"Catholic Alt-Right" organizes online to stifle Jesuit speaker

September 21, 2017 1:26 PM

The Jesuit priest and writer James Martin, S.J., has had three recent talks cancelled after a coordinated campaign by the "Catholic alt-right," because of his recent book on connecting the Catholic church with LGBT Catholics. As in the secular sphere, web sites, Twitter, and FaceBook groups are being used to organize actions to promote alt-right agendas, as described by the NYT here.

In a WaPo opinion piece today, Fr. Martin writes that he started to do specific work with the LGBT community after the PULSE nightclub shootings:

"Until then, I had never done what you might call formal ministry with LGBT Catholics, besides the counseling that almost every church worker does in his or her ministry. But the Catholic Church’s response to the events in Orlando encouraged me to do so in a more public way."

Since then, a lecture he delivered [SLYT] became the core of a book titled, “Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity.” The book was approved by his Jesuit superior and the order's theologian.

And even when LGBT issues weren't on the agenda, he has been forced to not speak:

First, at Cafod, the overseas aid agency of the bishops of England and Wales. Second, the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher, a Catholic group that had invited me to speak at its fall investiture dinner. And, finally, the Theological College at the Catholic University of America, the university’s seminary, which had invited me to speak to its alumni. Each of these talks was not about LGBT issues, but about Jesus. And in each of the cities in which the talk was scheduled, the local bishop (in each case a cardinal) had no qualms about the upcoming lecture.

Despite the positive, official support for his appearances, online groups rallied their members to pester the host organizations until Fr. Martin's talks were cancelled. Bloggers and other writers churn out angry denunciations of the priest. Fr. Martin has an active presence on FaceBook, however, and his supporters there have gathered to support him, as have the Jesuits themselves.

He concludes by saying, "But I am at peace with the book and with the mission to love and advocate for LGBT Catholics. After all, Francis asked the Jesuits to go to the 'peripheries' where people feel the Church isn’t serving them, or where they feel unloved. And I am trying to do what Jesus did, in reaching out to people on the margins and telling them that God created them, God loves them and God welcomes them. And that is the truth."

posted by wenestvedt (55 comments total)

Imagine the shock when they find out the definition of "catholic"
posted by leotrotsky at 1:58 PM on September 21, 2017 [30 favorites]

I'm a recovering Catholic. I'm a solid secular humanist. I still have a soft spot and mad respect for the clergy who seem to get the mission of compassion that should be a corner stone of their activities.

Fie on the the hateful.
posted by drewbage1847 at 2:05 PM on September 21, 2017 [47 favorites]

If Jesus wanted love and compassion for the downtrodden and different he would have mentioned it in the Bible instead of talking about the evils of high tax rates.
posted by Sangermaine at 2:13 PM on September 21, 2017 [97 favorites]

Nicely laid out, wenestvedt; thank you. I'd welcome further information on the Catholic alt-right, and more context for the anti-Francis forces (Traditionalists?), because I just...don't get it? Mercy is a bad thing?

I liked what Father Jim wrote in his FB post on his WaPo piece: "The Washington Post invited me to share my experiences with the pushback to my book on LGBT Catholics. "Ironically, these groups, like the website Church Militant, which tout their desire for traditional Catholic practices consistently set themselves against bishops and religious superiors. Thus, groups that have zero legitimacy in the Church (and which have often been criticized by Church leadership) are setting themselves up against legitimate authorities. Pope Francis himself, for example, is a frequent target. In this way, such supposedly 'traditional' Catholic websites are subverting tradition. As a result of their hateful content, they cause confusion, frustration and contempt. Such campaigns can never lead to the kind of results that St. Ignatius calls indicative of the 'Good Spirit': consolation, calm and peace. You can judge these unofficial inquisitions by their fruit.""
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:15 PM on September 21, 2017 [22 favorites]

the definition of "catholic"

My atheist brother found out the definition of Catholic, discussed at length with a Cardinal before his marriage to a devout Catholic in a Cathedral in Rome.

