Several years back, a famous “pro-life” MAGA priest posted this cartoon on his website.
It is captioned “This is How We Save the West”.
Looks wholesome, don’t it? A natural for all them good Catholic Defenders of the Family, no?
Yeah. Here’s the thing: The guy who made the cartoon is a Nazi. I mean a literal-admirer-of-Hitler Nazi, as the cartoon below shows.
Suddenly, the first cartoon snaps into focus, not as an endorsement of “Catholic family values” but as what it is: the statement of a blood-and-soil Fertility Cultist who wants the Master Race to outbreed its verminous inferiors.
Why would a priest post such a cartoon? Not, I think, because he endorses Nazism or even had the foggiest clue who made it and why, but because the “prolife” movement is suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Permit me to explain:
Hemoglobin is designed to bond with oxygen. The problem is that, to hemoglobin, deadly carbon monoxide looks just like oxygen. So it binds with it and does so with two hundred times the affinity that it has for oxygen. Result: it can’t unbind with CO and the red blood cell becomes useless for carrying oxygen. So you die.
In a conservative culture fixated on the family and the family alone as the highest social good (in reaction to things like divorce, abortion, and gay marriage), the carbon monoxide of blood-and-soil fertility cults of tribe, family, clan–and race–become indistinguishable from the oxygen of the actual normal, healthy Catholic understanding of the family.
Catholic teaching says the family is the basic building block of society. Conservatism affirms this, but then makes the cardinal blunder of stopping there and refusing to see any goods higher than the family–a process that has only been exacerbated by the overt racism of MAGA.
Catholic teaching, while acknowledging the family as the basic building block of society, insists that building blocks are for building and subordinates the family to the Kingdom of God. That’s why Jesus says all those shocking things about the ties of family coming second to the kingdom (“If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26)). The gospel is, in fact, shockingly radical, both in its support for the family as far as it goes, and in its radical subordination of blood, clan, and family to the Kingdom of God.
This has everything to do with, for instance, the reaction to Harrison Butker’s Commencement speech (and why, by the way, the same MAGA priest who gullibly posted the cartoon also rushed out to buy a Butker jersey).
The vast majority of Catholics enthusing over the speech seem to me to be suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning. They take stuff that seems to be praising family and fertility as the highest possible expression of Catholic faith while remaining oblivious to the many non-Catholic and even anti-Catholic elements in it. As long as a virile man praises women (but oddly, not men) taking up the task of having children, he could:
None of this plainly anti-Catholic nonsense registered on the consciousness of those who cosplayed at martyrdom and bravely “stood with” a millionaire as he “suffered” imaginary “cancellation”. All they heard or noticed was fertility cult language, divorced from the Catholic tradition–and they heard that as a perfect expression of the Catholic tradition.
It’s a big, big problem to which the “pro-life” movement is almost entirely blind and deaf.
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15 Responses
Put this one on a billboard, Mark. Send it to the Archbishop. Send it to the Pope. Put it in all Church bulletins, put flyers in every parish. Do talk shows. Go into the belly of the beast and wrestle with the non-angels.
I get annoyed with the “Good, Catholic family” schtick that so many right wing Catholics push, which basically states that a family with 4 children is better than a family with 2 children. When did raising children become a contest?
Also, most Catholics employ contraception because they do not want 8 or 10 children. They do not accept being judged by right wing buffoons who seem obsessed with other people’s sex lives.
We are not going back to the good, old days. Stop bothering people with medieval nonsense.
Way to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Number of children: There’s no contest. People sin. Some people make it a contest and attack others over this, but there’s no official endorsement that they can call upon. While it’s true that the Church cherishes large families and supports them in parishes and other local communities as best she can, there is no official line that demands large families from Catholics and certainly no “let’s outbreed [unappealing element X]” tribal mentality.
