Matthew Remsky critiques Bishop Robert Barron as America's foremost fascist apologist, highlighting his alignment with right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and service on Trump's Commission for Religious Liberty. Remsky contrasts Barron's silence on ICE raids targeting Minnesota parishioners with his tweets urging protesters to stop interfering, while exposing how his "Word on Fire" empire selectively promotes Thomas Merton despite omitting his radical activism. The segment concludes by noting Vatican reviews into Barron's alleged obedience to the U.S. president over Pope Leo XIV, suggesting a dangerous prioritization of political power over ecclesiastical duty. [Automatically generated summary]
On June 11th, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing.
Hey, don't kill a cop and bury him.
What are they going to do to me?
What really happened to the missing deputy?
Valley of Shadows, a new series from Pushkin Industries about crime and corruption in California's high desert.
Listen to Valley of Shadows wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, everyone.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
You can follow myself, Derek, and Julian on Blue Sky.
The podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle.
You can also support our Patreon.
And you can find me personally on YouTube and TikTok and upscrolled at antifascistdad.
Hey, everybody, it's Bishop Barron.
You know, just last week, Marco Rubio gave a talk that I thought was really good in Munich.
He was talking about the shared culture of Europe and America.
He referenced Gothic cathedrals and Dante and Shakespeare and even the Beatles.
His point was, we got to get beyond just our political differences and find our sources in the great culture that unites us.
Ah, yes, the culture that unites us all, eloquently described by Marco Rubio, the tip of Trump's imperial spear.
That was Bishop Bootlicker Barron of Minnesota, and I humbly pray to Jesus that my efforts here lock in this new name for our guy through this brief episode.
Barron has now superseded the now demoted QAnon Pope, Bishop Strickland, as America's foremost fascist apologist Catholic influencer.
But unlike Strickland, Barron, in my view, is more dangerous because he covers his red scare themes in Midwest folksiness and a well-tailored cassock of liberal respectability dedicated to making the Trump agenda tolerable to mainstream Catholics.
So today I'll run through Bishop Barron's greatest bootlicking hits from being an early adopter of Jordan Peterson's wisdom to boosting the likes of Michael Knowles on his podcast to serving on Trump's Commission for Religious Liberty to presiding over the wake of Charlie Kirk.
Catholic Crusaders in Spain00:04:58
And where does it all end?
Well, these days with utter silence in the aftermath of his own home state of Minnesota being under siege from ICE when his own Latino parishioners cowered on Sunday mornings unable to bring themselves to venture out to mass and as Alex Predi who happened to be Catholic is shot in the back by federal goons.
I'll get back to his views on Rubio at the end as well.
But first, let's set the historical stage with a memory of another time in which Catholic elites supported fascism.
The bishops blessed the blue shirts down in Galway as the sail beneath us was the girl to Spain.
He was the king of the God.
So that is Irish folk singer Christy Moore in Glasgow singing Viva la Quinta Brigada, his tribute to the international brigades who fought on the side of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War.
Those verses spotlight Baron's forebears in the Irish church.
I'll add some context here with the help of an article by Firgel McGarry, a Government of Ireland research fellow from the National University of Ireland in Maynooth.
McGarry writes, quote, in August 1936, General Owen O'Duffy, the former Garda Commissioner and Blue Shirt leader, announced the formation of an Irish brigade to fight for Franco.
O'Duffy claimed he was motivated by the historic links between Ireland and Spain, anti-communism, and the need to defend the Catholic Church.
Cardinal McRory had indeed encouraged O'Duffy to form the brigade, but O'Duffy, a failed politician, was also motivated by his fascist beliefs and a desire to resuscitate his own political career.
His proposal was very popular.
By late August, he claimed to have received 7,000 applications, although due to numerous complications, only 700 of these made it to nationalist Spain.
Most of the brigade's officers, former blue shirts and members of O'Duffy's National Corporate Party, were motivated by fascism or loyalty to their leader.
Some of the volunteers sought adventure or, as one priest put it, a change from standing around staring at the pump, but the great majority were genuinely motivated by the belief that the Spanish Civil War was a religious crusade against communism.
They were predominantly young men from rural Ireland, and few of them would have been exposed to any other analysis of the conflict.
As one teenager wrote to his mother, I didn't want to tell you I was coming here that day because I was afraid you wouldn't like it.