A Catholic has been Baptized, preferably near birth, and preferably has had the other sacraments, and has been schooled in the Catechism. That's really all that matters. So, I'm a Catholic as well, despite having zero Faith, yet loads of Hope and Charity.

The only thing that can negate your Catholicism is "sins against the Holy Spirit", which would be to actively discourage others from their belief in Catholic teachings.

When I say I'm a Catholic, some will say, why would you want to be a Catholic? I didn't choose to be a Catholic, I would have to choose not to be one, and I don't care that much about it to actively do that.

The Church is losing members, and some clergy realize that this is the problem, and that should be the main concern, and I hope the Church can change their ways and build their ranks. Some clergy realize that, and apparently some don't.
posted by StickyCarpet at 2:26 PM on September 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

Hadn't yet heard of a "Catholic alt-right", although of course there is a hardcore conservative Catholic subculture in the US, and has been for a long time. Reading the article, I'm not sure if there is anything like a group that calls itself that, or if it's the author's characterization.
posted by thelonius at 2:27 PM on September 21, 2017

That, in turn, prompted Austin Ruse, the president of the Center for Family and Human Rights, to call Father Martin’s reaction “pansified,” dubbing him “Father Snowflake” as well as a “perfidious priest.”

These ghouls sound like parodies of themselves.
posted by munchingzombie at 2:28 PM on September 21, 2017 [20 favorites]

I think leotrotsky may have meant the literal definition of catholic: all-embracing.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:32 PM on September 21, 2017 [40 favorites]

The laity (and younger Holy Orders) of the Catholic Church are getting more conservative in white-majority countries because liberal Catholics tend to stop being Catholics, tend not to have many kids, and the kids they do have tend never to become (adult) Catholics at all.

The Church in non-white-majority countries (often written about / referred to as the "global south") has a very different set of trends. In many of the places, an impulse to doctrinal conservatism leads people out of the Church to evangelical denominations, while there's no impulse to secularization to lead liberals out of the Church to nowhere.
posted by MattD at 2:32 PM on September 21, 2017 [14 favorites]

“pansified”...“Father Snowflake”
Well whatever they call themselves, alt-right seems to be a fair cop
posted by thelonius at 2:32 PM on September 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

James Martin is a family friend and a good dude. (His book "In Good Company" is very entertaining, IMO.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:33 PM on September 21, 2017 [23 favorites]

Yeah, pretty sure leotrotsky was drawing attention to the distinction between small-c "catholic" and big-C "Catholic".
posted by Lexica at 2:38 PM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

@MonkeyToes:

As I understand it (I'm not super on top of these things, but my interests are adjacent and so I sometimes encounter them), the two big traditionalist criticisms of Francis are related to the Laudato Si encyclical and the loosening of rules regarding divorce, which traditionalists see as possibly inconsistent with established teachings. Here's a quick overview (from Damon Linker, who is eponysterically left-leaning but quite fair). Rod Dreher also covers this often on his blog. He's no longer a Catholic, but he's intensely sympathetic to the anti-Franciscans. That's probably your best mainstream source for criticism from the right, although I think the term "alt-right" is somewhat misleading in the context of the Francis-traditionalist conflict. I'm not sure if that's the case with regard to Father Martin; everyone I know is intensely sympathetic to Father Martin (and to the Pope, for that matter).
posted by kevinbelt at 2:59 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

I follow Martin on twitter...I'm not sure why. I no longer identify as Roman Catholic, and even when I did my family was not at all serious about matters of religion. We didn't attend Mass, not even on Christmas or Easter. Weddings, funerals and baptisms were the only ceremonies we attended.

Here's what infuriates me about the reaction to Martin's book: he has proposed no changes whatsoever to the Church's doctrinal position on homosexuality. He's towing the same line that they were serving up as the official stance when I was a high school freshman at a Jesuit school in the early '80s. That position holds that homosexuality as an orientation is no sin, but acting upon it is.