And you’re way off base with the false dichotomy of unlimited number of children or contraception. Radtrads sneer upon NFP and Mark explicitly mentions NFP in his post. If you’re interested, Simcha Fisher wrote a two-part essay on this: “The contraceptive mentality is real, but it’s probably not what you think” and “The Contraceptive Mentality, Part 2: Grave reasons and obedience”.
Contraception: Most Catholics employ contraception because they want to have sex, don’t want the natural consequence of having children and are not interested in learning about NFP.
You do get the “right wing buffoons obsessed with people’s sex lives” bit right, but not in the way you think.
I’ll get back to that and to the reasons in a moment, but you’re parroting the official standpoint of the National Society for Perpetuating Stereotypes about Catholics if you repeat that “Catholics don’t want you to have sex”. Greg Popcak drives the point way better in his book, “Holy Sex”, but it’s emphatically not true that the Church tolerates sex because it’s incidental to procreation. Since you seem interested in the topic, I would absolutely recommend that you buy and read the book rather than learn about this in bits and pieces from random internet comments.
As for pelvic issues, again: people sin. Priests sin by misrepresenting their personal opinions on sexual maters as official Church teaching. They could be ignored, but then they also set out to write about abortion.
Thing is, abortion is tangent to sexuality, but it’s not a sexual matter. However, it is a sexual matter related to freedom of sexual expression to modern sensibilities, so when even Catholics debunk the essays on pelvic issues, once you debunk fifty out of a hundred, a lot of people badly surmise that all hundred are debunked and by extension, also those about abortion, no need to get into an actual debate. Especially when those same priests ignore the reality of human life and don’t care about the unborn, but conclude that abortion is a sin because it results from unrestricted sexuality.
Which brings me back to contraception and reasons about not using NFP. When only about 2% of Catholics even use NFP and it’s roundly criticized by both sides of the debate of for and against contraception, with one side saying it’s ineffective and requires self-control, and the other side *wrongly* saying it’s part of contraceptive mentality, a lot of people decide to just ignore that it’s a viable alternative to both possibilities (of using contraceptives and of completely unregulated births).
NFP is a great option for family planning, and it’s supported by church teaching. However, for the reactionary fringe, it’s not ok…”Catholic birth control” I believe is how he phrased it. That was one of the many disappointments for me with that speech. Such a missed opportunity. But on the other hand, burdened as he is with reactionary baggage, I’m not sure he had the ability to deliver a truly Catholic speech.
Some have pointed out the schism in the church will be on the right side of the church political aisle, and it does appear to be the case.
Schism of the right wing kooks! Good. Let them go and good riddance.
Schism is NEVER good and NEVER leads to anything good. Finding a common ground, working through differences and accepting that while some things can’t be reconciled, they may not necessarily be the dogmas and doctrines and both sides can be accommodated.
Other than the best known schisms, I’d like to call upon two examples which are obscure to many people in the West:
– Greek Catholic Church in Poland formed during Union of Brest, where Orthodox bishops accepted the authority of the Pope and joined the Catholic Church, while retaining autonomy in areas of spirituality, liturgy, discipline (e.g. no celibacy), Julian calendar and Old Church Slavonic as liturgical language. It might not seem like a great deal today, but to the contemporaries it seemed like giving up on control of crucial areas which make the Church Catholic.
– “Old Believers”, people who rejected the reforms of Orthodox Patriarch Nikon of Moscow in 17th century. Nikon’s reforms aimed to incorporate expressions of traditional Russian piety to Greek Orthodox worship in an attempt to unify the liturgy of Orthodox churches and to bring the Russian Orthodox Church under the hierarchy of Constantinople. Since Old Believers didn’t manage to convince a sufficiently large group to dissent, they were anathemized and persecutions started almost immediately. It took three centuries for the Moscow Patriarchate to revoke the anathemas, but not after even more schisms happened within the Old Believers and not until many more people died.
You seriously think that a right wing schism would be the right solution?
Yes, it would be nice to have the medieval, right wing kooks gone. Let them go off and wallow in medieval ignorance and leave the rest of us alone.
