One of the dumbest lies MAGA Court Prophets tell is that piety is a prophylactic against, not a preparation for, obedience to the social implications of the gospel. Jesus revealed his Presence in the least of these before he revealed his Presence in the Eucharist (see the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats).
One of the most active court prophets in the Age of MAGA is Bp. Robert Barron and his Word On Fire apostolate, ever ready to suck up to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Whether comparing Trump’s lie-filled speeches to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, indiscriminately condemning all concern about civil rights, racism, protests against police murdering brown people, knowledge of American history and a capacity for empathy as “vile wokism“, or turning a stone-blind eye on Trump’s massive religious bigotry and cynical exploitation of curdled Christian piety while supposedly championing “religious liberty” you can count on Word On Fire to always platform voices for the Tyrant’s regime and give short shrift to faithful Catholic voices that do not fit the MAGA narrative.
Case in point, this two-faced attempt to pretend to talk about Catholic Social Teaching while in fact poo-pooing it and reducing the entire mass of it to the legend of Rodents of Unusual Size in the fire swamps of Woke Catholic imagination. Like Marc Antony hailing Brutus as an honorable man and lying, “I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke” before proceeding to poison his hearers against him, this article tells us:
[N]ot all have been pleased with the quality of CST in the nine or ten encyclicals since Rerum Novarum. Complaints include the lack of philosophical rigor, confusion over the proper division of Church and State, a misuse of the concept of “justice,” and a failure to unequivocally condemn Marxism.
and continues:
‘What is social justice? Nobody really knows, but it sounds full of cachet. What is international justice? Few agree on its meaning, but it sounds sophisticated. What is racial justice? It’s hard to say because, as some believe, we are all racists. What is economic justice? It depends—are you a Marxist, a socialist, a capitalist, a libertarian, a radical leftist, a MAGA, an anarchist, or a Unitarian?
You get the picture.
This is, ‘ow you say?, a lie.
Deacon Steven Greydanus replies to it:
IT’S IN THE CATECHISM. ‘Society ensures social justice when it provides the conditions that allow associations or individuals to obtain what is their due, according to their nature and their vocation.’ (CCC 1928)
It’s in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. ‘The Church’s social Magisterium constantly calls for the most classical forms of justice to be respected: commutative, distributive and legal justice. Ever greater importance has been given to social justice, which represents a real development in general justice, the justice that regulates social relationships according to the criterion of observance of the law. Social justice, a requirement related to the social question which today is worldwide in scope, concerns the social, political and economic aspects and, above all, the structural dimension of problems and their respective solutions.’ (CSDC 201)
But of course if you’ve already deprecated actual papal encyclicals in the CST tradition for alleged ‘lack of philosophical rigor, confusion over the proper division of Church and State, a misuse of the concept of “justice,” and a failure to unequivocally condemn Marxism, you aren’t going to be impressed by the Catechism or the CSDC. You are the real Magisterium and the arbiter of what “justice” means.
For a more in-depth take from Deacon Steve, go here.
Over the next couple of days, I want to look at a few more samples of MAGA misinformation at work in the Church due to Word on Fire and compare them with the actual gospel. We will begin by looking at the hoary libertarian lie that concern for the rights of the poor is a matter solely for “charity” and not the government.
A Catholic apostolate (run by a bishop no less–and one famous for supposedly educating people on the Faith) sarcastically shrugging and lying to its readers that “nobody really knows” what Catholic Social Teaching is is worse than a Roman procurator tasked with dispensing justice asking, “What is truth?”
Bishop Robert Barron owes his readers an apology for actively spreading misinformation about the Church’s social doctrine. There is no difference between what WOF published above and publishing a claim that “nobody really knows” what the Eucharist is while insinuating that those who take the Real Presence seriously only do so to virtue-signal.
Suggested reading for those who ask questions to find things out about Catholic Social Teaching rather than, like MAGA Catholics, only asking questions to keep from finding things out.
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13 Responses
The good Bishop seems to think that throwing the poor and less fortunate under the bus is fine, because that is what Trump wants. And tax cuts for billionaires are in the Gospel, Matthew perhaps? The Bishop has become an apologist for Trump and MAGA. Why should we listen to him?
Bishop Barron’s refusal to make an attempt to fill the gap is a serious fault. An even bigger one is saying that Social Justice is conceptually dependent on analytical frameworks like Marx’s or Hayek’s. He’ll have no basis to criticize anyone else’s.
It’s a reasonable criticism “nobody knows” or at least “there’s no clear definition”. And no, it’s not in the Catechism: 1928 tells us when Social Justice is ensured, not what it is in the first place. CDSC 201 hints but still doesn’t give us a one-liner.
I’ve tried this, following my namesake once removed:
Social Justice is the virtue by which men establish institutions to help meet the demands of Distributive Justice
This avoids some traps:
1) It distinguishes the concept Social Justice and particular Acts of Social Justice
2) It tells us what an Act of Social Justice is: establishment of [and cheerful cooperation in] social institutions
3) It forecloses a retreat into some kind of “charitable dyad” calling it an Act of Social Justice
4) It forecloses a retreat from politics altogether
Note there’s still no basis really for criticizing anyone’s social institutions: it kicks the Distributive Justice can down the road. But! It squarely names the question: how shall burdens and benefits be portioned in any society, from the family to all mankind?
This question can be answered only by anthropology: What is Man? What, therefore, is a Society? The answers will be different in different societies according to their anthropologies. The contribution the Church can make is to propose that The Brotherhood of Man presupposes The Father of Man. As long as this question is placed outside Public Reason, Social Justice will appear as just another political slogan which is where Bishop Barron seems content to leave it. Maybe he thinks Social Justice functionally *is* just another political slogan. Maybe he thinks the term is so discredited by Critical Theorists it’s better to shrug his shoulders at it and move on without the label. I don’t know. But see the opening paragraph.
