Author: orantoday

Dear Bishop Vasquez:

As a member of your flock, I am looking to you for guidance in the wake of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ vote to deny Holy Communion to politicians who don’t support the Church’s position on abortion. On its surface, the USCCB’s action seems contrary to Church teaching in a number of areas, seems more likely to divide than to unite at a time with division is the largest threat the Church faces in this country and seems an explicit endorsement of one political party.

My question first is this: Will this direction apply only to politicians or will it apply to the Catholics who voted for them? I myself was a vocal supporter of President Biden during the general election. As the USCCB has instructed, I based my vote on a wide range of issues, but central it was President Biden’s stance on pro-life issues as defined by the Church. The death penalty, health care, immigration, housing, the treatment of workers, etc. On pro-life issues, I found President Biden far more compatible with my beliefs as well as the beliefs of the Church. And like President Biden, I oppose efforts to jail women who have abortions. The lack of support and the shaming single mothers face in this country — as well as the lack of support their children have — makes criminalization of abortion seem like rank hypocrisy to me. Will I be turned away from taking part in the sacrament at St. Mary’s from now on? If not, why do we have different rules for different people. Politicians aren’t the only ones who lead and set examples. I have taught confirmation classes at your cathedral for the past three years. I too am in a position to influence people, though on a much smaller scale. And while I’ve never disclosed my political position on abortion to my catechumens, I have been fairly open about my political leanings on all other pro-life issues.

This leads me to my second question. Will the political litmus test the USCCB is pushing be extended to other sins? Our governor here in Texas is a devout Catholic and occasionally attends Mass in your cathedral. Will he be denied communion because of his strong support of the death penalty? President Biden has never been in the position of being able to stop an abortion and failed to do so. Gov. Abbott, on the other hand, has declined to stop executions. Newt Gingrich is a serial adulterer, opponent of healthcare as a right and supporter of executions. Will he too be refused the eucharist? Will I be refused the Eucharist because of my vasectomy? Will Catholic politicians in Texas who voted to allow anyone to carry a gun while refusing to expand Medicaid be refused the Eucharist?

Third, can you clear up the confusion about the Church’s hierarchy this has created. Pope Francis has clearly said that communion is “bread for sinners” rather than a reward for the perfect. Cardinal Luis Laderia, the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith specifically told the USCCB not to move forward on this issue. It is impossible for any Catholic to be unaware of the words of the Holy Father these days. Is it the position of the USCCB that the edicts of the Bishop of Tyler supercede the edicts of the Bishop of Rome? I think it’s imperative for the Church to clear up this confusion. On this and numerous other issues, the USCCB has created opportunities for us to practice cafeteria Catholicism. As someone who gleefully had a vasectomy, I’m not averse to picking what I like, but at least I know that I’m acting against what the Church dictates on this. I worry that allowing people to rationalize their own cafeteria Catholicism while condemning others based on what vegetables they leave off their plate will hurt Church unity.

Fourth, will this lead to schism? The USCCB has been opposed to Pope Francis from the start, the inevitable result of a political conservatism that has lasted my entire lifetime. With a vote that was overwhelmingly for the politically conservative approach, but by no means unanimous, how much will USCCB’s choice to divide along political lines affect the overall unity of the Church in the United States? And how will a schism between the American church and the rest of Catholicism affect those of us who reject the politicization of our Church? Will there be a place for me to worship after the schism when Pope Dolan is giving orders from Manhattan?

Finally, and this is a much larger question, is the USCCB rejecting Vatican II? There are a number of things to say on this, but I’ll try to be concise. Vatican II holds that the ultimate arbiter of sin is the informed individual conscience. Dictating political positions as a qualification to receive the Eucharist is an explicit rejection of this fundamental tenant. I understand that many of your brother bishops have stood in strong opposition to the Pope, even those who condemned dissent from previous Popes’ teachings as a grave sin. But the USCCB is rejecting the teachings of a church council. I’m not aware of any scholarship or theology that questions the authority of a council. What are the implications for the teachings of other councils if the USCCB chooses to reject the teachings of the most recent council?

Thank you for your time and thank you in advance for your response. My informed individual conscience will simply not allow me to belong to any group that conditions salvation on my political position. The decision to deny the Eucharist the USCCB has taken can’t be seen in any other light. President Biden has never had an abortion, nor has he procured one. That means he’s in line with a strict reading of the catechism. The catechism doesn’t tell us we must support jailing or fining women or their doctors to prevent abortion. The most vocal bishops on this issue have spoken in support of politicians who work to implement laws that directly contradict Church teaching. As someone who has spoken eloquently and movingly on immigration, you know this first hand. I hope the Church that taught me to love everyone, to welcome everyone and to support everyone (and that continues to help me do so despite my own massive failings) will not push me out. I will miss that support far more than St. Mary’s will miss the $159 I contribute every month or my feeble efforts to witness to the next generation.

