Who Are the Opus Dei Trumpscum Hate America Catholic Fascists? Their Ally Bari Weiss Will Let You Know!
David Shasha
Canceled Priests, Catholic, Pope Francis, Latin Mass
By: Suzy Weiss
CHICAGO—Is Father James Altman a heretic, or one of the last men of faith?
The Wisconsin-based priest hasn’t been allowed to practice mass since 2021, after he appeared in a YouTube video preaching that “You cannot be Catholic and a Democrat.”
He also called climate change a “hoax,” and during the Covid lockdowns, in defiance of the Church and government ordinances, he held mass in person.
But the crowd at the second annual conference for the Coalition for Canceled Priests is going wild for Altman, who takes the stage in the afternoon on the second day of festivities. He is who they’re here to see. Altman spends his forty minutes at the lectern skewering the church’s hierarchy from top to bottom. Throughout, he refuses to call the pope Francis.
“No one in 2,000 years has been as fake and a fraud of a Catholic as the imposter prancing around in white in our day, Jorge Bergoglio,” Altman informs the rapt room.
Altman goes on to describe Pope Francis as an “anti-Pope” and an “earthly viper” in his talk. “We’ve had enough, Jorge,” he says. “If he doesn’t repent for his fraudulent and damned papacy, he will burn in the lowest level of hell.”
I’m sitting at a round table among dozens of others in the grand ballroom of the Hilton in Rosemont, Illinois, down the road from O’Hare Airport. It’s mid-June. There’s a knitting convention across the street, and a charity bike ride to benefit the Wounded Warrior Project happening nearby. But here, in this too-bright conference room with thick carpeting, hundreds of devout Catholics from across the country are gathered to confront a conflicting notion: that the faith they love, whose teachings they believe are infallible, is being led by the “woke pope,” a man they despise.
The purpose of this conference, which started last year and is run by the Coalition for Canceled Priests, an organization founded in 2020, is ostensibly to bring all the canceled priests together. There are “dozens” of canceled priests who the coalition is in contact with, according to a spokesman for the group. Eighteen of them, including Altman, are here today.
Before you ask, no, the so-called Canceled Priests weren’t canceled for that.
Sex crimes, they repeatedly say, aren’t why they were cast out of the church. Instead it is thought crimes—mostly railing against homosexuality, abortion, IVF, or because they were getting too political—that have led to their banishment. The priests, sprinkled among the 400 or so attendees, were removed from their pulpits and banned from hearing confessions by bishops in their diocese, and they were never reassigned to another parish. (Altman’s diocese cited “public and ecclesial concerns” when they announced he’d gotten the boot.)
The coalition raises money to support the priests and fund their canon lawyers, who appeal their dismissal to the higher-ups at the Vatican, similar to a civil procedure. Also attending are other conservative and controversial Catholic media stars and speakers like John-Henry Westen, who started LifeSite news, a far-right media outlet that was kicked off YouTube two years ago. The prepper Doug Barry, who gives advice on how to be ready for power outages and food shortages when the spiritual crisis gives way to a real-life one, is also here.
At first glance, this conference is standard convention fare. Everyone’s wearing bright orange lanyards. Vendors are hawking merchandise—thick theology books, glittering rosaries, and plastic Virgin Mary statues—from folding tables near the ballroom. An older woman with a sensible haircut and cotton capri pants, hobbling on crutches toward the check-in desk, announces, “This is why grandma doesn’t go whitewater rafting!”
But under the lanyards and the cheery faces of the volunteers working the conference is a roiling anger. The people here feel betrayed and abandoned by the Church, which they say has forsaken its own ideals in favor of modernity and liberalism.
Theirs is an extreme expression of what’s become a familiar feeling among millions of Americans who feel alienated from organizations or institutions or political parties they used to trust: I didn’t leave it. It left me. It’s an alienation that has led to a collapse of trust—even among the most faithful, even when it comes to one of the most ancient institutions in the West.
