And for the spiritually troubled, he reassures them: looks matter if they matter. And he goes farther: one has to have the opportunity to get to know the person. Halfway through, he sums up -- these are truisms, but truisms are truisms because they're true.
I watched several of his videos. I really can't avoid thinking there's no there there with this guy. What was his appeal that the major papers of record in the 1990s and early 2000s were calling him some sort of clerical superstar? I'm a little puzzled at the list of converts he's allegedly recruited for the Church: Newt Gingrich, Robert Bork, Robert Novak, Alfred Regnery, and Laura Ingraham, among others. My first question is how many on this list and others still go to regular mass and confession, if they ever actually did.
Certainly McCloskey is no St Augustine, no St Bernardino, no Ven Fulton Sheen, not even Bp Barron. The strongest Catholic YouTubers I see now have the force of reason, if not flashing azure eyes: Fr Ripperger, for instance, or Prof Feser. I don't see that with McCloskey. In fact, in the clip above, he's talking to his audience as if they were 13-year-olds, which he tends to do generally. Even Fr Mike Schmitz, whose target audience is adolescents slightly older who are discerning vocations, doesn't talk down that way.
Several things strike me as I reflect on this. McCloskey grew up in Bethesda, which I know well because I went to high school there. Bethesda is an über-snobby suburb next to Chevy Chase, which is even more so. McCloskey was part of a Catholic prep school subculture that I didn't run with, but it was clearly a subgroup of the same franchise. Some in my circle went to Sidwell Friends, while my sister went to National Cathedral School. Washington is a deeply class- and status-conscious place, which is a big reason Trump doesn't fit in.
McCloskey went on to Columbia, which would be an important merit badge in that environment, and I've simply got to assume that the various Republican swamp dwellers and media mavens who were attracted to whatever McCloskey called "Catholicism" saw it as some sort of flavor-of-the-month, and they trusted McCloskey because he was attractive, he knew all the right people, and he'd done all the right things.
And it sounds like he told people what they wanted to hear.
Again, I'd be interested to know how many of the Republican celebrities he recruited go to regular mass and confession. Of Ingraham, for instance, Wikipedia says,
Ingraham has previously dated broadcaster Keith Olbermann and former New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli. In April 2005, she announced her engagement to Chicago businessman James V. Reyes, and that she had undergone breast cancer surgery. In May 2005, Ingraham told listeners that her engagement to Reyes was canceled, citing issues regarding her diagnosis with breast cancer. She has also dated political commentator Dinesh D'Souza and George T. Conway, attorney and husband of Kellyanne Conway.As far as I can see, she's Catholic as long as it serves her interests and doesn't get in the way. I can't imagine that McCloskey would have told her it was anything else.She is a convert from the Baptist neo-tradition to the Roman Catholic faith. She has also studied Russian.