It's a ridiculous double standard, and one that necessarily prevents the faithful from extending to their gay neighbors the most important form of compassion that exists: treating them as full human beings. This is one of several reasons I no longer identify as Catholic.

BUT. But. The Church's official position is that we are to treat LGBTQ people lovingly, the same as we are supposed to do to all people. They've got a fucked-up idea of love that excludes according them a normal existence, but it's a key point that this deprivation is for their own moral good, and is not to be imposed cruelly, or with a feeling of condemnation or superiority.

The gist of Martin's book appears to be that the Church is fucking that part up, that too many Catholic lay persons and priests are guilty of treating gay people with a level of cruelty and judgment that is not in keeping with the spirit of "love-thy-neighbor". He doesn't propose to change the doctrine. He just wants people to be nicer, and more ready to listen, within the confines of that doctrine.

And THAT's what his protesters have a problem with. Ignore the fact that the compassion he argues for is a sad, limited form of it. The point is that even that small amount of goodwill is too much for them too countenance. And they will position themselves against him, and against all the clergy who granted his book the "Nihil Obstat" imprimatur, and against the entire hierarchy all the way up to the fucking Pope in Rome, rather than learning to live without openly bullying gay people.

John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats once said that although Jesus is the one he prays to when he prays, he hesitates to identify as Christian because doing so puts him in bad company. This whole controversy goes a long ways towards confirming that I was right to stop identifying as Catholic.
posted by Ipsifendus at 3:00 PM on September 21, 2017 [70 favorites]

Hadn't yet heard of a "Catholic alt-right" [...] I'm not sure if there is anything like a group that calls itself that, or if it's the author's characterization.

Isn't that true of the "alt-right" in general, though? There's only a small minority of people who self-describe as that, inside of the much greater circle of right-wing groups that might be characterized (more or less charitably, in some cases) that way. The fact that it's not a self-descriptor doesn't mean it's wrong, necessarily, in terms of being accurate.

Or put differently, does it matter whether the people shutting down this guy's speaking gigs refer to themselves as the "Catholic alt-right" or something else?


Anyway, moving away from what might be semantics, I can't help but noting that some of the tactics that these people—whatever we want to call them or they want to call themselves—are using seem to be borrowed from campus leftist groups. I mean, the whole thing could have been ripped out of the anti-Yiannopoulos handbook (well, the first few pages, anyway; it seems as though Martin's invitations were cancelled without as much of a fight as Yiannopoulos' sponsors typically put up; presumably the latter expect some hate mail).

And it gives some weight to a thought I've had periodically when reading about various "innovative" protest and disruption strategies, which is to be very careful when you start employing asymmetric tactics that don't rely on a capability you alone have, however tempting or effective in the moment; they can easily be reused to your peril later on. And the more effective they are—which is, the greater the degree of systematic vulnerability they expose—the greater the risk down the road when they come back the other way.

In particular, the hard left should probably take pause before devising and (more importantly) normalizing and intellectually justifying ways for a small but highly-motivated minority to exploit institutional vulnerabilities (e.g. unwillingness to deal with protests and disruption, or even mere threats of same, phone and fax spamming, etc.) to shut down public events, censor discourse, etc., because those techniques are probably more useful over the long run to the hard right. Making them acceptable behavior rather than beyond the pale is... perhaps unwise. On most issues, the left has the weight of demographics and trends over time on its side. The far right / alt-right has a hard core of very highly motivated people, though, and will likely have that for much longer than they have the ability to push any particular policy via normal democratic channels (that ability probably passed its expiration date already). So the utility of these tactics is probably greater there, where their hardest-core members represent a "long tail" over time that will continue to use them even when nothing else is left.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:02 PM on September 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

I enjoyed Martin's book In Good Company, about how he left the corporate world to join the Jesuits. I hadn't really followed his career since, but he struck me as a decent and humane person (the modern Jesuits seem to attract that type). It seems that impression was right, and it also seems he's suffering the fate of all decent and humane public figures these days.

I always assumed, based on a passing comment in In Good Company , that Martin was gay himself (as are a disproportionate number of priests). If so, I can only imagine what he's going through.

