Anglicans Can Somehow Become Catholic Without Anglicanorum Coetibus!

It should be no surprise to regular visitors that I'm on several of Bp Barron's e-mail lists. Last week I received this announcement from his Word on Fire Institute:

Meet the new Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture at the Word on Fire Institute

Oxford and Yale Educated Former Episcopal Priest Andrew Petiprin Contemplates Catholicism and Popular Culture for the Word on Fire Institute

Petiprin, the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture, analyzes media through the lenses of philosophy and theology

[Irving, TX] – The Word on Fire Institute, the arm of Bishop Robert Barron’s apostolate focused on educational and evangelistic formation, is pleased to highlight the work and accomplishments of its Fellows. Each Fellow brings unique gifts and a track record of noteworthy service in the fields of theology, apologetics, cultural renewal, and more. Andrew Petiprin’s work is shaped by his pastoral heart and his admiration for great art as found in literature, movies, and music.

Andrew Petiprin is the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen Fellow of Popular Culture. He earned a master’s degree in European literature as a Marshall Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, and then received another master’s degree at Yale Divinity School. He served for over nine years in ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church before joining the Catholic Church in 2019. He published Truth Matters: Knowing God and Yourself in 2018 with New Growth Press, and has written for The Catholic Herald, National Catholic Register, The Living Church, and Evangelization & Culture: The Journal of the Word on Fire Institute. In his role, Petiprin will produce written content and courses that analyze the Catholic integration of popular culture and evangelization.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen was a savvy observer of culture and a prophetic voice. He combined intellect and charisma to become a master of modern media. Petiprin stated, “Fulton Sheen wasn’t a disconnected commentator or an aloof analyst. This man of the Church took up space within the public square to convert the world and transform the culture. I want to follow his example by engaging with things in popular culture that touch upon life in both its brokenness and fullness, and thereby point to hope in the kingdom of God. I’m honored to have the fearless and winsome Archbishop Sheen as the patron of my fellowship.”

While Bp Barron clearly venerates Joseph Ratzinger as a theologian, he seldom if ever mentions Benedict XVI's apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, and here his foundation introduces an Episcopalian convert to Cstholicism without any reference to the Church's provision for such people. Will Petiprin be working out of Irving, TX? Will he be attending any of the Divine Worship masses available in that area? Will he become part of any ordinariate community?

I suspect that if he did, it would basically be beside the point. I get the impression that if he and Bp Barron are speaking of Archbishop Sheen, it's because they're facing outward toward society at large, not inward toward a retro thee-thou liturgy. But if Petiprin shows up at an ordinariate mass, I'd love to hear of it.

For that matter, I wish I could chat privately and off the record with Bp Barron about the ordinariates. Except that the last time I mentioned Anglicanorum coetibus to a diocesan priest, all I got was a quizzical expressiom. I have a feeling that Bp Bsrron and Mr Petiprin are too busy evangelizing to have much to say about it.

Edward Feser On Gnosticism

In yesterday's post, I talked about Jordan Peterson's belated and puzzled response to the collapse of main line Protestant academic culture, something that took place largely in the 1960s and 70s. By concidence, I ran into an essay by the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser that appeared this past January in Catholic World Report, The Gnostic heresy’s political successors. It talks about the academic side oif the culture that replaced main line Protestantism, gnosticism. Feser defines gnosticism as follows:

First, it sees evil as all-pervasive and nearly omnipotent, absolutely permeating the established order of things. You might wonder how this differs from the Christian doctrine of original sin. It differs radically. Christianity teaches the basic goodness of the created order. It teaches that human beings have a natural capacity for knowledge and practice of the good – the idea of natural law.

. . . Second, the Gnostic mentality holds that only an elect who have received a special gnosis or “knowledge” from a Gnostic sage can see through the illusory appearances of things to the reality of the incorrigible evil of this world.

