutional Roman Catholic Church but is largely autonomous, although sanctioned by the bishops who have aligned themselves with politically with the white supremacist, nationalist right wing in the United States.
No, not a word was said, nor a finger pointed in the direction of THAT criminal entity; that great white misogynist, neofascist hope and “elephant in the room, the UNited States Conference of Catholic Bishops, in the “anti-polarization” discourse. By design, “anti-polarization” invites Catholics to push away the urge to look behind THAT curtain.
I taught my children that bigotry is a sin. I taught them to walk away from bigots and thieves.
As a Catholic mother who made a substantial effort to teach my children about the teaching and traditions of the Catholic Church into which I was baptized, reared and within which I still, in some ways and not others, continue to worship and pray; I have taught my children that God’s love extends to good people and not so good people. I reared my children (We are white.) to have consciousness of our white privilege. I taught them about racist systems and structures before they could read.
Their father and I decided long before we were parents that our non-Catholic children who grew up in a Roman Catholic parish that was one-third Black; one third-Hispanic and Latinx/Latino, one-third white, a little gay, and open to interfaith families, would grow up in a city rich with diversity. Their father and I taught our (Reform) Jewish children tolerance. We taught them to muster the grace to forgive the occasional antisemitic or Catholic exceptionalist remark, and to respond graciously to such ignorance when, on rare occasion, they encountered it.
I did not teach them to be open to dialogue with white supremacists, fascists, theocrats, homophobes, transphobes, grifters, antisemites, xenophobes, or men who think male supremacist ordination is benign, just proper.
I did not teach them to engage in polite discourse with people who think it is morally permissible to let a woman die on an Operating Room table because she can’t get a life-saving abortion that could save her life. I did not teach them to exchange ideas with fool pedagogues who want to whitewash and erase history. I taught my children that bigotry is a sin. I taught them to walk away from bigots.
I have blood relatives who have voted for a fascist president. I have had hundreds of vocal misogynist college students, and hundreds of racist students, and I taught them well, and graded them fairly. I have worked a dozen jobs that brought me into contact with bigots and I have been polite towards them. I have tapped my own “God loves everyone” belief maybe a million times to find grace enough within me to be polite to homophobes and transphobes I felt like punching in the face.
I saw worshiping in the Roman Catholic Hate crime eat away at my often devout, queer brother. I taught my non-Christian children about Jesus. I taught them to debate civilly and peacefully with those whose views are unlike theirs, but I also taught them that bigotry is a sin. I taught them that greed and contempt for the poor are sins.
I taught them to walk away from bigots and criminals. To peacefully, politely walk away. I walk away, in Christ, from bigots too. Catholic “anti-polarization” isn’t civil. It’s a crock. It’s a desperate measure, a fund-raising strategy, and a hedge against the very costly schism heading our way.
MMS
3/22/24
NYC