Conspiracy Theories

 QAnon is the current conspiracy theory from the lunatic right, but the perpetual resurgence of such  indicates that this thought must provide clarity, certainty and comfort in times of anxiety, chaos, change, uncertainty and confusion. It must feel good to blame a culprit: the Jews or Freemasons, Hilary and her "epsteinian" pedophile collaborators, or Trump and the racists.

Black Lives Matter, with it simple, clear narrative of systematic white racism, is best understood as such a conspiracy theory. The suffering and oppression of the black underclass is profound, pervasive, perpetual and perplexing. The causes are dense, deep and complex. How simple and consoling to blame it on "systematic white racism." Is it that Trump and his buddies sit around wondering: "How can we keep blacks jailed, sick and aborted at high rates?" No, the theory coming from the university is more opaque and befuddling: That sub-or-un-consciously we are all of us, whites, thinking and behaving with racial prejudice and therefore perpetuating black oppression. It is really a mystique, a hidden and invisible dynamic; it operates with or without our intention or awareness; it is a powerful, independent dynamic ever at work. So, we have NFL and NBA basketball players (all millionaires) helping Oprah Winfrey (worth $2.5 billion) coach us on the invisible racism of the system in which they have (to understate) done rather well. How pleasant it identify the cause of such poverty and confront it (courageously and boldly!) by voting for Biden-Harris and positioning your BLM sign virtuously on your lawn. No need to ponder the abysmal cultural and class dynamics that keep the poor poor.

Thought experiment: Imagine that through an act of magic or a strange, scientific event everyone in the United States undergoes a change in skin color: everyone is a light green. Additionally, prominent racial features are homoginized: no more African or Jewish noses, Asian or blue eyes, kinky or blonde hair. Otherwise, everyone remains the same: biologically, culturally, morally, religiously and every which way. How much will things change? My guess: less than 5%. The class structure will remain with immense inequality. Culturally, some ethnic groups, while not visibly distinctive, will dominate the NBA; others graduate engineering programs; others are cops, fireman and bar owners; others run pizza parlors. 

Prejudice against skin color is not the key to explain our society. Nor is "progress" or class conflict or liberation from sexual  repression or evolution. But the human intellect is ever hungry to find pattern, purpose, meaning, intention, causality and finality in history and in reality itself. The ultimate question is whether there is finally purpose ("logos") or sheer chaos, meaninglessness, randomness and therefore nihilism. The choice is always Christ or Nietzche! The lesser paradigms of meaning eventually fail.

Let us return to: "Conspiracy!" It is a most beautiful word, even though it usually refers to nefarious, evil intent and collaboration. The word derives from the Latin co-spire, to breathe with. It means for us to breathe together: speak, think, plan, act together. So...here is the only valid and final conspiracy theory.

From eternity the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have been conspiring together, in an infinite expansive exuberant generous fecund hilarious Event of Love; among so much else, they conspired to create reality as a celebration of Unbounded Joy and specifically us human beings to delight with them, Three-in-One for eternity. That is Conspiracy 1.

Lucifer and his minions revolted against this plan and made their own, nefarious conspiracy: to revolt, assert their own dominion, and then bring all of creation away from heaven and into hell. Adam and Eve joined that plan. That is Conspiracy 2.

The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit then conspired for the Son to come to earth and live among us in the flesh and teach and heal us and suffer and die and rise for us and then fill us with the Holy Spirit for a lifetime and an eternity of Joy and Generosity. We will call that Conspiracy 1A since it is a development of Conspiracy 1.

And that is what your really need to know about conspiracies!

Yuval Levin on Institutions, Pope Francis and the Strange Case of James Alison

 Yuval Levin, in his masterful A Time To Build highlights the importance of institutions: they hold our communal lives together, advance causes beyond the individual self, systemically train us in virtue as they diminish selfishness. He identifies our societal crisis as largely a crisis in institutions as there is widespread loss of trust in them and lack of commitment to them.Specifically, he identifies the "cult of celebrity" in which the hegemonic, narcissist ego uses a prestigious institution to gain prestige even as the protocols and purposes of the institution are dismissed. Donald Trump is a blatant, egregious example, but he is simply emblematic as a pervasive trend. 

We Catholics identify two institutions as specifically defined by God: marriage/family and the Church. These two are absolutely sacred in their fundamental structures. Observant, obedient Catholics have lived and gladly died to defend these interwoven mysteries. Marriage/family itself is the foundational natural analogue for the Church whom we understand as the bride of Christ (the groom) and as our Mother (complementing God our father and our not-mother). 