. . . Third, the Gnostic mindset sees reality in starkly Manichean terms, as a twilight struggle between the sinister forces that rule this evil world and those who have been “purified” of it and armed with gnosis.

Feser expands on gnosticism's influence on current woke culture, and in my view it adds much perspective to a two-part YouTube presentation on gnosticism and New Age by Dr David Campbell that I referenced several times on the old blog. Part I:

Part 2:

Raised a not especially observant Presbyterian, I had no effective resources to fall back on as I watched main line Protestantism collapse around me while I was in college, brought down by the Pill, the Playboy Philosophy, and Viet Nam protests. What filled the gap in public culture at the time was the drug-hippie movement, which as Dr Campbell points out has morphed into New Age, all a form of gnosticism. This persists as well in the very pervasive Star Wars quasi-religion of Jedi, the sage Yoda, and the Force.

But Feser takes this farther. The political movement of the 1960s and 70s was the New Left, which was recognized at the time as nothing more than a rebranding of the Old Left. While New Age appealed to me in my youth, the New Left never did. Environmentalism in the early 1970s was something separate as well. Feser recognizes that the gnosticism that began as New Age religion has metastasized inmto intersectionality:

Other forms of woke Gnosticism have their own bogeymen – “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity,” etc. – which, like “whiteness,” are abstractions spoken of as if they were concrete demonic powers. And just when you thought you’d heard of every kind of “oppression” imaginable, the Critical Theorists come along with the notion of “intersectionality,” by which ever more exotic forms can be fantasized into being. For example, if you are a transgender lesbian woman of color, you suffer a special kind of oppression – one defined by the “intersection” of oppressions suffered by each of the groups to which you belong – that is different from the kind suffered by (say) a gay immigrant with disabilities. (Wokesters don’t play the victim card; they play a whole 52 card deck.)

this has all taken place in the vacuum left behind by the collapse of main line Protestantism, for which society as a whole is still struggling for a cure. Unfortunately, I think moderate or never-Trump Republicanism is nothing more than wishful thinking that some version of the main line Protestant consensus can be restored -- something like what the Bush family still tries to embody. I think Feser is more correct:

Gnostic woke madness will not be remedied by aping it. On the contrary, more than ever, what the times call for is conservative sobriety. And orthodoxy. Heresies not only aim to subvert the Church, but they fill the vacuum that opens up when the Church loses its self-confidence, its fidelity to its traditional teaching, and its sense of mission – and as a consequence, loses its attractiveness. The crisis of the West is the crisis of the Church. The West will not be restored to health until the Church is restored to health. And that is a project that requires us to see beyond election cycles, and indeed beyond politics.

Jordan Peterson Meets Bp Barron, Again

Jordan Peterson has recentlly begun to reenter the public forum following lengthy recovery from a life-threatening health crisis. As part of the reentry, he's done a second YouTube encounter with Bp Barron, which is linked above.

The thing that strikes me most in the encounter is how little Jordan Peterson has changed. The guy has had as difficult a struggle against addiction and other health issues as I can imagine, but he's exactly the same Jordan Peterson who engaged Bp Barron in their first encounter in 2019.

This is to say that he continues to be a product of the mid-20th century academic culture -- and I might go a little farther to say that since he was formed in part as a Harvard professor, it's mid-20th century Ivy League academic culture, precisely what I was exposed to in the 1960s. And this puzzles the heck out of me, the guy has simply not changed.

Peterson's outlook is a largely inchoate melange of Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, Orwell, and whatever else strikes him -- and it leans conservative, in the sense of National Review as of about 1968. In fact, it's what you found in the oligopoly stentorian media pre-Viet Nam, Time, Newsweek, Cronkite, the papers. This was on the intellectual supermarket shelves when I was in college, although even at the time it was regarded with deep suspicion by most faculty and students. As of now, it's simply a period piece. It's a cross-section of the conservative wing of main line Protestant academic culture and Protestant morality, which in the 1960s was collapsing.

