On the Lack of Conservative Catholic Anti-Fascist Antibodies

Last week, a fascist was elected Premier in Italy, and US MAGA Catholics could not be more thrilled.

They had already done a puff piece on her. All she had to do was make some noises about “family values” and, as with Trump, that was all the EWTN Industrial Complex needed to know.

One of the things the Register is helping to document is that MAGA Catholics have no ability to distinguish between Blood and Soil fascism and “family values”.

I’ve seen this before. The aptly named Fr. Richard Heilman, drunk on MAGA ideology, promoted cartoons like this, captioned “This is How We Save the West”:

All super-duper “prolifey”, right?

Problem is that they are by a white supremacist named “Jingerzilla” and were, in fact, calls for whites to outbreed browns and so save the race from the Great Replacement.

Here’s another sample of his work:

The Register and similar conservative right wing Catholic organs and dogmatists, having lost touch with what it means to be Catholic and fallen into the vortex of a mere white fertility cult betray not the slightest awareness of what they are actually serving.

It is true that Catholic teaching strongly supports the family. A huge portion of Catholic social teaching can be summed up by, “If it’s good for the family, it’s good.” Catholic Social Teaching insists that the family is the basic building block of society.

But here’s the thing US conservatives and all other Blood and Soil types overlook: building blocks are for building, not ends in themselves, and the Kingdom of God supercedes even the good of the family. That is why Jesus says all those shocking things about loving God more than family.

So when his own flesh and blood show up, he radically declares to a culture that takes the ties of blood as the very last word in where their allegiances lie:

“Who are my mother and my brethren?” And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brethren! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Mk 3:33–35)

And he doubles and triples down on this again and again, declaring that ties of blood, ethnos, tribe, and kinship must take a back seat to the Kingdom of God:

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. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple. (Lk 14:26–27)

And the Church, following this radical break with kinship ties as the basis of its society, will likewise see in baptism into Christ a bond that supercedes that of blood:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Ga 3:28)

All of this is anathema to “family values” fascist conservatism, both here and in Europe. Because, as all heresies do, it has focused on a fragment of the Tradition (“Family is good”) and pitted it against the rest of the Tradition in a struggle to turn the Faith into an ethnic fertility cult at war with whatever untermenschen the Fascist fears and hates.

When the family becomes a “selfish unit” that we “defend” from our duty to God and common good, we don’t get “family values”. We get atomized individualism that is powerless against the overweening power of the fascist state. “Divide and conquer” is the strategy of Hell. The Register, (and fascist, Francis-hating Christians in the US and Europe) having turned against the Holy Father and the teaching of the Church, are setting consumers of right wing propaganda up for a huge fall.