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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23688 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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SCOTUS: Catholics for Mass Immigration

As a gambit, Trump and Miller’s was always an extremely long shot, but it acts as an illustration of the seriousness of the national issue, and of the pernicious role of intellectual catholicism on the American right. This has less to do with lay Catholics, who are sometimes reactionary and sometimes liberal, or with very online rightist Catholics, whose devotion is questionable but who largely find the maximalist aesthetic interesting or more defensible than megachurch Christianity, which I sympathize with, or who find inspiration in its (arguable, the reality is rather mixed) historical antisemitism for their own LARPing.

One thing Roberts, Kavanaugh and ACB have in common is that they are all the court’s Catholic Intellectuals as an ideological grouping. This separates them from the other Catholics on the Supreme Court - Thomas left Catholicism and then came back to it but his conservatism is not distinctly Catholic (we can argue about this but it isn’t the thrust of my argument) and largely appears to view himself a jurist in both a conservative and a black conservative tradition that is not Catholic; his mentor and inspiration Sowell is (surprised to be writing is here - he’s 96 and still kicking) an atheist by all accounts. Alito is more devout but invented his own complex rationale for abandoning any form of integralism and essentially adopting WASPlite Conservatism With Ellis Islander Characteristics. Gorsuch rejected Catholicism. Sotomayor is nominally Catholic but openly lapsed as per her writings, so there is no need to even get into ideology with her.

Roberts, ACB and Kavanaugh are all much more products of the institutional Catholic Church. They continue to have senior roles in ‘official’ or semi official church organizations from which it would be extremely humiliating to be removed and where they ultimately, beyond many abstract layers of theological management, answer to the Pope, who is basically Zohran Mamdani if he was a little uncomfortable around abortion. If Thomas was denied communion on account of his politics I imagine he would laugh or ignore it; if ACB was I think she’d be very, very upset indeed, and it is laughable to think this isn’t the kind of motivator these people (who have spent most of their lives in this Catholic intellectual bubble surrounded by other Catholics) care about.

Catholicism is essentially a third-worldist institution - the largest, best funded, and most successful on earth - and has been for many decades. Third worldism as envisioned by its proponents was always more about the ‘south’ versus the ‘north’ (meaning countries with demographically european majorities, plus maybe japan) than it was about achieving socialism, which was really a second-tier target. Third worldism’s central organizing objective is ameliorating this supposed imbalance, this terrible and - in the eyes of the Church and its intellectual adherents - un-Christian state of affairs. Mass immigration is the central tool in this toolkit, since with enough of it (due to the vast majority of the world’s population being in the “global south”) the global north simply ceases to exist and one has won by Largely Peaceful™️ (and therefore very Christian) default. Catholicism is a global, transnational, extremely well functioning institution able to deploy tens of billions of (often tax) dollars towards this ideological aim; even more importantly, it has an entire ecosystem of forums, think tanks, colleges (including those on whose board the Roberts’ sit and with whom ACB has her central academic affiliation) and lobbying groups that exist to convince other ‘conservative’ Catholics (in the sense that they support some semblance of traditional marriages restriction of abortion etc) that mass immigration is actually lindy, wholesome chungus, and holy and you will go to hell if you fight it just as if you were a rapist, a murderer, or got ten abortions.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (the closest the US Church has to a governing body) is staunchly pro-life but staunchly pro-immigration. So is the (American) Pope. Conservatism for me and my issues, but not for thee and yours, you might say. By some estimates, USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980, almost all from the third world. Expecting this to have no impact on the court’s conservative justices, 5/6 of whom are somewhat Catholic and 3/6 (the aforementioned) are closely tied to the modern Catholic intellectual tradition was delusional. The Catholic Church is almost definitionally, as a transnational organization, less concerned with national borders. Far more of its adherents are would-be migrants and refugees than the people who would suffer in rich countries by their presence. Over the last two progressive papacies, by far the majority of the Catholic Church’s opprobrium for the United States has been about mass, and especially illegal, immigration. Of course, statistically, most Central and South American and Haitian illegal migrants - who are the migrants actually affected by the birthright citizenship debate since they can’t naturalize themselves - are literally Catholic.

This is part of the problem of talking about ‘social conservatism’ versus ‘economic conservatism’ or liberalism. If you hate abortion and have a kind of condescending pity for homosexuals but support the third-worldification of America, you are still a tradcon and the right will cheer as you’re appointed to the Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett has Haitian children. There are hundreds of thousands of Haitians illegally resident in the US, who have kids who look just like her kids but who weren’t lucky enough to be adopted by a rich American family. She was never going to vote to repeal birthright citizenship which, for all the legalistic arguments, is an inherently nativist-sympathetic move (just as it was when England repealed it in 1981, and when Australia did 5 years later), even if its proponents profess to and indeed do support mass immigration in general. Is your country for the world or is it, at least, for you and the people you choose to let in?

In America, our Catholic rulers have decided it is for the world.

I'm curious how your theory would explain Scalia and his immigration opinions, which almost universally came down on the side of the government, not the immigrant(s) in question.

Maybe already noted ITT, but the Catholic Church has been losing members for decades among citizens, and now 36% of their members are Hispanic. A large fraction of that is illegal migrants and their children. So there’s a clear financial, parish solvency conflict of interest in addition to the other issues. They would have otherwise had to shutter ~30% of their churches or something.

I agree with Amadan you should speak more clearly here. Because I see the "Catholic Occupied Government" meme floated by Jews like yourself and BAP, and I fully get the tongue-in-cheek reference but I don't understand what you actually believe. Given that those invoking that meme deny systematic Jewish influence in American politics and culture consciously optimized towards subverting White identity, are you saying that accusation is false for Jews but true for Catholics? Or are you saying it's false for both and using this analysis to try to show how easy it is to grasp circumstances and correlate religious backgrounds to create a false conspiracy? When JQ-deniers invoke "Catholic Occupied Government" I don't know which of those two positions they are trying to take.

For my part, I believe that accusation is true for both fundamentally, although there is greater heterogeneity among Catholic followers: there are many more pro-White Catholics than pro-White Jews. But that fact doesn't erase the implications of the mission of the Catholic Church, and I agree with your criticism, it's just interesting seeing you willing to apply this level of criticism with respect to the Catholic mission while in my mind denying a similar criticism of the Jewish religion with respect to its religious mission among the Gentiles.

Maybe we can meet in the middle and call it a "Yahweh Occupied Government" that for some weird reason appears inexorably hostile towards the White race at a fundamental level, as equally as it is philo-semitic.

There is no Jewish equivalent to the Catholic Church. This is actually relevant to this topic. Take something you and I have discussed many times, which is the that Jews support an ethnostate that is politically designed to preserve their demographic majority in Israel but promote mass immigration to the West. We can both agree that some do and some don’t, although we disagree on the proportion in each group.

The Catholic Church, though, is a legal and hierarchical entity to which its adherents must maintain a degree of underlying institutional loyalty, as the timely drama discussed above about the SSPX helpfully shows. If the Pope wants you out, you’re out. Leading rabbis in various Jewish sects can arbitrarily decide Jews are or aren’t devout, following the rules, or even Jewish at all (in the case of rules around patrilineal descent, conversion etc), but there is no universal standard; even in Israel where there is a semi-formal structure for religious courts some rabbis are far more lenient than others and scholars in the same niche chareidi sects overrule each other on interpreting the Talmud and indeed Torah all the time.

The Catholic Church has a leader who hands out judgments its members have to follow. You can be a Catholic who doubts or disagrees with some of them to an extent (which I noted when mentioning lay Catholics in my comment), but it is also correct to say that the Catholic Church, as an organization, believes or supports something. The Catholic Church supports mass immigration to Western lands. Those who oppose it have views that run directly contrary to the objective governing structure of the Church in America and globally. This is more like saying “Russia wants to permanently occupy Crimea”. It is not reasonable to ascribe this motivation to every Russian, but it is reasonable to ascribe it to the Russian state.

You may reply that Jews are a nation, or consider themselves one, but if this is taken literally it is an anarchist nation rather than a coherent or governed polity - unlike both Russia and the Catholic Church.

The hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church is not particularly relevant to your original criticism, which centered on the ideological mission of the Catholic church, which essentially entails grafting all the Gentiles of the world into the embrace of Yahweh as equals- there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death... And I completely agree with your interpretation of that mission. If the mode of organization of the Catholic Church were more similar to Judaism- a mode of organization which is by the way more deeply embedded in our economy, in our cultural institutions, in our lobbying groups than it is in a flag-bearing statelette run by a guy with a cool hat, that wouldn't undermine your criticism of the Catholic mission it would only make it even more nefarious. Edit: Of course ACB et al. are demonstrations of the principle of religious mission embedded in political and cultural institutions, expressing as hostility towards white people, so your analysis is basically acknowledging the phenomenon observed by those who attribute the influence of Jewish identity and ideology to the expression of anti-white cultural output in Hollywood and academia.

The notion that Judaism doesn't have a Pope and therefore a similar ideological mission cannot be attributed to it is blatantly false, it is simply a different mode of organization. There's the World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, B'nai B'rith International, the Anti Defamation League, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Chabad, of course the State of Israel- only to name a few out of thousands of such organizations that wield immense political and cultural power. Your implication that we can attribute the acts of Catholic Organizations to the Catholic Mission, but cannot attribute the acts of Jewish Organizations or ideologically-motivated Jewish people to the Jewish Mission simply because Judaism lacks a pope holds no water. The state of Israel has far more powerful political and cultural pull among global Jewry than the Vatican does among global Catholics, the prime reason there are "White Nationalist Catholics" is derived from the lack of loyalty to the Vatican and Catholic Mission itself among lay Catholics. There is far greater loyalty among Jews to Israel than there is among Catholics to the Vatican. Steven Spielberg transmitting a false propaganda film like Schindler's List to millions of Gentiles is no less of an act of ethnic aggression than the acts of the Catholic organizations you mentioned in your post. And of course hundreds of Jewish organizations are guilty of the exact behavior you lay at the feet of Catholic organizations with respect to mass immigration lawfare. They are two sides of the same coin.

Edit: One sad anecdote, a local Catholic Parish, in a long-standing lilly-White community, is getting a new Priest fresh off the boat from Uganda-- their new Spiritual Leader. The Catholic Mission is Lovecraftian horror, so you are not wrong but you are one-sided in your critical interpretation of how religion directly transmits ethnic warfare.

Ah, yes, a nonpracticing Jew blaming the ethnoreligious background of officials for a ruling which is, essentially, a literal restatement of existing law.

I see no reason this could backfire, none at all. Even leaving aside that is is unlikely Thomas and Alito are less religious than kavanaugh and Roberts, that 100% of the votes to hold that birthright citizenship was not guaranteed by the constitution were Catholic, and that the few remaining countries where the Catholic Church has actual political power do not have open borders. Such things wouldn’t stop antisemites, after all.

In which countries would you say the Catholic Church has actual political power?

Liechtenstein and Andorra(and Vatican City, of course). Neither of these are democracies and the actual imposition by the Catholic Church is to do with abortion policy, not immigration.

Not Poland?

The RCC has no constitutional power in Poland. Nor in Malta.

For my entire life, on the Sundays which held elections, all the dumb priests said clearly who the parishioners should vote for, and most of the smart ones referenced it in a more indirect way. Even if it's waning now, they held direct political influence, and I say it as someone generally sympathetic. Stop being obtuse.

Permit me to stand up and salute the papal flag while the anthem of Vatican City plays (and I didn't even know there was an anthem until now) as a detachment of the Swiss Guard march pass, and the Jesuits rub their hands sinisterly and huddle together plotting and scheming in the shadows (naturally).

I wipe away a quiet tear of pride. It's been centuries by this point, and still! And still the Sinister Papal Global Conspiracy (Polluting Pure WASP America Version) rides high in the charts, obsessing the minds of many! Why, we even pulled off the coup of getting one of your own, an American citizen of the good old USA, elected pope all the better to infiltrate and corrupt the Pure White Protestant State for a Pure White Protestant People!

Let's recall some of the greatest hits of the past:

(1) they're coming for our kids! (2) Don't let them ashore (3) Only the KKK can defend us! and Mormons or Catholics - which are worse? (4) The American Pope!

Micks, Spics, and Hicks - the Papist Menace still menacing to this day!

One of those cartoons has the ugliest, most australopithecine caricature Irishman I've ever seen.

Because we're the intermediate stage, for the white race, between black people and true humans (just as African-Americans are the intermediate stage between animals and humans). Simple! They were only following the example of British satirical publications. Indeed, some amateur scientists-cum-satirists writing for said magazines in 1862 classified us as proof of the theory of the Missing Link, being the link between the Gorilla, on one hand, and the Negro as the lowest example of true human on the other:

A gulf, certainly, does appear to yawn between the Gorilla and the Negro. The woods and wilds of Africa do not exhibit an example of any intermediate animal. But in this, as in so many other cases, philosophers go vainly searching abroad for that which they would readily find if they sought for it at home. A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages; the lowest species of the Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.

The Irish Yahoo generally confines itself within the limits of its own colony, except when it goes out of them to get its living. Sometimes, however, it sallies forth in states of excitement, and attacks civilised human beings that have provoked its fury. Large numbers of these Yahoos have been lately collecting themselves in Hyde Park on a Sunday, and molesting the people there assembled to express sympathy with GARIBALDI and the cause of United Italy. The Yahoos are actuated by an abject and truculent devotion to the POPE, which urges them to fly at all manner of persons who object to grovel under the Papal tyranny, and all others who assist or even applaud them in the attempt to throw it off. Nevertheless they will howl for their own liberty to do what they please like so many Calibans. They were organised by the Pontifical Government to fight the Italians, at Castelfidardo, where they failed, perhaps from want of sufficient dexterity to handle a rifle. Here they assail the friends of the Italian monarchy with the weapons which come natural to them; clubs and stones. In this sort of warfare they are more successful than they were on the field of battle; and their numbers, strength, and ferocity have struck such terror into the minds of the authorities, that the latter have judged it expedient to yield to them. They have accordingly succeeded in the attempt to stifle the expression of public sentiment by intimidation. It is not wonderful that creatures so like the Gorilla should frighten anybody; let alone the LORD MAYOR.

The somewhat superior ability of the Irish Yahoo to utter articulate sounds, may suffice to prove that it is a development, and not, as some imagine, a degeneration of the Gorilla.

It is hoped that the discovery, in the Irish Yahoo, of the Missing Link between Man and the Gorilla, will gratify the benevolent reader, by suggesting the necessity of an enlarged definition of our fellow-creatures, conceived in a truly liberal and catholic spirit.

The Irish were the problem for the North as the African-Americans were the problem for the South of the United States.

Getting back to the Problem of the Papist Prelates and Polluting Pure Protestant America, I think the divergence in views is because the Catholic Church is universal and global; black, white, red, yellow or brown, you can be part of the church like anyone else and the Pope is the boss of us all. It's not like state churches or national churches where "this is the German Lutherans in the Northern USA, and these are the Swedish Lutherans, and those over there are the liberal Lutherans, but we're all pretty much white". And for the Irish, we remember being immigrants ourselves, and attitudes such as the above when we were desperate and fleeing to any shore that would take us in. It's the legacy of the Famine. So yeah, that's why I'm always fighting on here with the "let's create the party of eugenics and the PMC strivers!" types.

the Jesuits rub their hands sinisterly and huddle together plotting and scheming in the shadows (naturally)

A man walks up to a Franciscan and a Jesuit. "How many novenas do I have to pray to get a Ferrari?" he asks.

The Franciscan looks confused, and says "What's a Ferrari?" The Jesuit looks confused too, and says "What's a novena?"

Indeed, this is Papal Territory. What more apt thing can I or the US Supreme Court say to the vanquised MAGA losers other than "Begone Thot Prot!".

This would be more convincing if the decision was close and there was a group of conservative justices who wrote in their dissents: "Children of illegal immigrants are not covered under the 14th amendment." However, 8/9 of the justices in their various opinions did not make that case at all. The dissenters mostly dissented over babies born on travel visas, where there is no intent to make the US a long term home. There just really isn't a strong case based on the 14th amendment to remove birthright citizenship from people here unlawfully. I'd rather good law than bad, regardless of the consequences. If we don't like it, we need to have a constitutional convention. We are more than overdue for one.

Agreed and honestly I'd wager for most babies born on travel visas their parents would rather they didn't get US citizenship, US tax reporting and being a US persion is a severe burden due to FATCA in pretty much all the rest of the world (banks may well refuse to serve you for example). If you're a successful businessman in Italy the last thing you want is the IRS coming for its cut even though you've never visited the US since childhood and don't even have a US passport. Sure some anchor babies benefit from the current ruling but for others it's really just extra hassle they didn't sign up for.