I do know it’s very, very difficult to talk about justice in rights-obsessed America. Justice isn’t about Rights, it’s about Duties.
Even without getting deep into the dark forest of theology, there exists a fairly simple way for a person to get their bearing on social justice:
Ask the old cliche question “what would Jesus do”? That should get anyone who isn’t a total sociopath on the paper if not the bullseye.
If you find yourself doing all kinds of contortions to justify comforting the comfortable and afflicting the already afflicted, you probably got it wrong
Asking “What would Jesus do” is a risky proposition. Jesus lived in a very different social and political structure and one could argue that His response to the problem of the sick would not be to establish a functional healthcare system.
One could sarcastically argue that His response would be to miraculously cure the sick.
But one can look at Tradition and how Christianity shaped the world around it. Before it became an established religion, there was no strong-arming of any issues dear to Christianity. For instance, blood games. There was no pressure from Christians to abolish them. And once Christendom was established, there was no need, because everyone agreed it was an aberration.
Similarly, before Christendom, widows and orphans and the sick were cared for by individuals who exhibited great personal charity. In Christendom, monasteries and churches took it upon themselves to provide care for the less fortunate ones.
The great tragedy here is that nobody gave thought to After Christendom.
How to establish guidelines that would provide support to the less fortunate ones once Christianity is no longer dominant?
Wealth in hands of Christians will inevitably diminish, so there will be more Christians in need and fewer well-off Christians to help them. How to address that?
Wealth will concentrate in hands of the few, so there will be more non-Christians in need. How to help them?
And so on. The response was appalling: “Empathy is a curse”. American private healthcare continues as is with blinders on. Rich countries with public healthcare provide relatively inexpensive “final solutions” to terminally ill rather than treatment and palliative care.
This will only expand.
Perhaps it’s a sign of these times that when some rich wacko (that I’m not going to name) proposed “sports” games with doped up athletes, not caring whether they survive to the award ceremony, let alone about their quality of life after the games, people applauded. When another bored rich guy proposed actual blood games for entertainment, “games” in which people would actually wager their lives, modeled after real life gladiatorial fights and fiction like Hunger Games or Squid Game, this is actually being considered!
What happened to Robert Barron? What is social justice? I suggest he read Matthew 25: 31-45. The USCCB version online https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/25 calls it “The Judgement of the Nations”. It’s pretty clear what social justice is and who is responsible for it – the Nations. And what happens to those who don’t follow it.
It seems that the good Bishop has become a spokesman for Trump. Tax cuts for the rich, cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. Throw the poor under the bus, so the billionaires can buy another yacht.
Does the Bishop actually think he speaks for God and the Church? He does not speak for me.
Like I said – what happened to him? He used to be a real shepherd.
Thanks for speaking the truth!
Hope you can keep reaching out with your message.
Catholic, but not maga-Catholic
It’s interesting that all of the top apologists for nihilism these days are not atheists or Satanists or libertine Pagans.
They are Christian thought leaders. I’m an apostate from Catholicism for 40 years and a practicing Pagan of 20, and I’m pretty sure I understand the church’s social justice teachings better than Barron. At least the gist of it.
This dude isn’t some backwater priest. He’s a theologian who taught and oversaw the formation of other priests at a seminary. He’s supposed to be able to read all of those dense papal encyclicals and grasp all of the jargon and nuances in Latin.
Academics often know more and more about less and less. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Bishop Barron has an incredibly gifted mind.
I’m reminded of Jesus saying to his followers: “I saw Satan fall like lightning”. Satan has an incredibly gifted mind too. Sometimes a great mind leads to great temptation.
Perhaps he should preach the actual Gospel, like Matthew 25, instead of being a shill for Trump?
I’ll start with this:
• a failure to unequivocally condemn Marxism.
Three things:
1. “Rerum Novarum” was (among other things) a rebuttal of Marxism and some key tenets. It anticipated the direction that Marx was taking and reacted in advance.
2. RN was promulgated before Marx even finished writing “Das Kapital”.
3. In many ways, Marx was correct. He made astute observations, but provided a faulty diagnosis of the causes because he was blinded by his biases and his solutions were utterly wrong.
It’s amazing how the very encyclical managed to lay down the foundations of Catholic social teaching, criticize socialism and predict its outcomes in the real world. All in a much thinner and concise booklet than the three volume “Das Kapital”.
On to the other points:
• lack of philosophical rigor
Simple reason: CST does not provide a cookie cutter solution where there can’t be one.
• confusion over the proper division of Church and State
This sounds very much internally inconsistent. Marxism only allows the State running the show. Defining some clear division and ceding responsibilities on the state would essentially be a form of Church-endorsed Marxism.
No confusion at all. In some places, the Church was de facto running the State, so again, it would be hard to specifically draw the exact borderline. In the modern world, local Churches are relatively rich or poor in relation to the State and can wield relatively high or low organizational power. So while in some places the State is the right place to vest leading roles and the Church can support or provide services under a contract, in other places, the Church can (and should) step in where it can, and in failed states, the Church absolutely must take on that role.
• a misuse of the concept of “justice,”
Only to those who only consider punitive justice as a true expression of justice and split hairs on the meaning of justice, legality, etc.
And also, once condemned, forever condemned. Marxism was condemned by Rerum Novarum to the extent of bad solutions it proposed and (rightly) did not comment on the correct observations. Once it became clear what Marxism leads to, the Church wisely decided to let the fruits speak for themselves. There was no point and no need to revisit the condemnation.
The solutions proposed by CST are very clearly not Marxist, which is all the condemnation that’s required.