Even at the time, I had a nagging feeling that there was no there there, but main line Protestant culture, liberal or conservative, offered no systematic challenge, because, inchoate, there was no good way to parse it on its own terms. I suspect the same doubts bother Peterson, but again, formed in the same mid-20th century confusion, he has no clear path forward. And today, all that Jung-Freud-Nietzsche-Darwin-Orwell may as well have sunk with the Titanic.

What strikes me especially as I come back to Peterson after his absence of several years is his determined agnosticism. I recognize it now particularly from my recent reading of Frederick Kinsman's Reveries of a Hermit, which, nothing like a reverie, makes a careful case for Protestantism as a form of agnosticism. And I can find no better example of Kinsman's view than Jordan Peterson, who is hardly Protestant but definitely agnostic.

He sees lots of good in the Bible, because it's full of Jungian archetypes. The archetypes have lots of good things to tell us, and it's hard to disagree that insofar as they teach prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude, they're very good things indeed. The problem seems to be that Peterson is stuck roughly there. He doesn't seem to be able to proceed to a more unifying explanation, which is probably what makes him agnostic.

Peterson in a tentative way keeps advancing the position to Bp Barron that they agree in some basic way -- the Bible is a good thing, and the virtues are good things, but he just doesn't quite know what to make of everything else.

Bp Barron keeps responding yes, they agree, and we as humans have been endowed with reason, a tool that Aristotle and Aquinas can help us use, but then there are the Church Fathers, who take Biblical interpretation even a little farther down the road than you have, Prof Peterson. And in fact, faith can be seen as a step beyond reason. (I'm not sure if we even need to go that far, but it's a different issue.)

So far, poor Jordan Peterson is left stroking his chin and furrowing his brow. I think he's still puzzling over the collapse of mid-20th century main line Protestant consensus and what's so far replaced it, but an agnostic to the core, he's not going to make a whole lot of progress beyond that.

What Are We Learning From Cable Shows? -- III

Gold Rush is yet another extremely popular cable show:

Discovery Channel Struck gold on Friday Dec. 11 [2020] as two series, GOLD RUSH and GOLD RUSH: WHITE WATER, broke ratings and viewership records for the season. GOLD RUSH was the #1 program on ALL OF TELEVISION among Men, beating all broadcast networks, including CBS, NBC, ABC and FOX. On cable, GOLD RUSH and GOLD RUSH: WHITE WATER topped all networks among both Adults and Men.

The development we're starting to see here, now a decade and more in process, is a completely new style of television entertainment that's eclipsed the sitcom of the 1950s and 60s. I suspect that the new genre has been so effective -- remember that people are now paying extra, directly, for these shows via cable subscriptions, when I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best were "free" -- that people have even become less nostalgic for the old ones. With good reason. This says mostly good things about the current state of our culture.

The "stars" of Gold Rush aren't in fact very Hollywood. None is conventionally handsome. They wear dirty jeans, work boots, hard hats, and safety vests. They aren't especially well spoken; Parker Schnabel is normally taciturn, and when he elaborates, he's tactless. Tony Beets is not only blunt and taciturn, what apeech he utters is so profane, the bleeps are nearly constant. In fact, all of them often simply act like bullies and jerks. This is anything but escapist fantasy.

The episodes show little or no leisure activity. There's a weigh-in scene at the end of each week's events in which each team gathers with carefully masked bottles of beer, but that's pretty much it. Everyone is driven. An odd byproduct is that in a sense, the show makes workaholics somehow appealing.

If elite culture thinks "white people" enjoy shows like this because there's some sort of nostaligic retreat to a world of Leave it to Beaver or Dick Van Dyke, nothing could be farther from the truth. If there's escapism in such a reality-based show, it's escapism only in the sense that being a workaholic is a form of escape from the family, which is a recognized motive for being that way -- if you're at the office 'til 11 PM, you're in fact not with your family, and to such people, that's not a bug, it's a feature.