Sincerely Yours:

Michael Wright

This is trump’s legacy. There is no hiding from it. Everyone who yelled, “build the wall,” “lock her up,” “law and order” is complicit. Everyone who believed Fox’s lies, who deflected to some other issue, who failed to fact check a meme because you didn’t care if it was true as long as it comforted your cognitive dissonance is complicit. Every. Single. One. Of. You.

There is nothing more for me to do tonight. I’ve voted. I’ve phone banked. I’ve argued. I’ve tried to persuade. Now I wait to see if the American experiment ends. trump has spent four years tearing down the restraints that keep us from autocracy. Without those restraints he’ll be free the next four years to do it all. To lock up political opponents and critics. To destroy more families. To line more of his pockets and to enable more criminals. If he wins, there will be nothing left to restrain him and the gang of criminals with whom he’s surrounded himself. If he wins, we might not have another election. None of the trump supporters I know would be bothered by that.

And if he loses? If he loses, 40 percent of the voters in this country, minimum, will have voted for unrestrained police violence, denial of rights to LGBTQ citizens, forced sterilization, systemic racism, arbitrary detention, torture. If you are reading this and saying to yourself “Not me, I’m not for those things, I just like the tax cuts,” you’re lying. We’ve gone past the point where a vote for trump might not mean you’re racist, it just means you don’t have a problem with racism. No, a vote for trump now means you are complicit in everything he’s done. It means you’ve seen the bad and decided it’s worth it because you’ll come out ahead.

If he loses, the country is still in trouble. We’ve seen the hate in the heart of the trump supporters who cheer as cars get run off the road, who decried the burning of the Minneapolis police station, then suddenly went silent when it turned out it was a white trump supporter. And those who attempted to deflect attention and blame from such things are every bit as complicit. There will be violence. There will be riots and looting. And the complicit will suddenly find their taste for law and order growing stale when the law and the order is applied to white people. Like Kyle Rittenhouse. Like Ivan Harrison Hunter. Like the men who charged with plotting to overthrow the government of Michigan. The more malleable will riot. The more sedentary will cluck at the violence and try to deflect with more “whataboutism” as they project their own wishes of an autocracy that will serve their entitlement onto those of us they’ve long believed to be enemies.

A Biden win, even a landslide, doesn’t get us out of the woods. It only puts us back on the trail. We need to keep walking down it. We need to stop normalizing fascism, whether its from the president or at the dinner table. We need to make sure everyone can vote, we need to find ways to make it easier for more people to vote and we need shun — politically, socially and personally — people who want make it harder for anyone to vote. American is at stake, not just tomorrow, but in the days and years to come.

trump will go away. He might file some motions, but once he establishes his martyrdom and victimhood, he will go away because he is a coward. He’s not willing to do the work it takes to embed fascism, thank God. But his supporters will remain. They will walk among us. We can never forget what they did.

It’s probably always been this way. I’ve never stopped to think about it. But COVID-19 puts it in such stark relief, that you really have to work to miss it. Thrown out all the political science class definitions of Burkian conservatism and classic liberalism. Throw out the buzzwords and the attempts by one side to slur any term they oppose. This isn’t about a differing set of ideas on the way to a common goal. It’s about empathy. One side has it. One doesn’t. And the one that doesn’t is keenly, if subconsciously, aware of it.

Liberals want to make the world a better and they want it to be better for everyone. Conservatives do not. Conservatives can’t see beyond their own parochial concerns, concerns they reinforce by living in a bubble, information wise and otherwise. It seems like a broad generalization, but when you start thinking about it, it’s not. What are the core tenants of conservative ideology these days? Lower taxes so I can keep more of my money. More money for cops, so we can punish people who come after my stuff. Less money for programs that help people improve their lives.

They will tell you it’s not about not helping people. It’s about the best way to help people help themselves. That teach a man to fish and he’ll eat forever. That pulling money out of the public schools really is a good thing. After all, they’re all good Christians. Not Jesus-y, New Testament Christians of course, but angry Christians, horrified at the world and the people around them and any thought that their actions might be restricted in anyway. That’s why they won’t wear masks. They’ll tell you it’s because they aren’t afraid, but it’s really because masks don’t project them. They project Other People. And the core tenant of MAGA voters is “We don’t give a fuck about Other People.”