I hadn't heard about Cafod canceling his talk. Very glad I stopped supporting them (and the Church in general) some years ago.
posted by Perodicticus potto at 3:33 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

I would say there is a specifically Catholic iteration of the alt-right. The distinguishing feature is an obsession with reviving the high medieval period as opposed to the Third Reich or the Confederacy. (Note that the aforementioned Austin Ruse highlighted his status as a "Knight of Magistral Grace in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta" when he wrote his own Wikipedia page.)

The only way in which this distinction is at all important to us is that sometimes fascists will claim not to be fascists because they eschew Nazi and Confederate aesthetics. This was Bannon's recent play when he tried to distance himself from the Charlottesville protesters. If he does look down on totalitarian ethno-nationalists, it's only because he thinks they're small-time for not being totalitarian Catholic-centrists.
posted by Iridic at 3:33 PM on September 21, 2017 [14 favorites]

Right-wing Catholic bloggers are some of the most unhappy, hateful people on this planet. I discovered this the hard way, back when I was (sorta) Catholic and living in Malawi--Pope Benedict had done a tour of African nations, and during a mass, he chastised the Church in Africa for allowing "deviations" from the order of the mass (like, you know, expressing the human emotion of joy through dance and music). I wrote about it on my blog, which I didn't think anyone but my parents actually read, and expressed some mild disdain for the pontiff's crappy colonial mindset.

That was 10 almost years ago. I still get hate mail every now and then.
posted by duffell at 3:36 PM on September 21, 2017 [24 favorites]

"In particular, the hard left should probably take pause before devising and (more importantly) normalizing and intellectually justifying ways for a small but highly-motivated minority to exploit institutional vulnerabilities ... to shut down public events, censor discourse, etc., because those techniques are probably more useful over the long run to the hard right. Making them acceptable behavior rather than beyond the pale is... perhaps unwise."

Amusingly (to me), this is quite similar to Edmund Burke's reaction to the French Revolution that laid the groundwork for modern conservatism as a school of thought. He was not, as is commonly thought, opposed to the Revolution itself, or the Enlightenment; he was a liberal who enthusiastically supported the American Revolution. Rather, he feared the unintended consequences of revolutionary tactics.
posted by kevinbelt at 3:39 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

That was 10 almost years ago. I still get hate mail every now and then.

Oh and obsessive. Did I mention obsessive?
posted by duffell at 3:41 PM on September 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

Just went over to Twitter (yes, I should know better) and saw one of these folks calling Martin a "crypto Jew." (This was in response to a tweet by Martin wishing his Jewish followers Shanah Tovah.) I wonder if the allegedly respectable writers who attack him know whose side they're on.
posted by Perodicticus potto at 3:47 PM on September 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

saw one of these folks calling Martin a "crypto Jew."

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
posted by leotrotsky at 4:34 PM on September 21, 2017 [12 favorites]

Martin was the "Official Chaplain" of The Colbert Report, so I imagine the "Catholic alt-right" has had it in for him for a while.
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:49 PM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

(Can I say how awesome this thread is going, compared to many past threads involving Christians and Roman Catholicism? You people are awesome.)
posted by wenestvedt at 5:05 PM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

I started following him on Facebook because ex husband's aunt was always sharing posts of his I thought were really good. Not only about LGBT issues but immigration as well (which is another topic he covers that likely angers the alt right.)
posted by vespabelle at 5:23 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

Stop giving these people credibility by parroting their sophistry. They are fascists. No one should ever call them the "alt-right."
posted by tzikeh at 5:42 PM on September 21, 2017 [16 favorites]

You're right of course, tzikeh. I meant to say that there is indeed a fascist presence in the church, differing in small cosmetic ways from other outbreaks of fascism but really a manifestation of the same old evil. God forbid I ever give the fuckers intellectual cover.
posted by Iridic at 6:35 PM on September 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

It's ironically humorous to me that the Jesuits, after cutting their teeth running the Inquisition, are now the vanguards of decency and thoughtfulness in the Church.