I don't think it's coincidence that so many of these very popular cable shows portray mostly men in environments, from Oak Island to the Bering Sea to gold mines in the Yukon, where their families are absent. Most in fact do have families, but wives and daughters, while they sometimes appear, aren't primary figures and, with only a few exceptions, don't normally accompany the men. Plot devices do sometimes take particular men away from certain episodes due to family issues, but their function is simply to make the men absent. When the men return, they resume their near-exclusive focus on the work.

The big exception that proves the ruie is the Beets family, since Tony's wife clearly sets policy and runs the finances with a firm hand, and most of their children also live on site and work in the family mining business -- but they're hardly the Brady Bunch. Although they don't appear to be religiously observant at all, there's a certain Old Testament atmosphere in the family's dedication to a common purpose via hard work, thrift, and resourcefulness.

I think that the Beets family is so unusual for such a show reflects the continuing crisis of the US family that began in the early 1960s, certainly with the advent of more effective birth control. Where TV shows before that time centered on the nuclear family, presenting an idealized picture of suburban life without serious crisis, by the Obama era, the most popular general-insterest shows effectively dropped the family as any kind of focus and left that issue for someone else to handle.

"Reality" shows are in fact scripted in whole or part. The main action in Gold Rush episodes hinges on often unpredictable factors -- mechanical breakdowns, technical surprises, weather, injuries, other emergencies -- but it requires editing to stitch the pieces into a coherent narrative. What's intereting is the more obviously scripted action the producers constantly insist on inserting, excited whoops, cheers, high-fives, man hugs and such (my wife and I note that Parker Schnabel and Tony Beets are apparently exempt, but everyone else must do these things at the producers' behest). I think this is an effort, possibly even conscious on the part of the producers, to replace bonds of affection and familiarity that are otherwise missing without conventional family bonds.

This is a reflection of what popular entertainment is now telling us about the culture.

What Are We Learning From Cable Shows? -- II

White House Press Secretaary Jen Psaki, an upper-class white woman with The Look, acknowledged the importance of the most-watched cable shows a few weeks ago, when, implying that white conservatives were somehow lagging behind in getting their vaccinations, she said,

“We’ve run PSAs on the ‘Deadliest Catch,’ we’re engaged with NASCAR and Country Music TV,” Psaki added. “We’re looking for a range of ways to get directly connected to white conservative communities. . ."

I found a 2014 piece in Variety that gives an indication of Deadliest Catch's continuing popularity:

The show, which tells real-life stories aboard fishing vessels in the Bering Sea during crab fishing season, averaged 3.02 million viewers in the 9 o’clock hour, according to Nielsen, its largest audience in five weeks. It finished close behind TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting” (3.03 million) as the most popular cable series overall on the night.

It’s in key demos, though, that “Deadliest Catch” is especially potent. Its 1.2 rating/4 share in adults 18-49 was tops on cable for the night, and even beat programs on Fox and CBS (a repeat) in its time period.

But it's beyond oversimplification to say it's a show about white guys, which is certainly what Jen Psaki suggests it is. From my time in the insurance industry, I know that Bering Sea crab fishermen are among the very few occupations for which insurers will not underwrite life insurance policies, period. The show gives a very clear picture of why this is. Not only are the workers routinely subject to injury and death while on deck, but whole vessels simply sink and disappear with some regularity, losing most or all of their crews.

Among other things, the show doesn't romanticize or sugar-coat any of this. It does strongly suggest that highly capable captains and crews can minimize the chances of these things happening, which is a theme we've learned since Melville and Conrad, and it's sometimes the focus of action in particular episodes.

In fact, I would say that this is a strong factor behind the show's ongoing popularity: there's an admiration for competence, experience, and job knowledge. Among the crews, on one hand, there's a sense that going crab fishing may be something of a last chance in a life headed toward the bottom, but clearly the job demands the ability to do exhausting physical labor for 24 hours and more at a stretch, in extreme cold, with ocean water pouring over the deck.