Sexuality itself is deeply, clearly institutionalized in the Church...it has been from the beginning...in the institutions of marriage/family and virginity/celibacy. In the first, sex is the privileged expression of an enduring, exclusive, fruitful communion of love between man and woman. Outside of that sacred context, it is sacrilegious and toxic. In the second state of life, Eros is sublimated in a sacrificial generosity into a bridal reception of Christ the Bridegroom and/or into the virile imaging of Christ's spousal love for His bride. 

The defining cultural/religious issue of the last half century has been the sterilizing of sexuality: its separation from fruitfulness, from the masculine/feminine Mystery, and from an enduring community of love. 

Now let us consider the strange case of Pope Francis and James Alison. James Alison, the British version of James Martin S.J., has long been active as an advocate within the Church for the LGBTQ program. He is, in short,  aggressively disruptive of the defining icon of the Catholic institution: the Church as receptive, faithful, fruitful Bride and Mother. He was laicized by the Vatican's Congregation on the Clergy. A few years later, he received a call from Pope Francis who told him privately: "I give you the keys. Do you understand?" Clearly, by this he dismissed the declaration of his own congregation; restored full priestly faculties; and approved the gay agenda, the sterilization of sexuality.

This is a problem on many levels.

1. In the manner of our own President Trump, he directly contradicted, undermined and frustrated his own institution. And so, we the faithful now have two Church voices: that of the Congregation and that of the Pope himself. We have a split personality. We are polarized and divided...not only between ourselves, but within ourselves. Were I invited to a (Fr.?) Alison mass, do I obey the Congregation or the private chat of the pope? There is no way to reconcile this: we follow Francis or his own institution.

2. Again, like Trump, Francis flourishes his celebrity status to operate above and beyond  institutional protocols. One might reasonably argue that this path was already walked by John Paul and even John XXIII, just as Reagan and JFK already created the celebrity presidency. But both Francis and Trump have brought this troubling development to a new, catastrophic level.

3. The action was done privately, secretly, like so much in this pontificate. Tragically, our pontiff has revived the old stereotype of the Jesuit, operating politically behind the scenes in a secretive, deceptive manner. The horrible agreement with the Chinese Communist government remains a secret. The entire McCarrick story remains secretive, over two years later, so that the Vigano accusation remains as a shadow over this entire pontificate. A rational conclusion is that allegation of a lavender mafia operating in the Vatican must be accurate, given the protection given McCarrick for decades and the continued secrecy.

4. This phone call is in accord with the deconstruction of Rome's John Paul Institute for Marriage and the Family and any number of decisions and appointments and verifies that this papacy intends to destroy John Paul's legacy of the Theology of the Body.

5. Again like our own President, this Pope acts on personal whims and preferences and dismisses institutional restrains. After the synod of bishops clearly rejected the suggestion of sacramental remarriage for the (non-annulled) divorced, Francis slipped it into his document. Without consulting with the bishops or cardinals, he changed the Catechism's teaching on capital punishment. In one swap, he disparaged the college of cardinals and blemished the (amazing) Catechism.

6. In countless off-handed remarks and homilies he has disparaged institutions and encouraged (not least by his own example) subjective, impulsive actions that disregard custom, tradition and authority.

Francis, in short, in his phone call to Alison and in a myriad of ways embodies the aversion to institutions, the celebrity cult of narcissism, and an ethic of individualism, irrationality, and self-will. Most troubling of all, he is covertly waging war against our defining institutions: marriage/ family and Church as bride and mother.

Low-sex, low-gender, low-concupiscence, low-bar Catholicism

 Heather King, in her poignant "Ravished: Notes on Womanhood," resolved some of my puzzlement about Pope Francis and so many others.

It has baffled and perplexed me that our pontiff, like so many others with fine intellects and good hearts, has no clue about the sexual revolution and the culture war. I have wondered if he lives in another world. He seems unbothered by the plague of male promiscuity and infidelity, the resulting abandonment of women and children in poverty, the objectification and abuse of women across the global culture, the demise of virtuous masculinity and fatherhood and fidelity, the plague of pornography, the degradation and trivilization  and sterilization of sexuality and gender. To be sure, Francis (and many who admire him) is not a sexual libertine. He has NOT advocated for sexual license, gay marriage or woman priests. It seems more like he "has no dog in this fight." Or, he would rather not talk about these things. Or, he wants to win people over by welcome and acceptance and downplay the Church's moral teachings. So, he highlights global warming, refugees and the death penalty. To be sure, at his best he is a gifted spiritual director and speaker, using imagery effectively to call us to other dimensions of the gospel. His call to the margins and the poor is exemplary and arguable the heart of his pontificate. But unfortunately, like many conflicts, this Culture War cannot tolerate neutrality. So his decisions have empowered those hostile to the traditional Catholic sexual ethic, The destruction of the John Paul Institute for the Study of the Family in Rome is the most brutal and blatant sign of his implicit assault on the legacy of John Paul.

