"Bishop Of Catholic Social Media"

A recent YouTube interview of Bp Barron by Brandon Vogt gives him, somewhat playfully, the title "Bishop of Catholic Social Media". Based on Vogt's preliminary remarks, it sounds as if the interview was recorded several weeks before its release, and Bp Barron doesn't make any real mention of the hottest issue that's arisen more recently, the ongoing "de-platforming" of YouTubers and others whose opinions even a few years ago, like those of Carl Benjamin, would have been seen as mainstream and even center-left.

This past March I noted a visit by Bp Barron to YouTube's and Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley. I said at the time that the visit must have had a context, and I still assume it did. Bp Barron, I've got to assume, is not naive. But it's a little disconcerting that he sees YouTube as something like the areopagus, when the proprietors of all such modern fora make it plain that they have not just an option but an obligation to limit debate. If they have their way, views will not be aired.

In fact, two Democrat senators, including Bp Barron's own senator from California, have denounced the Knights of Columbus for holding "extreme" positions. As the New York Post points out,

“Extremism” is a fast-moving target. As evidence of its extremism, the Democrats cite KOC’s support of California’s Proposition 8, a ballot measure that limited marriage to one man and one woman for the purposes of state law. The measure easily won a majority — a majority of California voters. That was in 2008, when young Sen. Barack Obama was running for president as a candidate opposed to same-sex marriage, as indeed was his major Democratic primary opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At the end of the interview, Vogt asks Bp Barron if he's part of the "intellectual dark web". Barron is rightly very cautious about this, since those who characterize themselves this way are largely atheist or agnostic and libertarian, but he raises the tantalizing question of an exchange with Jordan Peterson -- I would say that Peterson's interest in the Bible stems from a view that it somehow confirms his Jungian views on psychology, not that it carries any spiritual truth outside an essentially materialistic framework.

But Peterson, Benjamin, and others also espouse an essentially Aristotelian view of natural law, which they would share with Bp Barron, and Aristotelian views would be among those that corporate-state globalists will work to suppress. I continue to think Bp Barron is not naive, and I eagerly await an areopagus-style encounter between him and Jordan Peterson. That is, if Silicon Valley is still in a mood to allow it.