HAVING WRITTEN A response to a piece of hate mail the other day, I decided I probably wouldn't post it but this morning this piece about the interview the misogynist media bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota with an actor I'd never heard of before, Shia LeBeouf, which discusses the psycho-misogyinist masculinity as muscular Catholic integralism is the topic. I'd thought that Pope Francis appointing the media darling Barron to what is a rather out of the way bishopric might mute his media presence and tone down his masculinity obsessed media operation (he's got a real thing about hiring body-builders who have lots of issues and get into trouble) but apparently not. The Bish's got issues.
The hour-and-a-half conversation between actor Shia LaBeouf and Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, lasts only seven minutes before the tension surrounding the Latin Mass comes up.
While the motive of the interview is primarily to discuss LaBeouf's portrayal of the titular saint in the forthcoming feature film "Padre Pio", the major revelation of the dialogue is LaBeouf's conversion to Catholicism, which is first brought to light through the discussion of, essentially, the role of the secret within the sacred as it pertains to differences between the Catholic liturgy's ordinary and extraordinary forms.
LaBeouf's own words praising the Latin Mass are, for lack of understanding Latin: "I can't argue the word, because I don't know what the word means, so I'm just left with this feeling." Barron himself brings up that a secondary purpose of incense at Mass is that it obscures the action in the sanctuary.
"I don't know what the word means, so I'm just left with this feeling." is actually a good summation as to what was so bad about the Latin Mass in the period after almost everyone except the ordained clergy (Women religious were not typically taught Latin for most of the history of Catholicism) understood what was going on. It was useless for much more than giving vague or often pathologically twisted feelings. Much, though not all, of the Protestant critique of that is far more valid than anything the Latin nostalgics have to say about it. If they want a feeling without understanding, what else do they make crappy religio-sentimentalistic Hallmark equivalent movies for? His religion doesn't even get to the levels of the cloying Going My Way or the Bells of St. Mary's. Clearly both LeBeouf's and Barron's Catholicism has more in common with a Chick Publications style idea of The Book of Revelations.
LaBeouf also says, before his conversion, he did not initially feel compelled to have a relationship with Jesus because he only knew the "soft, fragile, all-loving, all-listening but no ferocity … meek" Jesus (Barron immediately offers the word "feminized"), and it was only when LaBeouf encountered what he considered to be "masculine" — "cape, dipped in blood, sword" — that Jesus felt "appealing."
We should be concerned about anyone who finds the Gospel most compelling in its violence or who is put off by the femininity of Jesus. If we are to understand Jesus as the savior of all, we must embrace his full divinity that has no gender, and we must confidently identify the goodness of both the masculine and feminine in the incarnation.
Throughout the interview, LaBeouf cites a number of tropes and returns to them often: cowboys, cavemen and gangsters. He repeatedly expresses gratitude for the men who accompanied him and "masculinized" his journey, "the hero's journey."
LaBeouf also discloses the heart of this pull to the masculine: He is drawn to those who treat him in a fatherly or grandfatherly way, and he is lonesome for friends. He finds all of these things in the Catholic world.
Someone's been watching too much Joseph Campbell. I have more than just a suspicion that both the Bish and the guy who works in makeup and make believe have a conception of Catholicism which has little to no use for those who Jesus put at the center of his ministry, perhaps their devotion of a liturgy in a language which the either understood not at all or not very well has something to do with that. I have to say, every time I dip into the activities of Robert Barron I'm left without many good feelings and in the Latin mass cult of today's American Catholic-fascism, I've developed an almost Protestant level of hostility toward it, which is too bad because I really do love medieval and renaissance Latin language religious music.
I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the disturbing article, here's what I have held back posting.
"Irish Catholic Fundamentalist" - Hate Mail
IN THE RECENT PACKING AND UNPACKING of my books, due to my moving to and back from my very little house, I can't find the book in which was noted that Biblical fundamentalism as an organized movement in Protestantism was intimately tied in with the 18th-to today Scottish "common sense" school of philosophy, which started that delusion called "the enlightenment." If that is correct it is ironic because most of that so-called "enlightenment" thought was and is quite opposed to Christianity and religion in the atheist-materialist branch of that fashion which so influenced the framing of the U.S. Constitution. The idea that you could just read the enormously complex, enormously varied, Scriptures, the product of an extremely long, very complex history and many, often not agreeing minds, many of them entirely unknowable to us as if it were a simple work of 18th century expository writing by a single author is and always has been ridiculous. In the long history of serious consideration of Scripture in Christianity, it has often been considered to be extremely complex. Even in the understanding of Scripture which I have gotten, mostly from Walter Brueggemann who notes that all of it revolves around the liberation of The Children of Israel from slavery, notes how extremely complex it is.