By and large, the ones who wittingly accept those conditions rise to the challenge, and this is something the episodes often reflect as well. And while some scenes in any cable show like this are scripted beforehand by the producers, or editors stitch individual scenes to imply a continuity that wasn't originally there, the fact that the episodes are filmed on deck and in the pilot house from day to day as the voyages unfold means there's a core of experience that can't be faked, glossed over, or moralized.

Jen Psaki strongly implies that the shows are about, and appeal primarily to, white people. The first impression I have is that if you watch the show or others like it, this simply isn't the case. Just earning a living in a place like Los Angeles, or for that matter a place like Alaska, people run into such a wild mix of populations that it's hard to tell who's what -- and that's because you're running into different people all day, every day, and let's face it, you're busy.

In our Roman Catholic parish there are Anglos, people of African descent, both from the US, Africa, and wherever else, people of South Asian descent, Filipinos of Chinese descent, Filipinos of Filipino descent, Koreans, Vietnamese, Latins from anywhere, and so forth, to the point that nobody from any group is entirely certain who's what. At one point, we had two priests from India, but the Filipinos were convinced that one of them was Filipino, which both the Indian priests enjoyed greatly. The fact is that in the real world, nobody has time for who checks what box.

The impression I have from watching Deadliest Catch is that the crews are inevitably going to be that sort of mix. Some are whites, some are Native Alaskan, some are going to be Russian, Hawaiian, Japanese, or Chinese. They're all filthy, unshaven, wearing rain gear with hoods, waves pouring over them. Nobody, on deck or at home, has time to worry over who's what, too much is going on. This is much of the world in the 21st century.

The issue is getting the job done and getting home safely with a big reward. Clearly this sort of thing resonates with the plebs. Jen Psaki, an upper class white woman stuck in a bubble, hasn't a clue.

What Are We Learning From Cable Shows? -- I

It's hard to tell which cable shows are highest rated, but amomg those is certainly The Curse of Oak Island, in which a bunch of white guys, under the guise of searching for hidden treasure, are actually starting to sponsor legitimate historical research in an area that's had little serious study. Nobody at this point, including the Lagina family, seems focused primarily on what treasure, if any, remains buried under the island. The question is increasingly what the heck went on there over a period of possibly 200+ years, because it's becoming plain that something did, and we know absolutely nothing about what it was.

The 2020-21 season, shortened and handicapped by COVID restrictions, had the serendipitous effect of redirecting the searchers to what might be found on the surface in a shorter period and without heavy equipment. The result was to discover a heavily engineered road, probably reflecting military use, extending over some area of the island. Other naval and military artifacts appeared in conjunction with the road. This had been buried under several feet of overburden and had been invisible up to the decision, from necessity, to excavate in that area rather than in the more fully explored parts of the island.

As the show has become more successful, it's had the resources either to hire full time academics to assist in the excavations or to bring in PhD specialists as consultants. Their opinions of artifacts, as well as carbon dating of organic material from the excavations, suggests there was intense activity on the island, completely undocumented up to now, between potentially the 1500s and the mid 1700s. One team of archaeologists suggests that in fact, given the relative paucity of artifacts vis-a-vis what might be expected on an equivalent site, considerable effort must have been taken to conceal evidence of the activity after it ceased.

Even the current historical record gives little reason to think there would have been much activity in that part of Nova Scotia in colonial times. There was a series of almost constant colonial wars between England and France in greater Acadia, but the key events took place near Halifax and farther north and along the Bay of Fundy, not on Oak Island. Oak Island may have been used as a refuge by Scottish colonists in the area following the French reconquest of Acadia in 1632, but what we're also beginning to see is evidence of much more extensive British military-style activity through at least the 1760s, so far completely undocumented and unrelated to known military maneuvers in the wars against the French. Other artifacts suggest activity in the 1500s or earlier.

