He sees the posture and perhaps the semi-deliberate (although also just resulting from confusion and discomfort) refusal of Sandmann to move or even change his facial expression as an implicit rejection of everything the Native American provocateur Phillips stands for. Fr Longenecker has a similar take:
You realize that their dancing and drumming and chanting was not just a form of political activism? They believed they were doing something religious and therefore righteous, and they were using their religion as a weapon to intimidate others, gain ground and asset themselves in an aggressive way.Benjamin, neither Catholic nor any sort of theist and apparently not educated to see a religious context here, leaves out that Sandmann is, well, a Catholic, and Phillips, clearly the aggressor, is a pagan. In earlier times, Sandmann would have become a martyr in such circumstances. How many saints became martyrs at the same age, perhaps not fully mature, perhaps with the same set of ambiguous circumstances forced on them?
By and large, our bishops and other Catholic leaders aren't seeing this, or if they are, they're at best trying to distance themselves from that sort of Catholic. Walkbacks of earlier condemnations have been largely ill-tempered and pusillanimous. Let's take the statement the Diocese of Covington belatedly issued yesterday after taking its website down for some hours:
Concerning the incident in Washington, D.C., between Covington Catholic students, Elder Nathan Phillips and Black Hebrew Israelites the independent, third-party investigation is planned to begin this week. This is a very serious matter that has already permanently altered the lives of many people. It is important for us to gather the facts that will allow us to determine what corrective actions, if any, are appropriate.So, how long will this take? Will it be a lot of mealy-mouthed equivocation that comes out months later when everyone's forgotten about it? I would guess that Bp Foys and his staff are essentially in hiding and will not emerge for some time. But let's move to Bp Barron, whose views strike me as not fully coherent:We pray that we may come to the truth and that this unfortunate situation may be resolved peacefully and amicably and ask others to join us in this prayer.
We will have no further statements until the investigation is complete.
The immediate and ferocious judgment of the internet community was that the boy was effectively taunting and belittling the elder, but subsequent videos from wider angles as well as the young man’s own testimony have cast considerable doubt on this original assessment. My purpose in this article is not to adjudicate the situation, which remains, at best, ambiguous, even in regard to the basic facts. It is to comment, rather, on the morally outrageous and deeply troubling nature of the response to this occurrence, one that I would characterize as, quite literally, Satanic.Well, the immediate and ferocious reaction came not just from the "internet community", but from the Bishop of Covington, the Archbishop of Louisville, and celebrity priests like Fr James Martin, SJ. I'd like to assume Bp Barron is on the side of the angels here, but I'm always ready to be disappointed. Note that he won't "adjudicate the situation", which he's presumably going to leave to Bp Foys's intrepid third-party investigators, who likely will make it plain that the boys contributed to the problem with their microaggressions.
And of course, while he characterizes the judgment of the "internet community" as Satanic, he leaves out the cowardly willingness of bishops and others to cave over this judgment at the expense of decent Catholic boys, their school, and their families. Oddly, before this story broke, I read someone on the web noting how few bishops, proportionately, have been saints.
But let's take another celebrity priest, Fr Edward Beck of CNN, who hasn't walked back any of his initial condemnations:
My feelings about the #CovingtonBoys are unchanged since the first reporting and viewing many different videos. The boys acted inappropriately, and chaperones should have intervened. And boys should not have been permitted to wear MAGA hats if they were representing the school.Let's back up a little here. For starters, "Make America Great Again" is a campaign theme that's been around for some decades and has been used by politicians of both parties in the past. In 2016, Donald Trump used it in the course of a campaign that won the election and gained him over half the Catholic vote. The message itself is optimistic and positive.
Second, let's not lose awareness that the Covington episode came in the context of the annual March for Life, a largely (though not exclusively) Christian witness that's had Catholic participation endorsed by Catholic authorities. Two factors in this year's event are important. One is that pressure from rank-and-file Catholics led to the removal of the corrupt Cardinal Wuerl as celebrant of the concurrent Mass for Life event. This likely made AmChurch uncomfortable.
But also, Donald Trump endorsed the March for Life with a televised address. Contrast this with the numerous nominal Catholic politicians, like Joseph Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and many others, who wouldn't dream of endorsing it. I think this makes AmChurch uncomfortable as well, because there's been little move by bishops to insist that these politicians vote for policy in conformance to Church teaching, especially when they use the Catholic brand to appeal to the electorate.
If you think about it, "make America great again" would certainly imply that an America that stops using abortion to control minority birth rates, returns to single-sex bathroom rules, or stops exploiting child drag queens as entertainers would be "great again". To complain that the boys, well-groomed and cheerful, were wearing MAGA hats is part of the establishment's pusillanimous and ill-tempered response to the whole episode.
What makes me optimistic is that the rank and file has been able demonstrably to make its feelings known and bring about reforms.
