Audio only:
It’s a delicate time to talk about anger. There is a lot to be angry about. There’s a lot in the secular world to be angry about. There’s a lot in the church to be angry about, but we want to be giving an account of our faith that draws other people—most especially our children—towards the faith. Matthew Walther and Cy Kellett discuss how anger can ruin apologetics.
“Which brings me to my final point, the harshest of all the censures that I intend to present here. It is one that I hope will, literally speaking, hit very close to home. I am talking about what you are doing to your families, about the relentless negativity that you are inviting into your homes and the sentiments you are inculcating among those for whose spiritual well-being you have been given an especial care. Do you really suppose that your families care as much as you do about the latest supposed outrage half a world away that you have learned about on your computer? Does it really seem to you likely that your children are spiritually edified by learning that, according to self-proclaimed experts on the internet, truths that they themselves barely understand are being denied by shadowy figures who do not figure meaningfully into their own existences? They are weary to the point of exhaustion with you and your online outrage.” —Matthew Walther, The Addiction Problem in Catholic Media,The Lamp
Cy Kellett:
Is your anger messing up your apologetics? Matthew Walther is next.
Hello, and welcome to Focus The Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett your host, and it’s a delicate time to talk about anger, for this reason there is a lot to be angry about. There’s a lot in the secular world to be angry about. There’s a lot in the church to be angry about, but we want to be giving an account of our faith that draws other people towards the faith. Most especially draws our children towards the faith. So we were really impressed with the reflections of Matthew Walther, who we have on this episode who’s the editor of The Lamp, a new Catholic magazine.
When he gave us some reflections in the magazine about how anger is actually getting in the way of the presentation of the faith these days. Particularly anger frankly, at our Holy father Pope Francis and anger that is being… it’s creating a cycle of being angry at the Pope, consuming a lot of Catholic media that’s angry at the Pope, becoming more angry at the Pope, supporting that Catholic media, getting more of that Catholic media and then a cycle of decline.
We might call it a cycle of decline is happening. We were a little bit startled by the accusation against Catholic media because we’re a Catholic media company, but we were very impressed with what he said and so we decided we’d have a conversation with them. Here’s Matthew Walther from The Lamp. Matthew Walther editor of The Lamp, the new Catholic magazine, thanks for being with us here at Catholic Answers Focus.
Matthew Walther:
Thanks so much for having me.
Cy Kellett:
I’ve seen your work in other places, but your recent piece in The Lamp. We thought we’d really like to have a conversation with you and thanks for coming in to do that. The name of the piece is the addiction problem in Catholic media and as members of the Catholic media we pretty much had to read that around here, and we found ourselves in great sympathy with what you wrote. And so maybe I could just ask you, well, let’s see if we can categorize it. It does seem to me that the addiction that you are talking about is a grumpiness, even anger, often directed at Pope Francis, but also more generalized in that it’s a kind of angry Catholicism. Am I in the ballpark of what you intended?
Matthew Walther:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think it’s fair to say that it’s this symbiotic thing where Catholic media has come to depend upon this angry fixation among certain readers. And then the appetite just becomes self perpetuating.
Cy Kellett:
There’s a certain way in which it there’s… and I think that you… as a matter you do address this and there’s a financial incentive to keep the anger going for those who are presenting media, either through the internet or even in print media or other media outlets, there is a financial reason to keep the anger going.
Matthew Walther:
Right, and I think that’s something that’s true, not just in Catholic media, certainly you can look at politics in the secular world and you can see how competing cultures of outrage give rise to certain priorities and coverage, which in turn just feed the outrage more and it’s never ending. But I think that there’s a specifically Catholic version of this, which is what I was trying to address.
Cy Kellett:
A particularly Catholic version, but also that it being Catholic makes it particularly pernicious in that, this is not what our faith is about and it seriously handicaps the conveying of the faith to other people to be just angry all the time.
Matthew Walther:
Absolutely. And there are two sides to that. On the one hand I think about, I’ve actually been lucky enough to have welcomed a few friends, either who have grown up Protestant or have been atheist into the church in recent years. And one thing I’ve always asked them after they’ve been received is, “How did you possibly think that this is a thing that you wanted to get into?” Especially when you’re talking about the Protestant friend who had some serious theological convictions obviously, primacy of the chair of St. Peter is a stumbling block for something. And when you see that even otherwise very Orthodox serious Catholics seem to hold these views about the current occupant of the Holy Seat, that is not really compatible with the theology, the papacy. How do you do that?
