A Critical Analysis of “Staring Into the Abyss with Fr. Ed Meeks” — PART ONE
“In this statement, we bishops do not intend to tell Catholics for whom or against whom to vote.”
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States (emphasis added)
“A Catholic organization may not directly or indirectly make any statement, in any medium, to endorse, support, or oppose any candidate for public office, political party or PAC.”
Political Activity & Lobbying Guidelines for Catholic Organizations — USCCB Office of General Counsel
On October 11th, Fr. Edward Meeks delivered a 26-minute homily at Christ the King parish in Towson, MD. His homily was subsequently uploaded to his YouTube channel under the title “Staring Into the Abyss with Fr. Ed Meeks” and has amassed over one million views at this writing.
The homily has also been poorly transcribed and published at The Thinking Conservative. I was unable to copy and paste directly from the published transcript, but I converted it to a PDF document and will be using that version (with slight corrections) for my analysis here.
Fr. Meek’s homily can be divided into three parts: the preamble, a five-point critique of Joe Biden, and the conclusion. I will work through the homily in the same sequence here, working selectively in line-by-line commentary and then comments following longer sections. This is part one of three. (Part two is here and part three is here.)
PART ONE: THE PREAMBLE
I mentioned to you for the past two Sunday’s that I’m going to be speaking today on the November 3rd election and want to give you a little heads-up as I begin.
This first line establishes that Fr. Meek’s homily is premeditated and carefully planned and forewarned. I think it is safe to also assume the recording and posting afterwards were planned. What this tells us is that this is not a “candid camera” homily, but, instead, a staged homily, read from a prepared manuscript and recorded for use as media.
We also can see that the preamble is the last guard or “heads-up” before the substance of the homily (i.e., the five-point critique of Joe Biden) to follow.
I will be going a little bit long this morning because I have a lot of ground to cover.
This simply adds to the advance notice and prepares the listener for a longer homily. At 26 minutes, Fr. Meek’s homily would be on the longer end of things, but by no means the longest one I have heard.
This will be for me personally the 14th presidential election I will have voted in since reaching the age of majority, and this one is unlike anything I have ever seen.
I didn’t do the math to figure out Fr. Meek’s age, but it does impress a sense of singular historic importance to this election which adds even more drama to this homily.
I actually said the same thing about the last election in 2016, but the events of the last four years and, in fact, of the past six or seven months, have cast this upcoming election in a whole new and ever more dire light.
This both anticipates the objection that every partisan pre-election speech begins with “this is the most consequential election of our lifetime” and, oddly enough, doubles down on it. We also begin to see the profound pessimism of the title “Staring into the Abyss.” If the past four years have been dire then one might think that Trump’s presidency is going to be critiqued but, instead, as we will see, the critique will solely land on his opponent’s shoulders. Odd. Also, a bit too Last Roman for my taste.
I believe that at this moment in time in history you and I find ourselves as part of a society that is staring into the abyss, and that how our nation votes on November 3rd will determine whether we collectively step off the cliff into that abyss, or step back from it, if only temporarily.
One should note that these framing themes of looming doom and cultural collapse and civilizational crisis are well-worn territory for nationalist and nativist rhetoric. They are the premeditated, chosen themes for this homily. Fr. Meeks never explains his metaphor of “the abyss” but he repeats it again and again and affixes it to his title. Oddly enough, the real preface doesn’t begin until the next line.
Now let me preface my remarks by saying that it is not my place to tell you how you must vote.
Fr. Meeks now begins to perform the contradiction that his homily truly is. By the meagre and most literal letter of the law, he admits that it is not his place to tell anyone how to vote. But, as we will see, he will go on to do exactly this in a number of ways I will point out. This may seem to satisfy the USCCB’s directive that serves as this post’s epigraph: “…we bishops do not intend to tell Catholics for whom or against whom to vote.” But, as the emphasis shows, Fr. Meeks will soon fall short of it. He will miss entirely that it is not his place to tell us “for whom or against whom” to vote.
We do, after all, still live in a free country with free elections at least for the time being, but it is my place as your priest and pastor to help you see how your vote may or may not line up with the teachings of the church.
We first see the pessimist Last Roman nativism sink into cynicism as Fr. Meeks implies that the abyss that awaits us is an unfree country without free elections. Then we see an emerging contradiction. If “ it is not my place to tell you how you must vote” then how does Fr. Meeks square that “it is my place as your priest and pastor to help you see how your vote may or may not line up with the teachings of the church.” This note about speaking as “your priest and pastor” should also be recalled for when, as we will see, Fr. Meeks tries to downgrade his homily from speaking as “your priest and pastor” to mere personal opinion.