It is not an exaggeration to say Father James Altman railing against Rome sounds just a little like Martin Luther with his Ninety-Five Theses doing the same more than 500 years ago in Wittenberg, Germany, igniting the Reformation that split the church.
“Covid really woke a lot of people up to what’s happening,” attendee Linda Kapolas tells me while perusing hand-painted canvases of St. Michael for sale in the vendor room. Kapolas, who lives between Arizona and Wisconsin, had started following Father Altman, and then the rest of the canceled priests like Fr. Clay Hunt, Fr. Jeff Fasching, and Fr. James Parker on social media.
“We know that Satan has infiltrated much of the church at this point,” she says. But when I ask for examples, I get a vague answer: “Events that are taking place, the divisions that are occurring, things that the pope is coming out with.”
In short, she just doesn't trust it anymore.
Nor does Abby Johnson, the pro-life activist who worked for Planned Parenthood between 2001 and 2009 before pivoting hard against abortion. She kicked off the two-day event with a rant about how scientists developed the Covid vaccine using cells from aborted babies, and how the Church, in her mind, just shrugged that off.
“Nevermind the fact that if you get the jab and you’re pregnant, it might kill your baby in the womb,” Johnson boomed. Someone pipes up from a table in the back—“Tell it, Abby!”—before the whole room breaks out in applause.
Back in August 2021, when the pope said it was an “act of love” to get the shot, Abby went rogue. She posted a video on Facebook about vaccines and was promptly disinvited from speaking at a few pro-life and Catholic events. One was a women’s event in her diocese in Texas. Two others were with National Right to Life, the biggest anti-abortion organization in the country. All three canceled her for “going against the Church,” she says.
“They can cancel me here but I will not be canceled in the kingdom of God,” she trills, followed by another big round of applause.
The vaccine isn’t the only sticking point for these Catholics. Many of them are also upset that Rome encouraged churches to shut their doors during the pandemic, which people here count as sacrilege. Another gripe that comes up in several of the speeches and conversations I had is the 2019 service attended by the pope in the Vatican gardens where an Amazonian statue of a fertility goddess called Pachamama was on display, for which he was accused of pagan idolatry.
Some of the rage here dates as far back to 2003, when a scandal of widespread child abuse committed by priests first emerged in Boston. That these crimes continued well into 2018, when a Pennsylvania grand jury exposed how the Church had covered up the sexual abuse of over 1,000 children in the state by more than 300 priests over 70 years, has many here fuming. “If anyone’s abusing a child or anyone abusing anyone, period, I don’t care what their age is, it’s going against the dignity of the human person,” Father John Lovell, who founded and runs the coalition, told me. Lovell claims he was punished, and eventually axed by his bishop in Rockford, Illinois, after he blew the whistle on a teacher for having an inappropriate relationship with a student at a Catholic school where he taught.
In short, the Coalition for Canceled Priests is not impressed with Pope Francis’s 10-year tenure. But as much as they detest the state of the Church, the idea of leaving it is unthinkable. They want to get it back.
For many, that means returning to a time before the Second Vatican Council, which, among many changes, expressly disavowed any theological basis for antisemitism.
The conference attendees probably don’t believe the Jews are Christ-killers, but they do crave a more authentic Church, one that hasn’t forgotten itself. One that conducts its mass the way it used to, in Latin. One that isn’t bleeding hundreds of thousands of believers every year, from Latin America to Europe.
Over the dregs of a communal bowl of russet potato chips, I spoke to a young couple who traveled from Broward County in Florida for the conference.
“The traditional mass has been kind of hidden. It’s not really spoken about, you have to search for it,” Andrew James tells me. He’s here with Yairene Rivera, 30, who he met at church. Rivera describes the Latin Mass as "The One."
“I wanted the full experience of the mass that was never changed, no restrictions."
She’s not the only one attracted to the uncompromising version of the faith. In fact, hardline Catholicism is having a cultural moment. In young urban circles, like in downtown Manhattan, Catholicism has taken on a punk sheen, as religious orthodoxy becomes the new way to prove you’re transgressive. Meanwhile, the new, post-liberal right includes intellectuals who embrace the idea of integralism, which dictates that Catholicism should be the basis of our government and laws.