Cy Kellett:
Indeed, but, and so let’s talk about St. Francis… I mean St. Francis, Pope Francis a little bit then, because I wonder if your impression of the whole situation is that, it may be that we Catholics and I think of my friends, Catholic men of a certain age. We know that the culture is not on our side. We’re not going to turn on Netflix and we’re going to find a lot of stuff that supports what we would like our children to learn, or what we believe about the human person. And we’re not going to find it in politics and we’re certainly not going to find it in the New York times or, so you have a little bit of a circle, the wagons thing. So then you have these Pope’s like Pope John Paul the II and Pope Benedict who are over there in Rome.
And you think, “Well, at least that part is settled. I don’t have to be angry at that.” And then along comes Pope Francis who unsettles that, and now the thing that was feeling at least stable doesn’t feel stable. And then that… I think that might have directed a great deal of anger in Pope Francis’s direction, not that it’s new anger but that it’s old anger that used to feel at least some security that the guy who was in the chair, Peter was on our side and now we can’t even be sure of that. What do you think of that thesis?
Matthew Walther:
Yeah, I think that there are certainly a new development there in the sense that one thing that’s been very surprising to me over the last few years, is to see people who had reflexively ultra maintain views about the papacy. And in fact, people who… I think maybe sometimes to a fault tended when there were questions of apologetics or debates within the church, especially debates with liberal Catholics tended to make arguments just by pointing, “Well, this is what the Pope says,” as opposed to being able to engage with the tradition in a three-dimensional way and it’s just astonishing to me to see people who conceived of the faith that way, have this very openly hostile relationship with the current Pope.
Cy Kellett:
Now, I did get the sense that… it struck me that there was a determination in this piece that you wrote. And again, it’s in The Lamp magazine you can find it, it’s called, “The addiction problem in Catholic media,” Matthew Walther, our guest is the author in addition to being editor there at The Lamp. And it seemed to me that there was a determination in here that you were going to be somewhat confrontational with a certain kind of Catholic, and frankly it struck me as even a certain kind of male Catholic, that a certain kind of man.
Matthew Walther:
I think that guilty as charged. I think what I’ve noticed over the last few years, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about this year, thinking about after the Holy father announced the year of St. Joseph, there are Catholic men who are devoting hours and hours of their time every day to reading inflammatory often just simply factually inaccurate material, not just about the Pope, but about a church gossip and goings-on in Rome and something… the strange dynamic ball there is that they seem to be hoping for the worst. So for example, we have the Amazon Senate and before, during, and immediately after all these people were confidently asserting that the Holy father was going to suspend the ancient discipline of clerical celibacy in their wrong right.
And nothing of the kind ever happened, and I remember being so struck by how a certain kind of Catholic man was almost palpably disappointed, because they… and it… I think what we’re seeing is something that is bad. It’s bad for families. It’s bad for the formation of children. And I think it’s definitely male driven. I always joke with my wife about this, she doesn’t have the luxury about being mad at things that happen inside her computer, because she has serious work to do like forming and raising our children.
Cy Kellett:
Well, I want to get to that because what you got to as far as forming and raising children, I thought was just beautiful and would have been… is helpful whether in the context of this article or not, but it does… I want to address first that you’re addressing of this mindset, it does seem that if you notice, and I have no reason to dispute you as a matter of fact, I think you actually quite bravely said exactly what the truth is here. That people are actually disappointed when Pope Francis… a certain kind of angry male, as a matter of fact, is disappointed when Pope Francis does moderating things, things that you might not agree with, you might agree with, but they’re not revolutionary. The disappointment is related to the fact that, well, the Pope failed once again to give us a galvanizing moment, we want a galvanizing moment so that we can go to war.
I think that’s what is happening. And then the Pope repeatedly doesn’t give quite that… he came off of close with the Pachamama and I have to say, here at Catholic Answers, we were very critical of the Pachamama deal. Because you the best defense, at least it seemed to me was a muddled. Well, it’s not clear what the Vatican was doing well, when it comes to religious idols you should be crystal clear. It should be absolutely crystal clear, but that criticism is not at all a cause for what we’re looking for some moment to go to war with the person God has given us to be his vicar on earth and our spiritual father. But there does seem to be this desire for a galvanizing moment so the revolution can start.
Matthew Walther:
I think that’s right. And I think that actually the incident that you alluded to in 2019 actually helps to illustrate my thesis. I didn’t actually end up going into this in the piece, I think, but yeah. Suppose you really were convinced like that fellow Alexander [shovel 00:12:15].
