A (0:01)

Reggie, I just sold my car online. Let's go, Grandpa. Wait, you did? Yep. On Carvana. Just put in the license plate, answered a few questions, got an offer in minutes. Easier than setting up that new digital picture frame.

B (0:13)

You don't say.

A (0:14)

Yeah, they're even picking it up tomorrow. Talk about fast.

B (0:17)

Wow.

A (0:18)

Way to go. So, about that picture frame. Ah, forget about it. Until Carvana makes one, I'm not interested.

B (0:24)

Car selling made easy on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. 5am I'm up with a crisp Celsius energy drink running 12 miles today. Grab a green juice, quick change, and head to work.

C (0:37)

Meetings, workshops.

B (0:39)

One more Celsius. No slowing down, working late, but obviously still meeting the girls for a little dancing. Celsius Live Fit. Go grab a cold, refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now@celsius.com. Hello, everyone. I'm Matthew Remsky. This is Conspirituality. 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 NTIFascistad.

A (1:29)

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.

B (1:51)

Ah, yes, the culture that unites us all. Eloquently described by Marco Rubio, the. 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 Through this brief episode, Barron has now superseded the now demoted QAnon Pope, Bishop Strickland, as America's foremost fascist apologist Catholic influencer.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. 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 Preddy, 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 for with a memory of another time in which Catholic elites supported fascism, when the Irishman heard the call of Frankel, joined Hitler and Mussolemi too, the propaganda from the popular newspapers had done the field together on his career, and the word came from the Church, support the Mass minute lofty fay hail again the Bishops bless the blue shirts down and gone away as the sail beneath us was to get the Spain Viva the Kingdom Brigade. 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 barons forebears in the Irish Church. I'll add some context here with the help of an article by Feargal 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 Francois. 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 McRoary 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. There is no room any longer for any doubts as to the issue at stake in the Spanish conflict, declared Cardinal McRoary 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 antifascists. 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. 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 acts. They came of age during stagflation, Watergate, and post Vietnam malaise. But Barron 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. 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, 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 Barron'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. 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've made the greatest impact on the culture, the only consistent piece of their lives was that they lived the faith radically in love with 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 Messien, especially for his quartet for the End of Time, which he wrote in a Nazi POW camp. He loves Arvo Peart, the Estonian minimalist who became Eastern Orthodox after the Soviet period ended. I mean, who he doesn't love? Arvo Parrot. And Baron consistently promotes Gregorian chant as the heartbeat of Catholic culture. In writers, he's a GK 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 Rightward 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 hundredth 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 interstates. 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 night the fire watch is instituted because of a great fire, 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 US 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 Baron 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 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 was 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 inter religious 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. 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, Baron 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 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 Douthat. 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, I'm very grateful to President Trump for his Declaration of Religious Liberty Day. 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. 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 Rene Goode or Alex Brady, 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 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 anim 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 Renee Goode shot in the face, very animating. Alexhot in the back, very annoying. Preddy, 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 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 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 Inchauskas 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 obligations 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 Walz pointed out that 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 bishops bootlicker Baron, 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.