In the event of a truly accidental American the IRS never finds out. You’re an Italian businessman, you’ve never applied for a US passport, your parents travel insurance paid for your birth (or they skipped town and never paid), you travel to the US solely on your Italian passport if you ever do so and are welcomed as a foreigner. If Customs sees your ‘place of birth’ as the US, they won’t care, and in the very unlikely event they do, the businessman tells them his parents were diplomats or soldiers or UN. They will not ask for proof. The IRS isn’t going to track down hospital records in Philadelphia from 50 years ago to deduce that there might be an American somewhere in the world who didn’t pay taxes.

Most ‘accidental Americans’ are not accidental at all. There’s a huge growth industry of third world PMCs flying to the US to give birth so their kids get citizenship.

In the event of a truly accidental American the IRS never finds out. You’re an Italian businessman, you’ve never applied for a US passport, your parents travel insurance paid for your birth (or they skipped town and never paid), you travel to the US solely on your Italian passport if you ever do so and are welcomed as a foreigner. If Customs sees your ‘place of birth’ as the US, they won’t care, and in the very unlikely event they do, the businessman tells them his parents were diplomats or soldiers or UN. They will not ask for proof. The IRS isn’t going to track down hospital records in Philadelphia from 50 years ago to deduce that there might be an American somewhere in the world who didn’t pay taxes.

Boris Johnson got into trouble at JFK for travelling to the US on a British passport listing a US place of birth. (US citizens are legally required to arrive and depart the US on their US passports), and the IRS attempted to collect capital gains tax on the sale of his London home. (It isn't clear if he paid or not). And the tax treaty between the US and the UK requires banks to freak out if they see a British passport with a US place of birth as part of customer due diligence. So I don't think being an accidental American is as safe as that.

I’m afraid that according to Boris’ own article on that 2006 incident, helpfully scanned here he was asked if he had previously held a US passport (and he answered yes). In fact, this was explicitly the question the agent asked him. He had also written many times about being a US citizen in articles one presume could be easily found on Google even back then.

A very different situation from the Italian in Count’s comment.

Most ‘accidental Americans’ are not accidental at all. There’s a huge growth industry of third world PMCs flying to the US to give birth so their kids get citizenship.

This is a fairly strong claim, is there any evidence for it happening at industrial scale? There are interesting left-wing arguments that could be made if its true but you would need evidence that its more than just a conspiracy theory.

I've personally seen it and read news articles about it. Example. It may not be a huge in scale, but it is not nothing.

I believe the typical case of a genuinely accidental American that causes problems is when someone isn't born in the US but has citizenship from their parents, which the IRS likely would discover.

The devils duo, Catholics and Jews. The KKK tried to warn us but we didn't listen. Now look at it.

The tradcaths on X do so much PR work by being miles to the right of their Church. And one has to believe they are sincere and genuine. Which leads one to ask why they present themselves as Catholic. My muslim coworker expressed a similar sentiment when he saw a normal family of four flying the rainbow flag. 'That is not for you. Why do you have it?'

The tradcaths on X do so much PR work by being miles to the right of their Church. And one has to believe they are sincere and genuine. Which leads one to ask why they present themselves as Catholic.

Because they believe that the teachings of the Catholic Church are true. What other reason would they need?

I mean, do they? Are the Twitter Tradcath Brigade staunch religious liberty advocates and fans of Dignitatis humanae?

Because they believe that the teachings of the Catholic Church are true. What other reason would they need?

While they simultaneously believe that the whole church, including the hierarchy and Pope, got these teachings wrong. Not an enviable position.

Can you name one dogma you think internet trad caths believe which the Catholic hierarchy does not teach?

Immigration is an area of prudential judgement and the Catholic Church has a nuanced view of it, more nuanced than you find here. The doctrines are to respect the host country's laws and customs, and for the host country to take in the needy as much as possible (acknowledging that there are goods such as social cohesion that can limit the host country's ability to take in the needy.) Trad Caths agree on these points, just disagree with the prudential judgement of whether or not the US has helped as much as it can and it's time to cool off on immigration.

There is, in practice, one doctrine which some trad-Caths believe which is condemned by Rome, and that is Jewish deicide theory. On the institutional level even the SSPX claims to hold to this condemnation; but there are occasional and visible trads who do not.

SSPX

Timely reference, hydro.

This is quite the broad banded statement, though, or woolly as somebody else said below. If ‘taking in the needy’ includes opinions as diverse as ‘protect a white demographic supermajority, deport millions and ban all nonwhite immigration’ (the way Groyper Catholics like Nick Fuentes want) and ‘take in the entire world, legalize all illegal migrants, create legal routes for the global south’ (the way those on the radical left of the Church want) then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.

What we can actually observe from:

  • The central role the institution of the Catholic Church has played in resettling migrants into America and Western Europe under both liberals like Leo and conservatives like Benedict
  • The public messaging of church leaders including almost all senior Western European and American bishops and various Popes themselves
  • The significant lobbying the Church has engaged in to water down naturalization law, legalize illegal migrants and so on in countries like Spain, the US and elsewhere

…is that the Church’s policy here is actually very clear. And the Catholic Church is actually an organization. It’s not an ideological grouping. It’s an actual club, with a members list and an initiation ritual and regular meetings and a management structure and a leader and if you are a member of it, then to some extent it is reasonable to expect that you broadly agree with the organization. This is different from Lutheranism or Judaism or Islam, which have religious organizations but none that can lay claim to the institutional support of anywhere close to a majority of adherents.

~all institutional churches have done this.

then it’s an essentially meaningless statement.

It's a principle, which can be interpreted by different people in different ways. But that's not the part being interpreted. No one has a problem with setting up a temporary refugee camp for Canadians who are fleeing from the great Canada-Russo war of 2035 assuming the US still has enough oatmeal and blankets to keep them alive.

The part that people are interpreting differently is if the US already has all the people it can safely assimilate without massive social upheaval. The Catholic US Bishops are pretty clueless to the actual costs of mass immigration, the Catholic groypers have perhaps an oversized idea of the costs of mass immigration. The truth is that you can take a consistent set of principles and adjust what the recommendations are based on different facts available.

I'm not sure to whom you are referring by this. The tradcaths I've encountered don't believe that. They believe the previous form of the liturgy is better, but liturgy is not dogma and they are allowed to believe that. They don't believe that any actual dogma was put forth wrongly by the church.

I have had multiple tradcaths tell me that Muslims, Jews, and Protestants cannot be saved (“there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church”), let alone adherents of non-Abrahamic religions. Many also support the death penalty, don’t like government welfare, oppose immigration, oppose religious freedom, oppose separation of church and state, and hold several other positions that don’t fit comfortably with modern Roman Catholic teachings.

While CCC 847 does allow for the possibility of salvation for those ignorant of Christ:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.

I think tradcaths could have an out for not believing that the vast majority of Muslims, Jews or Protestants will actually make it to heaven, since they could just assert that in the modern world, most such people are not ignorant of Christ and his Church, and if they are, it is their own fault.

I don’t think that gives them much of an out. Other sections of the CCC address these groups pretty unambiguously.

Protestants:

818 “... the Catholic Church accepts them with respect and affection as brothers.... All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church.”

819 “... Christ's Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church. All these blessings come from Christ and lead to him, and are in themselves calls to “Catholic unity.”

Jews:

839 When she delves into her own mystery, the Church, the People of God in the New Covenant, discovers her link with the Jewish People, “to whom the Lord our God spoke first.” The Jewish faith, unlike other non-Christian religions, is already a response to God's revelation in the Old Covenant. To the Jews “belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ”, “for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”

Muslims:

841 “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind's judge on the last day.”

Now, I’m sympathetic to the tradcaths on this point (though they’re usually so loathsome, it makes it difficult to have sympathy for them at all), in that Rome didn’t always have such an inclusive attitude, so they have plenty of prior writings to point to that make the opposite claims. But those are just the sort of problems you have to put up with when your church changes its doctrine while pretending both that it hasn’t and that it can’t.

Not sure how they can square that with the need for baptism (even of infants).

That hasn't been a hard and fast rule ever.

In the fourth century, Roman Emperor Valentinian II was a catechumen who expressed desire to be baptized by St. Ambrose of Milan, but he was assassinated before the bishop could reach him. Ambrose consoled the mourning family by stating: "Did he not have the grace which he desired? Did he not have what he eagerly sought? Certainly, because he sought it, he received it."

