A reply to Karl Keating’s latest attempt to discredit The Remnant, with an explanation of certain basic literary devices
Karl Keating has been paying a lot of attention to The Remnant of late. A lot of attention. Far too much, I would say. His attention has become so minuscule that one would think he is daily parsing its pages, even line by line, in search of a “gotcha” he can publish as evidence that one must not take seriously a traditional Catholic journal of forty years’ standing he is obviously taking quite seriously indeed. What is to account for Keating’s fixation on this newspaper? I have a suggestion. It has to do with what one can only call The Situation with Pope Francis, which is becoming stranger and more alarming by the day. Let me explain.
By The Situation I mean, first and foremost, the unprecedented debacle of a “Synod on the Family” that was shaping up as a frontal attack on the family as expressed in the Synod’s disgraceful midterm report, which the Synod ultimately rejected root and branch, but only after the “revolt” of the conservative Synod Fathers who refused to be railroaded by Francis and his handpicked Synod controllers. Cardinal Burke has rightly noted that there is “a very serious responsibility to try to correct as quickly and as effectively as possible the scandal caused by the midterm report.” In reply, Francis has said in essence: nothing doing. He has ordered the midterm report to be published and distributed to the world’s bishops in preparation for Synod II, as if Synod I had not rejected it completely.
Then there are the almost weekly whoppers in the Pope’s off-the-cuff sermons—far too many even to summarize here. For example, just yesterday Francis winged it yet again, declaring to the whole Catholic world that among the Apostles “Judas was not the one who sinned most: I don’t know who sinned the most…” Our Lord would appear to differ with Francis: “but woe to that man by whom the Son of man shall be betrayed: it were better for him, if that man had not been born. And Judas that betrayed him, answering, said: Is it I, Rabbi? He saith to him: Thou hast said it.” (Matt. 26:24-25). As Francis would have it, Judas’s only problem was that he “closed himself to love and that is why he became a traitor. And they all ran away during the difficult time of the Passion and left Jesus alone. They are all sinners.” Well, it’s a point of view, but certainly not something any Pope before Francis has ever uttered. Judas was a deliberate traitor—the only one among the Twelve—who cold-bloodedly plotted Our Lord’s betrayal into the hands of his enemies in exchange for thirty pieces of silver, whereas the others (but not John) fled out of fear and human weakness. There is also the little matter of Judas hanging himself. Francis’s attempt to set up a moral equivalence between Judas the traitor and suicide and the Apostles who were all saints and who (except John) were all martyred is simply grotesque. Quite frankly, we must ignore Francis (as is so often the case) and recall what Our Lord said of Judas and him alone: “Have not I chosen you twelve; and one of you is a devil?” (John 6:70).
Or, to take another example, last week Francis made the stupefying pronouncement that “corruption [which he never defined] is an evil worse than sin” (la corruzione è un male più grande del peccato). Of course this is nonsense, as the things Francis seemed to be addressing at random in the same sermon—the dishonest practices of people in power, the love of money, the death penalty, life sentences and the “accumulation of global wealth”—would not be evils if they were not also sinful, and there is no sin that is worse than sin. The confusion here seems to arise from Francis’s tendency to avoid the word “sin” altogether, especially when it comes to public adulterers and “gay people,” leaving him little room to condemn the many things he considers “corruption” without creating a purely verbal category of supremely condemnable behaviors that are somehow not sins. At one point Francis likened the ill-defined “corruption” to “bad breath” (l’alito cattivo) which one does not know he has “until someone tells him.” Here again it seems best simply to ignore Francis, although one cannot ignore the damage his ramblings are causing, to the great delight of the press
On and on Francis goes, doing whatever he wishes and saying whatever he thinks—all to the world’s ever louder applause, including Elton John, who wants Francis canonized while he is still alive. The Situation has reached such massive proportions that even sober commentators like Pat Buchanan at the American Conservative and Ross Douthat at no less than the New York Times are stating openly that this Pope is endangering the integrity of the Faith. Douthat went so far as to declare: “this pope may be preserved from error only if the church itself resists him.” Apparently, Keating missed this rather momentous declaration in the world’s “Paper of Record” while he was scrutinizing The Remnant for any little thing he could hurl against it.