Come on. This priest is a nothing burger. The rot starts from the head – the USCCB.
USCCB just cut the staffing for Department of Justice, Peace, and Human Development by more than half, a massive disinvestment in its social mission.
Bishop Oakley is the USCCB secretary, who gets to decide there things . Oakley is poised to be elected president of the U.S. bishops’ conference in November 2025.
Guess what? Coakley is the episcopal adviser for the Napa Institute, an organization of right-wing billionaires, the true magisterium for the American Catholic Church . The Napa Institue’s goal is to. make the American Catholic Church into a cult for Trump
Don’t forget that Oakley and Broglio (another rightwing culture warrior bishop) , were elected as leaders of USCCB by 65% of the US catholic bishops. The bishops are all in on prostituting the Church for billionaires, what is a measly priest to do other than follow his superiors?
If my point were, “Somebody has to do something about that priest” you’d have a point. But my point is, “The problem is that the “prolife” movement cannot tell the difference between the Church’s teaching about the good of the family and blood and soil racism” and to illustrate what that difference is.
You may be giving them entirely too much benefit of doubt.
Pro-life Catholics espousing racial hygiene doctrines is, at best vincible ignorance. At worst, and in many if not most cases, it is a willful embrace of evil.
I find it especially hard to believe that a priest could graduate seminary without sufficient grounding in church doctrine to know it’s incompatibility with the platforms of national socialism.
I am inclined to think the priest had this cartoon wash up in his feed and was not familiar with the rest of the artist’s work. He is, to put is kindly, not the brightest priest I have ever encountered.
> insinuate that the overwhelming majority of Catholics who worship God in the ordinary form are not offering true worship,
I’ve attended Ordinary Form Mass all my life and the only time I’ve been to Extraordinary Form Mass was in Egypt (Catholic Coptic Mass), but I had thought that there may be something to Vetus Ordo that’s missing in the Ordinary Form.
It ‘clicked’ for me when I read Simcha Fisher’s recent (March 2024) article titled “Superstition can be sinful. And it’s more common than Catholics might think.” in Americamagazine dot com: While there’s nothing in Extraordinary Form that would make God more pleased with it, there’s certainly an opportunity for it to speak better to the hearts and souls of the congregation. And while there’s nothing in Ordinary Form that would make God displeased with it, there are those who don’t feel it has the same weight and depth as they felt Mass had in their youth.
Perhaps some of that is nostalgia, perhaps it simply appeals to how some people live their faith. And there’s nothing wrong with it until somebody thinks one Form is superior to the other and then, by extension, thinks that the inferior form is wrong or incomplete. And “Novus Ordo people” (myself included) are certainly not free of temptation of thinking that Ordinary Form is superior and/or that Tridentine Mass is inferior for putting form before function.
The MAGA-lite AfD in Germany has anti-immigrant billboards featuring beautiful blonde women with the caption “New Germans? We make them ourselves!”
Worldwide, the anti-NFP crowd is hard to pigeon hole. I haven’t found it to be a thing amongst the rad-trads because they don’t use it and are eager to out breed the “novus-ordos” as they call them. The real fervent anti-NFP crowd are professional middle aged men— the so-called Post-NFP Catholics. They accept the Church’s teaching on the pelvic issues but their parents only had 1-3 children. They show no interest in forming relations with women or getting married. You’ll often see them at early daily masses or adoration and they usually drive sports cars. Like their parents, they’re upper middle class or rich. I don’t know if this phenomenon exists among women but the fact that these men have taken themselves “out of the market “ means there are more single women.
it has been my impression that the loudest opinions are fueled by guilt–people who later in life regret having used ABC, and men who for whatever reason couldn’t embrace being the father of a child. I think they focus on the perceived faults of others rather than admit what is broken in them.
A Guy,
Thank you for that reference to Simcha’s article. It was excellent. Reminded me of a talk by Msgr Richter in Bismarck diocese, including the directive, “don’t pray like a pagan”.