I have a feeling you hate me for it, but after all, what I have done is for our Lord, and if I die, it will be only for the best.
Newspaper accounts convey the atmosphere of militant Catholicism as the volunteers left Ireland.
Large crowds gathered to sing Faith of Our Fathers as the volunteers were blessed by priests and handed sacred heart badges, miraculous medals, and prayer books.
The brigade's organizers told the volunteers they were part of a crusade prepared to fight under the banner of the cross to help deliver Spain.
Most were to find the war a very different kind of crusade from what they imagined.
So, the Catholic Church, the most influential body in the young Irish state, committed itself fully to Franco's cause.
Quote, there is no room any longer for any doubts as to the issue at stake in the Spanish conflict, declared Cardinal McRory in September 1936.
It is a question of whether Spain will remain as she has been so long, a Christian and Catholic land or a Bolshevist and anti-God one.
Now, Christy Moore, in his song, doesn't leave the theme of religion in the doghouse because he also sings about a Christian brother and an Anglican minister who actually travel from Killarney and Derry respectively to Spain to fight with the anti-fascists.
There's always an anti-fascist path.
Now, Robert Barron, born in Chicago in 1959, doesn't make much hay out of his Irish heritage, but at this point, he's showing the signs of some inherited fascist traits.
Walking Through Fire00:15:43
He was ordained in 1986 and served as a seminary rector and completed graduate degrees with a focus on Thomas Aquinas and Heidegger.
Nothing too adventurous.
Aquinas is all about synthesizing Christian theology and Aristotle according to Enlightenment principles, and Heidegger was famous for digesting existentialism and phenomenology into forms that inspired a generation of Catholic theologians.
He was also an unrepentant Nazi.
Now, in getting to know Barron's work in preparation for this, I think it's notable that he's in that late slice of boomerdom called Generation Jones.
These are folks who were too young to meaningfully participate in 1960s counterculture, and a lot of that generation telegraphed the melancholy of my own Generation X.
They came of age during stagflation, Watergate, and post-Vietnam Malaise.
But Baron comes off as if he has never had a period of disillusionment.
It feels like he hit the ground running in the mid-70s, like it was still the 50s.
Pope Francis appointed Baron Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles in 2015, and in 2022, Francis moved him to Winona, Rochester, Minnesota, where he's now the Archbishop.
The Vatican doesn't disclose why bishops are moved around or appointed this place and that place, but it's notable that in 2018, Winona Rochester declared bankruptcy in advance of a pending abuse settlement.
In 2021, the Archdiocese was ordered to pay out $21.5 million to 145 survivors of clerical abuse.
So when Barron arrives the following year, he's rebuilding a whole infrastructure, and maybe his entrepreneurialism had something to offer that project.
Speaking of which, why does Bishop Barron have 438,000 followers on X?
Well, he worked hard for it.
He's been running a media platform called Word on Fire since 2000, which produces Catholic propaganda, books, videos, podcasts, educational resources.
He got a big public boost as a talking head on the 2011 documentary series Catholicism, which aired on PBS.
And according to tax filings, Word on Fire brings in about $27 million per year and holds over $50 million in assets.
No religious media entrepreneur is even doing his job if he's not also selling courses on how to be like him.
So Barron's Word on Fire Institute, according to its homepage, boasts 29,000 members who are paying $27 a month subscription.
That alone is a gross of $9 million per year.
To avail themselves of what Barron transparently presents as propaganda, conferences, live stream events, an endless scroll of videos by Barron and guests instructing members on how to evangelize like they do, especially to those in recent surveys who identify as none.
In other words, younger people who claim no religious affiliation when asked.
From their mission statement, quote, the Word on Fire Institute equips members to evangelize the culture with an array of opportunities to learn and connect with fellow believers, including interactive live seminars, evangelically oriented retreats, college-level courses, evangelical charism communities, professional certification opportunities, and access to an accredited master's degree, all on one easy-to-use platform.
We're building a digital city of God, a community of communities, a place to be and become Catholic with and for others.
Now, you might hear the ping of St. Augustine here.
What's important in that framing is that Augustine explicitly juxtaposed the city of God with this irredeemable earthly city.
So the idea is that Barron is creating a counterculture within secular digital space.
And when you scroll through the curriculum, it's very ambitious.