Before then, St Justin Martyr developed the concept of the Logos Spermatikos ("seeds of the Word"). He argued that because Christ is the Divine Reason (Logos) that illuminates every human mind, anyone who lived righteously according to the truth they had was already participating invisibly in Christ:

"We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists." — First Apology, Chapter 46

St. Irenaeus defended the idea that God’s saving grace was not restricted to only those alive during or after Christ’s death. He argued that God has always been present to humanity, judging people based on the capacity and information they possessed in their own time.

"For Christ came not only for those who believed on Him in the time of Tiberius Caesar, nor did the Father provide only for those who are now living, but for all men altogether, who from the beginning... feared and loved God, and behaved justly and piously towards their neighbors, and longed to see Christ." — Against Heresies, Book IV, Chapter 22

The Church has held for as long as we have records that people who want to be baptized are baptized, people who would have wanted to be baptized had they known of baptism are baptized, and it's all a mystery but if you know of and want to get baptized you should.

According to the CCC, they're a little more wishy-washy on that these days:

1259 For catechumens who die before their Baptism, their explicit desire to receive it, together with repentance for their sins, and charity, assures them the salvation that they were not able to receive through the sacrament.

1260 "Since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers, in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery."62 Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved. It may be supposed that such persons would have desired Baptism explicitly if they had known its necessity.

1261 As regards children who have died without Baptism, the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God, as she does in her funeral rites for them. Indeed, the great mercy of God who desires that all men should be saved, and Jesus' tenderness toward children which caused him to say: "Let the children come to me, do not hinder them,"63 allow us to hope that there is a way of salvation for children who have died without Baptism. All the more urgent is the Church's call not to prevent little children coming to Christ through the gift of holy Baptism.

So basically, adult non-believers who served God to the best of their ability and who would have hypothetically desired baptism had they known of its necessity get to go to Heaven, and unbaptized children get a big question mark plus a "I really hope God has a way to save these guys."

The way out I see for tradcaths, is simply asserting that Muslims and Jews either did know of the necessity of baptism and rejected it, or that they didn't try to seek truth and do the will of God in accordance with their understanding of it, because if they had, they would have found the Roman Catholic Church and Jesus.

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I'm not sure to whom you are referring by this.

We are clearly talking about online Warhammer Catholics, who really want to believe that racism and bigotry are compatible with teachings of the church, while the modern church as a whole rather strongly disagrees.

Typical example.

Yes, Mr. Morlock is professing Catholic who for some reason was not listening to his well trained priest when he was explaining to him that racism is wrong.

And Morlock's not even a crusader-PFP-tradcatholicism-is-my-identity type, from what I can tell. N=vibes but I get the sense that some form of integralism is pretty popular in those corners despite being (at least in the more hardcore varieties) contrary to church teaching and potentially even doctrine in 2026.

Yeah, I think Catholics/Jews/Protestants all somewhat misunderstand each other, but they do have distinct and conflicting models of the world, and I think the US is substantially worse since letting Catholics and Jews into positions of influence.

The biggest point of conflict is that unlike Catholics and Jews, Protestants have no will to power in the sense of large state or quasi-state institutions, while Catholics and Jews do. To American Protestants, the dream is to be self-sovereign and free not merely from control by the centralised state, but free even from dependency on it in the first place. As far as I can tell from extensive interaction with Catholics and Jews, this dream is... not at all shared by them. This entire thought paradigm doesn't even exist in their heads, and to the extent they try to entertain it, it seems silly and quaint. Their model of the world is there is centralised power and we need to be in control of it. The Catholic view is they're the rightful shepherds of the sheeple, and the sheeple ought to defer to their expertise, and this is the rightful way of the world; the Jewish view is to exploit the discrepancy in cognitive ability and offer the sheeple bad deals which put the Jews in charge of everything, then say "Well, the sheeple signed off on it right here! Look at the contract they signed!" Potter from It's a Wonderful Life, basically. Or Mark Zuckerberg.

As someone from a Protestant-adjacent background, I do find both of these views naturally repulsive. But at the same time, the root problem of the Protestant model is that the sheeple are indeed completely retarded, and trying to give them a say in anything really does just result in them putting shysters in charge of everything. As is abundantly displayed in software choice, if you offer people sovereignty and freedom, they don't want it: they want the mass surveillance, censorship, and ads. I don't fault the Jews for the slur "goyim": it's completely justified.

Protestants have no will to power in the sense of large state or quasi-state institutions

Let me roll on the floor laughing here. Yep, no will to power. Just wanna sit at home being a Quietist Pietist, reading the Bible at mother's knee and knitting in the rocking chair.

Not like they went out to conquer empires or the likes.

Not like they went out to conquer empires or the likes.

Those Protestants were Church of England, whom I've heard described as 'Catholics who flunked Latin'.

The Church of England swayed this way and that, in the power struggles over the centuries. Henry at its inception was pretty much still Catholic, he was not a doctrinal innovator (to the chagrin and impatience of those of his court who were all-in with the Reformers) and it was only gradually that a lot of the liturgical changes happened. Edward his son, having been raised by his more Reformed relations, was more Protestant and stripped out much more. Mary who succeeded him tried to roll back changes but died too soon. Elizabeth who succeeded her was not concerned so much with internal belief as external, and most importantly, political acquiescence. And James who succeeded her had been raised by the Presbyterian Scottish nobles in a much more Bible-oriented, Reform version of Protestantism.

As Supreme Head/Governor of the Church, the monarch's personal beliefs of course held much sway when steering the direction it would go (see the 18th century satirical song The Vicar of Bray about how the titular vicar trims his views to suit the political currents in order to hold on to his benefice). But the clergy and the rising middle-class also had a lot of influence, and there were perpetual struggles between those deemed High Church (much too like the despised Roman Catholics), Low Church (more in tune with the other Protestant Reformation churches like the Presbyterians) and the Broad Church, who thought of themselves as traditional, middle of the road, and not concerned with finicky points of doctrine and liturgy, just a basic "God and the Ten Commandments and no need to go deeper than that".

So the Empire was built and at its peak governed by the 'simple basic Christianity' Protestants, and if you don't think that was their view of the matter, take a gander at this, The Secret of England's Greatness:

The scene depicted is based on a popular but unfounded anecdote current in the 1850s. When asked by a diplomatic delegation how Britain had become so powerful, 'our beloved Queen sent him, not the number of her fleet, not the number of her armies, not the account of her boundless merchandise, not the details of her inexhaustible wealth … but handing him a beautifully bound copy of the Bible, she said 'Tell the Prince that this is the Secret of England's Greatness'. In Victorian times, ‘greatness’ was linked to a sense of Christian duty. This helped justify British colonialism as a 'civilising mission', supporting the belief that religious conversion brought about global improvement.

I probably should have specified "American Protestants" in the first instance, rather than the second. There is, in fact, a difference between people who cross an ocean to brave a frontier with their own little religious sect and a monarch who wants to get a divorce.

Protestants have no will to power in the sense of large state or quasi-state institutions

I think that this is downstream of the grievous damage that Mainstream Protestantism did to itself and the United States when it started dabbling in theological liberalism. Since mainstream Protestants controlled the institutions, their liberalization kicked off a withdrawal by theologically conservative Protestants. The conservatives ended up with the numbers and zeal, but didn't inherit the institutional capacity (although they have been working to build it back up).

To American Protestants, the dream is to be self-sovereign and free not merely from control by the centralised state, but free even from dependency on it in the first place

I am pretty libertarian and so sympathetic to this desire, so I'd interrogate to what degree this is actually a problem. But I definitely don't think it's inherent to Protestantism (and fwiw you see much less of this sort of thinking, from what I can tell, among the Reformed Protestants).

I don't think theological liberalisation or even a loss of faith among Protestants necessarily entails a decay into centralised power. In fact, if anything, I'd say libertarianism is the more fundamental ideology that was hallucinated into existence as a way of dealing with religious fracture. I wouldn't say things like homesteading, having solar panels, raising cattle, hosting your own git server, self-custody of your Bitcoin, etc., have any particular rooting in Protestant theology itself (although I won't pretend some Protestants don't try to contend so; but I think this is them failing to recognise their own reflection in the Rorschach dots, rather than remotely serious exegesis of what's actually being said in the text).