I no longer consider myself Catholic, but I do root for the Jesuits quite often.

The easiest way to find "alt-right" Catholics--who by dint of opposing the Church and railing against modernity betray themselves to be neither Catholic nor catholic, respectively--is the "Latin Mass" bumper stickers on their cars.
posted by notsnot at 6:52 PM on September 21, 2017 [15 favorites]

Reading this brought to mind Michael Coren who was, at one point, a smug, fascistic Canadian Catholic broadcaster and journalist. He was the subject of this thread, and some discussion of him ensues. tl;dr: He broke with the Catholic Church over its views on same-sex marriage and joined the Anglican Church, and published a book about his change of heart. While Coren isn't a member of the clergy, he was then venomously attacked by right-wing Catholics in the same fashion as James Martin has been.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:27 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

"Anyway, moving away from what might be semantics, I can't help but noting that some of the tactics that these people—whatever we want to call them or they want to call themselves—are using seem to be borrowed from campus leftist groups. "

To a degree, but these people have been around in US Catholicism for YEARS. (I mean, I guess basically since Vatican II.) They're the people who threw eggs at students who attended screenings of The Last Temptation of Christ on Catholic campuses in 1988. They ran a ten-year campaign in the 1990s to get the archbishop of Milwaukee removed because he liked folk music at Mass, and was seen as insufficiently right-wing, and spent years and years making false allegations of financial improprieties to both US and canon authorities, triggering investigation after investigation. (Ironically, the archbishop was forced out due to the clergy sex scandals, but the Catholic ultra-right gives zero shits whatsoever about that kind of thing, that's not a problem for them.) They "vet" Catholic college course catalogs and even syllabi for what they feel are "wrong" teachings and will call the president's office over and over pretending to be "concerned parents." They make the same calls to the local bishop's office. They've organized calling campaigns and harassment campaigns for years to prevent theologians they hate from being appointed to professorships or granted tenure or giving speeches here or there. Before the internet, they used good old fashioned phone trees to pass the word about who to harass, and they targeted people for YEARS on end. They were into "swatting" before it was cool, only their version is to call the cops with made-up criminal allegations (usually financial) and/or to call canon authorities with allegations of breaches of canon law to try to get people defrocked or (in some cases) to lose their nihil obstat. I had FOUR theology professors in college (two of whom I considered quite theologically conservative!) who'd been accused by the local Catholic right-wing group of supporting a mistress (always a housekeeper!) on their faculty salary. Amusingly three of them drew no salary at all (they had poverty vows, their salaries were paid to their order's good works fund and they couldn't draw on it) and I'm not sure any of them had a housekeeper -- I think they all lived in communal priest facilities -- but they still got investigated by their superiors for sexual misconduct. (Also, it's kind-of telling, in a twisted way, that at the height of the clergy abuse scandals, they were accusing priests of having sex with adult women, rather than teenaged boys, because a lot of them insisted and continue to insist that that was a made-up scandal caused by angry gays targeting the church for "telling the truth" about the "evils" of "the gay lifestyle." When really if you wanted to a priest's life in that era, a priest who taught at a college, allegations of abuse of a teenaged boy would have been absolutely the way to go.)

I even accidentally stumbled into being a target of these yahoos. I wrote a piece in my campus newspaper (at a Catholic university) that was generally about my disappointment that only 7 people bothered to show up for a vigil at a federal prison 40 minutes away when they were executing someone, but more than 400 spent five day taking buses to DC to protest about abortion, and basically that this was a disappointingly incomplete form of pro-life activism, especially when executions were happening in their own backyard and they couldn't be arsed. So of course my language was a bit incendiary because it was college and of course people got kinda shirty about it in both directions (because it was college), but for the most part even people who were really angry about what I said were fairly cordial and determined to persuade me with well-reasoned arguments. (And the president of campus pro-life, which is a big-deal role there and involves some national prominence, whom I had never met before, treated me to lunch so we could talk about it, and she could not have been kinder, and we had a really interesting conversation where we agreed on some things and disagreed on others, and we ended up friends as a result of the whole thing (especially because we kept being invited to be on panels together rehashing the thing over and over!), and although she and I disagree on many specifics of how our Catholic faith ought to be lived in the world (that is to say, our politics), we remain good friends and I still think of her as one of the most thoughtful and devout and exemplary Catholics I know.)

