“Bishop Barron,” I said to a friend earlier, “has fallen off harder than The Simpsons.” One might also say he has jumped the proverbial selachian, like in the (in)famous Happy Days plotline illustrated in the featured image above.
The context for this was an astonishing post from the bishop on the platform formerly known as Twitter, which he devoted entirely to how wonderful he thinks Donald Trump’s policies on religious liberty are. I’ll also include a screenshot of that post in this essay, for those who don’t want to give it traffic, or in case Barron thinks better of it at some point and takes it down.
Barron is a diocesan bishop in Minnesota, which admittedly can be difficult to tell given his focus on national culture war issues and/or municipal politics in another part of the country. From his comments here one would never suspect that anything particularly bad or alarming is currently happening in Minnesota. Certainly one would not suspect that it is the current main theater for a war of words, of morals, and of spirits between Catholic teaching on human dignity and the politician Barron is so fulsomely praising. One would also never suspect that this (supposedly) has to do with an issue area, immigration enforcement, in which current policy involves an awful lot of denial of religious liberty to detainees, including Catholic ones. That’s not what Bishop Barron is interested in these days.
I don’t know what happened, although the fact that Barron has a podcast probably has a lot to do with it. Apparently Christopher Hale over at Letters from Leo has his theories. There’s probably something to those theories, but I’m less interested in the how and why and more interested in the what. It hasn’t fully sunk in for many Catholics that Barron is no longer a serious voice in the public square. That is a fact that has to be admitted, even though (or because) it is a tragedy.
Barron’s current style, tone, and focus remind me not so much of anyone else currently prominent on the American Catholic right as of Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest from my own state who served in the US House of Representatives from 1971 till 1981. Drinan got into electoral politics because he opposed the Vietnam War, but he was also so pro-choice that he is thought to have actually influenced various other left-of-center politicians, including “big names” like Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton, towards more absolutist pro-choice positions. I’m sure Barron and Drinan would both hate this comparison, but it’s what comes to mind. These are men who seem to take a perverse joy in making a priority of something on which they increasingly part company from the moral and intellectual requirements of Catholic clerical leadership, to prove that they’re independent thinkers or to declare that they’re better than other people or to signal that they “get it” or for some other reason.
It’s not too late for Bishop Barron, because it’s not too late for any of us. He’s almost certainly not going to read this, but if by some chance he does: I beg you, bishop, please log off and, as they say, touch grass. I know it’s cold in Minnesota this time of year. It is in Massachusetts too. But I’ve heard it’s beautiful country out there.
Image: The Fonz jumping the shark.
Nathan Turowsky—a native New Englander, an alumnus of Boston University School of Theology, and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution—works in the nonprofit sector and writes at Silicate Siesta.
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