I HAD BEEN CURIOUS to read what the current - and clearly stupider* - version of the former foremost American media bishop, Fulton Sheen, Bishop Robert Barron would say through his media operation "Word on Fire"** would be saying about the evils, the sins and the crimes of Trump II. I've wondered that several times during the past six weeks but didn't bother to find out what he'd said. It appears that before last week, he didn't say much not even as Trump and his boss, Musk took actions to kill and harm the least among us.
That curiosity rose even higher when I found out last week he was the guest of West Virginia representative Riley Moore (WVa) at Trump's State of Trump Dementia blithering the other night and, now, the asshole with a bishoprick has compared the stream of lies and hate-speech to the sacrifice of the Mass.
I should stop and point out to non-Catholics the enormous significance that The Mass is to Catholicism and Catholics, it is among the most sacred of actions, of words, of experiences, held in the highest regard by church law and practice. For a Catholic bishop to say in comparing it to the rite of lies, hate-speech and inane insanity that Trump pulled would be an occasion of a serious criticism of him from his fellow bishops and should get him investigated by the relevant Vatican offices because if there is an occasion to scandalize Catholics and non-Catholics both, it is someone with not only his official and misplaced credibility but ALSO HIS PUBLIC POSITION AS THE FOREMOST CATHOLIC MEDIA FIGURE IN THE U.S. TODAY it should be Robert Barron's sacrilege and opposition to Church teaching, some of it among the most definitive of Catholic teaching.
Here is a rather complete fisking of Barron's statements about the fascist-speech and the Trump regime made the other day. I'll give you just a sample so you can judge the morality and honesty of Barron, keeping in mind he is probably the most widely followed U.S. Catholic bishop due to his slick media operation: I'll put Barron's text in bold italics and the comments on it in plain italics so you will know it's not my commentary.
We then made our way over to the House, and we went to the speaker's reception, which is quite extraordinary. So the Speaker of the House has a reception before the speech. And there were hundreds of people there. Everyone who was anyone was there. I worked my way through the crowd, and I found myself face to face with RFK Jr. [Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] and then I'd see Ben Shapiro was there, and then representatives that I recognized, and kind of in a huddle, you know, greeting people. Finally made it to the speaker's office, and Speaker [Mike] Johnson, very gracious guy. So all that was thrilling, just to be kind of behind the scenes.
Barron speaks gleefully about his insider access — by his own admission — to be counted among the people who mattered. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who he specifically cites here as "someone," is a divorced and remarried Catholic, and has been panned by his own family members and close contacts as a "predator" and "drug dealer." More recently, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has peddled dangerous and incorrect conspiracy theories about vaccinations, as well as citing out of context data to suggest unconventional therapies to combat the measles epidemic in West Texas.
Ben Shapiro, a divisive conservative media personality, is a strong advocate for capital punishment, does not believe climate change is a global emergency, and is currently advocating for the release and pardon of Derek Chauvin, the man convicted in the murder of George Floyd. Shapiro and Matt Walsh (a self-defined theocratic fascist) were both guests of Speaker Mike Johnson.
And then we made our way up to the gallery, and I was brought into the section of the gallery kind of early. We got there quarter to eight. The speech didn't start till about 9:15 [p.m.]. We were stripped of our cell phones. Everybody up there in the gallery said that was, you know, challenging, but it also compelled us to speak to each other.
And then here's what I found really interesting. I'd been in that chamber before, but never up in the gallery, never for an event like this, and I'm speaking now as a Catholic bishop, I know about ritual. I know about processions. I know about organizing an ordered body of people, and that's really what was going on. It was a kind of high liturgy of our democracy, as the senators and representatives gather, and then, you know, the gavel is sounded, and in come the joint chiefs, and then income the Supreme Court justices, and then in comes the president's cabinet in a kind of stately procession. And I'm like, yep, I get it. This is a liturgy of democracy.
And then, of course, at the very end, just as the bishop or priest comes last to lead the prayer, well, then finally, you know, the president of the United States comes into the chamber. So all that it was, you know, very interesting to see. And having watched these things for many, many years, to be there in the place was interesting.
Barron is comparing the President of the United States to a bishop or priest, and a joint address to Congress to a Mass. In Trump's joint address to Congress, the president bragged about: withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord; ending environmental restrictions that protected land, air and water; freezing foreign aid that among other things delivers food to the starving of the world; ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and taking over two sovereign nations, Panama and Greenland.
Barron, a bishop of the church, compared all of that to what Catholics consider the most important and sacred act of worship: the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
I have, literally, never heard of a bishop or, in fact, priest in good standing say anything as bad as that about the Catholic liturgy. I have never heard a bishop say something that reckless about the Mass, it is something I can imagine many of the worst and most corrupt members of clergies under dictatorships saying if they wanted to curry favor with the dictator, I suspect that Barron aspires to be such a figure under what he clearly hopes will be a Republican-fascist dictatorship, one in which he is hoping the dictator will hold sway in Rome to give him a more significant position than the one Pope Francis moved him to, I suspect to blunt the effect of his fascist-friendly media operation. With this statement I'm hoping that Francis will take steps to remove him from any diocese, I'd suggest reassigning him to somewhere in the Vatican where he could be kept under observation and under check. Actually, what he's done is veering into the same territory that the excommunicated fascist liar and hack Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò inhabits. But I doubt even he would make such a comparison as Barron did. Considering the proximity to sacrilege Barron's fondling of Trump's ass is, it's more akin to the witch-hunter's imagined "osculum infame" I wouldn't be surprised if Robert Barron is anticipating being freed of his duties so he can spend all of his time lying on behalf of the Trumpzis and the trad-catholic heresy funded by millionaires and billionaires. He clearly has no interest in serving the least among us or even the truth.
I didn't much like Fulton Sheen when he was alive and had a regular TV show. Even when I was a kid he gave me the creeps, then I understood what he was saying and didn't like a lot of it. But as far as I know, even as Vatican II so drastically altered the Catholic Church he had promoted, he didn't violate its new, really much older teachings. Barron has already done that as far as I can see.
* I've come to the conclusion that you can bet on pretty much everything being stupider in the "information age."
** It's an appropriate name since his career is based in burning the Gospel, the Prophets and The Law to ashes as he pretends to be a Catholic and a Christian. Not to mention burning the truth to the ground.
Frankly, as an LGBTQ+ man, Barron's clear attraction to and propensity in hiring steroid-guzzling body builders has given rise to exactly the suspicions in me that this sentence gave rise to in you. I don't trust anti-LGBTQ+ men with careers so suggestive of closeted homosexuality, they're worse than the straight haters. It makes me think of that previous figure in such right-wing Catholicism widely known to be a practicing homosexual hypocrite, Francis ("Fanny") Cardinal Spelman. His promotion of, then falling out with Fulton Sheen made amusing reading, well after both of them were dead. The description of the confrontation of Spelman, the biggest self-promoter and power-wielder in the American hierarchy with the biggest TV bishop in front of Pius XII as described in "La Popessa: The Controversial Biography of Sister Pascalina, the Most Powerful Woman in Vatican History" was very entertaining.
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