And that’s where the projection comes. And that’s why trump, not some neighbor-loving Jew from Palestine, is their messiah. It’s never been more evident than in their screeds against Biden. He’s doddering, he’s a puppet, his child is corrupt. None of those things are true of Biden, all of those things are true of trump. But they follow him because he doesn’t ask sacrifice of them. He doesn’t ask them to think about anyone but themselves.

And they truly don’t see the problem. If you look like them, they’ll say the quite parts out loud until they realize you aren’t with them. Then they’ll either scream it to own the libs or withdraw. Because the cruelty is the point. I’ve listened to people tell me not to worry about the Public Charge Rule, which allows the government to deport legal immigrants who receive assistance, because my wife is long past the time when that would affect her. No explanation that my concern isn’t for her, but for little girls growing up now in the same situation she did. But these people cannot see it from anyone else’s view. Another friend has LGBTQ relatives, but shows no concern they could be fired simply for who they love if trump has is way. “No good employer would do that.” As if we all get to work for good employers all our lives.

They vote for trump because their stock shares are up. Because their prescription prices have dropped, but can’t cite a single policy that caused that (likely a move to generic). They take it as an article of faith that Biden is corrupt, but will not see that trump’s children are raking in tens of millions from foreign governments, that trump’s business record is one of abject failure. That he’s a tax cheat who writes off consulting fees paid to employees and $70,000 worth of hair care. They vote on self-interest and wrap it in the flag, tough love and entitlement. They care nothing for the principles on which this country is founded. They are all too happy to lock ’em up, send armed thugs to intimidate voters and cheer those who would overthrow the government, as long as they look like them and don’t inconvenience them. They want a government designed to give them their way, not one designed to make sure everyone’s voice is heard.

trump’s defeat won’t change them. But it will signal their reign of terror is nearing an end. They’ve stood before every effort to make this country better for 400 years. We’re not going back to the way it was. We’ve seen too many things from our friends, neighbors and family that we can’t unsee. As the last four years capped off government by the selfish, we’ve seen the disguise slip off too often and too casually to truly trust them again. All we have is our ideals and our community and the end community will prevail over selfishness as long as we are willing to look it it the eye and call it out for what it really is.

My father was disappointed we didn’t have senior quotes in my yearbook. He suggested mine should be the entire lyrics of “Gettin’ By,” the song that opens Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Viva Terlingua.” It was a comment on my habit of “just living my life, easy come, easy go.” It wasn’t a compliment.

He was a walking contradiction, to steal a line from Kris Kristofferson, a songwriter with a poor voice whose covers of other people’s songs are among his most treasured works; a world-class asshole by most accounts whose generosity made the careers of other writers we might never heard of; a New Yorker whose biggest hit came before living in Austin was ever a gleam in his eye but who defined Texas music more than anyone, including Willie Nelson.

If I could start my career as a writer in any time and any place, it would be Austin, Texas in 1968. A group of singers and songwriters who were never good enough for Nashville’s vile orchestrations or didn’t want pay the price the establishment took from Hank Williams changed everything. Without the pressures of creating hits, they created art, stripping country to its roots, then fertilizing it with rock and jazz. Walker showed up after Michael Murphy and Steve Fromholtz and before Willie came back. He rented a recording studio on Sixth Street, borrowed Murphy’s band and recorded eponymous album “Jerry Jeff Walker,” and it was a big fuck you to everyone who thought they knew how to make a country song.

You can’t find the album streaming anywhere now, but it gave us “Charlie Dunn,” “Hairy-Ass Hillibillies” and “Old Beat Up Guitar.” But it was the Guy

Clark song “L.A. Freeway” that made that album literature. Walker’s cover was better than Clarke’s just as his cover of “Desperadoes Waiting on a Train” was better. Just as Texas as founded and then defined by people who weren’t born in Texas, Outlaw Country’s nexus was the man from New York. And make no mistake about it, the work he did from 1972 to 1975 when Ridin’ High came out defined the era and the place. As he got lost in cocaine and money woes, Willie became a movie star and Nashville took back over. George Strait was nice, but he didn’t have the edge. But was Jerry Jeff we missed. When my brother told me about this signer he’d heard in College Station, Willie wasn’t the frame of reference, “He might be better than Jerry Jeff,” he said.

Like all country music (no one named Luke or Dirks plays real country music) Walker’s songs were about pain. But it was a different pain. It wasn’t a pain you were sharing or that anyone else really understood. It’s a lonely pain that looks out the window and wonders if the girl who broke your heart ever sees that same bird. It’s a lonely pain that tells a lover, “it seems like you would have found your own self by now.” It’s a lonely pain that laments “We never want the things we’ve already got. We always want what we can’t have.” It’s a pain that sits alone in a room listening to those lyrics over and over, not telling anyone about the pain when the sun comes up, then goes back and does it again the next night. It’s the pain that lives in your heart, even after it stops hurting.