There's a kind of sense of totality or completeness that I associate with that early 20th century Catholic iteration of the third way, an attempt to intervene in human affairs from beyond the duality of communism and capitalism.
It has a college-level vibe to it, which makes sense given Baron's target market, the irreligiosity of younger people.
Here's a summary from Jared Zimmerer, the former senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and the Dean of Pastoral Fellows.
Quote, If you've listened to anything produced by Bishop Barron within the last two years, you've probably heard the dire statistics of the nuns, those absented from religion.
Of particular concern are those in the iGen, those born between 1995 and 2012.
One of the most difficult aspects of dealing with a crisis of such proportion and type is thinking through a solution to the problem.
There are many who have come to find that in the great tradition of reformers and evangelists, there really isn't that one thing that's going to solve a crisis.
Rather, if you look at those who have made the greatest impact on the culture, the only consistent piece of their lives was that they lived the faith radically in love with Jesus Christ.
So, Barron's podcast archive is pretty broad, and I think you'd expect that for someone who's been on the mic for two decades.
And you can also see in his guest roster the echoes of his academic focus.
For instance, Heidegger haunts his emphasis on beauty as an entry point for faith, art, architecture, and music all being evidence of Catholicism's cultural depth.
So, he's a huge fan of Catholic painters like Makoto Fujimara, who does really beautiful abstract art, and John August Swanson, a Catholic narrative painter and printmaker.
And I actually enjoyed getting to know the work of these two.
In Catholic music, he adores the French composer Olivier Messian, especially for his quartet for the end of time, which he wrote in a Nazi POW camp.
He loves Arvo Pert, the Estonian minimalist who became Eastern Orthodox after the Soviet period ended.
I mean, who doesn't love Arvo Pert.
And Barron consistently promotes Gregorian chant as the heartbeat of Catholic culture.
In writers, he's a G.K. Chesterton guy, he's a Flannery O'Connor guy.
It's all modernist stuff.
And with the exception of Chesterton and O'Connor, who are both anti-communists, he's pretty avoidant of politics in his artistic tastes, it seems.
Barron's curation says that the realm of beauty points to transcendence beyond politics, full stop.
Now, I would have to conduct an exhaustive survey of Barron's archive to really understand where he begins to strongly sort of manifest this right word drift.
What I can say is that before he merges with the right-wing media ecosystem in 2018, which started with him boosting Jordan Peterson with a fawning review of 12 Rules for Life, I think he showed his political cards with his celebration of Thomas Merton's 100th birthday anniversary.
So he wrote an article in 2015 in which he described reading Merton's spiritual autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, reading it as a teenager, and how it opened him up to the mysteries of contemplative life.
And with good reason, because Merton was an incredible scribe of his inner states.
And I'm being very particular there.
They are his inner states, because I think one of the big misconceptions about mystics is that they're describing some sort of universal state instead of their own sort of unique or, you know, idiosyncratic feelings.
But the thing that he focused on more was this sense of silent uncertainty.
And to give a sense of what that feels like, I just want to give a passage from a book called The Signs of Jonas.
And it's from an account of Merton making the night rounds of the fire watch at his home monastery in Gethsemane in Kentucky.
Now, the fire watch is instituted because of a great fire at the monastery a generation before, you know, because there's bad electrical wiring in the old building and, you know, there's open flames with gas appliances and things like that.
So he's making the fire watch walk.
It's late at night.
He writes, I have prayed to you in the daytime with thoughts and reasons, and in the nighttime you have confronted me, scattering thought and reason.
I have come to you in the morning with light and with desire, and you have descended upon me with great gentleness, with most forbearing silence, in this inexplicable night, dispersing light, defeating all desire.
I have explained to you a hundred times my motives for entering the monastery, and you have listened and said nothing, and I have turned away and wept with shame.
Is it true that all my motives have meant nothing?
Is it true that all my desires were an illusion?
While I am asking questions which you do not answer, you ask me a question which is so simple that I cannot answer.
I do not even understand the question.
So for me, there's a lot to love there.
And while my view on Barron today is that he's on the road to full-blown fascist collaborator, I can see where he comes from.
It's an era of U.S. Catholic devotionalism that's supported by the post-war dream of the Pax Americana.
We won the war.
We know communism is evil, but we're not fully aligned with consumerist capitalism either.
We are looking for a holy space outside of politics.
