won’t deny, if you insist, that secularism is a problem for the Church; I won’t deny, for it would be foolhardy, that elitism exists, even among prelates. But it’s a feverish, undisciplined mind that would try to attribute these things, without evidence or example, to a global conspiracy of bogeymen who are out to get Christians. Archbishop Gomez desperately wants to be persecuted.
His recent—hideous—address, delivered in Madrid on November 4, is titled “Reflections on the Church and America’s New Religions”; and you may read it if you insist, but keep in mind, dear reader, that part of my duty as a blogger is to read such painful things so you won’t have to. It’s not easy. You must remember me in your prayers.
•••
Gomez begins with these words: “I think we all know.”
When someone begins that way, you can be sure that what follows is sheer bunkum. You can be sure that what follows is a sweeping claim with no evidence. Why bother with evidence if “we all know”? “We all know” saves you the inconvenient task of providing any. You can say anything you want after that, if you know your audience already agrees with you.
You know, we all know, you know, that the St. Gallen Mafia plans to resurrect Liberace and make him the next pope. Pope Francis is just preparing the way for Antichrist. Bergoglio is like an Anti-John the Baptist.
No, we don’t “all know.” “We all know” is not a claim of universal knowledge; it’s a claim that a particular faction shares the presupposition of the speaker. It means: All of you in my audience already believe this. Gomez is not speaking to the Church; he’s speaking to a coterie of the like-minded. With that one phrase, I think we all know, he’s gathered up his audience, retreated to the catacombs, and walled himself off from the universal church.
“I think we all know,” he says,
that while there are unique conditions in the United States, similar broad patterns of aggressive secularization have long been at work in Spain and elsewhere in Europe.
An elite leadership class has risen in our countries that has little interest in religion and no real attachments to the nations they live in or to local traditions or cultures.
That’s a grand claim. But read on, for it gets grander:
This group, which is in charge in corporations, governments, universities, the media, and in the cultural and professional establishments, wants to establish what we might call a global civilization, built on a consumer economy and guided by science, technology, humanitarian values, and technocratic ideas about organizing society.
In this elite worldview, there is no need for old-fashioned belief systems and religions. In fact, as they see it [Note the “us” vs. “them” mindset; this is typical of bigots], religion, especially Christianity, only gets in the way of the society they hope to build.
So a global elite hostile to Christianity controls everything! Some people say that about THE JEWS; some people say that about THE ILLUMINATI or THE FREEMASONS or THE JESUITS. I’m not suggesting Gomez would say it about Jews or Illuminati or Freemasons or Jesuits. But it’s the same mindset; you just replace one bogeyman with another. Instead of “The Jews control everything,” the “secular elite” controls everything.
Does the global elite also have space lasers?
Gomez cites no evidence for his sweeping claim; he simply couches it in lazily gnostic “well, we all know” terms. We all know—meaning, us. We all know.
And the “us” vs. “them” mentality is especially un-Christian. It doesn’t unite anyone in Christ; it only divides. And don’t try to object here with, “But Alt! What about Matthew 10:34?” No. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a sword; right-wing fears of the bogeyman aren’t.
Gomez:
In your program for this Congress, you allude to “cancel culture” and “political correctness.” And we recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs—about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family, and more.
It would be nice if His Eminence gave any examples at all—even one—of what he’s talking about. It would be nicer if he could argue that the evidence proved that a conspiracy of “global elites” wants to wipe Christianity from the earth and grind its remnants into ashes. Perhaps Gomez doesn’t feel the need for evidence, since his audience already believes this anyway. They asked him to speak on this topic; they had itching ears and craved affirmation. Thus his purpose doesn’t appear to be persuasion so much as it appears to be mutual worrying and fretting.
The whole performance suggests, not that the lot of Christians are being persecuted by the culture, but that a scared faction of Dreherites are isolating themselves from the culture. They’re grabbing their reliquaries, rushing to the caves, and hoarsely whispering: “Shame!” Gomez will insist, later, that Christians must “engage” the world. But by that time it sounds hollow.
Gomez:
In your society and mine, the “space” that the Church and believing Christians are permitted to occupy is shrinking. [Really?] Church institutions and Christian-owned businesses are increasingly challenged and harassed. [Really?] The same is true for Christians working in education, health care, government, and other sectors. [Really?] Holding certain Christian beliefs is said to be a threat to the freedoms, and even to the safety, of other groups in our societies.
Really? I’ve not observed any of this. Too many claims, too few (as in zero) examples. What Christian beliefs are a “threat” to anyone? What Christian beliefs are even said to be a “threat” to anyone? Name one.
“Oh, but Alt! Pro-life! Lots of people say it’s a threat to women’s reproductive freedom! Have you not seen, have you not heard?
Really? Merely holding anti-abortion views is a “threat”? When exactly did the global secularists ban the March on Life? When was Fr. Pavone arrested? When were anti-abortion Christians turned away at the polls?
Gomez:
I think history will look back and see that this pandemic did not change our societies as much as it accelerated trends and directions that were already at work. Social changes that might have taken decades to play out, are now moving more rapidly in the wake of this disease and our societies’ responses.
I confess I have no clue what he’s talking about.