I got to see most of my musical heroes except Nanci Griffith. Jerry Jeff was the last one. It was always a crapshoot. A friend who was in college in the 70s told me she’d been to four Jerry Jeff concerts and had never heard him

sing a note live. My parents went to see him play with Willie Nelson when we were kids and when they returned my father gave us the disappointing news: Jerry Jeff had had car trouble and didn’t arrive until the show was almost over. “Car trouble, hell,” my mother said. “He was drunk. And Willie wasn’t happy.” My girlfriend finally took me to see him at Rockefeller’s in Houston during the Christmas season 1994. He played two shows and we caught the end of the last one. He drank a beer on stage toward the end and I knew that was trouble. The second show was a two-hour slide downhill.

It didn’t matter. The songs were great. The songs were mine, in my heart as permanent as a tattoo, as raw as a broken heart, as wild as Texas itself. He’s gone now. I read about it this morning and put “L.A. Freeway” woke my ex-girlfriend, who is now my wife, and said “He’s dead.” She knew. And now, as I finish writing this, Todd Snider is on YouTube live with a tribute. And he’s singing my theme song. So I’m gonna keep lettin’ it roll, lettin’ the high times carry the load and living my life easy come, easy go.

“Politics, though often denigrated, remains a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good. . . . I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor!”

Pope Francis, Evangelli Gaudium, no. 205

James Baldwin agreed with St. Paul’s self-assessment that he was a “wretched” man. Baldwin called that a critique written with “a most unusual and stunning exactness.” I’m beginning to empathize with The Master on this one, perhaps to an unhealthy degree when it comes to a number of prominent Catholic figures these days.

The Catholic Church, as you know, is pro-life. But it’s obvious from reading my Facebook feed, that many of you don’t understand what that means. It means supporting life from conception to natural death. Catechism paragraph 2272 is clear. It doesn’t mean putting all your chips in the anti-abortion pot.

“Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae,” by the very commission of the

offense,” and subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law. The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.”

You may not have an abortion. You may not perform an abortion. You may not pay for an abortion. Note what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say you are required to only support a candidate for office who wants to put people in jail for having an abortion.

Now let’s be clear: this is Church teaching. It cannot be overridden by a priest or a bishop or a cardinal. The pope may do it, but only if he speaks ex cathedra and that’s only happened twice. Neither had anything to do with abortion. So why are are so many people telling me otherwise? It’s bad enough when some evangelical Protestant takes it upon herself to lecture me about my failings as a Catholic. That can be ignored as ignorant rantings. But when a bishop repeats this heresy, it’s something I take far more seriously.

Church teaching requires Catholics to vote pro-life and goes out of its way to point out that pro-life isn’t just anti-abortion. It’s anti-death penalty, pro-healthcare, pro-education, pro-affordable housing, pro-immigrant, pro-environment and anti-racism. It explicitly says no candidate is perfect on life issues. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, not exactly a radical left assembly, is clear in its omnibus pamphlet on voting. “We recognize that the responsibility to make choices in political life rests with each individual in light of a properly formed conscience, and that participation goes well beyond casting a vote in a particular election.”

The Bishop of Tyler, Joseph Strickland, said my cousin’s funeral Mass. We ate together at reception following. He’s a lovely man with very nice

memories of my cousin and I found him charming and comforting. And yet he is by any reasonable definition a heretic. Bishop Strickland has endorsed the remarks of a Wisconsin priest who railed against homosexuals and immigrants and announced “You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat.” This is a direct contradiction of church teaching. And there is a word for that — heresy.

But Strickland, who’s also endorsed a call for his boss to resign, isn’t alone. There is a concentrated effort by the president* and his administration* (thank you Charlie Pierce) make Catholicism a central issue in the election. Or rather, to make the election a central issue in Catholicism. To do that, they must reduce Catholicism to a single issue and it’s a very tight rope they are traversing because it can be abortion and only abortion. If they try to make it the church’s position on life, they lose because the right and the Church only agree on abortion, despite what child-rape enablers like Timothy Dolan say. If they try to to make it the church’s position on sexuality, they’ll get killed, not just because of the Church’s conspiracy to rape children, but because if you talk of banning all birth control, those suburban women you need so badly will buy out all the tiki torches at Home Depot and set fire to everything you love.