And that's the focus of Barron's praise for Merton.
Merton the contemplative, Merton the monk, perpetually entranced by God.
What Barron avoids entirely, however, is Merton's radical politics, his vehement opposition to Vietnam, his civil rights activism, his relentless criticism of consumerism, and his drive to collaborate with Buddhist activists.
Barron leaves all of that out.
It's literally the most important stuff.
And as if to underline just how narrow his focus is, he actually plays devil's advocate against Merton's legacy for two reasons that I think are really distractive.
So he starts that sort of section of Devil's Advocate writing, sadly, for many younger Catholics today, Merton, if he is known at all, is viewed with a certain suspicion, and this for two reasons.
So here are the two things he wants to comfort young Catholics about when they're encountering Merton.
He mentions Merton's confession of having briefly fallen in love with a much younger woman before returning to his vows.
Okay, then number two is just how interested he seemed to have been in Buddhism.
Young people, Barron warned, might, quote, see this as an indication of a religious relativism or a vague syncretism.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Merton was indeed fascinated by the Eastern religions and felt that Christians could benefit from a greater understanding of their theory and practice, but he never for a moment felt that all the religions were the same or that Christians should move to some space beyond Christianity.
So this is subtle, but I think the key to Barron's rightward turn is all here.
He's idealizing a pretty volatile, mystical guy who came of age immediately before him in the fever of the 1960s.
The Catholic Church was barely able to contain Merton, a former alcoholic who is clearly afflicted with hypergraphia, publishing 50 books in his life and 20 more after he died at 53 by electrocution in his hotel room in Bangkok while attending a conference on monasticism and interreligious dialogue within the context of the anti-war movement.
Merton also never seemed to sleep.
But Barron debones Merton's work of any political significance and reassures the normie Catholics that Merton never had sex, or if he broke the rules a little bit, he was forgiven, and that none of his creativity or despair or fascination with friends like Thich Nhat Hanh even scratched his holy Catholic identity.
As if he can read Merton's mind, Barron transforms him into a digestible centrist saint, someone very much in Barron's own mold, well-read, well-educated, worldly, outwardly ecumenical, but inwardly zealous.
He's walked through the fire of celibacy and has come out radiant.
Barron's job is to accept Merton into the company of saints safely tucked away in gold-leafed children's books.
Now, leaving out Merton's appreciation for Marxism, his criticism of fanatical anti-communism, which he said was becoming its own religion, it's like presenting Martin Luther King Jr. as though he was just a black Baptist preacher.
So that's 2015, that tribute to Thomas Merton.
Trump comes to power in 2016.
In 2018, Barron gives a warm review of Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life, although he stays away from Peterson's fascist-leaning politics for the most part.
But here's his angle, quote, In many ways, Peterson is doing for this generation what Joseph Campbell did for the previous one, namely, reintroducing the archetypal psychology of Carl Gustav Jung in an appealing and provocative manner.
Jung's theorizing centered around what he termed the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which is to say, those primordial instincts, insights, and memories that influence much of our behavior and that substantially inform the religions, philosophies, and rituals of the human race.
The Jungian template enables Peterson to interpret many of the classic spiritual texts of Western culture in a fresh way, those very texts so often excoriated by mainstream intellectuals as hopelessly patriarchal, biased, and oppressive.
It also permits him to speak with a kind of psychological and spiritual authority to which young people are not accustomed, but to which they respond eagerly.
Now, Barron also includes a gentle caution against Peter's Gnosticism, I mean, not his transphobia, but then he ends by pinging that peak manosphere trope.
I think it's especially valuable for the beleaguered young men in our society who need a mentor to tell them to stand up straight and act like heroes.
Now, from there, Barron's podcast archive becomes a rogues gallery.
He interviews Ben Shapiro, Chris Ruffo, Michael Knowles, Ross Douthet.
He's guested for Tucker Carlson and his friend, Jordan Peterson.
Now, what about these days?
Barron isn't actively on the stump for Trump, but he has accepted a Trump appointment on the Religious Liberty Commission about which he tweeted out, quote, I'm very grateful to President Trump for his declaration of Religious Liberty Day.
Barron's Religious Liberty Commission Appointment00:07:39
More than any other president in my lifetime, Trump has recognized the central importance of our first freedom.
He understands that when religious liberty is threatened, all of our other freedoms are endangered.
