While We’re At It

♦ For some commentators, it’s always 1939. The title of a recent essay in The Atlantic by Anne Appelbaum says it all: “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” Applebaum makes much of Trump’s penchant for hyperbolic slander: “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin”; illegal immigrants who are “poisoning the blood of our country”; “sick people, radical-left lunatics.” No doubt these and other characterizations coarsen civic discourse. Unfortunately, Appelbaum and others ignore the fact that “fascist” is likewise a term of character assassination, and just as hyperbolic. Incontinent in their denunciations, which draw on the Manichean mythology of the twentieth century, they, too, increase the rancor in our society. Applebaum accuses Trump of “the cultivation of hatred.” She responds in kind.

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♦ Anthony Trollope’s characterization in Barchester Towers of an Anglican divine, Francis Arabin: “a high churchman at all points; so high indeed that at one period of his career he had all but toppled over into the cesspool of Rome.”

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♦ Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas: “Catholicism will be nihilism’s last competitor on the dance floor of history, and Catholicism will see it drop from exhaustion as the orchestra plays on. The music itself will testify.”

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♦ Kamala Harris released a five-part Opportunity Agenda for Black Men. The fifth item promised to legalize marijuana. Apparently, her campaign wishes to increase opportunities for black men to be stupefied.

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♦ Massimo Faggioli writing in Commonweal:

Francis doesn’t seem to have been influenced by the synodal vision that he is advocating for when it comes to his own manner of exercising papal primacy. This has created a sort of journalistic ultramontanism, augmented by Francis’s direct and frequent interactions with the press, where the only voice that ends up mattering is his. This problem was especially apparent most recently on the in-flight press conference of September 13, when Francis addressed the upcoming presidential election and suggested a moral equivalence between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Whatever happens on November 5 and after, Catholic voices must find a way to speak again to the ­public—but maybe also to the pope.

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♦ Krumme 13 is a group in Germany that lobbies for lowering the age of consent and legalizing child pornography. Don’t imagine that this effort is doomed to fail. If progressives are eager to allow thirteen-year-olds to choose to take life-altering hormones and undergo sex-change surgery, it’s hard to see why they shouldn’t let them choose to have sex with whomever they want. 

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♦ Results of a survey conducted by the S.I. ­Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse ­University: 

In 2022, slightly more than 36% of U.S. journalists say they identify with the Democrat Party, up about eight percentage points from 2013. The number of those who identified with the Republican party decreased about six percentage points to 3.4% during the same period. The number of journalists identifying as Independents increased by about two percentage points to 52% in 2022.

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♦ Mass immigration continues to roil European politics, and mainstream parties are beginning to adjust. In October, the German center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union, called for the European Union to build and reinforce border fences separating EU member states from sources of asylum seekers such as Belarus and Turkey. French interior minister Bruno Retailleau announced his support for a referendum on immigration, a measure long called for by Marine Le Pen’s party, Rassemblement National. In my estimation, these are signs of sanity. Determined to remain in power, the center aims to usurp the political advantages of the right. Democracy in action.

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♦ Seventeenth-century Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor: “Men are apt to prefer prosperous error to an afflicted truth.” In this matter, times have not changed.

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♦ Writing in his First Things “Synod Diary,” Larry Chapp notes the striking over-representation of ­Jesuits at October’s Synod on Synodality. Of the 310 clergy and religious who participated in official capacities, twenty-­five are members of the Society of Jesus. And they played prominent roles. The special secretary to the Synod, Fr. Giacomo Costa, is a Jesuit, as is the ­relator general, Jean-Claude Cardinal Hollerich. Eight of the thirty-seven Synod facilitators are Jesuits. ­Jesuits are also over-represented among theological experts and observers. Chapp notes the irony:

Though the promoters of this Synod and of the synodality concept emphasize hearing a wide range of voices, it is striking how many of those voices come from a very particular location within the contemporary Church. We’ve been told repeatedly that the three-year-long synodal process has been a genuine exercise in listening to “the People of God” and, indeed, to the Holy Spirit. But it seems that the Spirit has made a preferential option for listening to Jesuit voices above all others, and that the Jesuits represent the People of God in a strikingly outsized way.