But while the coalition’s attendees are not urban punks or political theorists, they are most certainly activists.
One speaker, Liz Yore, is a lawyer who focuses on human trafficking and a frequent guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room. Now, onstage, flanked by a statue of Jesus on the cross and another of the Virgin Mary, Yore struggles to get her slideshow to work.
But then, suddenly, a cascade of images emblematic of the culture war spill out onto a screen.
There are pictures of singer Sam Smith dressed as a devil, transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney clutching a Bud Light can, and Drag Queen Story Hour at a public library. She calls out Target for being “groomers,” and the Los Angeles Dodgers for hosting drag group Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at their stadium for Pride Night. That event, which happened a few days before this conference, led to a Catholic uprising with thousands marching and wielding signs outside the stadium.
People here blame Pope Francis for being too welcoming toward gay Catholics. This summer, they point out, the pope invited Father James Martin, a well-known proponent of gay inclusion in the Church, to participate in a council in Rome.
“The hierarchy has joined sides with the perverted atheistic propaganda and agenda of the globalists,” Yore says, to the sound of boos. “That was painfully obvious last week at Dodger Stadium, as thousands of Catholics marched at the very same time that Jorge Bergoglio sends a handwritten love note to Father James Martin.”
Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, who describes himself as “red-pilled,” led the procession of protesters in L.A. People here call Strickland “America’s Bishop” and he’s the only one they have any nice words for. The rest of the church hierarchy is referred to as “an Old Boys club,” “company men,” “cowardly,” “corrupt,” “emasculated,” and “vipers.”
Around three o’clock on the second day of the conference, the organizers get word that the Vatican has launched a formal investigation into Bishop Strickland after his appearance at the Dodgers protest. Soon after, donations to the coalition started pouring in.
“I just got an email from an anonymous donor, I won’t say who, who donated $3,000 to the coalition,” announced Fr. Scott Duvall from the stage.
One of the speakers, radio host Jesse Romero, leads the room in “Strickland” chants. Everyone pulls out their rosaries, and many people fall to their knees to pray.
Out front, near the check-in desk, I ran into Megan Olszewski, 52, from Southeast Wisconsin. She has glasses and short hair, and tells me she got pregnant in her teens and came back to the church after 17 years when she was homeschooling her son and he started attending confession. “I thought, ‘How could I send him to confession if I haven’t gone?’ ”
I asked her about what she thought about the conference.
“I’ve learned a lot,” she says, but she looks worried. “I’ve heard of the deep state before but I never heard of the deep church. It’s kind of terrifying.”
“I’m a rules girl,” she continues. “For me, you always listen to the pope and your bishops but at this point with Francis, and some of these other bishops, I’m like, ‘What do I do now? Am I supposed to go against authority?’ Because it sure seems like it.”
Additional reporting by Gabe Cohen.
Suzy Weiss is a reporter at The Free Press. Her last feature was about the tech messiahs who are battling mortality.
From The “Free” Press, August 8, 2023
Trump CPAC Speech Preceded by 'Divisive' Fired Priest Downplaying Importance of Science
By: Cammy Pedroja
Before former President Donald Trump delivered his address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, on Sunday, "divisive" catholic priest, Father James Altman took the stage to pray for God's blessing on the conference, decry cancel culture and downplay the importance of science.
His appearance at the event came two days after he was suspended from preaching and fired from his role as pastor of a Wisconsin church.
Altman was dismissed and barred from preaching or celebrating mass anywhere but in private by La Crosse Bishop William Callahan last week. Altman was also instructed to take a 30-day spiritual retreat to "give him the possibility to spiritually heal, recharge and address the issues that caused the issuance of this decree." Altman is also forbidden from "exercising the function of pastor."
Altman's appearance at CPAC, where the theme was "America Un-Canceled," appeared to be violating those terms.
"Send your Spirit," Altman prayed to the spectators assembled at CPAC, "down upon us like the dewfall that fed the Israelites wandering in the desert in their time and place. Nourish us and strengthen us with such grace that we may be such witnesses of faith, family, and country that the whole world will come to know we will not be canceled."