So, given this context, here is my take on Keating’s latest attempt to discredit The Remnant: Keating has long been invested in the rapidly decomposing Novus Ordo status quo, conformity to which precludes him and Catholic Answers from speaking the truth about The Situation. But The Remnant, unencumbered by such restraints, has been speaking out since The Situation first developed—after, I hasten to add, Remnant columnists had first praised Francis and given him every benefit of the doubt, including yours truly, who is being mocked by a sedevacantist website for “gushing” over Francis on the night of his election. The Remnant reports candidly on The Situation, while Keating’s organization tries to explain it all away, no doubt prompting many of its supporters to demand to know why Catholic Answers is not providing any Catholic answers to the confusion and division Francis is obviously causing.
Consequently, The Remnant is attracting a growing number of Catholics who want to make sense of The Situation rather than hearing endless, patently contrived excuses for it. Keating, on the other hand, has to sit there in his office, pulling down a kingly paycheck, while being constrained to avoid saying anything particularly relevant. We are now witnessing one of the most turbulent eras in Church history, something future historians will record as both intriguing and terrible to behold; and yet Keating, alive in the very midst of it all, is effectively gagged by his circumstances. How distressing it must be, then, for Keating to see The Remnant, which he once thought he could safely ignore as a “fringe” publication—the neo-Catholic doyen’s favorite epithet to ensure a priori dismissal of traditionalist sources—gaining credibility by addressing the ecclesial reality that confronts us while Catholic Answers must pretend it doesn’t exist.
No wonder, then, Keating parses The Remnant’s pages looking for something—anything—to discredit it. The last time it was Robert Siscoe’s interesting article on the “two Popes” problem that preoccupies the Italian press and public intellectual community. Keating tried to depict the piece as some dire threat to the Church that would drive countless numbers of the faithful over the precipice of apostasy like a herd of lemmings. Sure, Karl. Whatever. Report back to us on that one, OK?
This time Keating’s “recovering lawyer’s” approach to the task of trying to take down The Remnant reveals a curious lack of appreciation for basic literary devices and a rather embarrassing tendency to literal-mindedness. Keating complains about a recent article by a Remnant columnist whose pen name is Megaera Erinyes, a reference to Megaera, one of the three Furies (enrinyes) of Greek mythology who avenged unpunished crimes, Megaera’s specialty being adultery. Concerning this fairly subtle literary allusion, Keating writes: “that Fury was blamed for causing jealousy and envy, and her name has come down in some languages to indicate a jealous or spiteful woman. In English the equivalent is ‘shrew.’ So why is ‘The Remnant’ running columns under such a name? I have no idea…” Karl, Karl, Karl, you left out the part about avenging crimes, such as adultery, and your reduction of Magaera to simply “shrew” in English is a blunt amputation of the allusion’s nuances. But you knew that, didn’t you, Karl?
Next Keating zeros in—Now I’ve got them!—on Megaera’s exasperated lamentation, uttered with Francis’s “corruption is worse than evil” nonsense in view:
I do not know what Bergoglio is. But I know that nothing he says makes any sense. I know that he cannot be followed or obeyed, not because of his heresies, which are growing more manifest by the hour, but because of the incomprehensibility, the sheer nonsense of his utterances. . . . If a pope is not a Catholic, does it really matter if he is an anti-pope? I don’t pretend to know what really goes on inside the obviously confused and contradictory mind of Jorge Bergoglio, whether his oddness and confusion is a deliberate ruse or if it is simply a sign of dementia . . .
Here Keating offers what he seems to think is a devastating riposte: “She doesn’t know ‘what Bergoglio is.’ (Answer: He’s the pope.).” Karl, Karl, Karl. When Megaera says she does not know “what” Bergoglio is—that is, when she refers to the Pope as if he were an object—this, Karl, is known as a trope. A trope is “a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression.” The intent here is to stress the problematic nature of this pontificate by figuratively describing Francis as a “what,” a phenomenon of sorts that the press widely describes as the “Francis effect.”
Keating continues in his profession of perplexity: “She [Megaera ] says that ‘nothing he says makes any sense.’ Nothing? Not a single paragraph? Not a single sentence? Not a word?… Of course, she doesn’t really mean that, nor do her editors mean that [my emphasis]. But then why does she say it, and why do they let her say it?” Karl, Karl, Karl. Megaera says this, and her editors let her say it, precisely because she doesn’t mean it. This is the literary device known as hyperbole, Karl. Hyperbole means “exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.” They are said for effect, Karl. The desired effect here is to convey the magnitude of the problem with Francis.