The Lagina brothers appear to come from a middle-class background in northern Michigan. Marty, Rick's younger brother, appears to have made a fortune as a canny businessman and has undertaken more upper-class style sidelines like winemaking, but he has invested a considerable fortune in exploring Oak Island, in some part to indulge his brother Rick, a retired postal worker. Marty has clearly been skeptical of Oak Island speculation until very recent discoveries like the heavily engineered road.

The peculiar thing about the project and the media empire that's grown up around it is that it springs from entirely plebeian culture. The brothers became interested in the island due to a Reader's Digest story. Other than Franklin Roosevelt, who visited the island in the early 1900s with associated investors, the project has attracted largely working-class entrepreneurs through much of its history. The current investment seems to be essentially mad money from a middle-class businessman who became very prosperous through hard work and canny foresight, supplemented by equally canny TV producers who recognized the project's potential mass appeal.

At this stage, the project has potential for extending our knowledge of North American colonial settlement in ways that still can't be predicted, but could even influence key historical narratives. But the impetus hasn't come from the academy or philanthropic foundations. It's come from the plebs, and its interest is from the plebs as well. This is an important cultural development.

Overtaken By Events

Despite Tuesday's updated CDC guidance, this PSA from the California state health department continued to appear on Facebook yesterday. Although the CDC distinguishes between the vaxxed and unvaxxed, clearly this is unenforceable on a sidewalk or transit platform or in a public park. As a practical matter, unless an indoor restaurant strictly enforces the mask rule -- though they'd also have to ask for evidence of vaccination if they did -- masks have basically become optional.

And it's worth noting that it was only on March 30, a mere month ago, that Dr Walensky, the head honcho of the entire US public health establishment, gave her weepy warning of impending COVID doom. Some Cassandra.

But there are lurking questions that, so far, nobody seems to be asking, much less answering. California completely avoided the February-March third surge in COVID cases that was limited mainly to the US northeast. But vaccine became available to all states, with equally limited distribution, in mid-December. California experienced just as many of the new varieties as any other state, and it had just as much travel in and out (but Arizona's and Nevada's COVID patterns are similar to California's). And so far, the vaccines have proven effective against the new varieties.

Yet California is in fact heading toward that word nobody is daring to use, "herd immunity". As of yesterday, 39% of those in the state are "fully vaccinated', at least two weeks past their last shot. LA County has announced that, after three weeks in the "orange" tier, it will almost certainly qualify to move to the still less restrictive "yellow" tier by the middle of next week. The recent trend suggests that the rest of the state will follow within weeks.

The received wisdom from the Mayo Clinic, which reflects the view of the public health establishment, is this:

Experts estimate that in the U.S., 70% of the population — more than 200 million people — would have to recover from COVID-19 to halt the pandemic. This number of infections could lead to serious complications and millions of deaths, especially among older people and those who have existing health conditions. The health care system could quickly become overwhelmed.

. . . But reaching herd immunity through vaccination against COVID-19 might be difficult for many reasons.

The U.S. is currently making progress toward herd immunity through a combined approach.

. . . Given the challenges, it’s not clear if or when the U.S. will achieve herd immunity.

The example of California suggests that the process can take place much faster, and with far fewer vaccinations, than the public health establishment has anticipated. In fact, the pause in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine looks to have been done mostly to try to slow things down, since after dithering for a week and a half, the experts just said "never mind".

The question has been raised in many venues why the US Congress, which is assumed to have been fully vaccinated for months, chose nevertheless to be masked and socially distanced for President Biden's address, when even CDC guidelines now suggest this was unnecessary. The answer is that the people who run the planet are clearly reluctant to drop the controls that, however ineffective at stopping multiple surges of COVID, have nevertheless apparently served whatever obscure purpose they've been serving.

What a shame that the public panic is going to go away, later if not sooner. The problem is the people we pay to protect the public health are the ones who'll be least likely to recognize this.