In recent months, Altman has courted controversy by publicly breaking COVID-19 quarantine rules during lockdowns, referring to the coronavirus pandemic as "a hoax," and denigrating vaccination efforts.
"Our help is in the name of the Lord, who actually did make heaven and earth, and that's all the science we need to know," Altman told CPAC attendees. It was not immediately clear if he was alluding to the COVID-19 vaccination, although that was a topic of discussion at the event.
In April, a page from Altman's former church bulletin read, it is "diabolical for anyone to virtue-signal/shame/compel you to take such an experimental drug, making you nothing other than a guinea pig," seeming to refer to the COVID-19 vaccines. "God is still the best doctor and prayer is still the best medicine," the statement said.
Altman, who had previously been asked to willingly step down as pastor at St. James the Less Catholic Church, was eventually removed from the role unwillingly. He had been given repeated warnings about his "divisive and ineffective" actions, which had gained him national attention in recent months.
Altman became well-known among far-right Christians after he appeared in a video preaching, "You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat. Period."
"Repent of your support of that party or face the fires of hell," he said. Altman also slurred immigrants to the U.S. in the same video.
After his prayer to the CPAC audience, Altman later returned to the stage to field questions about faith and society.
Newsweek reached out to St. James the Less Catholic Church for comment.
From Newsweek, July 12, 2021
How Catholic Leaders Helped Give Rise to Violence at the U.S. Capitol
By: James Martin, S.J.
At the end of last August, the Rev. James Altman, the pastor of St. James the Less Parish in La Crosse, Wis., uploaded a video to YouTube that has been viewed over 1.2 million times. The video’s title voiced what an increasing number of Catholic bishops and priests were saying in the run-up to the presidential election: “You Cannot be a Catholic and a Democrat.”
“Their party platform absolutely is against everything the Catholic Church teaches,” said Father Altman, as music from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 swelled in the background. “So just quit pretending that you’re Catholic and vote Democrat. Repent of your support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell.”
(Full disclosure: Father Altman referred to me as a “hyper-confusion spreading heretic” in the same video.)
Incorrect moral reasoning
There are traditional restrictions on Catholic clergy endorsing political candidates. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ document on voting, “Faithful Citizenship,” states that the church should refrain from endorsing parties or candidates. As Pope Francis has said, the church is called “to form consciences, not to replace them.” More bluntly, a Vatican directive from 1994 says that a priest “ought to refrain from actively engaging himself in politics.”
The response of the local bishop to Father Altman’s video, however, was mixed. Bishop William Patrick Callahan released a written statement saying that while the tone was so “angry and judgmental” that it caused scandal, he understood “the undeniable truth that motivates [Father Altman’s] message.” He added that penalties might be applied if Father Altman did not respond to the bishop’s “fraternal correction.”
The U.S. bishops’ document on voting states that the church should refrain from endorsing parties or candidates. As Pope Francis has said, the church is called “to form consciences, not to replace them.”
In response, Father Altman simply doubled down, in a follow-up video titled “Liberal Catholics are Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.” Later, he compared the tactics of people on the “left” to those of Nazis in one video interview and ratcheted up his comments on the LifeSite News show “Mother Miriam Live,” in an episode titled “If you vote for Biden you’re voting for the murder of babies.”
A few weeks later, the Rev. Ed Meeks, the pastor of Christ the King Church in Towson, Md., preached a homily, also uploaded to YouTube, under the title “Staring into the Abyss,” in which he declared the Democratic Party the “party of death.”
Father Meeks’s video, which has received over two million views, was warmly commended by Bishop Joseph Strickland, of Tyler, Tex., who tweeted it out to his 40,000 followers with the message “Every Catholic should listen to this wise and faithful priest.” Earlier, Bishop Strickland had endorsed Father Altman’s video as well, tweeting, “As the Bishop of Tyler I endorse Fr Altman’s statement in this video. My shame is that it has taken me so long. Thank you Fr Altman for your COURAGE. If you love Jesus & His Church & this nation...pleases [sic] HEED THIS MESSAGE.” Father Altman later appeared as a guest on the premiere episode of “The Bishop Strickland Show” on LifeSite News.
