I used to be much more vocal about being a Catholic blogger, and then things got weird. I alienated a bunch of Catholic readers with my posts about Trump and then about COVID, and then my post about January 6 was just a bridge too far for some folks. I don't know how much of the issue is that fewer people are reading blogs now, and how much of the issue is that people stopped reading my blog in particular. But there is a deep rift in the particular Catholic subculture I used to inhabit so happily.
In my first months of blogging, way back in 2004, I connected with a blogging Catholic midwife and mom of six who became a Facebook friend. Earlier this week she posted a link to the NPR interview with Russell Moore in which he talked about all the pastors who tell him they can't preach the Sermon on the Mount these days. Jesus sounds like a wuss, their congregants complain. She got a reply from someone I've been seeing in internet comment boxes for almost 20 years now, an earthy-crunchy mom of many whom I first encountered in that same Catholic subculture. "You can't trust anything NPR says," she asserted.
This is not the first time I've posted about the problems with contemporary US Catholic epistemology, so I'll try not to repeat myself. I'm thinking about it this weekend, though, because I can't quite get my mind around the Bishop Strickland situation.
If this hasn't been on your radar, here's the short version: a bishop in rural Texas has been increasingly strident in his opposition to the pope. Months ago the Vatican sent a deputation to investigate, and he was asked for his resignation on Thursday. He declined to resign, so the Holy Father removed him from office yesterday.
"I will not read the comments," I said to Elwood yesterday morning. "For the health of my soul I am not going to look at what traditionalists are saying about his removal." Unfortunately, I'm going to have to work at not reading the comments, because I can't open Facebook without being greeted by posts about the situation. I keep hiding them, but the algorithm is astoundingly good at sniffing out outrage, is it not?
I am thinking about all the people I knew in the nineties and the aughts who were a little smug about the need to yield to the pope's authority. (I include myself in the smug tally-- mea culpa.) I keep asking myself: what happened? And how do we fix it?
I don't know the answer to either of those questions. But I do know better than to read the comments.
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