The idea it could be read in a "common sense" manner is so ridiculous that even some of those who were considered part of the "enlightenment" commented on the complexity of the least opaque and complex part of Scriptures, created in a very condensed period of time among a relatively related group of writers, the New Testament.* The complexity of it was one of the things that the anti-Christian side of the "enlightenment" used as an argument against it, though they certainly didn't find that a problem with other things which were complex and far less productive of good like the English Common Law.
Always beware of hidden motives and intents when people want to make such appeals to simplicity and "common sense." I will set aside the temptation to go into a diatribe about Thomas Paine and the demonstrable lack of "common sense" in his biography at this point. Scribbling is so much easier than living.
"Fundamentalist" is one of those words which began with a fairly limited range of meaning, in terms of Biblical fundamentalism, it named those Protestant denominations and individuals who signed on to a rigid, bigoted, and pretty awful set of claims published as The Fundamentals. Unfortunately, largely at the hands of some academics writing secondary, tertiary, etc. stuff about conservative Protestantism, the actual meaning of the word was expanded and distorted, often quite wrongly. I would guess that it was from them that it filtered through those in "journalism" and even more popular writing and babbling, they having learned the word, first, from those secondary (etc.) sources and having further generalized its use into no more than something for "fundamentalists" to say yea to and those who didn't like conservative Christianity or real Christainty to slam. It's expansion to cover Islam and Judaism and other things totally unrelated to any religious scripture reached the point where Stephen Jay Gould (from who I got it) talked of the pseudo-scientific fad of the 1970s-today of Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as "Darwinian fundamentalism." I've used that term quite a lot so, you see, I'm as much a sinner as anyone. The inability of People to live up to their most definite professions is one of the reasons we should all practice mercy to others, they might get into the habit and return it on us. But don't count on that as a sure thing.
I have gotten some use of the original meaning of the word when I mock people who talk about "Catholic fundamentalists" as you did because if there's one thing that is characteristic of The Fundamentals and many of those who pledged allegiance to that mock-scripture, it is its vicious anti-Catholicism. The now billionaire-astro-turf bull shit of "traditional Catholicism" is more related to a particularly awful early 20th century phenomenon of "integralism" among right-wing Catholics. It is now a neo-fascist-capitalist cult which, like all "Christianity" that makes common cause with the rich and hateful, has no real dedication to the Gospel, the Law or the Prophets, it has little to nothing to do with Scripture at all but feeds off of the detritus of the worst period of Catholic history when the Papacy and many local bishops held medieval type power in kingdoms of this world and alligned themselves with the degenerate feudal rulers of kingdoms of the Earth who, likewise, never intended to follow the teachings of Jesus, the Law or the Prophets. Though a lot of it is even more in line with the putrid cabloid network of "Mother Angelica" or, as I called her, "that Nazi-nun" and its cloying nostalgia for a Hollywood "religious picture" conception of what Catholicism is supposed to all be about. Bing Crosby or Spencer Tracy playing a priest always made me gag. They hate Francis because he thinks Catholicism should be about the Gospel, Acts and the Epistles.
There is nothing more radical than the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets a close second to that in a graph of radicalism. And, with what has been done to the word "radical" I have to stipulate that as radical in a good way.
* It's telling how many of the atheist-fundamentalists insist that that the Fundamentalist style of Scripture reading is the only valid way to read them. Of course, that's because "Fundamentalism" turns God into a series of idols which are easy to knock down in argument. The reason that reading so much of the pop-atheist lit reveals how shallow it is. Perhaps since the "common sense" philosophical school is intimately tied in with the extension of the method of science into an ideological framing of reality and its morally catastrophic results, that isn't any big surprise. I think modern atheism in the European style, especially the Brit-English-Language style is as much a product of that simplistic methodology of "common sense" philosophy as Biblical fundamentalism is. Given enough time I might relate that to the degeneracy that pseudo-science and academia fell into in the "enlightenment" imposition of scientism as the only respectable intellectual position and its invasion of popular culture among the mid-brow, college-credentialed population, the ones who so futilely war with the "fundamentalists" who certainly have had a far greater success in terms of politics and influence.
It's remarkable how dumbing stuff down is so much a part of that "enlightenment." And if there's one thing that might be a truism, stupid sells when you scrap moral responsibility.
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