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right. The guy who threw the Pachamama into the river.
Matthew Walther:
Yeah, the guy who threw it in into the tyber, if you really believe that this was an unholy idol that had been placed in a sacred space and was desecrating. There are actual manuals for the destruction of idols, there are very straightforward courses of action that one would take. And probably it’s not something that a layman would want to do at all, but the last thing that you would do is make a showboating video of yourself, throwing it into the tyber, where among other things it could easily be recovered and indeed was, and then proceed to go on a speaking tour of the United States and raise all this money and become a celebrity that seems like immediate stunt, that doesn’t seem like St. Athanasius putting areas under his heel.
Cy Kellett:
Right. And again, there is a great deal of money changing hands from people who are angry to the people who are stoking the fires of anger. I don’t think that that’s a deniable fact and the question is, well, we’ll be told, I suppose, it’s righteous anger and all that. Well, nonetheless it’s caused for suspicion that this is not a holy undertaking, all of this cycle of anger and the angry paying for more reason to be angry.
Matthew Walther:
That’s right, and I think we have to remember the wrath of man work is not the righteousness of God. The question for me is, what sense of history is being brought to bear on these questions that are supposed to inspire so much outrage? And I think the ongoing debate about a Morris Latisha is a perfect illustration of this, because I don’t see very much daylight between the Morris Latisha and to me, basically untenable. Prescription outlined in familiar as consortium decades ago saying, “Well, you’re living in these irregular unions. You can maintain all the outward trappings of that as long as you don’t engage in adultery.” That seems Pollyannish to me, it’s not something that pastorally you can reasonably expect people to adhere to, but none of the people who are so outraged about a Morris Latisha seem to have grappled with that question along and how revolutionary that change familiar as consortia was in comparison with the previous discipline.
Cy Kellett:
Right, and then the Pope Francis, as you point out at least required people to go talk to a priest about… that doesn’t seem like a step back, whatever else you might say that in itself, doesn’t seem like a step back.
Matthew Walther:
Right, for most of Catholics who are my age. Late twenties, early thirties, unless we grew up outside of the enclaves places like the diocese of Arlington Virginia, and some other places like that, which tend to be the sources of a lot of this, the outrage industry, the reality on the ground that we were used to was unquestioned reception of Holy communion by divorced and remarried people. It was just the reality on the ground and it had been for decades. So I think that’s another angle here where we’re getting worked up about something that has been in front of all of our eyes. A crisis in the church has been with us for decades and decades and we want to blame it on the current occupant of the Holy seat when that’s just… it’s not a reasonable or adult or historical response to this crisis.
Cy Kellett:
No, I cannot disagree with you there. You did give a few prescriptions at the end or as you made your way through the piece in The Lamp magazine, the new Catholic magazine. And one of them has to do with not paying for this, but it’s connected to… The call to men, to renew their family life because they’re damaging their family life with all of this. And I think most of us have at some point, if you’ve lived long enough as a Catholic, you’ve seen the devout Catholic father who has alienated his own children from the faith by living that devotion out in an angry way. And you just have to be lying to yourself if you said, “You’d never have seen that.” And it does seem to me you’re profoundly concerned about the children of men who are angry and have directed that anger at the institutions of the church.
So, first of all, the first prescription it has to do with the Catholic media and who are selling this constant outrage and you say, do not, you say, continue to enrich them, throw the money changes out of the temple, do not donate or subscribe to websites or groups that promise only the fetishization of despair and calumnies against the Holy father, save it for our poor women religious, for chapels dedicated to the traditional mass, for Holy missionaries, for the support of your own parishes and Holy priests known to you for any number of worthy causes up to, and including taking your family on a nice vacation during which you do not check your favorite Catholic website and instead apply yourself manfully to the duties of family life.
This seems to me as a call, if you will, for a Catholic traditionalism that is actually, these are the traditions we Catholics used to live by and in the media age, we’ve gotten away from them because we rather scream at each other on the internet about being more traditional. Do you see what I’m saying? That the actual traditions of the church are, “You really believe this faith, well support the missionary, support the sisters, spend time with your family.” That’s traditional Catholicism and getting on the internet and yelling about traditional Catholicism is not traditional it’s profoundly untraditional.