Here is how Heather King has helped me. She is one very, very high-sexed Catholic woman. I have never known a woman to write so candidly, honestly, transparently about her sexuality: her longings, her wounds, her sadness. She writes as a grateful, happy, unabashed celibate...elegantly about the joys of chastity, about the sorrow of lust. She is "twice-born" (using the terminology of William James) and she knows the delight of purity and the despair of sin. You would not describe her as a culture warrior but she is probably the very most effective, subtle, gentle and effective of us all. She writes from the inside of her "womanhood" and describes it touchingly. She has known, intimately concupiscence (disordered desire) although I don't recall her using that word (she is too cool for such an old-fashioned term; but there is nothing that quite replaces it.). So, she is high-sexed, high-gendered, and high-in-concupiscence, even as she is high on the splendor of the masculine/feminine and chaste/fruitful sexuality.

So, the thought came to me: many are not so high-sexed, so high-gendered, and so high-in -concupiscence...as Heather, myself, an others. Perhaps this is why  so many...of fine mind and good heart...don't care much about the culture war over sexuality.

So, the liberal/conservative divide may have something to do with low/high scale on  sexuality, gender and concupiscence as well as the high/low bar on your ideal of sexuality. Being high-sexed is not a bad thing; in itself it is preferable as it is associated with intense energy, attraction, focus, generosity and appreciation. Paolo Prosperi speaks of "the generosity of eros." I am not sure what that means but it sounds fantastic! The problem is: concupiscence: disordered or sinful desire. The best combination to have would be high sex and gender, low concupiscence, and a high ideal for sex. This describes John Paul perfectly. He radiated virile energy, paternal tenderness, quiet strength...as well as a a refreshing innocence and purity. I was personally blessed with a father who, more quietly,  combined the same ingredients in all I saw of him. He left me a wonderful template of masculine chastity but somehow I got more concupiscence so my adult life has been one of relentless tension between my passions and my aspirations. Obviously, I externalize my inner conflict to the wider world: so I am a fervent follower of John Paul in his teaching on chastity and gender. 

And so, with regard to the Culture War, over sex and gender (and innocent life, and tradition, and authority and technology) we might identify three groups: traditionalists (often high-sexed, high in concupiscence, high-gendered, high-barred in ideal); sexual liberators (often high-sexed, high in concupiscence high-gendered, and insistent on lowering the bar); and a third group that seemed placid in their own sexuality, and concerned with other things. 

This explains how many gifted, intelligent, goodhearted people are  tone-deaf,  insensitive, and entirely oblivious of the catastrophic spiritual-cultural war being waged for the heart and soul of our world and our Church. This explains to me how so many are on the sidelines: really have no clear, strong position on gay marriage or woman priests or contraception or pornography. The real cultural liberals, on the other hand, seem to be high on sex and on concupiscence, but they have a low ideal of sex; they are fierce in their determination to enjoy sexual license without boundaries and limits. They rage in fury and demand, from the Church, an approval for a pattern of behavior. They will NEVER get that approval! They hate the Church in her rigor. 

The Culture War, raging now for over 50 years,  is getting worse, not better. Standing on the sidelines is not really an option. 

An Anomaly

"You are an anomaly," my nephews agreed, "a conservative, for sure, but not typical in any sense." They had a point: my thought would not quite fit into any current journal, movement or school. Part of this is my own tempermental peculiarity; but much has to do with what has influenced me. 10 influences come to mind:

1.  The ordinary Catholic faith I received from my family and the Church of the post-war period: traditional but open and fluid; confident, certain, sturdy, fecund.

2.  An innate love for the poor was nourished by our working class, labor union family and my  Catholic schooling and led me to college seminary with the Maryknoll Fathers.This disposition remained with me and has found happy expression late in life in Magnificat Home, our residence for low-income women.

