Sarah Mullally’s New Role

King Charles III through UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer (or maybe vice versa) has appointed Sarah Mullally to be the next “Archbishop of Canterbury.” Thoughts? Well, in one sense the question is moot. There hasn’t been a real Archbishop of Canterbury for over 400 years. Changes to the Anglican ordination rite in the 16^th century, denying the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, meant that the valid ordination of Anglicans to the episcopate ended around 1550. Real bishops in the Church of England have been long dead. Pope Leo XIII made that clear in Apostolicae Curae in 1896. (See here.) That is settled teaching. Still, Canterbury symbolically remained England’s original and primatial see, even if it’s long been truly vacant. Recent popes, in pursuit of ecumenical understanding, have met with Anglican leaders.

But the choice of Sarah Mullally marks a decisive moment. As the first woman pretending to be Archbishop of Canterbury, her nomination raises not only questions about the lack of apostolic succession in the Anglican “Communion” (the key point of Apostolicae Curae). It also implicates central points in the teaching of Ordinatio sacerdotalis that the Church is incapable of ordaining women to the priesthood (see here). Anglicanism itself has fractured over priestesses and later female “bishops,” but the elevation of a woman to the symbolic position of unity in the Anglican Communion is a qualitatively defining moment.

Catholics may regard the question as moot, given the overall invalidity of Anglican orders (even though there are those in the professional ecumenical establishment who would like to tamper with Apostolicae curae). But Sebastian Wang raises a provocative question (here). Anglicans have always defended the validity of their orders using an innovative ecclesiology called “branch theory.” Put most basically, it posits some generic “Christian” tree trunk out of which grew three major branches: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism. In contrast to Catholic ecclesiology, the “branch” partisans refuse to identify primitive Christianity with the Catholic Church. Neatly, however, the “branch theory” does not accommodate other branches of “low” Protestantism because their doctrines, morality, and/or disciplines are so divergent from that primitive stock. I find “branch theory” a convenient fig leaf to justify the preexistence of a church that didn’t, but that’s another question. Well, as Wang observes, “Mrs. Mullally” now calls branch theory into question. There’s no question that primitive Christianity did not ordain women to the priesthood or episcopate, in its Catholic, Orthodox, or crypto-“Anglican” expressions. The history is indisputable. Catholicism teaches it cannot ordain women. Orthodoxy might not put it in such words but, at root, shares that conviction.

Which leaves Anglicanism alone. It cannot deny it is doing something in its highest office — its primacy — that has no precedent in the primitive Christianity of which it claims to be part. Wang is right in saying Canterbury now has a choice: to stop pretending Anglicanism is some kind of Catholic half-way house and admit its Protestantism or admit what it’s done is incompatible with the tree of which it claims to be a branch and reverse itself. I doubt the latter will happen; they’ll likely claim a “development of doctrine” à la Newman of the kind about which John Henry’s honesty made him finally stop prevaricating and swim the Tiber. But it is a moment that, on the grounds of Anglican ecclesiology itself, ought to make one ask just how real this body’s claim to primitive Christian paternity is. Because how one answers that has implications for Catholic self-understanding, too.

Conversion Therapy on Supreme Court Docket

The Supreme Court, which began its new term Monday, will today hear the case of Chiles v. Salazar. The case seeks to declare Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy — therapy aimed at assisting a minor towards a heterosexual orientation — unconstitutional. Colorado is one of 23 states that prohibit therapists from even discussing a change in sexual orientation if told by a minor of his same-sex attraction. (See a map here.) An evangelical Christian therapist is challenging the Colorado gag order as a violation of freedom of speech. (One wonders what it will take for some Catholics to get litigious.) Defenders of the gag order claim that conversion therapy is not just ineffective but actually is harmful to children. The usual bogeyman of suicidal inclination is often trotted out to justify the prohibition.

