Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome XVI; or, Maureen Mullarkey’s latest rant: Notes on a dumb show.

aureen Mullarkey has giv­en vent to anoth­er in a long, sple­net­ic string of anti-Fran­cis blog­gage. She has much breath for that kind of thing. In this one, she accus­es the pope of col­lud­ing with Pres­i­dent Oba­ma in order to destroy free­dom across the globe. I jest not, dear read­er. The short of it is, it was post­ed at First Things; then, R.R. Reno took it down, wrote a post to the effect that Ms. Mullarkey will no longer write for his site; after which, the post appeared at 1 Peter 5; and last, Ben Domenech at the Fed­er­al­ist declared that, what­ev­er Mr. Reno does, Ms. Mullarkey is wel­come to pub­lish her filth with him.

Now, any­one who has fol­lowed me on Face­book knows the low opin­ion I have of 1 Peter 5 in gen­er­al and Steve Sko­jec in par­tic­u­lar. I have made no secret of that. But I sense that Mr. Sko­jec’s ide­al is for his site to be a rep­utable place for Tra­di­tion­al­ist voic­es in the Church. How­ev­er much that may be true, the anti-Fran­cis rhetoric and vit­ri­ol there, includ­ing from Mr. Sko­jec him­self, hurts that goal and injects poi­son into the dis­course and stirs schism in the heart. If then he gives a plat­form to some­one as unwell in her hatred of the pope as Ms. Mullarkey, that only gives his site the less repute.

Shadows on Her Wall

As an exam­ple of how deranged Ms. Mullarkey’s blog post is, con­sid­er these three state­ments. (I promise I’m not going to fisk the whole pain-aching thing.)

She says the pope’s vis­it to Amer­i­ca was a “Roman can­dle of demon­ic sanc­ti­mo­ny.” The pope is of his father the Dev­il.

She accus­es the pope of col­lud­ing with Oba­ma to destroy free­dom around the globe. The pope is “tight­en­ing the screws,” pos­si­bly to screw us all.

She com­pares the raised arms of priests tak­ing cell phone pic­tures of the pope to the raised arms of a Fas­cist salute. Those who want­ed a pic­ture of the Holy Father are mass­es as duped as those who shout­ed “Heil!”

All this is mad­ness so mad it is hard to know how to respond to any of it. How do you rea­son with unrea­son? Hon­est­ly, dear reader—that I should have to point this out is a sign of how far pub­lic dis­course has sunk—this is the kind of stuff that deserves, not a plat­form, but a padded room. Mr. Domenech says that pun­gent opin­ions are opin­ions and should be heard, but this wan­ders so far off the spec­trum of defen­si­ble opin­ion one won­ders what luna­cy he would­n’t print. Or Mr. Sko­jec.

Where is the evi­dence for any of this? Is it too much to to ask that an opin­ion, espe­cial­ly one as wild as this, have facts to back it up? But Ms. Mullarkey gives none. She cites no source, no text, noth­ing. In fact, her col­umn is not an argu­ment, or an exer­cise in rea­son or log­ic, but a self-indul­gent vom­it of bile and infect­ed pus. It’s an aching­ly long pile of one ten­den­tious sen­tence after anoth­er with no anchor in cit­ed fact. As thus:

Catholics are dou­bly bur­dened. The intel­lec­tu­al squalor of our sec­u­lar admin­is­tra­tion is mir­rored in a preen­ing Vat­i­can fac­tion that adds moral indi­gence to the equa­tion. The mod­ern state is exempt from any man­date to lead us toward a tran­scen­dent end. That is the work of the Church—an unsur­pass­able, crown­ing mis­sion addressed to the poor and the pros­per­ous alike. But this pon­tif­i­cate makes an idol of The Poor, an abstrac­tion by which it jus­ti­fies its own ran­cor toward the devel­oped world. It gives evi­dence of a mind fed on tracts by sta­tist ide­o­laters who mud­dle dis­tinc­tion between the mate­r­i­al and the tran­scen­dent. Worse, it squan­ders the moral author­i­ty of the Church on an unholy alliance with cor­rupt or rent-seek­ing regimes that relin­quish their own respon­si­bil­i­ty for the con­di­tions of those they gov­ern. It is an omi­nous con­fed­er­a­cy that denies moral agency to all but the West.

Wild is the wind. One gets the sense, from read­ing this tire­some bore, that she has fall­en in love with the loud bang of her own beat­en pots. But she can do no more than bang pot after pot, as though the ques­tion she asks her­self is not, “How do I know this? What facts back this up?” but, “How can I out­bang myself?

Ms. Mullarkey does­n’t see facts but fears. Ms. Mullarkey sees the bogey­man of bad dreams. Ms. Mullarkey starts at shad­ows on the wall.

A Little Impaired

But I did­n’t real­ly want to talk about Ms. Mullarkey. What I real­ly wrote this post for was to say a few words about the eighth com­mand­ment. Or rather, to say a few words about what the Cat­e­chism says about the eighth com­mand­ment. You know, the one that says thou shalt not bear false wit­ness. This is a very seri­ous mat­ter.

2477 Respect for the rep­u­ta­tion of per­sons for­bids every atti­tude and word like­ly to cause them unjust injury. He becomes guilty:

of rash judg­ment who, even tac­it­ly, assumes as true, with­out suf­fi­cient foun­da­tion, the moral fault of a neigh­bor;

of detrac­tion who, with­out objec­tive­ly valid rea­son, dis­clos­es anoth­er’s faults and fail­ings to per­sons who did not know them;

of calum­ny who, by remarks con­trary to the truth, harms the rep­u­ta­tion of oth­ers and gives occa­sion for false judg­ments con­cern­ing them.