3.  Early adulthood, tumultuous 1965-9, found me peacefully sequestered in the wholesome, semi-monastic seminary routine of study, prayer, friendship, and just enough work, recreation, rest. These years became intellectually intoxicating as I breathed deeply of the "spirit of Vatican II." I read widely in theology, culture, philosophy and the social sciences and deepened my gasp of my Catholic faith.

4.  My mentor was Pat Williams: librarian, ex-marine, ex-pugilist, father of four, autodidact, voracious reader, and a creative-independent-insightful-maverick thinker. He surprised and delighted me by his interest in and esteem for me.He modeled for me how to live and think as a lay,non-credentialed, down-to-earth, pragmatic, gospel-inspired, intelligent, fierce, passionate, counter-cultural, amateur thinker.

5.  The infamous Ivan Illich "radicalized me" and left a permanent imprint on my view of the world. Eccentric mystic, laicized priest, brilliant iconoclast...Illich proundly critiqued the entirety of modernity as technocracy and bureaucracy with a special animus against the clerical institutions of the American, my own Church. He left me with a deeper love of the Church our Mother, but a skepticism about current Church institutions and a deep suspicion of the Mega-world of meritocracy, technology and bureaucracy. 

6.  Joe Whelan, a holy and learned Jesuit priest taught the theology of prayer and Catholic spirituality at Woodstock Theologate in NYC 1970-2. He had studied Baron von Hugel on mysticism and was himself a mystic, by far my best teacher ever, and a deep influence. He unveiled for me how the Mystery of Jesus Christ animates everything that is living and beautiful in Catholicism.

7.  Charismatic movement and other lay renewal groups (cursillo, marriage encounter, Communion and Liberation, Neocatechumenal Way, and later Our Lady's Missionaries of the Eucharist) inflamed and strengthened our Catholic faith from early in our marriage.

8.  From the late 1970s, the entire pontificate of John Paul (especially his catechesis on sexuality), of Benedict, and the thought of Balthasar and the Communio school of theology continued to deepen, solidify and crystalize my theological vision.

9.  12-step spirituality (nicely complemented by the catechesis of Kiko for a period) opened for me, later in middle age, a path to freedom from persistent character defects and vices through its profound sense of powerlessness, surrender and its networks of support.

10. Early in 1971 we married. That same year saw the tyrannical dictate of Roe v. Wade and the hegemony of Cultural Liberalism: sterilization, trivialization and profanation of sexuality; deconstruction of the iconography of gender; rejection of authority, tradition and God;annihilation of the helpless; idolization of technology; and more. The trajectory of my adult life for the next 50 years has been a rejection of that tyranny and a defense of what is for me most beautiful, good and true: my faith, family, Church, the poor, the sacredness of sexuality and gender. I have tried to live, and hope to die, quietly and peacefully, as a Cultural Warrior in the image of St. John Paul II, my captain and hero.

A Rash Judgement

To summarize:  the allegation of systematic white racism, especially among police, is:

1.  A falsehood. It is not true. Sure there are white racists. But systematic white racism..current,deliberate, planned, observable, empirical...is NOT what keeps the black underclass oppressed.

2. A slander of and a scapegoating of the police, who risk their lives to protect the rest of us. Sure there are bad actors; there are systematic problems with union power, accountability and the "code of blue." On the whole it is an honorable, and often heroic profession. They are unjustly broadly, viciously slandered.

3. A slander against the white population. It is an inverse racism: stereotyping whites as racist. It is an obsession with a "black-white" polarity in a world becoming beautifully and colorfully inter-and-multi-ethnic..

4. A purification ritual, a virtue-signalling, by affluent elites, afflicted with unacknowledged guilt over their privilege in a world of poverty and their indulgence in sexual liberation, who proclaim their moral superiority with "hate does not live here" signs on their sequestered, manicured, lily-white lawns.

5.  A well-intended, indeed compassionate, but sentimental and misguided, response to the persistent suffering of the black underclass.

6.  A distraction from the real causes of black oppression, particularly the Culture of Poverty, the disastrous, complex, dense network of dynamics that is itself color-blind, afflicting peoples of all races.

7.  A distraction from the primary cause of all American poverty: absence of the father and strong men, male infidelity and promiscuity, sexual license.

8.  An intensification of that very root cause as it demonizes the police, a quintessential masculine figure of protection and strength. The mission statement of Black Lives Matters explicitly excludes fathers and males and the entire movement marginalizes and slanders masculinity.