So I will tell you emphatically that what I’m about to say to you should not be taken as an implicit endorsement of any candidate by Christ the King Church or by the personal ordinariate of the chair of Saint Peter.
While he may not endorse any candidate, Fr. Meeks is making direct remarks on the November 3rd election in a homily of a Catholic Mass, speaking as “your priest and pastor” and, as we will see, he will explicitly make an anti-endorsement of Joe Biden. Take that as you will.
I’m taking this opportunity to speak to you personally, to share with you my own personal opinion, but it is an opinion based formed and informed by the word of God and by the crystal clear teaching of the Church for the purpose of helping you think through the choices because, again, there are certain realities about the candidates and their parties that directly impact our Catholic faith, and so we must be aware of these realities before we cast our vote and my first allegiance is not to any political candidate or party, but to the truth.
Is Fr. Meeks speaking as “your priest and pastor” during the homily of a Catholic Mass or is he speaking personally, sharing mere personal opinion? Notice how quickly he shifts from “your pastor and priest” to “personal opinion” to “formed and informed by the word of God and by the crystal clear teaching of the Church.” By this point, the capacity in which Fr. Meeks is speaking is almost purposefully unclear, but we can see what is most obvious: He is standing at the pulpit, before his parish, their pastor and priest, speaking personally but with an asserted authority of the word of God and “crystal clear” teaching of the Church.
His final clause about not speaking about “any political candidate or party” is odd since he only attacks Joe Biden and the Democratic Party (e.g., “…there is one presidential candidate who stands in very public, very obstinate, opposition to church teaching, namely, former Vice President Joe Biden, along with the Democratic Party.”).
So, what I’m going to say is not politically motivated, because the stakes involved for transcend politics. But what I’m going to say, I believe, has to be said. Now let me begin by telling you that I have struggled mightily with this message, not because I’m afraid of thetruth. I think you know me better than that. To the contrary the truth is what motivates me every day of my life. I resonate completely with Saint Paul who said, “woe is me if I do not preach the truth of the Gospel.” Frankly, if I were not sold out to the truth I wouldn’t even be standing in front of you today, because I would not be a Catholic priest. No, the reason for my struggle has to do with the vitriol and with the vicious animosity that are evident in our society today. Animosity that is played out tens of millions of times daily on social media and in the violence that has overtaken so many of America’s cities and was even on full display in the recent presidential debate.
Besides trying to ally himself to the truth as opposed to a political party, despite the forthcoming enumerated critiques of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party in a de facto two-party system, the oddest part of this paragraph is that Fr. Meeks pretends to be concerned about his homily in light of the internet. If that was true then why would be have prepared to deliver it, record it, and post it to his YouTube channel for one million and counting views? If this is motivated by the truth with trepidation over social media then why is he so clearly doing this in a way that literally maximizes its media footprint to the tune of seven figures and counting?
Brothers and sisters, we live in a nation that is sadly, tragically divided. A nation at odds with itself. Jesus words in the Gospel of this past Friday were never more true, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I grieve for what has become of America. And so the last thing I want to do is to have this message contribute to that division in our country, and least of all to have it cause division in our parish. You and I are children of the same heavenly Father. You and I are servants of the same Lord and Master. We are first Christians, Catholics, we are second Americans, and then somewhere down the line from there we are Republicans or Democrats or Independents or whatever. Never forget that order. And so it has almost become a cliché to declare that we have reached a tipping point in our nation, but it is also true, and it is time for faithful Catholics and other Christians to stand up courageously and forthrightly to confront the evil that has overtaken our culture and say enough is enough. Because, whether you are aware of it or not, there are powerful forces in government at every level, as well as in the mainstream media, and in the Silicon Valley technocracy, that are working aggressively to silence the church, through legislation, lies, intimidation and censorship.
It is good that Fr. Meeks admits that his rhetoric is a cliché at this point. It is not so good that cannot see how his conspiratorial claims add fuel to the divisions be condemns. Plus, as I noted above, if he really cared about “the Silicon Valley technocracy,” he may not be trying to make a viral YouTube video out of a Sunday homily.
