Of popes, politics, and the blinding force of ideology

Last updated on: March 25, 2016 at 4:34 pm by Rebecca Bratten Weiss

Of popes, politics, and the blinding force of ideology 2016-03-25T16:34:58-04:00 Rebecca Bratten Weiss

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“Diabolical Narcissist Peronist-Fascist.”

“The massive crime against humanity … will carry on utterly unchecked and uncontested through time until Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ returns in glory… UNLESS positive, proactive, countermeasures are taken.”

“Satan has made his move… and his tool…has a new diabolical meme or soundbite nearly every day – something to disorient, confuse, mislead or repulse human souls AWAY from the Truth of Jesus Christ and His Holy Catholic Church.”

“Because the good German people cowered and failed to stand up and stop what they clearly saw happening in the mid-to-late 1930s, their collective failure in courage cumulated and compounded. Where their failure in courage all eventually ended up was on the shoulders of the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy, among many, many others.”

Anti-Trump rhetoric? No – anti-Francis rhetoric.

Because I like to live dangerously, I read several Remnant articles attacking Pope Francis, calling for his resignation, etc – and then sat down yesterday evening to write a response. And this is what I wrote:

I ought to be used to it by now, but the anti-Francis faction seems determined to outdo the capabilities of even the silliest satirist, in their escalatingly ludicrous attacks on the Pope.

A few days ago, Remnant writer Ann Barnhart published a post proclaiming her “perfect hatred” of feminism. Why is feminism so evil? Well, apparently, because it has produced a generation of “Diabolical Narcissists” so lost to human decency as to dislike housework. Prior generations were clearly immune to this wickedness (which is why, prior to feminism, middle and upper class women hired the poor to do housework for them).

So I am just as tickled as can be to find, according to this post (“CALLING ALL BISHOPS THAT ARE STILL CATHOLIC — the die is cast: Bergoglio MUST be deposed”) that I’m tarred with the same brush as our very own Pope Francis. He’s even worse than I am, though – not only a diabolical narcissist, but a “Diabolical Narcissist Peronist-Fascist.” The writer’s love affair with random capitalization is fun, because it reminds me of the epistolary prose of those nineteenth-century women who had not yet been corrupted by feminists into thinking that washing dishes isn’t amazing.

I’m afraid the basic gist of the piece is exactly what you’d expect if you downed six shots of cheap bourbon and tried to channel an angry sedevacantist issuing internet excommunications from his basement study. Francis is consistently referred to as “Bergoglio.” Bergoglio is endangering souls. Bergoglio is part of Satan’s plan. “The massive crime against humanity that Bergoglio is executing – and consider for a moment that Bergoglio certainly has the potential to be the one human being that ends up personally responsible for the most loss of human souls to eternal damnation, above Luther, above mohammed, above Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha), above Paul VI Montini – will carry on utterly unchecked and uncontested through time until Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ returns in glory… UNLESS positive, proactive, countermeasures are taken” (I read the damned thing, so you don’t have to). Barnhart, not herself a Diabolical Narcissist, goes on to quote something she once wrote herself, about the duty to stand up to Nazis, and now draws an analogy from this to the duty to stand up to “Bergoglio.”

At which point, I stopped writing. This, I thought, is not the way I write; this is the way I rant, and it’s mildly cathartic, but I’m not really saying anything that isn’t already obvious to sympathetic readers, and only raising the hackles of those on board with the Remnant and its like. It’s easy enough to mock the prose style of someone who sounds mildly unhinged, or to note the irony of misapplied labels, but this is a game that leads nowhere, because the obvious result is that, if anyone notices, they will turn around and do the same to me. Then, woe betide me if I’ve accidentally split an infinitive.

