In the words and images to follow, I will recount the story of how Bishop Robert Barron deleted three of my comments that were critical of his recent Word on Fire article.
On Wednesday, August 10, 2021, at 3:35 pm, a friend shared with me on my personal Facebook page Barron’s Word on Fire essay, “Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Distinction Between Fact and Fiction,” which Barron had posted at 8:00 am on his official Facebook page.
I didn’t read Barron’s essay until Thursday morning. At 9:44 am, I posted a comment to Barron’s official Facebook page. In that comment, I included a screenshot from pages 22 and 23 of Arendt’s essay “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” In that essay, she notes that the moral assumption that prevailed amongst intellectuals in Germany before 1933 — “Das Moralische versteht sich von selbst” (“the moral is obvious”) — was massively wrong.
This “the moral is obvious” assumption is echoed in a passage selected from Barron’s article, affixed to a photo of Arendt: “The objectively good and the objectively true have their own intrinsic authority — that is to say, they command, by their very excellence, the obedience of the receptive mind and the responsive will.”
The passage I shared in my comment showed how sharply Arendt, in her own words, disagrees with…