By drawing this line in the sand, the Bishops are risking the same fate as William Travis and his followers suffered. Church attendance in America is falling and has been falling for years. Polls show 60 percent of Catholics don’t wan’t abortion outright banned. People who don’t want abortion outright banned aren’t going to vote Republican. Thus, Bishop Strickland just excommunicated three in five Catholics.

I understand why the GOP does it. “Abortion Evil” is a good slogan. It’s easy and doesn’t need much explanation. “Abortion is Evil, but not criminal and I don’t want the government involved in that decision and making it illegal won’t stop it and I’m a man anyway and have neither had nor procured one” doesn’t roll off the tongue. And in politics, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. It’s a simple slogan and that’s what sells (and it’s only a slogan, the GOP has never made a serious attempt to ban it). It’s something Bill Clinton understood when he said he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal and rare.”

But Catholicism isn’t a simple slogan. We have a long intellectual history from St. Augustine to Flanner O’Connor to Massimo Faggioli that delves into the grey areas, that brings out the nuance in our faith. And I’m not even scratching the lint on the surface of Catholic theology and intellectualism. The basic tennent, the Holy Trinity, is an incredibly complex concept that we haven’t solved yet. To act like a political party in a democratic society has a monopoly on morality is, in my eyes, a grave sin. And a politics of hate can’t survive in a democracy, so it must destroy that democracy.

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated.

James Baldwin

So don’t insult me. Don’t tell me the candidate who goes to Mass every Sunday, who has suffered grievous loss and used his faith to make sense of it, who is on the right side of racism, healthcare, the environment and the problems of capitalism is a better Catholic choice than a tax-cutting, pro-birth, pussy grabber. It’s not a sin to vote for trump because of your position on life issues. But voting for Biden doesn’t excommunicate you either. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

The world is a beautiful place and simplistic theology threatens it as much as simplistic politics. When Baldwin had dinner with Elijah Muhammed, he writes in “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” he looked at the men, women and children at the table, Nation of Islam members all, and was taken by their beauty as they talked about divine vengeance, which Muhammed’s followers were sure would soon be aimed at the white man. Baldwin wondered if the white world’s ignorance will make that vengeance inevitable. We are almost sixty years down farther down the arc he wrote about then, the same arc Dr. King insisted was long but bent toward justice. But lying about our own teachings, using Jesus to gain power, making the path to God more and more exclusive doesn’t bend that arc.

Where are the arrests? Where are the police vans full of people trying to change the system? Where are the jails overflowing with people crammed into miserable conditions as they put an ever-increasing strain on the resources of their jailers?

The point of non-violent protest isn’t to make those in power feel comfortable. It isn’t to ask politely for rights everyone else had handed to them 240 years ago. It’s to provoke a confrontation, to stretch those in power to the point where they lash out, demonstrating the rot that lies beneath the platitudes about bootstraps and property rights. It’s to show, in the words of Monty Python, the violence inherent in the system.

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

What we’re seeing now doesn’t resemble the marches in Birmingham and Selma or the Freedom Riders or the sit-ins. What we’re seeing now is a bunch of dilettantes. They aren’t serious about changing things. They just want to get on TV and virtue signal. They are angry because they think the right is distorting the “I Have and Dream” speech when what they should be waiving is “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” King didn’t say ask nicely and take care that you don’t mess up the grass. He said demand, get in their face, shout, be loud, be angry, just don’t be violent. Because violence doesn’t get you what you deserve.

King’s goal was to create tension and push it to the boiling point. “The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation,” he writes. It took months to create that tension in Birmingham. And it took sending children out to be arrested on Easter Sunday to create it.

There was violence in those marches too. There were people using that violence to smear the whole movement, not because they abhorred violence or loved property, but because they hated the people marching and hated what they were marching for. The right is holding up its end. It’s using a match struck to light a cigarette to justify murder with police complicity. It’s raised a million dollars for the shooter and raised it in the name of Jesus.

Are the marchers on the left up to their role? Are they ready to confront and to provoke more Kyle Rittenhouses? Are they ready to absorb the blows and the bullets from the Proud Boys, the Boogaloos, the militias, the police and the Department of Homeland Security? That’s what it will take. When you protest non-violently, when you follow the teachings of King and of Gandhi and — yes — of Jesus his ownself, people support your cause. The polls show it. Is the left ready to make the sacrifice? Is the left ready to demonstrate Christian values against the Christianists and the performative patriots?