Both videos focused on abortion. If a candidate was pro-choice, the priests said, then a Catholic could never vote for him or her because abortion is an intrinsic evil. Bishop Thomas Daly of Spokane summed up this approach in one interview by asking, “If abortion is intrinsically evil...how can Catholics vote for a candidate like Biden?”
This, however, does not adequately reflect church teaching, which leaves the final choice on voting to an individual’s formed conscience, recognizing that there are many important issues that a voter might have to consider. As the U.S.C.C.B. states in “Faithful Citizenship”:
There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position even on policies promoting an intrinsically evil act may reasonably decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons.
One “morally grave reason” would be if the pro-life candidate were unhinged, unfit to govern or somehow posed a threat to the republic—as President Trump confirmed he was by inciting a mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol, causing a stunningly violent riot that left five people dead.
Widespread pressure
Despite clear restrictions on political endorsements and the church’s longstanding teaching on conscience, the statements from Fathers Altman and Meeks and Bishop Strickland were part of a pattern of similar commentary from members of the clergy. Most did not make the news, as they were heard in homilies and read in parish bulletins. But they were no less effective in communicating the message that the election was an almost apocalyptic battle between good and evil.
In the weeks before the election, I received Facebook messages from many Catholics struggling to make sense of pastors who cast the election in such terms or condemned Democrats outright, either from the pulpit or in private conversations. Many felt not only attacked for their political views but alienated from their own parishes.
“How do I deal with my church life when my pastor says I am not a Catholic because I am a Biden supporter?” wrote one. “Father, I am struggling, I cannot vote for Donald Trump for many reasons. I’m being told if I vote for Joe Biden it’s a mortal sin. Can you please help me understand?” “Monsignor came to our house to chat about why our family left right after the divisive homily and why we were planning to leave the parish. This was the homily where he endorsed a political candidate and called anyone who voted for Biden a sinner or a pawn of the devil.”
Some provided links to homilies or letters that were posted online. The Rev. Kevin Cusick, the pastor of St. Francis de Sales Parish in Benedict, Md., wrote: “Joe Biden is not a practicing Catholic. And practicing Catholics cannot vote for Biden for president in good conscience.” The Rev. David Miller, the pastor of St. Dorothy’s Parish in North Carolina, said in a homily posted to YouTube that if “[Mr. Biden] dies the way he is now, unrepentant for his years of denying Christ...before repentance...you and I know where he will go: He will be damned to hell for all eternity.”
This approach was not confined to the local level. Cardinal Raymond Burke, the former Archbishop of St. Louis and a former Vatican official, had called the Democrats the “party of death” in 2008. This past autumn, he was a guest on EWTN’s show “The World Over,” where he was interviewed by Raymond Arroyo, speaking of Mr. Biden as involved in a “grave, immoral evil that is the source of scandal.”
Perhaps the most frequent promoter of these arguments was Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Vatican nuncio to the United States and one of Pope Francis’ most relentless critics. Mr. Biden, he said, is “a puppet manipulated by the elite, a puppet in the hands of people thirsty for power and willing to do anything to expand it.” Archbishop Viganò predicted that the election of Mr. Biden would usher in a near-Satanic age characterized by “ecumenism, Malthusian environmentalism, pansexualism and immigrationism.”
Archbishop Viganò predicted that the election of Mr. Biden would usher in a near-Satanic age characterized by “ecumenism, Malthusian environmentalism, pansexualism and immigrationism.”
I offer this lengthy list to show that these were not isolated incidents. Rather, they were part of a pattern of messages from bishops and priests casting the election not only in terms of pure good versus pure evil but in apocalyptic language.