Anyway, the local nutty campus conservative Catholics -- in this case, organized through an Opus Dei house that was so fucking out of control they'd been kicked off campus -- decided to target me for "heretical" views. (In fact, my comments were totally unremarkable -- Catholics are obligated to oppose the death penalty as well as abortion; lots of Catholics only oppose one and that's a problem that is routinely called out by church authorities; it's a wholly orthodox and uncontroversial claim, except insofar as people have disagreements about tactics.) So they organized a phone harassment campaign where basically they called me every 20 minutes, all day, all night, and shrieked "baby killer!" and hung up. They exploited a quirk of the campus phone system where once your voice mail was filled up (it only kept a certain number of minutes of messages), it'd ring forever, so they'd call and leave the phone off the hook until my voice mail filled up, and then call and call and call and call. I found out from a friend who was loosely involved with Opus Dei that calling me to harass me was literally on the chore list, along with cooking and cleaning and eucharistic adoration shifts. They called my professors, they called my rector, they called my boss, with all kinds of anonymous complaints about me being a bad person; they found out my class schedule and lurked around outside my theology classes to shout random things at me when I left.

I mean, luckily, this kind of shit's been going on for decades at Catholic colleges so my boss/profs/etc just shrugged it off -- they knew exactly what it was -- and I was able to get my phone disconnected until they got bored and moved on to harassing someone else after a few weeks. Which they did, because there's always a new heretic to harass. Similarly, while this is unpleasant for Martin, I know he's seen it before and I know he knows exactly what it is. And I guarantee this isn't the first time those poor secretaries have had random angry Catholics calling and shouting obscenities at them* because the college dared to, I don't know, let the state's Senator speak to students when one time he failed to vote to defund Planned Parenthood. I mean sometimes you legit have to cancel or reschedule things because it just isn't safe, but these people are long-time lunatics with a limited tool box.

(*Oh! Oh! True reason for right-wing Catholic insanity phone harassment campaign: my campus newspaper printed horoscopes so a small group of around five random Catholics from like four states over, neither alumni nor parents, called our poor secretary every day to yell at her about Satan working through the horoscopes. There is NOTHING TOO TRIVIAL for screaming at secretaries with no control over the alleged heresy!)

Anyway, a lot of the alt-right tactics we've been seeing in the last few years are not new to me; they've been around for years in Catholic circles from angry Latin Mass-lovers. (The one elaboration from the alt-right that is new is swatting in terms of calling police to a fake crime in progress and the level of violence and immediacy; the Catholic ultra right usually stuck to reporting fake financial or sexual malfeasance to trigger annoying investigations, but not to have cops bust down your door.) They probably all sit there with little black books full of medieval-style lists of how many minutes off of your time in Purgatory you get for each meritorious act and they give themselves two hours off every time they scream at a secretary who has nothing to do with anything, keeping careful track in a neat ledger inside the back cover.

(In fact someone should make this short film, about an angry Catholic who piously tracks his minutes off of Purgatory for his harassment of people in the name of God, who finds himself meeting St. Peter at the pearly gates, and St. Peter has his ledger but is using it to add triple-time penalties to his time in Purgatory.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:16 PM on September 21, 2017 [62 favorites]

It's ironically humorous to me that the Jesuits, after cutting their teeth running the Inquisition


What?

