When first told that Jesus was “him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote,” the future Apostle Nathanael replied, “Can anything good from Nazareth?” Today we might ask, “Can anything good come from California?” Or, for jaundiced Catholics, “Can anything good come from the bishops?” José Gomez, like the Nazarene rabbi of old, has proven the skeptics wrong. The Archbishop of Los Angeles, Gomez turned a lot of heads with a video address delivered to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid, Spain, on November 4. Decrying what he calls the modern “pseudo-religions” that go by various names—“wokeness,” “intersectionality,” “successor ideology,” and even “social justice”—Archbishop Gomez not only diagnosed what makes them so destructive but pointed the way forward for Catholics, other Christians, and, more broadly the United States and other countries beset with these pseudo-religions.
What makes Archbishop Gomez’s address so important is that he is the current president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. While a great many of the U. S. bishops have been fairly tame in challenging these currents of thought—Gomez’s own auxiliary (or assistant) bishop Robert Barron is a notable counterexample—Gomez’s critique of these ideologies signals to other bishops that they need not and indeed ought not verbally bow to these ideologies, which are in truth competitors to a Christian view even if they sometimes go under Catholic-sounding terms such as “social justice.”
Read Full Article »