The truth is that such gag orders are efforts by typically sexually liberal states to put their weight behind homosexual identities. In many jurisdictions, refusal to “affirm” a child’s “sexual orientation” can be a pretext for state intervention. It can be held against a parent in child custody or visitation matters. Some states a priori declare such parents ineligible to be foster parents. A legislator in Virginia even proposed taking children away from “non-affirming” parents and turning them into wards of the state. Many places have school boards that conceal “sexual orientation” and “gender transitions” from parents, e.g., using names and pronouns for kids in school other than the ones parents gave them. (Another case on that question from Massachusetts is headed to the Supreme Court this term.) California has legislation pending to have the state put the 1-800 number to an “LGBTQ+” endorsing group on all student ID cards  to give “counseling” to kids with suicidal ideation (because the number already there to the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is apparently not enough). And, even if a parent wants to find a therapist who might try to help a child’s gender confusion, Colorado (ground zero of persecution for bakers that won’t bake same-sex wedding cakes) puts its thumb on the scale by prohibiting such talk under pain of losing one’s professional credentials.

Colorado’s contention is that it can and should regulate professional care standards. There is something to be said for that. But when states weigh in exclusively and compulsorily on one side of controversial social issues, one must ask how much that intervention is “public health” and how much lifestyle ideology? Forced COVID vaccinations at the cost of employment and social access bears a lot of responsibility for why people are questioning the mandatory immunization regimen, an unnecessary undermining of the important achievement of childhood vaccination care. Likewise, forced prohibitions on discussing gender identity with a minor because the state (as opposed to parents) “knows better” raises questions of what really drives these policies? Are they like the “non-cooperation” policies blue states have pushed post-Dobbs to shield their abortionists from accountability (including for malpractice — often long-distance — with pregnant patients) in states that protect life?

Marrying commonsense public health policies to disputed public issues, bringing the weight of the state to bear against even parents in the care and raising of their children is a dangerous path down which many states want to go. One hopes the Supreme Court will throw out Colorado’s restrictions.

Immigration Enforcement and Political Bait-and-Switch

I recently raised concerns about the need versus the means of addressing the problem of poverty. I want to raise them alongside the debate in the United States over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) because the latter raises questions that impair ecclesiastical credibility about the former. There are calls in many quarters demanding ICE’s abolition, with ecclesiastical voices complaining about its enforcement actions against illegal immigrants. Note what “abolitionists” demand. They are not calling for “reform” of ICE, e.g., its arrest tactics. Arrests are never going to be “nice.” Most people don’t want to get arrested and will run, if not resist. The abolitionists deem ICE irreformable. They want its abolition, and not because they want an effective law enforcement agency that will detain and deport illegal aliens. They reject that project. They insist “no human is illegal” and they want a “reformed” immigration system that expands “legal pathways for immigration.” In other words, they want an agency that enforces an immigration law that hands out Bienvenidos packages with preloaded credit cards, EBT SNAP cards, green cards, naturalization applications, and voter registration cards (not necessarily in that sequence) to every “poor” economic migrant who has decided he is entitled to enter the United States, legally or not.

This is the kind of phenomenon that makes people doubt claims about “immigrants’ rights” and “poverty” and what is the required “Christian response.” We’re regularly told countries have a theoretical right to regulate their borders, but in practice that right is always subordinated to the “needs” of the “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” seeking to be self-qualified economic migrants. And, until that doubletalk ceases, such dubiety seems credible.

Greta’s Excellent Adventure

Greta Thunberg has been twice interdicted by Israel naval forces, arrested, and now faces deportation. I admit little sympathy for her flotilla’s antics in trying to run a naval security zone. But there were two aspects of her most recent eastern Mediterranean cruise that seemed particularly disturbing.