If you are, then the Republic might yet, at this late date, be saved. If you’re not, if you strike back, if you burn, if you allow the MAGAts to lie about your stance and your actions, there is no hope. The American experiment will end Nov. 3 and we will not see it arise again in my lifetime.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Revelations 6:8

The federal government hasn’t executed anyone in 17 years. Until this week. On Tuesday
the United States killed Daniel Lee for the murder of three members of the same family. This morning, we executed Wesley Purkey for killing a 16-year-old girl. Tomorrow we will kill Dustin Lee Honken. Other than four Supreme Court justices, a superhero nun and some folks we’ll talk about in a minute, no one paid much attention. Our minds are on other things, like pandemics and elections. But if we had been paying attention, even the death penalty supporters among us might see some causes for concern.

Because there’s something important to see here. The Department of Justice, under trump hatchetman and fixer Bill Barr, claimed it was killing Lee, in part, to bring closure to the family of the victims. Let’s let Sister Helen Prejean tell it.

“Family members of the three people murdered by Lee were resolutely opposed to the planned execution, and had made their wishes clear almost a year before the announced execution,” Sister Helen writes.

And the DOJ, which had argued we must kill Lee because we “owe it to the victims, and to the families left behind,” responded to the victim’s family’s pleas by saying “victims’ families have no right to attend the execution of a person involved in the killing of their loved ones.”

So Barr, who claims his governing philosophy is based on his Catholic religion, lied so he could kill. The people who support this execution, of whatever religion, are often the people who are demanding stricter abortion laws. They will tell you they are pro-life. They are lying. Pro-life is a lie. Pro-lifers aren’t against executions, they aren’t for health care and education for everyone. They aren’t for better schools and reduced military expenses. They aren’t for better child care, fairer wages, worker safety or fighting climate change. They are simply against abortion. Once the baby is born, they are done with it. The honest ones, who really oppose abortion are merely pro-birth. The rest are just raising money on the issue, which is why you never see anyone introduce a bill banning abortion.

The Catholic Church, to its credit, is pro-life. It supports all these things. But it doesn’t get the word out to its employees very well, at least not in this country. Leading Catholics, starting with the United States Conference of Bishops, decided in the wake of Roe. v. Wade that abortion was the top issue and anything that conflicted with it should be shunted aside. So Catholics made a deal with the devil. Well, not the devil, but the group we’ve held up as the devil for a long time — evangelical protestants.

So now we have “leaders” like Viganò openly pushing for the re-election of a president who is odious to everything the church teaches. We have Dolan slobbering at the feet of an authoritarian who tear-gassed clergy so he could stage a photo op at a church. We have a priest in Texas extolling the virtues of a rosary made from bullets. We have a priest in Indiana sidelined because he called Black Lives Matter “maggots and parasites” on a church website. 

None of this is pro-life. Because the people who claim to be pro-life are lying. They’ve been lying since the beginning. Traditional Catholics jumped in bed with the GOP over abortion and haven’t looked back or looked up Catholic teaching on life. They made a deal with people who have been working to destroy them for centuries and they’ve told themselves it’s different now.

But then this story comes along, from my hometown, a town with at least one church on every corner, only 4 percent of the population is Catholic. My other hometown, slightly smaller, is 29 percent Catholic. I guarantee you the people who did this call themselves pro-life. I guarantee you they vote the same way Bill Barr does. I guarantee you when the left is finally defeated and the the Religious Right takes final power, the first thing they will do is turn on the Jews and Catholics and destroy them. And they will cite the Bible as they do it.

I have a friend, a relative actually, who is sick with COVID-19. It’s not just her, but her husband and her son. The boy is hospitalized. As I write, I don’t know their condition or prognosis. I don’t know what’s going to happen to them, but I don’t want it to be more sickness or death. I suspect more and more people are coming to this realization. As the cases spike, as the sickness spikes, COVID-19 is going from an abstraction to a concrete threat to the people we love. And we don’t see the way out. We don’t see it, because there is no one to twist our head toward the path we have to take and shove us down the trail, painful as it might be.

“Leadership,” said Tom Landry, “is getting someone to do what they don’t want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.” We all want COVID to go away. We all want to save our economy and keep our jobs. We all want to have dinner and a movie with our friends and our lovers. But we don’t all want to pay the price. This is not, ultimately, a failure of the community, though that concept has been under attack for 40 years in American politics. It’s a failure of leadership, at the federal and at the state level.

There is no one to make us do what we don’t want to do, to achieve what we want to achieve.

We should have been told in March to put on our big-girl panties and step up. Those of us who could work from home should have been told we’re going to have to kick in a little more to help those whose jobs can’t function in a lockdown. Other countries did that and aren’t seeing a spike and are in much better shape economically than we are now. But our leaders told us to choose between our lives and our livelihoods. We couldn’t have both. Then they listened to the mob and they went away. Now the message is we need to live with it. 

