Getting the Memo

Part of the blindness of my Super Catholic former friends is that they really don’t understand how wrong and ridiculous they have been revealed to be in the Great Unmasking.  They never got the memo - the memo that told them that by turning the worst disaster in America into a conspiracy theory about government control; by refusing to make any sacrifices to protect their vulnerable neighbors; by supporting the Big Lie and attempted coup of the most horrific figure in American politics; by voting for a rapist / felon who says he will become America’s dictator - they have not gotten the memo that by doing these things they have lost all moral authority, any ability to proselytize or “evangelize”, and any and all respectability in the eyes of normal people.

Eric Voegelin described these people, these Super Catholic types, these ideologues or ideologists, decades ago in a letter to a friend …

… take our pet grievance, the ideologist. If you simply describe him, he will be an unintelligible caricature; if you interpret him by a psychology of motivations, you will at best get the rationale of his actions. In order to bring him to life you will have to reflect on the problem of a man who wants to transform the world in his image. If you try that, you may find that there are men who cannot grow with themselves and cannot make their own life transparent for death. When they stop to grow, an event that frequently occurs around twenty, the tension between the status at which they have arrived spiritually and intellectually and the relentless process of time in themselves and the world surrounding them will cause anxiety, and from anxiety is born hatred. From such hatred then may arise an infinite variety of attempts at stopping the flux of time—childish things like the professor for whom science must stop at the point that he has reached with so much labor at the time of his Ph.D.; terrible things like the political leader who wants to freeze history at some ridiculous point of order that he has picked up somewhere in his youth (Hitler for instance in the Ostara phantasies, as has come out now).

As an example of this anxiety, this hatred, this attempt to stop the flux of time and return to a golden age - all the while not realizing how foolish this makes you look to others - is a telling moment in a book I’m reading by one of these Super Catholic “ideologists”.  He mentions a religious community and speaks of them with glowing praise - a community that has been called a cult and accused of sexual abuse by at least four of their former members, accusations that were made public while this book was being written.

But this cult is “Catholic” and “pro-life” and so they’ve got to be good, you know?  A Super Catholic ideologue would never criticize them, no matter how much harm this group has caused and may still be causing.  They are on the right team, you see?  They are “us”; they ain’t “them”.

A friend of mine once said to my wife Karen and me over dinner that America would be a better country if everybody were Catholic.  Karen told me later that this was the stupidest thing she’d heard this man say; but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.  I assumed he meant “if everybody in America were a good and self-giving Christian.”  

But, on reflection, I think he meant simply “Catholic” - belonging to the right team in the Culture Wars, being one of “us”, not “them” - because, after all, these team members have shown themselves to be anything but “good and self-giving Christians”.

Being Catholic for these people is, indeed, an ideology.  It’s not a way of loving God or loving your neighbor.  It’s a club you belong to that you can beat other people over the head with.  

We all see that now.  But they don’t see that we see it.  They haven’t gotten the memo. They still think they’re holding the upper hand when it comes to morality, righteousness, even mere decency; which is why Bishop Barron and our Catholic parishes can glibly carry on with business as usual.  Rome fiddles while Nero burns.