9.  A castration of black men as they are portrayed as powerless victims of stronger, hostile white forces.

10. A proclamation of black powerlessness and dependency upon the stronger, white power structure.

11. A soft, amorphous Marxism that is hostile to the current capitalist order but proposes no coherent alternative.

12. An articulation of the very Cultural Liberalism that has decimated the black poor: sexual freedom, deconstruction of gender, genocide against the unborn.

13. A polarization of society: a spirit of indignation and resentment; a propensity to violence; a further alienation of poor whites, the Trump base, who should be the very allies of their brother-sister-in-poverty blacks and browns and all colors.

14. An movement towards violence. Surely we distinguish between peaceful protests and violent riots, but the anger and indignation of the broader movement have allowed the outbreak of violence. Note the passivity and impotence of liberal urban mayors. 

15. It is a slander of the Civil Rights Movement. That was a tremendous historical accomplishment: primarily a credit to the resilience, moral fortitude, wisdom and perseverance of the black people themselves.Secondly, that victorious moral-political movement was a testament to the widespread acceptance by virtually all arenas of white society: religious, educational, athletic, legal, and industrial. By the 1970 long-lasting (real) structures of white racism were replaced by fierce and effective systems of anti-white-racism. Anti-racism prevailed at all respected levels of society and itself became something of a religion. 

Black Lives Matters is everything the Civil Rights Movement was not; it is a moral inversion, the evil twin brother. It is resentful, not generous; polarizing, not uniting; destructive of memory and tradition, not grateful; envious, not magnanimous; violent, not peacemaking.Black Lives Matter is a rotten tree with poisonous fruit.

n Late (Post?) Liberalism: a Catholic Politics of Abundance, Generosity, Peace

Medievalist Andrew Willard Jones ("The End of Sovereignty: an Essay in Postliberalism" Communio, Fall/Winter 2018) helpfully compares our late {post?) liberal order to the high middle ages to suggest our path forward. The "liberal order" here indicates the ever-increasing (towards absolute) sovereignty of the nation state as the only guarantee of peace in a metaphysical order that assumes the primacy of the autonomous, isolated individual and therefore the unending war of "all against all." The purpose of the liberal order is to protect the rights and powers of the competent individual: to define happiness, to property and economic initiative, to "choice", to sexual preferences, and ad infinitum. As this order develops, it progressively erodes all communal bonds: family, marriage, Church, community, nation, and all the mediating institutions. Increasingly, the absolute state (in partnership we might add, with the global corporation) assumes complete control to protect but also enslave the isolated individual. 

By contrast, the medieval monarch and government had nothing remotely approaching such sovereignty. The King and his knights, in a given area, may have monopolized the weapons of destruction, but their powers were circumscribed by a complex network of countervailing communities and institutions: the Church and clergy, monasteries, schools, guilds, townships, and other. These competing centers of power were in constant, dynamic competition. The person was never an isolated unit, but always embedded in a number of communities: extended family, craft,parish,  and social order of some sort. The Catholic vision of life permeated society so there was always an awareness that all of us, together, are pilgrims on a journey to another kingdom, heaven. The social order opened itself up to a transcendent horizon so total sovereignty was granted to no one: not the state or the king, certainly not the individual.

Jones proposes that rather than understanding the Church and religious freedom within the liberal order, we re-contextualize the liberal order itself within the larger Catholic vision of communal life as already a participation and anticipation of heaven. The liberal, legal, regulative order deals with rights, procedures, duties; but it knows nothing about the boundless exuberance of actual human life: the love shared quietly between spouses, parents and children, friends, pastor and flock and so forth. The inexorable logic of the liberal order is to shrink actual human life to the boundaries of law, regulation and bureaucracy; but the spontaneity and fecundity of life cannot finally be so controlled. 

Jones leaves the reader with a sense of the ambiguity, fragility and smallness of the liberal order. It is ambiguous: it is far superior to its competitors such as communism or sharia law. It grew out of Christendom and retains rich residues of that legacy. But it cannot help from elevating the individual and the mega-state as it systematically destroys all the rich, diverse forms of community which image the eternal Trinity.

Jones joins Dineen, Vermulle, Douthat, Dreher and others as we consider our path forward in a liberal order that is systematically destroying itself. 

His thought is liberating. He acknowledges the totalitarian propensities of liberalism (of the right and the left) but he has a sense of its impotence and fragility. On the other hand, he intuits the dynamism, promise and fecundity of an evangelical civilization in all its dimensions, however hidden and modest. He leaves us with a sense that every happy family, every gathering to worship, every act of mercy and generosity, every moment of quiet prayer...is already a humble political event