Even after the election, such commentary continued. In late December, the Rev. Jeffrey Kirby, pastor of Our Lady of Grace in Lancaster, S.C., preached a homily on how to survive the “evil” Biden administration. Taking an even more extreme step, the Rev. John Zuhlsdorf, who lives in Madison, Wis., and blogs as “Father Z,” conducted an exorcism, broadcast on YouTube, over those who were involved in counting votes, who he said had engaged in “fraud,” “sin,” “lying,” “cheating” and “stealing” and who “put their souls in terrible mortal peril,” as well as over “demonic influence.”
“This morning during the 8:30 AM Mass,” someone wrote me just last week, a priest “stated from the pulpit that...if you voted for Joe Biden you weren’t a real Christian.”
For his part, Father Altman spoke out the day after the riots with another priest, the Rev. Richard Heilman, in a video titled “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God,” in which he expressed his rage against left-wing “Nazis.”
Real-life consequences
Where does this kind of dualistic and often apocalyptic language lead? It can, of course, lead to some Catholics voting for Donald Trump over Joe Biden. But it can also lead to anger at pastors, division in parishes, alienation from the church, hatred of candidates and elected officials, contempt for people who belong to one party, rage over election results, despair in the future of the country and, ultimately, to violence. For if the “party of death” gains power, then one must resist, by any means necessary.
Such dualistic thinking was strongly critiqued by Pope Francis in his address to the Joint Session of Congress in 2015, in the very building that would be vandalized: “[T]here is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.”
One could argue that lay Catholic commentators should be allowed to condemn whomever they want and endorse whomever they please, no matter how hateful their language. It is a free country.
Pope Francis: “[T]here is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.”
But when it comes to priests and bishops, it is not a free church. Nor should it be. There are many good reasons why Catholic clergy do not endorse candidates. Some that are often adduced: The church should never be aligned with one or another party since it limits its freedom and even corrupts it; bishops and pastors should never endorse one candidate because it will split dioceses and parishes; and the church should never endorse because it could jeopardize its tax-exempt status.
For myself, I offered a prayer at the Democratic National Convention but would have been happy to have offered the same prayer, word for word, at the Republican convention, if I had been asked. And I did not endorse either candidate. The traditional restrictions on clergy are sensible guidelines.
These seemingly theoretical reasons were displaced with the eruption of mob violence in Washington, egged on by the supposedly pro-life candidate, which led to the vandalizing of a hallowed national symbol, the interruption of the election process, physical danger posed to legislators and law officers, and worse, the death of five people. Can anyone doubt that the moral calculus proposed by some Christian leaders, including Catholic priests and bishops, framed in the language of pure good versus pure evil, contributed to the presence of so many rioters brandishing overtly Christian symbols as they carried out their violence?
Thus, the more important reason to avoid that kind of moral language is this: When casting an election in terms of pure evil and pure good, when saying that voting for one candidate will cause someone to go to hell or when demonizing candidates as monsters, one runs the risk of people drawing the conclusion that fighting against this, by any means necessary, is an absolute moral imperative. If one party is the “party of death,” then eradicating it is a triumph for life.
Personal vilification
This faulty moral reasoning—you will go to hell if you vote for Mr. Biden, you commit a mortal sin by not voting for President Trump, the Democrats are the party of death—was exacerbated by widespread personal vilification of candidates from Catholic leaders.
Bishop Richard Stika of Knoxville, Tenn., tweeted this about Mr. Biden and his “sidekick,” Senator Kamala Harris: “[I] don’t understand how Mr. Biden can claim to be a good and faithful Catholic as he denies so much of Church teaching, especially on the absolute child abuse and human rights violations of the most innocent, the not yet born,” followed by “And he also praises his sidekick who has shown time and time again in senate [sic] hearings that she is an anti-Catholic bigot....”
“Why is it that the supporters of this goddamn loser Biden and his morally corrupt, America-hating, God hating Democrat party can’t say a goddamn thing in support of their loser candidate without using the word Trump? What the hell do you have to say for yourselves losers?” the Rev. Frank Pavone, the national director of Priests for Life, wrote in a tweet that has since been deleted.
Bishops and priests need to understand the real-life effects of such contemptuous and even dehumanizing language.
