Too Righteous to Apologize

Since Steve Greydanus was mentioned in this space yesterday and his essay touched on the fracas a while back in which a man who kicks a football said a number of embarrassingly wrong and awful things and called it all “Catholic”, I thought I would follow up on that story and the way in which the MAGA Reactionary cult, at war with Pope Francis and the rest of the Church, dealt with it when he was called out on the numerous wrong and false and deeply anti-Catholic things he said.

Basically, on cue, the ignorant MAGA culture warriors then declared him a Holy Martyr when people who know what they are talking about said that he was ignorant and wrong.

As part of their efforts to bend the Faith to their ignorant wrongness, it has become all too common for conservative and Trad Catholics to post “inspirational” memes (often illustrated with pictures of This Week’s Right Wing Cosplay Martyr) that say stuff like this:

When you’ve reduced every critic to a demon and exalted yourself to a Holy Martyr, you are in no psychological place for having an intelligent conversation about the weather, much less about the multiple, documentable, stupid and deeply anti-Catholic things you have said, such as

• insinuating that any vocation for women beyond homemaker is a “diabolical lie”,
• attacking the bishops for observing good public health during the pandemic despite the fact that your sect’s opposition to good public health helped kill a million Americans,
• attacking NFP as somehow heterodox,
• insinuating that the overwhelming majority of Catholics who worship God in the ordinary form are not offering true worship,
• making the absurd Prosperity Gospel claim that respect for Tradition will lead to success both worldly and spiritual
• and, most vile of all, claiming that a bill opposing antisemitism threatens your precious precious right to blame Jews for killing Christ.

But this deeply rooted habit among conservative and Trad Catholics is in evidence constantly. And it leads to far worse things than a man who kicks a ball for a living making Catholics look like jackasses.

Take, for instance, this very similar-sounding exaltation of yet another guy ready to put icky girls in their place with more invocations of demons:

Fr. Crow is here being platformed and promoted by a guy who is, himself, treated as a leading authority on the glories of hairy-chested ManCatholics keeping the ladies in place. Timothy Gordon is the author of such fine works as THE CASE FOR PATRIARCHY and a brief on the glories of white Christian Nationalism with smells and bells called CATHOLIC REPUBLIC: WHY AMERICA WILL PERISH WITHOUT ROME (by which he means “raw authoritarian power by a latter day Pius IX, not the despised Pope Francis):

Gordon, like a host of Reactionary Tradicals convinced that God has anointed them to save the Church from the Pope and restore us to the glorious days when a Man was a Man and a Dame was a Broad, loved to hear from Fr. Crow on how manly Catholics should rule over the womenfolk. Both of them were very certain they were anointed by God to drive from the Church all the Lib Wimps.

Not unrelatedly, this bold priest of Manly Manliness stood with Patrick Coffin, who bravely rejects the papacy of liberal wuss and heretic Francis when a bunch of speakers refused to speak at his May 2023 “Hope is Fuel” confererence due both to his hatred of the Pope and to the presence of virulent anti-semite E. Michael Jones:

The May 24 event, led by author and media personality Patrick Coffin, was slated to include talks by several well-known Catholic presenters and apologists, including Jesuit Father Robert Spitzer, president of the Magis Center, which advances dialogue between faith and science; author and Bible instructor Jeff Cavins; and Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of the Ruth Institute, an interfaith coalition that promotes family life.

They and 17 other speakers have since canceled their appearances. In a May 11 tweet posted by the Magis Center, Father Spitzer said had been made aware that same day that “Patrick Coffin has challenged the authenticity of the (sic) Pope Francis,” and that “full disclosure … about Mr. Coffin’s controversial position” had not been made to him prior to the interview.

Coffin’s blog contains numerous posts asserting that Pope Benedict XVI’s retirement was invalid, and that Pope Francis is not the legitimate pontiff.

“I do not hold his position and would never hold this position,” Father Spitzer said, adding he also had requested his name “not be associated with the series or other projects he is hosting, including advertising, etc.”

Coffin told OSV News that he views Pope Francis as an “anti-pope” presiding during an “interregnum” period in the papacy.

Coffin said that the retirement of Pope Benedict XVI and the election of Pope Francis had been orchestrated by the “St. Gallen Mafia,” often cited by conspiracy theorists as an alleged group of high-ranking liberal clerics seeking to advance a left-wing agenda in the church.

In a May 14 video and print statement, Morse said she was already aware of Coffin’s position on Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation and had told him she did not agree.

However, Morse resigned from the conference on learning that it also featured E. Michael Jones, author of “The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit: Its Impact on World History” who is cited by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for extensive antisemitic writings.

Morse said in her statement that while Jones had produced “several important books” in the past, his recent works, which she considered antisemitic, were “poisonous.”

“Antisemitism carries a historical load that no other form of discrimination carries. … The world does not need antisemitism, especially from a Catholic,” Morse stated.

“Jones was a dealbreaker,” she told OSV News.

Jones told OSV News that he stood by his premise, articulated in “The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit,” that “when the Jews rejected Christ, they rejected the Logos incarnate, and they rejected the order of the universe.”

Jones accused Jews of being “the main supporters of feminism, homosexuality, transgenderism and abortion.” He added that “abortion is a fundamental Jewish value … a sacrament (and) a way of becoming Jewish.”

Claiming “the church has never defined antisemitism,” Jones asserted “the people who call themselves Jews are in rebellion against everything Moses stood for, because he was waiting for the Messiah.”

“If I were speaking to someone who was Jewish, I would say, ‘You killed Christ,’” Jones said.

Yet, though Fr. Spitzer and others would not stand with Coffin in his hatred of the Pope and Jews, one manly priest stood with him: Fr. Alex Crow.

Yet oddly, neither Coffin nor Gordon were anywhere to be seen when Fr. Crow asserted his manliness to such a degree that seduced a teenage girl and ran off to Italy with her, after which he returned to Mobile, Alabama, married her, and asked to be laicized.

Instead, they both ghosted on him, with Gordon pretending like he never heard of the guy, much less promoted him as a huge celebrity and bulwark against the devil himself. Suddenly, the problem was not suckers like himself exercising zero discernment in their rush to platform obviously unstable celebrities who tell them what their itching ears want to hear but “Catholic priesthood in 2023” (a lovely abstract culture war enemy that he uses to deflect all responsibility away from himself).

So now, as they so often do, the Greatest Catholics of All Time–who have been so wrong about so much so many times for so long that only a fool would trust their judgement–have deep-sixed Mr. Crow (and their platforming of him) down the memory hole with all the efficiency and dishonesty of a Stalinist propagandist airbrushing Trotsky out of a photo. Theirs is to accuse everybody else in the Church, especially the Pope. They can’t waste time with mea culpas for their own visible-from-space bad judgment.

The guy was flying visible-from-space red flags obvious to anybody with eyes. Only the Greatest Catholics of All Time could have failed to see it and chosen to platform him. These guys so eager to peer into the souls of everybody else and kick them out of the Church are the worst people in the world to turn to as Inquisitors and arbiters of Real Catholic[TM] faith.