Here is my thesis. [It’s taken him this long to get to the thesis? Isn’t the thesis supposed to be in the first sentence? At least the first paragraph? Poor Gomez is already in section two.] I believe the best way for the Church to understand the new social justice movements [New?] is to understand them as pseudo-religions, and even replacements and rivals to traditional Christian beliefs.
That’s just embarrassing. Social justice is not “new,” nor is it a “pseudo religion” or “replacement” to Christianity. Social justice runs like waters and a mighty stream through the entire Old Testament (and the New, for that matter.) Gomez has no excuse for not knowing this. The actual president of the actual USSCCB dismisses core Catholic doctrine as a pseudo-religion. What the actual.
Back in 1931, Pope Pius IX, in Quadragesimo Anno said that the Church’s aim—not the secular elite’s aim but the Church’s—is “to restore society … on the firmly established basis of social justice and social charity.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has an entire section on social justice.
Numerous encyclicals, as well as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church and Gaudium et Spes mention social justice as intrinsic to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
According to Matthew 25, our very salvation depends upon social justice.
“Pseudo-religious replacement of Christianity” my tookus.
Gomez:
Whatever we call these movements—“social justice,” “wokeness,” “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” “successor ideology”—they claim to offer what religion provides.
Here Gomez makes it plain (as though it were in doubt) that he has no idea what he’s talking about and is just throwing scare-words at his audience like fresh meat to dogs. These terms are not synonymous, so I am left to conclude that Gomez doesn’t really know what they mean, and possibly hasn’t bothered to ask himself or give any thought to it. They’re just Scary Words that give him The Shivers.
They [i.e., the Scary Words] provide people with an explanation for events and conditions in the world. They offer a sense of meaning, a purpose for living, and the feeling of belonging to a community.
If Gomez doesn’t know what they mean, how can he know this?
•••
Next Gomez claims the secular elites are promoting a parody Christianity and that its gospel can be summarized something like this:
We cannot know where we came from, but we are aware that we have interests in common with those who share our skin color or our position in society. We are also painfully aware that our group is suffering and alienated, through no fault of our own. The cause of our unhappiness is that we are victims of oppression by other groups in society. We are liberated and find redemption through our constant struggle against our oppressors, by waging a battle for political and cultural power in the name of creating a society of equity.
This is a caricature that reveals more about Gomez’s ignorance of what he pretends to be critiquing than it does about anything else. It’s also very hideous to claim that striving for a just society means that you think salvation is found in politics rather than Jesus Christ.
Surely Gomez doesn’t think that Christ demands that we isolate ourselves from social engagement, lest we suppose we are redeemed by politics rather than Christ himself. Earlier, Gomez acknowledged that Christians are supposed to “build His Kingdom on earth.”
But fighting racial injustice—or any other form of injustice—is what “building His Kingdom on earth” is.
“This story,” Gomez insists—the salvation-through-politics story, which the elitists supposedly believe—
draws its strength from the simplicity of its explanations—the world is divided into innocents and victims, allies and adversaries.
I thought that was what Gomez was doing: dividing the world into us vs. them: the persecuted Christians and the global secularists. Accusation is confession.
Skipping ahead a few paragraphs:
Today’s critical theories and ideologies are profoundly atheistic. They deny the soul, the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human nature; or they think that it is irrelevant to human happiness. They reduce what it means to be human to essentially physical qualities—the color of our skin, our sex, our notions of gender, our ethnic background, or our position in society.
But since Gomez doesn’t actually understand the “critical theories” he objects to, it’s impossible for him to say this. It is a claim with no evidence. It amounts to no more than Gomez criticizing what he doesn’t understand and hasn’t bothered to try to understand.
How does he know that these “critical theories” reduce the human person to physical attributes? He doesn’t say.
And because neither he nor his audience has bothered to understand these “critical theories,” Gomez thinks he can get away with it if he says that they contain a quite eclectic mix of ideologies and ancient heresies. It’s a pseudo-intellectual performance he’s engaging in here, to try to dazzle us with his learning. According to Gomez, the “critical theories” are—at one and the same time—Marxist, Manichean, Gnostic, Pelagian, and Utopian.
That’s quite a trick for the global elites to have pulled off!
Gomez:
Again my friends, my point is this: I believe that it is important for the Church to understand and engage these new movements—not on social or political terms, but as dangerous substitutes for true religion.
But Gomez is not trying to “understand” or “engage” them at all. Gomez’s entire address has been one long hysterical screech at what he has obviously spent not two seconds attempting to understand and which he only wants to castigate in the safe company of the like-minded who “all know.”
“The Church has been anti-racist from the beginning,” Gomez insists. It surely has. But since that is so, why should Gomez take such pains to castigate anti-racist movements as though they constitute bogeymen to fear rather than allies to welcome (whether they share our religious views or not).
Indeed, if Gomez really believes (as he says he does) that Christians must engage the culture, there are few better ways to do that than to find common cause with those who don’t think like us. Gomez’s insistence on ideological purity does not threaten the “global elites”; it threatens the Gospel.
Striving for common cause might convince atheists that they don’t need to fear Christians, neither do Christians need to fear atheists. We both have objectives that matter to us: the creation of a more just society. If you start there, you establish trust; and in that space of trust (and love) talking about Jesus Christ with credibility becomes possible.
Fearmongering about global conspiracies of elites who are out to get us won’t achieve that (if that’s what Gomez really wants to achieve). Fearmongering is an abandonment of the Great Commission, not a protection of it.
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