As for whether theological liberalism resulted in a loss of power, I mean, kind of? But the Jews who are actually in power are not the sort who take the Torah particularly seriously. I mean, they do in a sort of "It's tradition, and it's our tradition" sense. It's clear Scott in Unsong has great affection for Jewish tradition. But it's also definitely not the same sort of respect as religious fundamentalists have.

And the Catholics in power today... well, as has been questioned on this very forum: "Is the pope Catholic?"

I don't think theological liberalisation or even a loss of faith among Protestants necessarily entails a decay into centralised power.

No, you're mistaking me: I am saying Mainline Protestants had a lot of power in America for a long time, but theological liberalization split them and the (conservative) splitters by default didn't have institutional control. Here, this comment explains more of what I am getting at.

if anything, I'd say libertarianism is the more fundamental ideology that was hallucinated into existence as a way of dealing with religious fracture.

Libertarianism is famously hard to define but the traits that are shared by libertarian-leaning Americans predate the fundamentalist-mainline split.

I wouldn't say things like homesteading, having solar panels, raising cattle, hosting your own git server, self-custody of your Bitcoin, etc., have any particular rooting in Protestant theology itself

WELL THIS IS AN INTERESTING QUESTION and what I would say is that the theology and culture are all caught up together. To grossly simplify things, there's a good argument to be had that the libertarian tendency in the United States is in no small part downstream of the British Isles and specifically the borderers. Now, Christianity in the Isles were always distinct from the mainland. Check in on the Scottish clergy and you'll find them doing things like "illegally seating an excommunicated guy as king." It's not particularly surprising that if you check in on them a bit later you find that their theology is, if not "libertarian," skeptical of tyranny and ("papish") centralized authority. I think the culture and theology accelerated each other; necessity is the mother of invention and all that.

As for whether theological liberalism resulted in a loss of power, I mean, kind of? But the Jews who are actually in power are not the sort who take the Torah particularly seriously.

  1. I didn't say anything about the Jews, I am only talking about Protestant Christians
  2. I am not arguing that theological liberalism inherently leads to a loss of power. I am saying it split Christianity in the States.

And the Catholics in power today... well, as has been questioned on this very forum: "Is the pope Catholic?"

Power is downstream of institution-building. I have had an unusually high amount of exposure to institutions of both Protestant and Catholic origin and I have every respect for Catholic institution building. They are very smart, very serious, and their approach to the world helps them avoid some pitfalls that Protestants often fall into, in my opinion. Protestants are extremely likely to want their organizations to be a fully confessional community, which has serious advantages but cuts Protestant entities off from the talent of other faith groups. This is easiest to see in their universities: Catholic institutions are typically quite happy to hire talented professors and staff of all or no faith, while conservative Protestant schools often restrict staff to those who share their faith. This has real benefits but narrows their talent pool, sometimes fairly dramatically.

Indeed, my own Catholic people's history since 1759 has been trying to set themselves free from Protestants, so I think the parent's opinion requires being very selective with evidence. I'm sure the Irish also would have some choice words about Protestants' will to power.

Yes, I think conservative Protestants were likely under pressure from three different directions

  1. that they were getting outflanked in the institutions
  2. the institutions were genuinely doing stuff that was inimical to their culture and beliefs and in some cases also really bad
  3. there's long been an anti-institutional conservative-libertarian-borderer-frontiersman cultural streak in the United States that many Protestants were also a part of

For all of these reasons, chunking the ring into Mount Doom instead of trying to continue to wield it began to look increasingly attractive. I think the degree to which Protestants actually bailed out of institutional competitiveness is likely overstated, but I wouldn't say it's not real.

there's long been an anti-institutional conservative-libertarian-borderer-frontiersman cultural streak in the United States that many Protestants were also a part of

That seems a much more likely reason, that early colonisation of the american frontier selected heavily for people who prefer to be away from centralized power, and that is not necessarily downstream of being protestants, lest we forget that the US states were not the only european colonies in early America.

Which leads one to ask why they present themselves as Catholic.

Why do you present yourself as American, given the demographics of the country, which you linked yourself?

Yeah. When I heard that the jury in Karmelo Anthony's case was 'all white' I could only imagine 12 obese Mexicans in buttoned up shirts with white cowboy hats sitting in the courtroom sweating profusely under the Texas sun.

I feel like the American identity isn't a comparable thing to say, Austrian, Dutch, Polish or similar. It's more like a gameshow competition where the last one to stop touching it wins. Though to be fair many European countries are moving in that direction.

Yeah. When I heard that the jury in Karmelo Anthony's case was 'all white' I could only imagine 12 obese Mexicans in buttoned up shirts with white cowboy hats sitting in the courtroom sweating profusely under the Texas sun.

It had no black people, but it did have asians, hispanics, etc, as was frequently pointed out. The people claiming it was "all white" were lying for their immediate social advantage; this proves nothing about how assimilation operates in the general context.

I don't see what the practical consequences of this decision going the other way would have been, other than increasing the number of illegal immigrants on paper. If mass deportations were going to happen, they would have already, so what difference does it make?

As to the role of the Church in all this, what did you think real Christianity meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Trying to repurpose a universalist and egalitarian religion into a tool of nativist exclusion was always a fool's errand. Perhaps the laity can be kept ignorant of the tenets of their own faith, but not the elites who have to read and interpret the scriptures.

They continue to have senior roles in ‘official’ or semi official church organizations from which it would be extremely humiliating to be removed and where they ultimately, beyond many abstract layers of theological management, answer to the Pope, who is basically Zohran Mamdani if he was a little uncomfortable around abortion.

Honest question: what "senior roles" are we talking about here? I wasn't able to find anything on a quick search but this sounds like it would be a pretty serious conflict of interest if true. Barrett is part of some lay ecumenical Christian group which I think you'd be hard pressed to call even a semi-official Catholic organization given Protestants can join. Kavanaugh is a lector which I think means he just does readings in church sometimes? I couldn't find anything on Roberts. I'm open to being convinced otherwise that these three are somehow crypto-Papists with a direct line to the Vatican, but this seems like a stretch. I'll grant that the Pope denying communion would be pretty serious, though considering this never happened to Biden, Pelosi or any other Catholic politician to my knowledge it seems like a long shot short of some major changes in Rome.

My dudette, I am sympathetic to some of your points, but the snark level makes it difficult to tell which are serious.

In any case I don't think the Roman Catholic justices need to worry about excommunication. Their bishops are far too institutionalist to impose it, even if they felt it were appropriate.

Amy Coney Barrett has Haitian children. There are hundreds of thousands of Haitians illegally resident in the US, who have kids who look just like her kids but who weren’t lucky enough to be adopted by a rich American family.

For this reason I was highly skeptical of ACB from before or around the time she was nominated.

She had already personally imported two members of a low human capital populace into the United States. With conservatives such as these, who even needs progressives?

Great. Now you are making me defend the Catholics.

With your complaining about the Evil Catholics on the court, I can not help but notice that all of them except for Sotomayor were appointed by Republican presidents. In particular, two of the three you identify as strongly Catholic (ACB and Kavanaugh) were appointed by President Trump. Perhaps ask him why he did not appoint some gun enthusiast evangelicals which favor rounding up the illegals and sending them to megaprisons in some shithole nation, or blow up their ships before they arrive?

To get the obvious out of the way: the SCOTUS upholding birthright citizenship is not that surprising that we need conspiracy explanations. The plain language of the 14th, plus a century and change worth of legal precedent based on a textual interpretation of the 14th is not something you overturn easily. In fact, overturning it would have been legislation from the bench almost as bad as Roe. We do not need to suppose that the conservatives who voted for birthright citizenship are stooges of the pope when the alternative explanation is that they are textualists who are reluctant to say "actually the constitution means X when it says Y because it would be really convenient for the object level decision if it did."

Also, if you think that the Vatican would excommunicate anyone over being against open borders, think again. Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy on a platform of zero tolerance for illegal immigration. She is openly and performatively Catholic.

I am also sorry to inform you that some brands of Christianity do not make good foundations on which you can project arbitrary political messages. Christianity comes with its own ideas about what is good. Caring for the plight of the needy was very much instrumental in early Christianity spreading. There were certainly papacies where this message was lost almost completely, but a general attitude of "let the third worlders drown, who gives a fuck" is not compatible with Catholicism. (In better news, there are plenty of choices for religions which are long on not giving a fuck about others. Vance, Hegseth and his ilk might be better off worshipping Huitzilopochtli, Odin or Khorne.)