Instead of “going to the peripheries,” as a slogan of this pontificate urges, we are asked to follow leading figures of the progressive Catholic establishment in the West. Chapp again: “In a global Church that is, ­indisputably, the most multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilinguistic, and multinational institution on the planet, the claim that a Synod, dominated in its leadership positions by Jesuits from the global north, is representative of the world Church is prima facie ­implausible.”

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♦ The synod underway in Rome as I write is Seinfeldian, a synod about nothing. So argues Kevin ­Tierney in his Substack column, “Kevin’s Substack.” The Francis pontificate has encouraged open warfare among factions: progressives, conservatives, rad-trads, African eminences, American bishops, and so on. The effect has been incoherence and herky-jerky, stop-start measures such as Fiducia Supplicans, which allowed (sort of) the blessing of same-sex couples, just as an earlier measure allowed (sort of) the reception of Communion by divorced and remarried Catholics. The give-then-take-away dance was repeated when Pope Francis removed all progressive ambitions from the synod’s agenda, doing so after having promised that the synodal process would represent a new and transformative way of “doing church.” In effect, everything cancels everything else. “This will result in an ­eventual apostolic exhortation that nobody will read, and even fewer will implement. We’ve come a long way from ‘the culmination of the Second Vatican ­Council’”—the initial marketing of the synodal process—“to a discussion about nothing, leading to a document about nothing, to be read by nobody.”

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♦ Tierney is right. Yes, there will be uses of canonical power. The Vatican recently ordered an apostolic visitation of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, a traditionalist movement devoted to the Latin Mass. No doubt the visitation is being orchestrated by those who hope that Francis will suppress the society. But whatever the outcome, no minds will be changed. Latin Mass attendance will continue to increase, along with bitterness toward the arrogant and authoritarian Baby Boomers who preach “inclusion” while persecuting those who hold different views. Instead of uniting the Church, this pontificate has promoted its fragmentation. The Holy Spirit may be smiling. Catholicism seems to be heading toward a more federal structure, in spirit if not in law. Perhaps this development will be a fitting corrective to the undue “Romanization” of the Church after the pontificate of Pius IX.

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♦ Simone Weil: “If children are accustomed to not thinking of God, they will become fascists or Communists out of a need to give themselves to something.” Perhaps, but as Dan Mahoney observes in “Simone Weil’s Conversion” (Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2024), “listless nihilism” and “spiritual indifference” are also possibilities.

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♦ We are racing to complete work on a new website. Our ambition is to provide readers with an online experience as delightful as our beautiful print edition. We’re proud of what we publish. We want to be proud of the way in which we publish. The new website will have a few new features. Subscribers will be able to download a PDF of the new issues as they appear, allowing for ­leisurely reading on an iPad or laptop in places with spotty Wi-Fi coverage. (Regulars on Amtrak will appreciate this feature.)The new website will also employ a comprehensive paywall. (At present, web-exclusive content is free to everyone at all times.) The experts we consulted counseled us to maintain a tight paywall, permitting just one or two free articles before requiring a subscription. But increased subscription revenue is not our sole motive. We have a mission, and we want our content to be read by as many people as possible. The new website will impose limits on free content in the hope that devoted readers who are not subscribers will join our community of supporters. Our prices will remain low, lower than many Substack subscriptions and other online magazines.As a rule, readers rarely like change. I’m among them. But as St. John Henry Newman observed: “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” We won’t be perfect, but our aim is to have a living ­publication—hence, our new website.

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♦ I’m pleased to announce the launch of an annual First Things lecture in Florida, named in honor of our founder, Richard John Neuhaus. Political philosopher Patrick Deneen will deliver the inaugural Neuhaus Lecture at New College of Florida on Thursday, February 13. Visit firstthings.com for details.