Matthew Walther:
Absolutely, and being so hyped up by the argument going on your phone that at family dinner, you’re reaching for your electronic device instead of having a conversation with your children about what they were doing that day. You know, that, excuse me. Yeah, I find this deeply unhealthy and as you say it’s just deeply untraditional. This is not the model of fatherhood that the church has always held up for us, especially in the figure of St. Joseph. I always like to say, can you imagine St. Joseph not getting down to his work as a carpenter, because he’s busy ranting to our blessed mother about something he disagrees with that one of the temple priest is doing.
Cy Kellett:
No, no, you can’t, you can’t imagine it. And somehow, well, first of all, it’s just not a nice thing to do to your wife. It’s mean to inflict all this anger on other people, all this ranting on other people.
Matthew Walther:
Right, and this is a question that I’ve been thinking about for a while earlier, you were talking about how we have this circle the wagons mentality, rightly as Catholics because so much of what is out there in the world is just filth. And so what this means is, as lay people, we we’re trying to pursue authentic obedient, faithful Catholic family life.
It means dropping out to some extent, and it means being isolated from the rest of society. And you see this hundreds of thousands of Catholic families across this country who were homeschooling for example, and they’re doing this in a world in which you don’t have the built-in networks of neighbors with whom you’re on good terms or aunts or mothers who necessarily live down the road are there to help you through all the work of looking after kids. Catholic women, faithful Catholic wives and mothers, I will always say, are the loneliest, some of the loneliest least regarded people in the church today. And they are doing the most important work thanklessly and their burdens do not need to be multiplied by their husbands who were upset about petty controversies on their computers.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Again, I find myself in complete agreement with you and actually quite impressed that you made the point because… and you did it on the internet because there’s also this crowd reaction to these things that you… I suppose, let me put it to you this way, because I have asked others about this, but there seems to be a way in which this desire for that galvanizing moment, when finally we can rise up in a revolution and all say, this is a terrible Pope.
And I don’t know what the next step after that is, but what we can finally all do that, and we can all take the right color pill or whatever the metaphor is that’s being used. This waiting for that galvanizing moment also means a constant suspicion of other people like, are you really the right kind of Catholic, not… are you a fellow baptized Catholic, my brother or sister in the Lord? Whatever your opinion about anything is, Jesus say I don’t have very little to say about casting people out because their opinions, but we’re constantly looking, did that guy did that Matthew Walther, just give me a signal that maybe he’s the wrong kind of Catholic and he’s not with us. And yet you wrote this and you don’t seem concerned about that at all.
Matthew Walther:
Yeah. I just don’t think that thing matters very much. And I think this is another unhealthy dynamic that has within certain areas of Catholic media for a long time, which is this bizarre desire to impose loyalty tests.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, well said, yeah.
Matthew Walther:
And you see it, you see it actually not as much in the real world in the day-to-day life of a parish. I would say that I don’t actually see very much of this stuff. It’s something that plays out most prominently online, but you see it in people who are attached to the traditional mass, especially in circles of people like my family who attended basically exclusively, where if someone doesn’t have that view, or if someone… even little things policing women about whether they’re… vail or wear hats at church. Being obsessed with that, being obsessed with whether the priests vestments are the kind that you want or being obsessed… I heard someone write to me about how he went to a traditional mass at a parish that he had visited before, and he thought it was so great. But when father was preaching, he preached without a Beretta.
Cy Kellett:
Oh yeah. Well, Matthew, we cannot have that. If we start allowing preaching without a Beretta, that is the end of Catholic faith. But that’s really… are you in league with the anti-Christ? [crosstalk 00:25:26]. Yeah, I see what you mean though. It’s the fetishizing and obsessing over minor details, almost all of which are none of your business. Whether a woman wears a veil or not, even if you’re related to that woman is none of your… and I really would like to use a vulgar term right now as a modifier, business. It’s none of your business ever but the fact that we get into obsessing over those things is really… yeah, it’s a sign of… well, you said a loyalty test loyalty to what?
Matthew Walther:
Right. Loyalty to what? And if the answer isn’t loyalty to the church, loyalty to the Holy father and clearly that’s not what it is. Then the question is what? And what are these attachments that are apparently closer to our hearts than the church and that obedient.
Cy Kellett:
I have to tell you throughout this recording, occasionally we have heard some small feet and small voices behind you. And so you are a father yourself and you give advice to fathers at the end. I wonder if you would… before we have to wrap up, and again, I sincerely, I want to align myself with what you said in the addiction problem in Catholic media in The Lamp magazine and say, I’m grateful for it. And you’re braver than I am. And I hope nobody watches this YouTube, because I don’t want to get the emails, but you do talk about the Catholic father has as having an obligation, not to be the angry person and tell us a bit about what you said and why you said that.