Also, do you have some source for the Vatican (or even Mamdani) arguing that the best way to fix global poverty is just to open all the borders? Personally, I do not believe that open borders scale very well. Supporting the needy in a First World country seems much less effective than supporting them directly in the global South. Rescuing drowning migrants is, in my mind, not a part of a coherent plan to tackle global poverty. Instead, it is something you do because it is the thing a decent human should do, and you realize that you do not have the stomach to crucify enough migrants to deter them from coming, and do not trust any (hypothetical) utilitarian argument that this would lead to better global outcomes.

There are cardinals in the Catholic Church right now calling for stricter migration laws into the west. This is very much not an off limits thing.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is about how to treat schismatics, if anything, not about how to treat the strictly foreign and alien. The take away from this parable would be: “maintain neighborly love for a group like the SSPX”. The Samaritans were Israelites, existing within the borders of Israel, of the same blood and history as Jews, with scriptural and ritual overlap but large departures in orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The Jews were able to engage in some rituals with them, according to the Talmud, but otherwise they were treated as a heretical group. For an example of Catholics attempting to practice the meaning being this parable, see how they responded to yesterday’s excommunication of the SSPX. You will find a lot of malice and spite. Yet the SSPX is 99x more similar to the Vatican than the Samaritans to the ancient Jews.

The samaritans were heretics. Thé SSPX is schismatic(getting excommunicated for heresy would require something like denying the divinity of Christ) at the moment, but they weren’t for the better part of two decades ending on, literally, this Tuesday.

It is worth noting that their specific crime, electing bishops vagrans, is collapsed into a general crime of ‘consecrating bishops without mandate from the pope’ under the current code of canon law, but would be viewed as very bad behavior in the other apostolic churches as well, even if ‘schism’ isn’t really the right term for it(although as a legal category, thats where it goes).

Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy on a platform of zero tolerance for illegal immigration. She is openly and performatively Catholic

And what did she end up doing?

Great. Now you are making me defend the Catholics.

Fear not, heretic, once the Great Day of Total Domination comes and the Pope is both secular and spiritual head of the entire world (as is only right and proper), we will remember those who aided us and your cell in the dungeons will have a tiny slit to permit some cloudy natural daylight enter, and you will only be tortured by the Inquisition once a month!

In fact, overturning it would have been legislation from the bench almost as bad as Roe.

I mean, that's not really what "legislation from the bench" means? Take, for example, Kavanaugh's position that 14A doesn't require it either way, but Congress can legislate either way, wouldn't really be "legislation from the bench". It would instead be giving room for legislation. Typically, "legislation from the bench" means that the Court rules in a way that precludes legislation from making the decision. Somewhat ironically, that's kind of what the Court actually did here. By analog, Roe was legislation from the bench, where the Court decided the question in a way that didn't allow for any legislative choice, whereas Dobbs is probably not legislation from the bench, as it's saying that the legislation rests with the legislatures.

Of course, just because something is "legislation from the bench" doesn't mean that it's wrong; the Constitution may really, actually, say the thing.

I see what you're doing here.

Normally, I don't love this kind of thing and I'd even chide you for not "speaking clearly," but I have to admit this is well done. I am not even certain you aren't sincere.

What is she doing here?

Sounding the alarm about the machinations of [[[Insidious Hibernia]]]. I dare say @2rafa may be the only real white man left on this board.

Yes, we are Insidious, aided by our Machiavellian Italian co-religionists, our dour but doughty Polish co-religionists, the Bavarians (are they even proper Germans?), the French (well, what is there to say about the frogs that has not been said before?) and the gloomy, blood-drunken Spanish all of whom you foolishly permitted to immigrate to the unspotted virgin territory of the USA! Bwa-ha-ha, too late, too late!!!!

May the Christian Lord guide my hand against your ROMAN POPERY!

I want to see this conversation happen in a supermarket car park, with both parties in full regalia and at top volume...

There is a type of post that essentially goes: “All of the people behind this particular bad thing that happened are Jewish. Let’s unpack that,” but 2rafa wrote the post about Catholics instead.

I noticed the irony on my first read-through, but the thought that it was a bit never occurred to me. I still don’t think it’s a bit, but it certainly apes the style.

Sometimes they don't think it be like it is, but it do. And the group characterised in that style of post is irrelevant, all of them can behave in a collective manner when their actions are bourn of shared religion/memes/ideals.

I worry about our mods sometimes. Dealing with our nonsense has to be a serious infohazard.

Perhaps we might crowdfund some kind of retreat for them, or at least encourage the occasional rotating sabbatical.

As a Catholic I think her critique of Catholicism on US political institutions is a fair take. Why did Peronism, Franco, or Mussolini rise up in their respective Catholic countries but no such characters in English countries except for FDR after a lot of Catholic migration.

The main difference between Jews and Catholics is your allowed to criticize the Catholics and notice how their institutions and influence always seem to have certain characteristics but you are not allowed to do this with the Jews.

I think Joh Bjelke-Petersen (Premier of Queensland 1968-87) was a national populist in that mold, and he was from Protestant (Danish) stock. But I agree that the Anglosphere was historically (but sadly no longer) mostly immune to it.

It’s not entirely unserious, I have to say.

I believe she's sincere. 2rafa's view generally is very strongly opposed to immigration and she's even made commentary in the past about how Catholic and German immigration into the United States fundamentally changed the nature of the country. I also believe she lives in the UK (London?) now because she believes the US is a lost cause due to immigration.

I admit it's very interesting for a Jewish lady to have such a strong attachment to Anglo-Saxons (of course if we go too deep on this we'll get down our own "migration into the country fundamentally changed the nature of society" story) that she'd go to bat for them against the Germans or the Italians, but nevertheless hers is a unique stance and I find it interesting even when I think she's wrong.

I certainly didn’t move to London to get away from immigration (besides being an immigrant here myself, the demographics of London are pretty similar to NYC). I moved for work, stayed for the vibe (and eventually love).

Let's sanity-check this for a moment.

Let us consider comparable First World countries. If your theory holds, then the influence of the Catholic Church should positively correlate with mass migration. So, for instance, you might expect Ireland to be considerably more supportive of mass migration than England. Italy should be more supportive of it than Sweden. Spain should support it more than Denmark. Even in America, we should expect the US to be, though influenced by the Catholic Church, less supportive of mass migration than the entirety of Central America and South America.

Is this what we actually see?

I applaud the inventiveness of the top-level post - "the US is controlled by an elite conspiracy of Catholics" is a nice change from "the US is controlled by an elite conspiracy of Jews". But it doesn't survive more than a few minutes' consideration.

If nothing else, I think it requires a very specific and narrow level of Catholic ideology in power. The USCCB supports refugees and immigrants while still opposing abortion, euthanasia, LGBT, and so on - well, how are all those latter issues doing? We just saw the pope being quite critical of AI bots. I guess the Catholic conspiracy had better get on to that immediately, because man, it is doing a bad job of stopping those in the US.

I think you'd expect there to be different dynamics between the Church and migration in countries that are institutionally and autochthonously Catholic and countries that aren't. The establishment institutions, and powerholders in the US are still fundamentally protestant-judeo-atheist, and so further migration from the Catholic new world is required to increase raw and elite numbers. In Italy or Spain, new migration (unless from South America) would be necessarily diluting the Catholic % of the country. All this to say that you wouldn't necessarily assume that the more Catholic a country, the more migration you'd expect.

There's probably also a dynamic with new and old world Catholicism - it isn't a coincidence that Francis and Leo are both ultimately 2nd and 3rd gen migrants themselves. North American Catholic congregations would always have had a huge percentage of their congregants as recent migrants, and the same with Argentina. This dynamic does not extend to Italy, France, or Spain.

As a datapoint to this, Spain recently legalized between 500000 and a million illegal immigrants thanks to lobbying by the catholic church.

Sure? I'm not saying that those historically Catholic countries don't have amnesties or allow illegal migrants. I'm saying that they don't do that noticeably more often or more enthusiastically than similar non-Catholic countries.

To be honest, I don't really disagree with you. Open borders ideology is really downstream of christianity in general, rather than just catholicism. What we really need is western shintoism.

Again, sure. I don't agree with that understanding of Christianity, but I am very conscious of what I might term the 'neo-pagan right' or the 'post-Christian right', and the accompanying wish for a faith more robustly nationalist or even racialist than Christianity.

Christianity is fascinating for... well, a lot of reasons, and obviously the most important one is that it's literally true, but putting that aside and speaking more sociologically, Christianity is simultaneously individualist and universalist. God is the creator of all things and all people and the faith has a universal scope. Nothing is excluded; God is not parochial. At the same time, God is always encountered as an individual, and individual piety, and the unique relationship that God forms with every single person is likewise at the heart of the faith.