It has been an honor to serve on the President's Religious Liberty Commission, whose entire purpose is to propose ways in which this most precious of our freedoms might be defended and enhanced.
Now, this past December, he also rushed to eulogize Charlie Kirk on the day of his assassination, tweeting out, quote, he was indeed a great debater and also one of the best advocates in our country for civil discourse, but he was, first and last, a passionate Christian.
Five days later, Barron was writing in the conservative Catholic magazine First Things this eulogy in which he compared Kirk to Socrates, Plato, and Thomas Aquinas.
Quote, up until his dying moment, he concluded, Charlie was engaging in a practice that goes back to Socrates and that informs the West at its best.
And that is precisely we all feel so unnerved by his death.
We sense that something basic to our civilization, something axiomatic and fundamental, is teetering, and that truly fetid cultural influences have found their way into our institutions and the minds of our kids.
My sincere hope and prayer is that we can take renewed inspiration from a courageous and religious man who died not with a gun in his hand, but rather an instrument of communication.
Now, what has Barron had to say as the top Catholic cleric in Minnesota as it's occupied by a fascist federal government?
Well, so far, Barron isn't taking it as far as those bishops down in Galway.
He's not saying mass for ICE agents.
He's not waving incense over missiles pointed at Iran for that matter, but he could get there.
His diocese is just south of Minneapolis, and he's managed to say nothing about the chaos.
He said nothing about René Goode or Alex Pretty, who is Catholic.
He said nothing about his fellow citizens under siege.
Unitarians and liberation theology people are out there getting shot with pepper balls while standing up for their neighbors.
Meanwhile, Barron tweets out the following, quote, the Trump administration and ICE should limit themselves, at least for the time being, to rounding up undocumented people who have committed serious crimes.
Political leaders should stop stirring up resentment against officers who are endeavoring to enforce the laws of the country.
And protesters should cease interfering with the work of ICE.
And in line with his religious liberties gig, Barron took time out of his busy prayer schedule to be outraged about the group that protested inside the church of David Easterwood.
He's that pastor who's also an ICE field commander, and people found out and they went to his church.
You might have seen that that was the protest that Don Lemon got arrested at for simply attending as a journalist.
Because I guess, according to Barron, being an ICE field commander is just everyone's sacred right as a Christian.
He tweeted out, quote, I don't care what is animating or annoying you.
I don't care what your political persuasion might be.
Invading a church is unacceptable and is a violation of religious liberty.
So, Rene Goode, shot in the face, very animating.
Alex Predi, shot in the back, very annoying.
Predi, again, I'll emphasize, was Catholic.
Barron is so oblivious, so tone-deaf, so out to lunch that he thinks protesting an ICE commander at his own church is some kind of emotional tantrum rather than a tactic to get these secret police thugs to stop killing and kidnapping their neighbors.
He can't think of that protest action outside of the terms of manners.
This is not someone who believes that human beings change things.
Now, Bootlicker Barron has fielded a lot of criticism for his shameful silence about the attack on his home state and members of his own diocese, which is home to about 100,000 Catholics, with 4% to 5% of them being of Latino heritage, and around 4,000 members of the harassed Somali community also live there.
We don't know how many people ICE and Customs and Border Patrol have snatched off the street in Barron's diocese because the fascists don't do paperwork and they'll inflate or depress numbers according to the propaganda they need to put out.
So they've said 3,000, they've said we've detained 10,000, but what we know for sure is that they have been very active in Rochester.
So what Barron has done with his statement is relatively safe and in line with his religious liberty portfolio.
Back in November, he tweeted out, I have been in touch with senior officials in both the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security and have brought forward the concerns of the church regarding detainees' access to sacraments.
They have assured me that these matters are under careful review.
I feel that maintaining open lines of communication and engaging in dialogue with the administration constitute the most constructive way forward.
Now, he's not talking about dialoguing about warrantless arrests, ripping people out of homes and workplaces, flying them in leg chains to Texas without legal representation.
Barron's most concerned that while his Catholics are in prison, they are allowed to be Catholic.
Now, when I interviewed liberation theologian Father David Enchauskis over on Anti-Fascist Dad about his work on the prison communion issue in Chicago, he said, because he's involved in that initiative as well, to bring the Blessed Sacrament to prisoners detained in the main facility there, he said that this was part of a multi-pronged strategy that started with the assertion of prisoner dignity,
but could and probably would escalate into direct actions obstructing illegal arrests.