2479 Detrac­tion and calum­ny destroy the rep­u­ta­tion and hon­or of one’s neigh­bor. Hon­or is the social wit­ness giv­en to human dig­ni­ty, and every­one enjoys a nat­ur­al right to the hon­or of his name and rep­u­ta­tion and to respect. Thus, detrac­tion and calum­ny offend against the virtues of jus­tice and char­i­ty.

I am sor­ry, but I must say this. I see the above far too much on social media among Catholics in St. Blog’s Parish. It is so bad that some good peo­ple, who have strong and wor­thy voic­es to share, hold back from con­ver­sa­tions because of the sheer vit­ri­ol of them.

It poi­sons our wit­ness to Christ.

We all have sin, but the fact that we all have sin is no excuse to wal­low in it like swine who love the mud. There is such a thing as a firm pur­pose of amend­ment.

When Ms. Mullarkey says, with no evi­dence of any kind, that the pope is col­lud­ing with Oba­ma to destroy free­dom, I’m sor­ry, that can­not be defend­ed as just a “strong opin­ion.”

It’s calum­ny.

When she com­pares a crowd of priests—priests—tak­ing cell phone pic­tures of the pope to the duped mass­es rais­ing a Sieg Hiel, mere­ly on the basis of a visu­al sim­i­lar­i­ty, I’m sor­ry, it can­not be defend­ed as just a “strong opin­ion.”

It’s calum­ny.

(It’s also insan­i­ty of the kind that says, Hey, the Infant of Prague looks just like a stat­ue of Bud­dha! See, those Catholics are pagan!)

If detrac­tion and calum­ny “destroy the rep­u­ta­tion and hon­or of one’s neigh­bor,” how much worse is it when you com­mit calum­ny against the pope—no mere neigh­bor but our father.

I don’t mean you have to like or agree with every­thing the pope says and does. But you owe him enough respect to knock it off with the irre­spon­si­ble, ground­less, pet­ty, ugly, bitchy, gos­sip-mon­ger­ing, tremu­lous, dis­tort­ed, calum­ni­at­ing, sin­ful accu­sa­tions. Stop it. It poi­sons the Church and kills char­i­ty and uni­ty.

We all have sinned and fall­en short of the glo­ry of God. We are all a lit­tle impaired. But there is a con­fes­sion­al in every parish, and I respect­ful­ly sug­gest that Ms. Mullarkey vis­it one.

I Should Get Some Sleep

Mr. Sko­jec has dou­bled down at 1 Peter 5, defend­ing Ms. Mullarkey’s “mas­tery” of “unpre­ten­tious” Eng­lish. I frankly don’t see that. The Eng­lish teacher in me tells me dif­fer­ent. Hers is not good writ­ing. It’s a per­for­mance. It’s a dumb show. It is writ­ing that loves to gaze at itself in the pool and seems ready to jump in after itself and drown.

That aside, the real point of Mr. Sko­jec’s defense was to dis­guise calum­ny as brav­ery and say, “Give us more.” He describes the cur­rent papa­cy as “the crush­ing weight of an over­whelm­ing foe.”

But no. That is the kind of thing that atro­phies the repute he seeks. Pope Fran­cis is not the ene­my. Sin is the ene­my. Hatred is the ene­my. Calum­ny is the ene­my. And sheer atro­cious and fevered ver­bal accu­sa­tion with­out evi­dence is the ene­my, not just to char­i­ty but to rea­son and truth. We write to seek truth, not to prove how ver­bal­ly clever we are, or to stir pots for the mere sake of the stir. To do that is to lack both decen­cy and repute.

When I have writ­ten about Pope Fran­cis Derange­ment Syn­drome, and have sought to clar­i­fy the pope’s words, I have, in every case, quot­ed from the pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments. I have tried to under­stand them in the light, not of nov­el­ty, but the con­sis­tent teach­ing of the Church. That is how you rea­son. That is how you seek truth—not rumor, not innu­en­do, not fear, not shad­ows, not bogey­men, but truth.

If there is schism in the Church, it won’t be because of the pope but because of those like Ms. Mullarkey, who have in this way poi­soned the dis­course and poi­soned souls. If you want evi­dence of that, just look at the com­box­es on these posts and these sites. They are sewage.

A per­son­al note. I don’t enjoy writ­ing this series. I get e‑mails all the time from read­ers who enjoy it, and I’m glad for that. But I start­ed blog­ging because I want­ed to write about apologetics—things like sola scrip­tura and Pur­ga­to­ry and Mary and the Church Fathers. And I have found myself spend­ing more time than I want­ed to defend­ing the Holy Father against silli­ness that is evi­dent as such if only you read the actu­al tran­scripts and doc­u­ments and com­pare them to what the Church has always said.

I have felt it nec­es­sary, and I will con­tin­ue to do so if need be. Uni­ty is in Peter, and Fran­cis is Peter. That’s why I do it. When you speak calum­ny against the pope, you speak calum­ny against Peter, and against the Chair of Peter. Truth and faith mat­ter, not rumor and fear.

But most of the time, writ­ing these posts, I’m tired. I should get some sleep. Tomor­row might be good for writ­ing some­thing.