I followed the trail from one Remnant article to the next, and then when I decided to look for unbiased news sources for their material, found only pieces from other similar sources (LifeSite, sspx.org, Rorate Caeli). It was as though I had fallen down the rabbit hole, landing in a strange narrow world of bristling and overlapping ideologies. In that world, language changes, no longer serving the phenomenological goal of unconcealing and discovering, but instead arising from some provocation. It is “self-expression” in the sense that one puts into speech what one feels, instead of trying to use words to give form to some reality beyond oneself (the goal of both the poet and the philosopher). Instead of writing my own self-expressive response, I should probably run out into the woods and howl like a wolf.

Having thus howled, I return to the matter at hand, trying to take a sober and empathetic approach. And I am left with two main considerations.

First of all, that in our moral and religious education we have focused excessively on rules and definitions. I’m not going to fall back on fluff philosophy and say that rules and definitions are useless: they’re obviously useful tools for the discipline of reasoning. A definition might help us “find out” but it is always secondary to a prior “finding out” which is pre-systematic. When we don’t do any “finding out” but instead simply memorize rules, we lose our ability to see. For instance: a student once turned in a paper on Crime and Punishment, the central argument of which was that Sonia was morally wrong to turn to prostitution. The ethical argumentation was correct, but completely missed the point that Sonia is a character of radiant and luminous goodness. That doesn’t mean she is some sort of type of “The Good Woman” or even “The Good Prostitute.” The serious study of literature enables the reader to see that persons can’t be limited to the labels of classical ethics. “The Magnanimous Man” does not exist. There are some people who tend to be magnanimous, but they have their petty moments, also. We are teeming with conflicting virtues, vices, fears, and desires. One morning I wake up as The Arrogant Woman. Another morning I am The Slothful Woman. And my slothfulness is always uniquely, disgustingly, my own.

What has stood out to me from the day Pope Francis was elected was a sense of his goodness. I don’t know him in person, of course; certainly media attention has a tendency to hyperbolize; I don’t even always agree with him; obviously he has his faults as everyone does – but what I see when I watch him act is goodness, his own goodness. Thus, my defense of Pope Francis is due not to some weird anachronistic ultramontanism (I don’t even like authority!) but instead to my gratitude that he is our pope. Half-hearted defenders of Pope Francis sometimes point out that “it could be worse” or “we’ve had awful popes in history, and the church survived” (which is true – we’ve had some doozies). Some remind us that we owe obedience to our shepherd even if we don’t enjoy it very much. Well, perhaps. We owe respect always to the office that the pope holds, but if our church leaders are pulling shenanigans we as the laity have a duty to call them out on it. Theological disagreements within the church mean not everyone is thrilled with the pope (he’s seen as too progressive by some traditionalists, and too traditional by some progressives) but theological disagreements should never obscure our view of a person as a person beyond our conflicting ideologies. The anti-Francis faction has become so obsessed with their ideology about what the church must be, that they have, ironically, forgotten not only the example of Christ and the light of the gospels, but also the rules that they themselves hold so dear.

Secondly, that we need to think about using our language differently. This is the case whether we are speaking as pro-lifers in debate with pro-choicers, as Christians in debate with atheists, as Catholics in debate with protestants. It’s the case when we take on those who oppose Pope Francis. It’s especially the case as we deal with the looming prospect of a Trump presidency. Those of us who dread such an event need to be careful about being lured into the Trump world of Trump rhetoric. It’s true that Trump is racist, narcissistic, bombastic, ridiculous, sexist, cowardly, and frightening. But having said that, have I fallen back on cheap rhetoric in which everyone is reduced simply to shouting at one another, instead of thinking carefully about solutions? Was that just another wolf-howl in the woods?

What if even our speech about “winning” and “beating” and “fighting” draws too much on a militarist ideology in which we reduce political opponents entirely to the position of “the enemy”? What will we be willing to do to defeat “the enemy”? Are we losing our grasp of our proper ethical and political ends? What about the religious obligation to “love our enemies”?

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel,” Pope Francis said in his recent interview. I suggest that we consider whether our language is building walls that obscure meaning, or bridges to understanding.

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