Bringing communion to prisoners is what you do while you're also doing whatever you can to get them out.
Barron is going to have many future opportunities to defend his people.
On February 25th, JD Vance announced that in the wake of ICE withdrawal, but also ongoing unsubstantiated claims running rampant on right-wing channels that Minnesota daycare centers run by Somali immigrants have been defrauding the feds,
Vance says the following, quote, we have decided to temporarily halt certain amounts of Medicaid funding that are going to the state of Minnesota in order to ensure that the state of Minnesota takes its obligation seriously to be good stewards of the American people's tax money.
NBC reports that the first payment to be withheld is worth $259 million.
And Governor Walls pointed out that, quote, these cuts will be devastating for veterans, families with young kids, folks with disabilities, and working people across our state.
And many of those people, of course, will be Catholic.
I'm going to zoom out on the home stretch here and ask, what seems to be most important to Bishop Bootlicker-Barron?
Material Conditions of Life00:11:52
And to do that, I'll go back to the top and flesh out those remarks he made about Marco Rubio's speech.
Here's the key graph.
Quote, his point, Rubio's point, was that we must look beyond our political differences and find our sources in the great culture that unites us, noting that culture is grounded in cult or religion.
He was not afraid to reference the Christian faith as a key element in giving rise to this shared culture.
Now, Rubio had spoken at the 62nd Munich Security Conference back in mid-February that brought together more than 40 heads of state and government, foreign and defense ministers, and senior representatives from NATO, the EU, and other dignitaries.
He took the opportunity to rant about protecting Western civilization.
And Barron just loved that.
But the punchline for his comment was directed at Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's response to Rubio and through her to the belly of the beast itself, in Barron's view, which is Marxism.
Here is the heart of what AOC said in response to Rubio.
You know, I think it's also important to note how thin that foundation is.
Culture is changing.
Culture always changed.
Culture for the entire history of human civilization has been a fluid, evolving thing that is a response to the conditions that we live in.
And so they want to take this mantle of culture.
At the end of the day, though, is you know, it is very thin.
And so the response that we have to have is, again, it's material, it's class-based, it's common interest.
There was certainly more openness to what I was saying than probably there would be in years past.
We can't underestimate the appeal of going back to these well-worn grooves.
A lot of what we talk about when we talk about a class-based internationalist perspective also means ending the hypocrisy towards the global south.
I'll go piece by piece through Barron's response because it's a masterpiece in Red Scare propaganda.
And what stands out to me is also how lazy it is, how he's reflecting AOC's concepts with decent fidelity, but pretending that they are self-evidently insane.
So that's speaking from the weight of hegemony for you, I guess.
Barron has no interest in persuading you why he's right.
He's there to simply remind the base of all the dog whistle keywords.
Now, as I'll go through, I'll provide the standard Marxist rebuttal since he's targeting Marxism for the purpose of showing that despite his erudition, he really doesn't know what he's talking about.
Well, I just, I think it was yesterday I saw Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez answering him, and I was very struck by her answer.
I thought it was very illuminating.
She said, oh, you know, this appeal to culture, it's so thin because culture is ephemeral.
It's always changing.
And so we shouldn't pay attention to culture.
We just pay attention to the material foundations in the class struggle.
Well, all of that, everybody, is right out of the Marxist playbook.
So as I said, he's not bad at communicating or reflecting her ideas with some fidelity.
So there's some sort of reasonability in there.
But then there's a lot of ignorance coming from a guy who seems to forget that every aspect of his existence, from his Swish education to his glasses, to his ability to produce propaganda at scale to the scarlet piping on his cassock, is created by the material labor of other people.
That's all culture, and it is downstream of modes of production.
There's none of that Gregorian chant, none of the painting, none of the organ music that Baron pins his transcendent hopes upon.
There's no writing by Thomas Merton, you know, which is inspired in part by his long-haul travel and his fascination with other cultures.
All of that comes through the usage of accumulated materials and manufactured things.
Culture does not flow from heaven, as Marco Rubio wants to imply.
It's not essential to the person or a mark of divine grace upon the nation.
It rises from the soil through the labor of creatures.
And then once it exists, it's not just some sort of veneer.
It's not an epiphenomenon.
It's not floating in space.