Where does that leave intermediate institutions? Elsewhere in the thread we have the start of a discussion about what this means for the church, and there's also a very rich well of Christian reflection on the concept of nations. What are 'the nations' as a theological category? Are they a problem, something merely temporary and to be abolished in the eschaton, and at worst occasions of idolatry? Or are they in some way intended features of God's design, or vectors of blessing?

I am more sympathetic to the latter view, and have talked about this before, but even granting, as I would, that the nations and their various searches for God are intentional features of his design (cf. Acts 17:26), the question of what their precise role in design is remains heavily contested, and that's where I'm going to end up in pretty fierce dispute with the new paganism, as it were.

I think it is fair to say that the church has been supportive of the state since the age of Constantine. Sure, the RCC wielded tremendous power in medieval times, and very much messed with worldly policy decisions, but in the end it has survived through pragmatism. Monarchs, states, democracies and dictatorships come and go, and while the RCC is rarely on the forefront of social change (and often has resisted it initially, especially if it was change towards the left), it tends to come around and view it as the god-given order eventually.

It doesn't matter if you think nations should exist or not. You are not getting away from help thy neighbor, your choices are one world order or letting everyone who wants in. You quote Acts 17:26, I raise you Acts 17:27: "God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us"

I don't follow? What are my choices meant to be?

I think you can make a Christian argument for the existence of nations and national cultures being a positive good, and in fact I would make an argument like that. I'd say also that there is a universal moral law to which nations no less than individuals must conform, and that this implies particular moral obligations about how nations relate to each other. I think that means I can robustly support the existence of a community of nations. I am not obligated to endorse some sort of one world government, and I am certainly not obligated to endorse open borders.

What does Acts 17:27 have to do with that? That is indeed a justification for why God would set many nations and many peoples upon the Earth - that we would each seek him and reach out for him and perhaps find him. That is good and entirely compatible with the continued existence of nations.

I am not obligated to endorse some sort of one world government, and I am certainly not obligated to endorse open borders.

The early church endorsed one world government when they were living under it. Were they wrong?

Had any early church father called to dissolve the Roman Empire into separate provinces (and to split Latin language into dozens of mutually incomprehensible dialects) as something more pleasing to God?

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And of course Revelations 13:7 is popular with the anti-NWO crowd at pointing precisely against this kind of thing. And depending on your reading of the Tower of Babel story, either God punishes hubris by scattering the nations, or God intervenes benevolently to scatter the nations for our long term health.

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This is true, and it's a good thing. Multiculturalism elegantly refutes the protestant notion that there can be authority without authorities. Protestants behold the society they created, where each person's own preferred interpretation of "good" are paramount... and weep. They have no ability to argue for the preservation of their culture as such, because their entire culture is founded on rejecting tradition. Appeals to racial solidarity fail because race is transparently a constructed category invented by 19th century aristocrats to convince poor people to be complicit in their own oppression.

If you would only convert to the true church, you would understand that all of culture that is actively worth is propagated not by heritage, language, or skin color, but by priests, monks, and sisters.

Multiculturalism elegantly refutes the protestant notion that there can be authority without authorities.

This is not a Protestant notion.

Obviously Protestantism acknowledges authorities in some sense - the Bible is clearly authoritative, for instance. You must be taking the view that 'authorities' must mean some sort of human organisation.

But Protestantism clearly allows for the existence of human organisations and governance. Even leaving aside secular governments, which hold authority in their proper (and limited) spheres, every Protestant tradition that I'm aware of has governing authorities in the church. Protestant churches have synods and assemblies and all the tools of government. What Protestants assert is that these authorities, though valid, are necessarily subject to higher authorities, which includes the likes of scripture.

Authorities exist but they are bounded in a way that they are not in Roman Catholicism. The Protestant case would be that the Catholic investiture of absolute interpretive and governing authority in the institutional body of the church is a kind of idolatry.

The Protestant case would be that the Catholic investiture of absolute interpretive and governing authority in the institutional body of the church is a kind of idolatry.

And this is a newer position of the Catholic church, too. St. Augustine very specifically says that the church councils can err (contrasting their fallibility with that of Scripture); even the Catholic church admits that the pope's authority was not something that was universally acknowledged or understood in the early church, but rather "gradually interpreted as a prerogative that was his because he was successor of Peter, the first of the apostles" and papal infallibility was only defined dogmatically in 1870 or so.

If you let me get on my hobby-horse, I'll argue that the Catholic Church as we understand it today is fundamentally an early modern institution - it's an enlightened absolute monarchy, ruled by a philosopher-prince. Its understanding of itself is shaped much more by secular forces than it would like to admit.

All churches exist in history and are shaped by forces beyond themselves, but then, Protestant churches generally make 'lower' claims about themselves. We are the locally and historically contingent expression of the universal church in this particular place and time.

the Catholic Church as we understand it today is fundamentally an early modern institution - it's an enlightened absolute monarchy, ruled by a philosopher-prince

And I suspect this arrangement was pretty adaptive to a lot of the pressures of the time. Protestantism is a very literate and democratic religion, culturally - while a church could hold its doctrines without literacy, I think the counterfactual for "the West but with Protestant doctrine" is likely the Eastern Orthodox moreso than the Southern Baptist Convention, or what have you.

Allows for? You are downplaying it. Exhibit A, Protestantism as practiced by Cromwell and contemporaries did not proscribe validity each person's own preferred interpretations, they banned public celebration of Christmas and other popery.

Cromwellian theocracy is one of the possible political arrangements compatible with Protestantism, I would say. But it is not required by Protestantism either.

I've never understood this specific type of Catholic triumphalism. Not only did the Catholic church pretty much entirely fail to conserve early Christian culture, or the universal church (where Western insistence on changing the Nicene Creed drove a split with the East), or pre-Reformation Catholic culture, or European monarchy (and attempts were made!) it also fails to convey its own teachings to its own members. The supposed authority of the Church yields a Catholic lay culture that is poorly catechized and where the overwhelming majority of weekly churchgoers oppose the church's own teachings. This might be a tolerable situation if the church was trading off quality for quantity, but (at least in the US) the opposite is happening: Catholicism is shrinking.

I highly recommend reading Barna or other pollsters on these sorts of things. The first thing that you realize when you start to look at the numbers is that Christians really need to be better catechized. The second thing you realize is that the denominations that, stereotypically, don't know what the word "catechism" means are doing a better job at it than Catholics (somehow).

If you would only convert to the true church, you would understand that all of culture that is actively worth is propagated not by heritage, language, or skin color, but by priests, monks, and sisters.

That seems contradicted by the behavior and beliefs of roughly 100% of Catholics historically, though. While one can argue for more or less immigration on prudential grounds, all non-church institutions and culture not being worth preserving doesn't seem to be a common viewpoint. What do you base it on? I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but that posture seems more akin to radical protestantism than Catholicism or Orthodoxy I'm familiar with.

I’m sure hereandgone will enjoy Father’s homily this weekend about how the Irish tricolor is cringe and non-Christian, and the Irish really should stop trying to preserve Irish Gaelic because heritage and language are not worth propagating. Leave the culture to the religious orders and the priests, please.

As we all know, Catholic cultures are completely apologetic and nonplussed about their heritage, culture, and language.

This is sarcastic, for the mods’ sake. But your position is very silly.

Your post basically hangs on this:

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (the closest the US Church has to a governing body) is staunchly pro-life but staunchly pro-immigration. So is the (American) Pope. Conservatism for me and my issues, but not for thee and yours, you might say. By some estimates, USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980, almost all from the third world. Expecting this to have no impact on the court’s conservative justices, 5/6 of whom are somewhat Catholic and 3/6 (the aforementioned) are closely tied to the modern Catholic intellectual tradition was delusional.

But this passage is not adequate to the task of holding up your argument. The USCCB is not "pro immigration", it advocates for treating people (including, but not limited to, immigrants) with kindness and dignity as befits someone made in the image of God. Nor does the church in general require anyone (supreme court justice or otherwise) to take any particular position on immigration policy. Believers are urged to follow their judgement as to what is prudent, based on love for their fellow man. And the justices, being highly educated people who know well what the church does and does not require, would be well aware of this. It is in no way "delusional" to believe that the justices are following their own reasoning rather than falling in line behind the USCCB, despite your assertion to the contrary.

