Thanks to JH for noting this curious front page from the Irish Catholic, out to spread seasonal good cheer.

This sort of hyperbole in the front page article is, sadly, of a piece with this stuff emanating from the US. As Slate reports the further shores of conservative Catholicism (by which one means genuinely reactionary conservative Catholicism) are very very wild indeed:

Last weekend, the leading voices of the QAnon camp gathered in Las Vegas to discuss the state of the world and the future of their movement. The prominent names in attendance at the convention included Jim and Ron Watkins, a father-and-son pair accused of inventing the conspiracy theory.

But the speech that ultimately garnered the most attention was by the actor Jim Caviezel, who is best known—at least among the conservative Christian crowd—for playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. Caviezel's speech, which amounted to a literal call to arms against the liberal worldview, concluded with the proclamation that "the Storm is upon us"—a direct invocation of QAnon's central conspiracy theory.

On Monday, Caviezel's speech was quoted approvingly by a Catholic bishop. "All need to listen to this speech," wrote Joseph Strickland, the bishop of Tyler, Texas.

Caviezel, as any who have followed his career, is a deeply conservative figure (pity, always liked him in Person of Interest, but separating the actor from the role isn't that difficult and the thought of the pro-same-sex relationships and feminist inflected scripts makes one believe that there is indeed a God and s/he has a pretty good sense of humour to place Caviezel at the heart of that show).

But if Caviezel comes over as, to put it at it's kindest, a simple if dangerously deluded soul, Strickland is something else, and as with the front page article on the Irish Catholic above all too eager to wade into 'culture wars' and such like. For Strickland Pope Francis is clearly next best thing to an apostate. And Strickland's Gospel is one that isn't limited to abortion or similar issues. Nope, as Slate notes he's exercised by a broader range of matters:

But those aren't the only issues that Strickland cares about, and while his position on abortion lines up with Catholic teaching, several other stances very much do not.

The most shocking evidence for this came from his firm support for a blogger priest named Fr. James Altman, whose reactionary positions led his own bishop in Wisconsin to ask him to resign. (Altman is currently challenging his ousting in a canonical appeal.) Altman set off a firestorm in 2020 with a video titled "You cannot be a Catholic & a Democrat. Period." In the video, he asserted that Democrats would burn in hell because of the party's support for abortion rights, DACA, and climate change mitigation efforts.

DACA, climate change? Perhaps science itself?

So while the Irish Catholic headline is foolish seeming, what it represents - and we've seen some remarkably reactionary voices in the Irish church well beyond their usual comfort zone during the pandemic - really isn't.

BTW, anyone read any of those editorials post-1916? Sounds interesting.