Both the Roman and the Spanish Inquisitions were mostly made up of Dominicans and Franciscans. The Society of Jesus traditionally played more of a missionary role, while the Inquisitions were primarily focused on identifying heresy and apostasy within Catholic countries. Even now, the Society and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are distinct organizations within the Church.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 8:38 PM on September 21, 2017 [13 favorites]

There's definitely some rubbing of shoulders between what I know as "trad caths" and other folks identified with the "alt-right" - at least online.
posted by atoxyl at 8:49 PM on September 21, 2017

I'm eagerly awaiting the free speech zealots who I'm sure will be taking this up
posted by mikek at 9:37 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

To a degree, but these people have been around in US Catholicism for YEARS.

They've been around since St Paul. Don't blame US Catholics.

US Catholics specialize in not being charitable, ex Paul Ryan, to a degree I've not seen elsewhere though.
posted by fshgrl at 10:19 PM on September 21, 2017 [10 favorites]

We should possibly call them 'radical' Catholics or 'anti-papal' or 'unorthodox' rather than alt-right. It would annoy them more.
posted by Segundus at 12:31 AM on September 22, 2017 [6 favorites]

They've organized calling campaigns and harassment campaigns for years to prevent theologians they hate from being appointed to professorships or granted tenure or giving speeches here or there. Before the internet, they used good old fashioned phone trees to pass the word about who to harass, and they targeted people for YEARS on end.

This can't be right. Someone upthread CLEARLY said it was the the left doing things recently that caused this. That doesn't work as an explanation if these people have been doing it for decades.
posted by Dysk at 2:04 AM on September 22, 2017 [15 favorites]

I wonder if the allegedly respectable writers who attack him know whose side they're on.

Yeah, they do.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 2:55 AM on September 22, 2017 [4 favorites]

Fascinating stuff, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

The streams of retrograde Catholicism I'm familiar with are the overtly fascist and patriarchal Mel Gibson/Opus Dei variety, and the bizarrely blinkered, sentimental and nostalgic form epitomized by my old nemesis (and chastity exponent) Dawn Eden.

I don't have to think twice to know what the former cohort thinks of Martin and his stance — hell, they're probably the ones sending the poison-pen letters. I do wonder, though, what the latter set thinks. Though they'll always be yoked to a fundamentally misogynist take on life, and worthy of profound and sustained criticism on that count alone, I'd respect them a whole lot more if they at least came out in support of him.
posted by adamgreenfield at 5:18 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

That doesn't work as an explanation if these people have been doing it for decades.

Yeah but we all know that only the left has agency.
posted by PMdixon at 6:45 AM on September 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

This thread has helped me understand why I saw so many Catholics at the Ark Encounter in Kentucky. (lots of church groups there wore matching t-shirts so it was easy to determine denomination). Despite the church's current views on global warming, the age of the earth, evolution, and science in general there were a lot of catholics there who seemed quite accepting of the evangelical literalism that surrounded them.
posted by thecjm at 7:35 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

fshgrl:US Catholics specialize in not being charitable, ex Paul Ryan, to a degree I've not seen elsewhere though.

In my hometown, the Catholic church there has put forth a plan to turn the empty convent building into a shelter for single mothers. The Facebook and public meeting outcry is exactly what one would expect: "OMG, poor people will bring drugs, crime, and destroy property values!" mixed with derp that has no grounding in reality.

So much for Christian charity....
posted by dr_dank at 7:46 AM on September 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

Eyebrows McGee: They ran a ten-year campaign in the 1990s to get the archbishop of Milwaukee removed because he liked folk music at Mass...

Well.... I've been to a banjo Mass, and I am here to say that these people aren't 100% wrong.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:05 AM on September 22, 2017 [6 favorites]

Must be getting close to Halloween. "Catholic Alt-Right" is terrifying.
posted by theora55 at 8:19 AM on September 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

Well, as someone who was raised a devout Catholic and now identifies as atheist/agnostic, this conversation intersects with my life in myriad ways -- none of which I'll go into here.

That said, the number of practicing Catholics in the Trump administration is both astounding and terrifying to me, because I'm sure they would be highly sympathetic to the trolls trying to undermine any semblance of progressive Catholicism. Sean Spicer's unapologetic interview tour these last few weeks, in particular, has really bugged me. I've ordered this book to see if I can make any sense of it all.