What they really mean, is we’re going to have to die our way out of it. Rather than take a little more money from those who are working and give it, temporarily, to those who can’t, we’re going to stage the Pandemic Games. Those who die will be the old and weak. And we’ll come through the other side of this Darwinian nightmare with the herd culled. That’s the plan. That’s all we get.

It’s all we get because we have leaders who want to rule, but not govern. They want the pomp, but not the circumstances. They don’t have it within them to call on us to make sacrifices because the very concept of sacrifice is alien to them. Sacrifice is something other people do for them. The Me Generation is in charge and their poisonous selfishness is filtering down, as it always has. When they do take action it’s too little and too late.

Masks aren’t enough. Social distancing isn’t enough. Lockdowns aren’t enough. We have to do all that and more. We have to test, we have to contact trace. We have to redistribute some wealth to help people get through to the other side. We have organize centrally and plan from the top. But no one will say that. No one will sit this country down and call it to action, call it to duty, call it to sacrifice, because no one on in position to lead knows anything about action, duty or sacrifice and they’ve gotten to the point where if they don’t know something, it doesn’t exist. Learning isn’t possible.

Instead, they only offer blame and rationalizations. It’s the goddamn protestors who are spreading it. It’s the people in bars congregating and singing so close to each other (churches? what churches, God doesn’t spread plague in churches, at least not my church). Everyone of us is allowed to say “not me, it’s them.” Everyone of us is allowed to say “they’re making their choice to go out, not masked. If you don’t want to catch it, avoid those who are spreading it.” It the epidemiological equivalent of “look at how she was dressed, she was asking for it.” That allows us to sleep at night, safe knowing that if we hang out with the right people and don’t walk down dark alleys, it could never happen to us. And if it happens to someone, well, they weren’t us after all.

But there is a greater responsibility. The mob has never exercised restraint. It has to be either tamed or conquered. Taming is harder. Taming means convincing people to give something up, not just wrenching it from them when their lack of restraint becomes inconvenient or offensive to you. But taming the mob pays off. Taming the mob brings out the better angels of our nature. Because, when given the call, Americans will answer it. When asked to sacrifice, when told why they are sacrificing and when shown that sacrifice is the only thing that has ever made this country great, Americans will answer that call.

Among the WWII souvenirs my grandparents kept were the ration books. We never paid any attention to them when we were kids. The uniforms and the flags and the pistol were all much cooler. But as I got older, I realized those things were close to meaningless. There were two artifacts in their house that showed American exceptionalism. One was the ration book limiting the gas or sugar or coffee my grandmother could buy. She kept that book and those stamps and I think she did it for reasons other than helping her grandchildren get good grades on their social studies project.

The other was the Bronze Star citation honoring my grandfather, not for feats of glory on a battlefield, but for feats of mercy in a death camp. He got drafted, shipped across the sea, left his wife and infant son, traveled all over Europe with a medical unit, not to kill, but to save.  The Jews in Dachau weren’t Americans. They couldn’t die their way out of the Shoah. But some of them made it out because Pop and an entire nation behind him didn’t talk about greatness, they achieved it. The work for which he was honored had nothing to do with individual Americans exercising their freedom.  It had everything to do with what makes America great. Helping people. Working together. Sacrifice.

America exists and has always existed on two levels: The symbolic level in which we stand as a grand experiment in freedom and self government and the tangible level where we do the work of bringing that experiment to reality. Symbols have been crucial to the idea of America since before the beginning. The founders understood that. Franklin roamed Paris in a preposterous outfit symbolizing what the French thought a simple, but wise country bumpkin would look like. Washington himself was a living symbol of integrity that survives to this day. But the real Franklin was incredibly sophisticated and the real Washington harbored tremendous ambition that was curtailed by his many failures.

Successful leaders understand and use the power of symbols, in America and in every other country in the world. That will never change, even as the meaning of the symbols seems too. The current argument over statues is over that meaning of symbols. Jefferson can stay even though he’s a slave owner and a rapist because he symbolizes much more than that and we can close our eyes to the evil he inflicted and choose to see only the good. And we can make a very good case that the public good outweighs the private bad. Lee in full uniform astride Traveler must go because there is nothing else he can symbolize. There is no Declaration or Bill of Rights to counterbalance the treason, the kidnapping of free blacks and sending them to slavery in the South, the whipping of his own slaves or the breaking apart of families. No one has yet been bold enough to suggest we leave Lee’s monuments up as a reminder of the national hypocrisy and the complicity of a generations of Americans, before and after, in the lie on which the white vision of the South has always rested.