First, Thunberg again insisted she was “kidnapped.” One X commentator made an appropriate observation: Greta seems to be the first person actually to get on a boat and sail back to her captors to be “kidnapped” a second time. Methinks we may see a revision of psychology’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: “Stockholm Syndrome: Thunberg Variant.” Second, more bothersome: Upon release, a Turkish co-“abductee” claimed “Little Greta” (his words) was abused in Israel, dragged by her hair and made to kiss an Israeli flag.  If true, these charges are serious.  But they also sound like some old antisemitic tropes.  They are repeated by other flotilla members, who already have an animus towards Israel, but what other corroboration exists?  They spread quickly on X.  I have to say, I was waiting next to hear that the “perfidious Jews” made her watch them drink newborn babies’ blood.

Absent independent confirmation, I have to say that these tropes — along with the “powerful Jews” who “control everything” — sound a lot like standard antisemitic bilge. That’s why I waited for the blood libel to be raised, too. Two things scare me: that 80 years after the Holocaust, it seems such tropes are again in circulation and receive credence in 2025, even among the apparently ostensibly “educated.” But, then again, the same afternoon these claims flooded social media, another poster asked whether we should believe ICE is actually deporting people as opposed to killing them and disposing of the bodies. (C’mon, they’re not Planned Parenthood, insisting on their right to dump “biological waste.”)

In “Fiddler on the Roof” the constable is a local Russian official who is nominally friends with Tevye. He doesn’t organize pogroms per se, but he carries them out when St. Petersburg officials tell him to. He’s “moderate” — he only allows a limited pogrom in the middle of Tzeitel’s wedding. But he won’t buck official opinion. When his superior tells him to throw out the “Christ-killers” of Anatevka, he mildly protests before conveying the eviction order. He’s a bystander. It’s fitting he’s shown sitting passively on his horse, watching the Jews file out for the last time from their settlement. Eighty years after the Holocaust, when antisemitic tropes appear again to be in circulation, let’s not be bystanders.

Have to say, should we await the Global Sumud Flotilla’s commemorative edition of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?”

Theft and Social Conflict

A white liberal woman in the Pacific Northwest had her iPhone stolen. In a social-media post she’s shown talking to a homeless group in a bus shelter, announcing that if they stole something from “rich scum” they should keep and sell it but they should return poor little old hers (video here). In such a world, should we all get a number tattooed on our foreheads? Line 11 of your 1040 form: “Adjusted Gross Income”? After all, we should want the “poor” to know from whom they may steal in good social conscience.

While on the Question of Numbers

There’s a concerted effort to sell Baltimore as a city on the verge of a “renaissance.” It presumably has nothing to do with a mayor who wants to be Maryland governor and a governor who imagines himself presidential timber. But it’s a good illustration of Mark Twain’s observation about “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” A New York Times article noting Baltimore’s impending revival (here) cites the murder rate as “the fewest… recorded in over 50 years “ (even though Charm City’s population halved in that period). A Baltimore police story (here) tells us murder is down 23%. What the “good news” data buffers is numbers. Yes, it’s a good thing there were “only” 203 murders in Baltimore in 2024. That’s better than 259 the previous year. But it’s still one killing every 43 hours.  (Chicago, with 573 murders last year, yields one killing every 15.3 hours).  And while the criminologists and the political spin doctors may think that statistically “normal,” it’s no consolation to the families of the latest victim slain every other day. A society that accepts a murder every two days as “normal” … isn’t.

Scandals You Won’t Hear Much About

Two states are holding gubernatorial elections this fall: Virginia and New Jersey. In both states, radical feminist Democrats pretending to be “moderates” hope for a glidepath into those governors’ mansions in opposition to President Trump. A complicit media tries to help by tamping down stories that should be scandals. Take Virginia, where Fairfax County Public Schools — one of the largest school districts just outside Washington — hopes you’ll ignore accusations it funded two minors’ abortions behind parents’ backs, in a state where parental consent is still legally required. Or Loudoun County, just next door, which tarred two middle school boys with the label of “sexual harassers” for being upset about having a girl-pretending-to-be-a-boy in their locker room. Smilin’ Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee with an eternally painted on grin, hopes you’ll ignore those stories lest she be derailed — like Terry MacAuliffe four years ago — by believers in parental rights.  And heaven forbid Democrats lose their paper-thin majorities in either house of the legislature, which would abort their plans to write abortion-on-demand into the state constitution.  (In Virginia, a state constitutional amendment has to pass the legislature twice with an intervening election before going to referendum.  It’s already passed once).