Matthew Walther:
So I think that one of the problems, like I said, that comes along with the constant circle, the wagons mentality is that while it’s totally fair that you’re going to put your children as a father in a position where you say, “Oh, this movie that you heard about from somebody from your cousin who maybe is not a faithful Catholic. We don’t do things like that. We don’t watch those movies or we don’t do those kinds of things.” There has to be give and take for that reason, and I think that the most important thing that bothers can communicate is an authentic sense of joy. Joy in the faith, joy in the promises of our Lord and those gifts and trusted to our lady and I’m not talking about happy clappy stuff.
I’m saying be that father who gets out of work, and instead of running to his computer to check his favorite blog, runs home and picks up the kids and is ready to go outside and play ball or have a fun time. And that father whose kids are so excited because it’s bedtime and we’re going to read some stories and we’re going to say our beads and we’re going to talk about grandma or whomever we want to pray for, trying to cultivate those virtues. Those are what matter. What doesn’t matter is, how much you know about the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago and whatever dumb Stephie’s doing, none of that matters. Our Lord is never going to ask you after the last Trump’s blow, whether you made the cleverest argument on Twitter or whatever. He’s going to ask you about what you did with those who had been placed under your care and what kind of a father you were.
Cy Kellett:
Man, I had some bad stuff I wanted to say about the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, but now I can’t say it to you, but all right, Matthew author, I appreciate. I want to recommend again to those who, by the way are going to send an email. I don’t have anything negative that I wanted to say about the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago. I was just playing around Matthew Walther is the editor of this new magazine, thelampmagazine.com is where you can find the article we’ve been talking about, the addiction problem in Catholic media, print it out, put it under the door of that person you know that it is directed at. Maybe before we go though, would you tell us a little bit about The Lamp magazine? Maybe give us the elevator pitch because you’ve been kind enough to spend this time with us. I’d like people to discover your magazine.
Matthew Walther:
Yeah, absolutely. So The Lamp is a new print magazine and we’ve chosen print for a very specific reason, even though we put some things on the website occasionally we want people to reject what Cardinal Sarah has called the culture of noise. We want people to step back and to realize that what’s out there in the wider culture, what’s going on there in secular politics. You have no allies, both sides are against you. And what we discover as Catholics is, what authentically has been placed before us both in the deposit of faith and prudentially and people in synagogue and so on. And really just learn how to think through the problems of the modern world as Catholics, and not as people who liked this presidential candidate and are also Catholics, or as people who vote for this party are Catholics. But just how to think about everything from politics to sports, to music as Catholic.
Cy Kellett:
It’s a beautiful effort. I wish you all the success in the world. Matthew Walther, thank you for being with us.
Matthew Walther:
Thanks so much, Kellett.
Cy Kellett:
Let me just tell you right now, I’m going to read all the comments after this one, and I’m going to do it on YouTube. So if you have angry comments, just put them in the YouTube stream and I will read them. I’m going to have a good cry for myself and then I’m going to take a deep breath and try to go on with my life. Again, I’ll recommend the article to you, I know you cannot cover these things perfectly but if there’s a general sense that… especially as Catholic men, kindness to our wives and to our children and the kind of kindness that does not inflict our anger on them is actually a very important part of sharing the faith with the people to whom… or the people that have been entrusted to us, to receive the faith from us. Us receiving the faith from them, certainly. But we have an obligation to share the faith with our wives and children.
And if we’re just angry that we can’t do that. So I’ll commend to you, if you’re having any trouble in that area, read Matthew Walther’s article. You can find it in The Lamp magazine, just put it in The Lamp magazine in Google and you’ll come across it, and you can send us an Email but I’m going first to read all the comments on YouTube. So if you got it, stick it right there.
If you want to send it in an email radio@catholic.com is our email address. If after this, you’re like, “I am free. I am healed. I want to support them financially.” You can do that by going to givecatholic.com, givecatholic.com and maybe give us a little note about why you’re supporting us. It helps more than you might suspect. If you get us on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher any of those services, if you wouldn’t mind subscribe, that way you’ll know when new episodes are out and leave us that five star review and a nice comment, and that will help to grow the podcast. If you’re angry, don’t leave it there. Leave that over at YouTube, that’s that’s better. I’m Cy Kellett your host, we’ll see you next time. God willing right here on Catholic Answers. Focus.