Personal vilification from members of the clergy inevitably gives rise to a lack of respect from the faithful, making it easier for those in the pews to revile government and civic leaders. Why respect someone who is a “puppet,” “bound for hell,” not a “good and faithful Catholic” or “a walking and talking scandal,” as another priest said? If bishops, the pre-eminent teachers in their dioceses, treat people with such contempt, then one should not be surprised when the faithful take their lead and, in turn, treat their institutions as something to be taken, razed, destroyed—because they are destroying institutions run by evil men and their “sidekicks.”
Bishops and priests need to understand the real-life effects of such contemptuous and even dehumanizing language. Catholic bishops and priests are meant to teach morality, but they are not meant to judge others (as Jesus said clearly) or to treat people with such bitter contempt. The real-world effect of this kind of language was revealed at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Jesus is My Savior. Trump is My President.
For many people who were encouraged in such dualistic thinking by their pastors, then, the choice was obvious. Storming the U.S. Capitol and, as we now know, planning to abduct or harm lawmakers, was a fight for life, for morality—for God.
This is why it was not surprising to see a surfeit of Christian signs and symbols as rioters overwhelmed the barricades and burst through the doors of the Capitol: “Jesus Saves,” “God, Guns and Trump,” “You Need Jesus” and “Jesus is My Savior. Trump is My President.” Or why aides to Senator Mitch McConnell heard a woman praying outside their barricaded door, at the height of the panic, for the “evil of Congress to be brought to an end.”
The invasion of the U.S. Capitol was seen by many rioters not simply as a political act but a religious one, in great part thanks to the moral framework fostered by too many Christian leaders.
The invasion of the U.S. Capitol was seen by many rioters not simply as a political act but a religious one, in great part thanks to the moral framework fostered by too many Christian leaders. Christians in the mob probably did not consider themselves criminals as much as prophets. One journalist reported the scene: “‘Give it up if you believe in Jesus!’ a man yelled near me. People cheered. ‘Give it up if you believe in Donald Trump!’ Louder cheer.”
Those who broke windows, trampled on journalists, terrified legislators and destroyed property likely felt they were doing something holy. Why wouldn’t they? This was a fight against evil. After all, that is what a cardinal, a small number of bishops and many more priests, aligning with self-appointed social media champions of “real Catholicism,” had been telling them for months. They heard it from the pulpit, they read it in parish bulletins and they saw it on social media.
By their fruits
To be clear, there were obvious moral questions in this election: abortion, economic justice, racism, migrants and refugees, care for the poor, care for the environment. But one side focused primarily on the single issue of abortion, which became the litmus test for all moral decision making and the way to declare if a candidate or a party was evil.
The moral evaluation of candidates for public office is never that simple, even if the moral nature of some specific public policy positions is straightforward. The evaluation of candidates often does involve questions of good and evil, but they are questions about policies and prudential judgments about the effect of electing a candidate, not absolute rules and not summary condemnations of a candidate’s moral goodness.
An alarming number of Catholic clergy contributed to an environment that led to the fatal riots at the U.S. Capitol.
Thanks to many bishops and priests, however, those nuanced views, as well the rich tradition on the primacy of the formed conscience and the degrees of “moral cooperation” were lost; the lack of any real action against priests and bishops promoting false dichotomies meant that people assumed simplistic bromides were “church teaching”; and the ability of so many apocalyptic voices to command a public stage through a coordinated effort by the far-right media gave these views a bigger megaphone.
The mistake for which Catholic leaders should be corrected, the mistake for which the church now needs to repent, is not simply casting this election in terms of good and evil; it is pretending that real questions of good and evil could be simplified to the point where violent responses, even acts of domestic terrorism, become thinkable and then are carried out.
As such, an alarming number of Catholic clergy contributed to an environment that led to the fatal riots at the U.S. Capitol. Ironically, priests and bishops who count themselves as pro-life helped spawn a hate-filled environment that led to mayhem, violence and, ultimately, death.
From America magazine, January 12, 2021