Finally, slightly off topic, but if you call yourself a believer, you should accept that being a Christian Is supposed to be hard. And not "It sure takes a lot of time saying these rosaries" hard but rather "It is hard finding love for people who do things I don't like or who appear different than me" hard. The anti-gay and anti-abortion sentiments espoused by Catholics utterly fail that test. As mentioned upthread, the Jesuit priest's efforts still fail that test but I'll give him credit for trying.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:50 AM on September 22, 2017 [6 favorites]

Segundus: "We should possibly call them 'radical' Catholics or 'anti-papal' or 'unorthodox' rather than alt-right. It would annoy them more."

"Heterodox", surely.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:48 AM on September 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

That said, the number of practicing Catholics in the Trump administration is both astounding and terrifying to me....

As a Catholic, allow me to add: me, too! They are betraying very basic tenets of the faith, like "mercy" and serving the poor...though I doubt they were ever doing anything more sincere than just humming along.

... you should accept that being a Christian Is supposed to be hard.

Oh, yeah, definitely: ask Thomas Merton or St. Augustine or Mother Tesersa. No one said that sincere forgiveness is easy: shit, they nailed Jesus to a tree for advocating it. People aren't perfect -- that's why we seek support in community, and can get forgiveness for sin.
posted by wenestvedt at 11:15 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

Well.... I've been to a banjo Mass, and I am here to say that these people aren't 100% wrong.

Folk music at Mass is like many things: sometimes forgettable, sometimes annoying, but when done well can sometimes be quite beautiful.
posted by ovvl at 12:04 PM on September 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

Oh, agreed about the music at Mass: my parish has as many as 18 musicians & singers at a time, and a crazy-ass club-style sound system :7)

But those banjos... *shudder* My family still jokes darkly about it, years later.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:58 PM on September 22, 2017

I once took a girl on a first date to a Mass that prominently featured bongo drums.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:37 PM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm really glad wenestvedt made a post about this. My only negative feeling about Catholicism growing up came from that one uncle that always had me sleep over his house Saturday night so he could take me to church on Sunday, but growing up in this town (wenestvedt and I are former and now quasi-neighbors) I just kinda thought all Catholics were like our Catholics. They're the helpers, the ones who ensured our town schools were the first in the state to have specific trans protection policies, the ones who ask thoughtful questions about my Holy Days (in fact, my Kugel recipe was served at one of his co-parishioner's Thanksgiving dinner last year!) and tend to be overwhelmingly liberal. Oh, that more Catholics could be like ours.
posted by Ruki at 7:10 PM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

being a Christian is supposed to be hard. There's a whole approach to being 'Christian' that's about saying Praise Jesus, saying Thank the Lord, identifying as a Christian, and then doing whatever you want, and seldom putting any effort into what religion might mean, or what you might be expected to do. I think of these people as Jesus-y.
posted by theora55 at 7:53 PM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

theora55, I think of those people as "fakers," or, when my cycle is trending negative, as "frauds." At that point, I ponder lovingly the latter chapters of Dante's Inferno.

And Ruki, I am happy to post about my man James martin (even when he's getting beat up a little)! Also, I meant to send a neighborly "Shana Tova!" to you but now I'm too late. *sigh* I'll always try to be the Catholic that lives up to a good friend's ideal, regardless of whether we share a faith...even though I often fall short.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:09 PM on September 22, 2017

What makes them "alt-right"? They sound like plain old right-wingers to me. I guess anything about the alt-right gets clicks these days.
posted by foobaz at 12:18 AM on September 23, 2017

foobaz: What makes them "alt-right"?

I took the "alt-" prefix to be a reference to them moving from phone trees (voice! hah!) to using Twitter, Facebook, and other electronic & social media.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:44 AM on September 25, 2017

Per my comment way above, BTW, and for those one of two of you who may be interested: I guess we have our answer.
posted by adamgreenfield at 3:21 PM on September 26, 2017