The latest turn in Virginia scandals is Democratic Attorney General candidate Jay Jones. The attorney general is the Commonwealth’s top law enforcement officer, but Virginia’s been beset by a number of Soros-funded prosecutors who don’t prosecute. With Jones, the idea of commonwealth attorneys who decide what Commonwealth laws they deign to enforce would reach its zenith. Of course, last week’s scandal was Jones’s prior arrest for doing 116 mph on a highway. His punishment? Doing volunteer “community service” hours — in his political action committee — in a state that otherwise can rival the worst of the “Southern speedtrap” caricature. This week’s scandal: resurfaced old emails expressing Jones’s fantasies about lethal political violence towards a political opponent (the Republican speaker of Virginia’s lower house), just as the murder of Charlie Kirk remains fresh. Virginia Democrats are busy circling the wagons, desperate not to watch Jones’s candidacy implode.

Such actions should be disqualifying vis-a-vis a state’s top law enforcement officer. No doubt, as with ex-Governor Ralph Northam (the infamous advocate of deadly conversations with parents about handicapped newborns) whose college pictures in blackface surfaced, his supporters will try to hunker down and weather criticism — with the support of a supine media focused on all the scandal news that’s fit NOT to print.

Shine on, Harvest Moon

Monday night was the 2025 Harvest Moon, the brightest moon right after the fall equinox which rises close to dusk and enabled farmers of old to glean their fields. (November 5 is Hunter’s Moon, analogous for forest and stream). I’ve always been struck by them as signs of divine Providence in a pre-electrified age, allowing man to prepare for the coming winter while “sun and moon mark the times and seasons” (Gen 1:14-19).

Truckers against Trafficking

Truckers against Trafficking (“TAT,” see here) is an organization that trains truckers — especially long-haul truckers — to identify and report signs of human trafficking. The mass influx of illegal aliens, especially in the past four years, brought with it rises in trafficking — both labor and sex — as illegals are forced to pay off “facilitators” (especially cartels) that assisted their entry. Regardless of what one thinks of breaking immigration law, no human being should be the object of human trafficking. It’s not just foreigners, though. Our frayed social lives lead to lots of dysfunctional families, including kids that run away from home. They too are prime candidates to be sucked into the trafficking underworld.

In the trafficking universe, truck stops are often hubs. Especially in the Midwest, West, and South, where distances on the interstates can be long, truck stops can be places of connection, transportation, or exploitation. The same, though, can be true in more densely populated areas, e.g., the East Coast’s I-95 corridor from Maine to Florida. TAT wants truckers to help make truck stops safe and to suppress human trafficking. They offer a variety of self-training modules.

TAT performs invaluable work. The police can’t be everywhere, and truckers are seasoned eyes that can spot what is and isn’t right. If you’re a Catholic trucker, take a look at their materials. If you’re a Catholic parish with a major truck stop in its boundaries, maybe you want to get to know the area better, maybe figure ways to make it “part” of your parish, with maybe a regular “night” in the truck stop restaurant, letting folks know of you.

Over the years, I’ve regularly traveled up I-95 between DC and New Jersey and almost always stop about half-way at Maryland Exit 109, Elkton. There are two huge truck stops there I first discovered about 40 years ago on a March for Life, when one of them was still a family-owned restaurant. Food, showers, gas, an ample supply shop — one thing I regularly noticed was a Protestant effort to evangelize the place. There was occasionally a preacher with on-site services, there is usually some religious literature at the door, and the store’s commodities includes long-distance tape sales and audio books with religious themes. It always seemed the Catholic presence in such places  is anemic, even as those who passed through seemed open to the God question. Perhaps banding together with your local stop to fight human trafficking could be a segue for you and/or your parish to accompanying the transient with the Good News of the Gospel.