And finally, Grift of the Holy Spirit on Why Bp. Barron’s Straining at Gnats and Swallowing Camels is So Disappointing

Tony Ginocchio writes:

According to RNS, the bishop of San Bernardino has formally lifted the Sunday Mass obligation in his diocese for anyone who fears for their safety due to increased immigration enforcement activity (the diocese of Nashville has also done something similar albeit a little more informally). As the bishop put it, “Authorities are now seizing brothers and sisters indiscriminately, without respect for their right to due process and their dignity as children of God.” There were apparently enforcement sweeps on the property of two diocesan parishes in San Bernardino, and now people in the diocese are scared to go to Mass because they may be arrested, detained, denied due process, shipped to some holding cell far away. That’s where we are. And I think that if a person is scared to go to Mass because they are worried about the government going onto church grounds and detaining them and denying them their rights and shipping them to a holding cell far away, then that person’s religious liberty is probably being threatened, and if there were any Catholic leaders who cared about religious liberty and had a line in to the government, this would be the moment for them to speak out boldly and say that this was wrong and should not be happening.

We all know what is going to happen next. We all know what Robert Barron is going to say and do next, which is “nothing”. We all know that Robert Barron is the kind of person that can go on a tirade about the “anti-Catholic” Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and then kind of shrug at Donald Trump posting a picture of himself in papal regalia. We all know that Robert Barron is the kind of bishop that you can spend the day with and then, without any qualms, go take selfies at CECOT; Robert Barron will never make you question whether that is a good or moral thing to do. We all know that Robert Barron is the kind of bishop that will give you a big award if you have restarted and chosen to accelerate federal executions; no matter how far you get from Catholic teaching, if you’re some other fat old white dude who doesn’t like woke things, Robert Barron will be there with a handshake and a smile. We all know that Robert Barron’s most recent statement on the current administration’s immigration policy is “I’m a member of the Minnesota bishops, and we issued a statement that was supportive of certain elements of the president’s immigration policy, critical of others,” and that’s about all that we’ve heard from him on any immigration issues from a guy who posts all of the time about everything. We all know that Robert Barron has an in with at least one editor at Newsweek who ran his huffing and puffing about the Olympic opening ceremonies and could easily help him slap together something about immigration policy. We all know that the only time Robert Barron has really ever spoken out against the current conservative movement in America was when some of Taylor Marshall’s followers were mean to him online, and even then, it kind of felt like that scene in Enter the Dragon where Bruce Lee is searching for Han but he’s in the hall of mirrors and all he sees is fifty copies of his own reflection.

We all know that Robert Barron is the man who sold his soul to become the most watched YouTube account in Rochester, Minnesota; Satan never thought he could get such a good deal before he met Robert Barron. I’ll eat my words if Barron proves me wrong and makes any strong public statement about the current administration’s deportation policy, but I’ve been writing about Robert Barron since 2020 and I haven’t had to eat my words yet.

Here’s cold, hard reality. Two decades ago, the larval MAGA cult was fretting about something called “Demographic Winter”. Back then, the Designated Scapegoat Group was Muslims who, we were instructed, were outbreeding the liberal, child-hating, secular West. So it was the duty of all Good Christians to have large families to Save the West. Guys like Fr. Richard Heilman posted “pro-life” cartoons like this underscore how vital it was for America’s Christians to beat the Muslims in the Fertility Race:

But as time went on, the MAGA Cult made extremely clear (as did the cartoonist)

that they did not, in fact, care one whit about Christian demographics. They cared about white fertility outstripping brown fertility. And so, to devout, Christian, brown people contributing trillions to our economy and wanting only to work raise their families and worship Jesus Christ, those Christians who once blathered about Demographic Winter said only, “Send them to concentration camps or deport them, even if they are citizens, even if they are children with brain cancer!”

And so today we live in a country where the biggest assault on Christian religious (and all other liberty) and one of the largest mass persecutions of Christians in the world is being perpetrated by other Christians.

And what is more, 61% of those persecuted are Catholics–while their white brother and sister Catholics cheer.

And Bishop Barron says and does nothing–except compare Trump’s lie-filled speeches to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, heap praise on a Catholic lawmaker who gets his jollies mugging for the camera in front of the wretches sent without trial to the CECOT concentration camp, and reserve the word “vile” for people aware of history and capable of empathy.