But something has changed. There has always been a conflict over the meaning of the symbols we use. But until now there hasn’t been a conflict over their role. The symbols have been stand ins for the ideals we want to achieve and even the means with which we wish to achieve those ideals. But in the last 30 years, we have shoved the symbols more and more to the forefront. We’ve fought so much over flag-burning, insignias, statues and platitudes that the symbols of our freedom have become more important than the freedom itself. They have, in fact, become a tool to deny that freedom to people with whom we disagree. But something more insidious has happened. We’ve gone from choosing sides by symbol and fighting elections by symbol to governing by symbol.

They will tell us we’re just going to have to die our way out of the pandemic.

It’s not just a president threatening to starve our national defenses if someone interprets a signal differently from him. It’s not just the symbolic use of language as dog whistles so the racists don’t have to say the quiet things out loud. It’s that we’ve put some much meaning on symbols that we’ve substituted symbols for policy.

Trump wants a border wall. The wall won’t have a significant effect on illegal immigration. Most illegal immigrants don’t sneak in and those who do will be able to hop it or tunnel it with relative ease. The wall is a symbol. But there’s nothing backing that symbol up. There’s no policy to keep people out that would recognize the realities on both sides of the border. There’s just a wall and the fight over the wall and the problem goes on.

We’ve issued mask orders in Texas. But there’s no policy behind those orders to stop the spread of COVID. You don’t have to wear a mask in church, where spread is easy and frequent. There’s no push to increase testing, there’s no contact tracing, there’s no quarantine policy for those potentially exposed. Without these things, there’s nothing to stop the rising rates of infection and death. It’s just a symbol and a month from now, when the number are still going up and the hospitals are overwhelmed, people are going to be angry that they had to give their freedom, angry that the masks didn’t work and the policy makers are going to say, we did what we could, it didn’t work, or people didn’t obey. And they’re going to tell us we’re just going to have to die our way out of the pandemic. Our governing class has become so addicted to symbols — not just flags and songs, but effete liberals, conspiratorial socialists, violent radicals — that they can’t see the tangible. Having dealt only in symbols, they can’t see the symbols are just illusions, mirages unless there is tangible action and leadership behind them.

This isn’t to say say symbols are evil or useless. Symbols are essential, we cannot communicate without them, language is nothing but a symbol. But the nature of a tree doesn’t change whether you call it a tree, un arból, or the big raw wood thing with green curlers that’s stuck in the ground. It still provides shade and converts carbon dioxide to oxygen. Public health policy is meaningless as a symbol. It’s worse than meaningless, it’s deadly and it’s a criminal abdication of responsibility by our leadership. Leadership isn’t whipping people up around a symbol. It’s getting people to go where they need to go when they don’t want to go there. That takes thought, courage and the willingness to risk popularity from the leader. Washington knew he was a symbol and he used his symbolic importance. But he never hid behind it, called it a day and went home leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

 

We are all responsible for each other.

I don’t think that should be a controversial statement in a nation many claim is founded on Christian principles. We are all responsible for each other. The people we revere in this nation, Lincoln, King, Dorothy Day, William Lloyd Garrison, even John Brown all believed that and put that into practice.

I don’t take any responsibility at all.
-Donald Trump

The president of the United States does not share this belief. The president of the United States believes that we are all responsible for maintaining his approval rating and ensuring the re-election he so desperately needs to avoid criminal prosecution, but he doesn’t believe there is any reciprocal responsibility from him or his office — two entities that seem to have merged into one in his addled brain.

“I don’t take any responsibility at all,” said the man who fired the people in charge of protecting usfrom pandemics, turned down the World Health Organization’s offer of testing kits, and has consistently lied about the scope of the threat and the measures his administration has taken to keep us safe.

The president, through his words, actions and ineptitude has made it clear, we’re on our own. He can’t even be bothered to set a good example by not shaking hands. We are all responsible for each other.

That means we need to heed the experts, not “commin’ sense,” as a dear friend so beautifully put it. We need to understand that bans of large gatherings aren’t needed because it’s bad, they are needed because we’re trying to stop it before it becomes bad. We need to understand that no matter how badly we want to go to Mass, one sick priest giving communion to 500 people can change the trajectory of the virus.

Even if we feel healthy, we need to understand that we can spread it to people in high risk groups, including the elderly, the immunosuppresed and those with diabetes. We need to realize the single largest group of people who have the disease in South Korea are 20-29 year-olds. Continue reading “In Which I Channel Fr. Panaloux” →