So for us faithful Catholics, the starting point of our choice of whom to vote for needs to be that we intentionally think with the church. Think with the church, something that too many Catholics have failed to do for far too long. A fact that is largely contributed to the dire condition of our culture today. The church has clearly and consistently based her teachingon the Sacred Scriptures and on the living tradition and embodied in two thousand years ofher magisterium. That teaching has led to an array of foundational principles when it comes to us as Catholics and our moral and Civic responsibilities. It’s not always easy to sift through the myriad of issues at play in presidential politics, so it becomes crucial then that we properly prioritize those issues. Because some are, more, clearly more important than others. We can respectfully disagree. And we can have differences of prudential judgment and opinion around issues like the economy, taxation, immigration, National Defense, trade, healthcare, climate change, and so on. But don’t get sidetracked by the spurious seamless garment theory espoused by many in the church that asserts issues like immigration and the environment are of equal weight with abortion, because there is a set of issues upon which Catholics must not disagree. Pope Benedict XVI specified those issues in his 2012 Apostolic Constitution entitled Sacramentum Caritatis, in which Benedict defined what he called are non-negotiable values, a concept which he repeated countless times during his pontificate. Among the list of non-negotiable values which he identified, chief among them are the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, the sanctity of marriage, as a lifelong sacramental union of a man and a woman, and the preservation of religious liberty. They are non-negotiable because they are of paramount importance in Catholic moral theology. They are the moral principles were the church draws a clear line in the sand. And all of the fog and the confusion and spin that surrounds every political season, we must, as faithful Catholics, conscientiously vote in such a way that best upholds and protects these non-negotiable values.
Here Fr. Meeks truly begins to build a premise for his assertions to follow. He first clears away the “spurious seamless garment theory” and replaces it with his reading of Benedict XVI’s criteria of non-negotiables. Many Catholics will want to quarrel with this uncharitable and out of hand rejection of the seamless garment as necessarily opposed to Benedict’s non-negotiables. That is worthwhile consideration but it is not needed to see that if Fr. Meeks was serious about giving a non-partisan account of these non-negotiables he would point out the flaws in both major parties. By choosing to only single out one of them as violating the three non-negotiables, he clearly is making the math very simple for his parishioners and many viewers: Don’t Vote for Biden. If you doubt me, just read what follows:
Again the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage, and religious liberty. Not that other issues are unimportant, but these three are foundational to who we are as human beingsand to what kind of society we are constructing. As Pope Benedict wrote regarding these values, “In the face of fundamental and inalienable ethical demands Christians must recognize that what is at stake is the essence of the moral law which concerns the integral, integral good of the human person.” On these and other critical issues, there is one presidential candidate who stands in very public, very obstinate, opposition to church teaching, namely, former Vice President Joe Biden, along with the Democratic Party.
Recall the epigraph from the USCCB: “In this statement, we bishops do not intend to tell Catholics for whom or against whom to vote.” Yea, so, Fr. Meeks is not doing that. He is saying, again, don’t vote for Biden or for Democrats. In doing so, he is at least violating the Church’s stance on clergy and election in spirit and there is room to say he is violating it in letter as well.
And so I’d like to share with you the five things which every Catholic needs to know about Catholic Joe Biden, and how these line up with the non-negotiables. And by the way, before I begin, and for the sake of those of you who might be a little bit squeamish about what I’m about to say, let me quote for you a principal from the second Vatican council’s pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world entitled Gaudium Et Spes. The council fathers wrote this, “At all times and in all places the church should have the true freedom to teach the faith, to proclaim its teaching about society, to carry out its tasks among men without hindrance, and to pass moral judgments even in matters relating to politics, whenever the fundamental right of man for the salvation of souls requires it.”
Citing this passage from Gaudium Et Spes is pretty rich when you consider that it comes from section 76 which begins as follows: “It is very important, especially where a pluralistic society prevails, that there be a correct notion of the relationship between the political community and the Church, and a clear distinction between the tasks which Christians undertake, individually or as a group, on their own responsibility as citizens guided by the dictates of a Christian conscience, and the activities which, in union with their pastors, they carry out in the name of the Church.” A line earlier, the council goes as far as to admit that “She will even give up the exercise of certain rights which have been legitimately acquired, if it becomes clear that their use will cast doubt on the sincerity of her witness.” Fr. Meeks is cherry-picking from Vatican II and ignoring the clear directives from the USCCB here. It is misleading and self-serving.
Okay then, the five things that every Catholic needs to know about Catholic Joe Biden.
The real title of this political election homily should just be “the five things that every Catholic needs to know about Catholic Joe Biden” because that is the real content. However, one will note that Fr. Meeks spends more time introducing these five-points than he does in presenting them.