For Keating, however, Magaera’s lament means simply that The Remnant “and its editor and chief writers” are “going down the road of sedevacantism…” Why else, he asks, “do such columns appear in its pages?” Karl, Karl, Karl. To answer your question, we need to consider another of those tricky literary devices: irony. Irony means “the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.” Here the effect is emphatic. Megaera’s reference to an anti-pope is a bit of irony designed to lead the reader beyond that concept, the “easy out” of the sedevacantists, in order confront the far more complex reality: a valid Pope who cannot simply be dismissed as a pretender to the papal throne.
So no, Karl, The Remnant, its “editor and chief writers” are not becoming sedevacantists. Oh, I know how much you would like that to be true, but, sorry, we cannot oblige you. On the contrary, please consult my multi-part series exposing the absurdities of the sedevacantist position, published in both The Remnant and Catholic Family News. Oh, wait a minute! You’ve already read it. You must have forgotten it, right, Karl? You must also have forgotten Remnant columnist Robert Siscoe’s very recent article on why sedevacantism is untenable. As Siscoe concludes:
What they [the sedevacantists] have failed to understand is that the judgment of heresy is not left to individual Catholics in the pew, but to the Church, which is why John of St. Thomas said: “be he [the Pope] ever so manifestly heretical according to private judgment, he remains as far as we are concerned a member of the Church and consequently its head. Judgment is required by the Church. It is only then that he ceases to be Pope as far as we are concerned.”
Finally, I note that Keating—the classic Man Without an Argument—even descends to denigrating the memory of the Editor’s father while pitting the late father against his son:
Most of the columns by “Megaera Erinyes” have a similar tone and similar premises, and they are mirrored by other articles in “The Remnant,” which has become so off-the-wall that its founder, the late Walter Matt, likely would have disowned what it has become. (He published some nonsense but nothing as mean-spirited and obtuse as what “Megaera Erinyes” writes.) [emphasis mine]
Putting aside Keating’s usual reliance on lazy characterizations instead of substantiated claims (“a similar tone,” “similar premises,” “mirrored by other articles,” “off-the-wall”), consider just how despicable this tactic is. Keating specializes in low blows, but here he outdoes himself: insulting Michael Matt’s father as a publisher of nonsense only to declare that Michael’s work is so much worse that even his nonsense-publishing father would disown it. Keating makes a shyster lawyer look like a paragon of noble discourse. I knew Walter Matt well enough to know that were he here today to speak in his son’s defense he would say that he is proud of what Michael is doing to carry on the Matt family’s 150-year-long Catholic journalistic tradition: telling the truth without reserve, while endeavoring to provide thoughtful and provocative commentary meant for people who know how to reason and understand the use of literary devices. Apologize, Karl, or forfeit whatever is left of your credibility as a Catholic writer.
Having, as usual, failed sustain his petty complaint against the traditionalist position in general and The Remnant in particular, Keating huffs that Megaera’s article is “mean-spirited and obtuse.” Neither adjective applies to the article in question, which is clearly the work of a very gifted writer as anyone who practices the craft of writing can see. But both adjectives apply in spades to Keating’s neurotic nitpicking of The Remnant while the Church faces a new stage in the post-conciliar crisis exemplified by the just-concluded Synod of Francis. As Cardinal Burke has so courageously stated: “the very fact that these matters were being discussed and questioned by the presidents of the conferences of bishops, by the heads of the dicasteries of the Roman Curia, and by other special appointees of the Holy Father to the synod caused a tremendous confusion and could even induce the faithful into error with regard to the teaching about marriage and other teachings.”
It is high time for Keating to join serious Catholic commentators around the world in focusing on something a bit more pressing than who said what in The Remnant: the increasingly troubling words and deeds of the Pope who engineered a totally unnecessary and very nearly disastrous Synod. Meanwhile, give The Remnant a break, will you, Karl? Find something else with which to distract yourself. Sharpen some pencils. Straighten out your desk. Or perhaps you could engage in the activity you like to tell your readers about: take a hike.