It becomes part of the material conditions of life.
Western culture, as Rubio invoked it, is thin the culture that gave us all those great figures, that gave us the rule of law, that gave us respect for the rights of the individual, that gave us our democratic political system, that gave us the university system.
That's thin.
And your argument is, well, because cultures always change.
Well, that's a banality.
I mean, of course, cultures are alive.
They change and evolve.
It doesn't mean for a second we can't identify the key elements within a culture that gives it its character.
So there's another angle on his idealism, but now with exceptionalism thrown in, because if you listen carefully, he's suggesting that it's Western culture that gives us intellectuals, the rule of law, respect for the rights of the individual, you know, institutions for making decisions collectively that somehow that's unknown everywhere else.
These are like racist statements.
And by the way, why does our system enshrine individual rights instead of communal obligations, as Simone Vey would describe them?
Because from monarchism to feudalism to capitalism, what has been most important to the powerful and then blessed by a succession of religious elites is the individual right to accumulate wealth.
And other individuals are granted rights to the extent that they do not interfere with that accumulation.
What's worrying me, everybody, is the extent to which political leadership on the left in America is becoming unapologetically Marxist.
The mayor of New York City, you know, the warmth of collectivism.
He's calling for the confiscation of private property, of seizing the means of production.
All language right out of the Communist Manifesto.
Okay, setting aside whether Mamdani is a Marxist or simply informed by Marxism, here Barron is pushing the same misreading of Marx that goes back to 1849, when Pius IX wrote in an encyclical called Nostis et Nobiscum, quote, Marx and Engels are preparing the working class for plundering, stealing,
and usurping first the church's and then everyone's property.
Now, Pius IX is writing a little bit before the Communist Manifesto, but there was enough literature out from Marx and Engels for him to get clearer on what was actually meant there.
And if Barron made any effort to read the manifesto, he would have found this paragraph, quote, the distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.
But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms on the exploitation of the many by the few.
So private property in this sense is not personal possessions, which is what Barron is dog whistling at you about.
It's that form of privatized profit that allows a capitalist to expand their process of exploitation.
And then Barron names some faltering and besieged projects that have attempted to do this.
So he pings Venezuela after his president launches an illegal kidnapping as an example of places where Marxism has failed terribly, or Cuba as his political crush Marco Rubio salvates over Cubans literally starving.
And he also pings North Korea as an example of a failed Marxist state as if it did not harden in response to U.S. imperialism.
In a written statement parallel to this little video, he wrote, as a bishop of the Catholic Church, this is particularly concerning because Marx himself said the first critique is a critique of religion, and Marxist tyrannies historically targeted religion first.
We must attend to this language as these leaders are telling us who they are and what they are for.
God bless you.
Now, Barron does not expect his followers to go to the source, but here it is.
This is from Karl Marx's 1844 contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right.
And this is the line that Baron is citing, quote, For Germany, the criticism of religion has been essentially completed, and the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.
Now, why does he say this?
Because religion, according to Marx, is the primary mode of mystifying material conditions.
And I would say Baron embodies this mystification.
The rest of the passage goes like this, and I'm abridging certain passages just for time, quote, The foundation of irreligious criticism is man makes religion, religion does not make man.
The state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world because they are an inverted world.
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn compliment, and its universal basis of consolation and justification.
It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality.
The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
The demand to give up illusions about their condition is the demand to give up a condition which requires illusions.
The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that veil of tears of which religion is the halo.
Barron's Ego Death00:01:14
So it's no surprise to me that Barron does not unpack this completely.
I think it would be a kind of ego death for him.
So we shall see how much farther Barron walks down toward that proverbial dock to sprinkle holy water on the Armada, the B-2s, the Hornets, the Stealth Fighters, the Tomahawks and Interceptors, and all the boys bristling with gear like they're in Call of Duty.
And we'll also see how Pope Leo, who is now being dragged on Catholic X as a Marxist for speaking out against Trump's illegal attacks on Iran, responds to Barron, whether, for instance, he'll take a similar action against him as Francis took against Bishop Strickland.
As Vatican beat reporter Christopher Hale reports in his letters from Leo Substack, quote, a Vatican dicastery for bishops official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there has been an informal review of the bishops' actions over the past year and remarked cautiously that Barron's obedience to the American president at times appears to override his obedience to Leo XIV and to the church.