I don't know much about American Catholicism, but it seems awfully hard to square:

The USCCB is not "pro immigration", it advocates for treating people (including, but not limited to, immigrants) with kindness and dignity

with:

USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980, almost all from the third world

The latter is what my high school history teacher would call 'crunchy' and the former what he would call 'woolly'. Our essays always had to be full of crunchy statements and avoid woolly ones, because an argument full of wooly statements can basically argue anything at all without evidence.

Here's the crunchy parts of what the USCCB actually says:

We bishops advocate for meaningful reforms of our nation's immigration laws

Safe and legal pathways serve as an antidote to such [trafficking] risks.

I would have quoted more but it's an unhighlightable PDF (surely a mortal sin?). But anyone reading can look at it themselves. I don't think it's too uncharitable to say that their solution to America's illegal third world immigration is to simply make that migration legal. Less charitably, to replace de facto open borders with de jure open borders.

That seems pretty pro-immigration to me...

Unfortunately, I have no idea what the actual facts behind "USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980" are, since none were provided. What are these affiliates, and what does "settled to the US" mean? I can envision very different scenarios that could be described by those words. So, without any real information about that (and also, you weren't the one advancing that point in fairness), let's focus on the PDF you linked (which I was able to highlight just fine btw, so I'm guessing there's some client differences in play). It actually says something very different from what you quoted, if you take it in context:

We recognize that nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good. Without such processes, immigrants face the risk of trafficking and other forms of exploitation. Safe and legal pathways serve as an antidote to such risks.

I think it is fair to say that the USCCB does not, based on that statement, support a complete cessation of immigration into the country. But neither are they advocating for simply opening the borders. Doing that would go against the statement that "nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good".

The statement from the USCCB is pretty light on what they envision a successful immigration policy might look like. But while it's true that they say they think our nation's policy needs reform, they also imply that national security is a legitimate concern in designing such a policy ("Human dignity and national security are not in conflict. Both are possible if people of good will work together."), as well as state outright that nations should regulate their borders (in the quote up above). They also state that we must recognize the inherent dignity of all people:

The Church’s teaching rests on the foundational concern for the human person, as created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27). As pastors, we look to Sacred Scripture and the example of the Lord Himself, where we find the wisdom of God’s compassion. The priority of the Lord, as the Prophets remind us, is for those who are most vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger (Zechariah 7:10). In the Lord Jesus, we see the One who became poor for our sake (2 Corinthians 8:9), we see the Good Samaritan who lifts us from the dust (Luke 10:30– 37), and we see the One who is found in the least of these (Matthew 25). The Church’s concern for neighbor and our concern here for immigrants is a response to the Lord’s command to love as He has loved us (John 13:34).

So in other words, they prioritize the importance of upholding the dignity of all people (immigrants as well as our existing citizens), with a focus on love, and finding a way forward which can meet the needs of all parties involved in the situation. I personally think that's pretty much what I said in my previous post, so I don't think that this document really refutes anything I said. In either case, I do not think that such a position qualifies as "pro immigration". They are not in favor of immigration per se, nor against it. They are instead focused on the dignity/love angle which is orthogonal to the question of what our immigration policy should be. Sometimes love is going to mean we should accept the less fortunate from other countries, and sometimes that is going to mean we should place restrictions so as to better serve the welfare of the people already living here.

Ignoring all the platitudes and bible verses, there is only one concrete change they propose, increasing legal migration to (somehow) eliminate illegal migration. Since demand to migrate to the US is extremely high and, more importantly, outwith the control of the US, the only way to stop illegal migration through legal migration is to grant literally everybody in the world who wants one a visa. Even with the lip service about secure borders, that's the only way that policy can work. You may say that doesn't count as 'open borders' (because every still has to apply for a visa) and they may say it still counts as 'secure borders' (because only legal migrants are allowed in) but come on, legalising all immigration from everywhere is open borders by any reasonable definition.

Saying that the organisation is 'pro-immigration' is frankly underselling it. Their policy proposals, slim as they are, are radical open-borders extremism that are far beyond the political mainstream. They may dress them up in nice cuddly language, but these boys are anarchists in frocks.

That document is a perfect example of why men of the cloth shouldn't get involved in politics. They've put out a special message that is 99% nothing and 1% childishly naive extremism with no addressing tradeoffs (simply stating that 'Human dignity and national security are not in conflict' doesn't count).

They are not serious people.

I think Catholicism even to Roman times was a slave religion and Universal Church. I don’t believe you need say their helping out compatriots today in the third world to find the reasoning for why Catholics have a lot of trouble denying immigrants.

Things like HBD or if you just want to call it racism is just very hard to square with Catholicism. It’s probably not even easy to square with Christianity and other sects but American Christianity does seem to have evolved immune responses that is more difficult for Catholicism to pick up. There is too much theological baggage that just can’t be repudiated and still maintaining their the original and true Church because Christianity is fundamentally a slave religion. Which I think was perfectly fine for Europe when they just dealt with Europeans or war with Muslims. There is just a huge parallelism with turning away a migrant and baby Jesus being turned away from the Inn in the nativity scene. Catholics were useful for abortion battles but the same thing probably going to be bad for immigration.

Maybe is just doing copium but I think at a minimum there is a 50% chance or more that within 20 years birth rate is changed. The Trump administration didn’t build this case the way the judges like. It’s better to take small steps than the whole thing at once. Just keep working exceptions and yes you probably have to quit appointing Catholics to the Court.

It's not Catholics, it's everybody. The median person at least. But Catholics like Nick Fuentes will keep blaming the Jews, because, let's face it, the Jews are to the left of the other religious groups so they were earlier on the scene and are always going to be over-represented in leftism. Not to mention the Israel issue.

Jews are of course overrepresented in leftism, but today wasn’t about Jews. The only Jewish person on the Supreme Court, appointed as a liberal justice, voted with the liberals, as would be obvious. In the same way, the black justice appointed as a liberal voted with the liberals, and the black justice appointed as a conservative voted with the conservatives.

The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.

The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.

“If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.”
--Justice Antonin Scalia

Now admittedly the right wing has a better judicial philosophy (originalism/textualism) to vote in non partisan ways on the Supreme Court when compared to the left wing (living constitutionalism). Judges should interpret the laws as it read by the common person at the time - not how they feel should be the best outcome for their political side.

The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.

There is nothing whatsoever that constitutes a "travesty" in justices voting against the actions of a president who appointed them. That is, in fact, the entire point behind having an independent court which serves for life. They are not meant to be an extension of the president's will, rubber stamping whatever he does. Moreover, even if the president's agenda is reasonable (an assertion you didn't bother to substantiate, but just assumed as fact), that does not therefore make his actions in pursuit of that agenda reasonable. He might be taking illegal actions in service to a reasonable goal, and in that case it is the duty of the judiciary to rein him in - that's what checks and balances are all about.

The only Jewish person on the Supreme Court, appointed as a liberal justice, voted with the liberals, as would be obvious. In the same way, the black justice appointed as a liberal voted with the liberals, and the black justice appointed as a conservative voted with the conservatives.

Yes. But on average, how do Jews and Blacks vote compared to Whites? Do you understand my point now?

The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.

An original American would say it's a papist conspiracy to flood the United States with papist hispanics so the Pope can rule over the US.

An original American would say it's a papist conspiracy to flood the United States with papist hispanics so the Pope can rule over the US.

Samuel Morse was never wrong, only early, and the plea for the west has been rejected.

An original American would say it's a papist conspiracy to flood the United States with papist hispanics so the Pope can rule over the US.

They might, and that would be closer to an accurate interpretation of today’s decision than that of many a modern American political commentator.

Historically, the United States had an open borders immigration policy. Perhaps we should say that the country was flooded with nativists?

That's not really true in any meaningful sense, is it?

Like, sure, an HBD nativist might believe that the importation of black slaves was a poison pill for the United States long term, but even as we let some non-Anglos come and work here, they often couldn't become citizens. And at various points in our history, we had quotas on different groups because we didn't want too many immigrants from those countries.

Eh, I'd take good old Leo as leader of the free world over Trump.

  • -11

While I do not have anything against Leo in general, any Vatican which had the ambition to rule the US by proxy would likely be as much of a disaster as Trump is.

In practice, this would be a ban on abortion while otherwise letting the normal government operate as it pleases.

As in so many cases, the fact that the Pope does not have the ambition to rule the US is part of why one might wish for him to do it.

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