Another one bites the dust

Word broke this week that First Things has dropped Maureen Mullarky's blog from their website.  I enjoy her writing.  She was sarcastic and humorous with a clear artistic and aesthetic sense.  And there's something about disdain and exasperation that only old women can pull off correctly.  But with that said, I'm not entirely surprised that she's left the site.  I'm still sad about it, but I'm not surprised.

It's been a hard year at First Things for M Mullarkey.  In January she penned a piece that seemed to get the ball rolling (still available at First Things, but for how long?).  An excerpt (in case it disappears soon)

He [Francis] is an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist. His clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba makes that clear. Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets, sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.
Later this year, Francis will take his sandwich board to the United Nations General Assembly, that beacon of progress toward the Kingdom. Next will come a summit of world religions—a sort of Green Assisi—organized to lend moral luster to an upcoming confederacy of world improvers in Paris. In the words of Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Francis means “to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”
There is a muddle for you. The bishop asserts a causal relation between two undefined, imprecise phenomena. His phrasing is a sober-sounding rhetorical dodge that eludes argument because the meaning is indeterminable. Ambiguity, like nonsense, is irrefutable. What caliber of scientist speaks this way?

...

Francis serves an environmentalist mindset that, unlike the traditional ethos of conservation, views man as a parasite (Western man in Francis’ marxisant variant) and understands wealth in pre-modern terms as a zero-sum game. It discards the West’s great discovery—realization that wealth can be created. The endgame is transfer of wealth from productive nations to unproductive ones.

Orthodox environmentalism resents human sovereignty over the earth we inhabit. It begrudges ingenuity in the transactions we invent with nature and with each other. Its radical form, which beckons Francis and Vatican academics, is atavistic, even animist. Discount the gospel gloss. What matters is the spectacle of the Church imitating the world by justifying political agendas based on still-contended data and half-baked Gramscian dogma.

I wrote to a friend at the time that I didn't much care for the harsh language, but I quite enjoyed the line "...Francis will take his sandwich board to the United Nations..."  And I still do.  That's classic Mullarkey: rich with imagery (the sky is falling!) and snark.

That piece apparently generated a flurry of hate mail to R.R. Reno, First Thing's publisher. He hurried to the website to assure the readers that First Things wasn't going all sede vacantist.  But things didn't get much better after that.  For the most part, she associated Francis with some movement, then complained about that movement thus indirectly criticizing Francis himself.  An example is her piece "The Second Coming of Peronismo".

By whatever varietal name you call it, populist leftism is experiencing a rebirth, with the Vicar of Christ as an attendant midwife. Jorge Bergolio grew up amid extravagant devotion to Juan and Eva Perón. The agitated history of those years and the collapse of the peronato into violence and economic ruin is well documented. What matters here is that Pope Francis brings to the Chair of Peter an embrace of the Peronist mystique untempered by its lessons.

She then goes on for many paragraphs detailing the ills of Peronism.  The bottom of this article linked to a related article in The Federalist where she was somewhat less charitable. 

However, the point where I saw her time at First Things growing short was another article she recently wrote on The Federalist, charmingly titled "Che Guevara's Pope".

In large measure, Thursday’s propaganda event will prove a concluding flourish to what this pope is on course to achieve: the descent of the Catholic Church into one more geopolitical “ism,” a pious-seeming companion to every other materialist -ism that tempts modern man away from freedom and toward submission to totalitarian order. Since ascending to the papacy, Francis’ actions have served a mongrel papo-caesarism that drains Christianity of its soul. Christian idiom degrades into the carrier of a secular agenda.
...
Something in me gave way at the sight of an exultant image of Che Guevara overseeing the altar in Plaza de la Revolución, the approved site of the recent papal Mass in Havana. A sadistic, murderous thug looked down on attendees in an obscene burlesque of Christ Pantocrator. Under the gaze of a butcher and amid symbols of the regime, Jorge Bergolio joined his fellow Argentine in service to the calamitous Cuban revolution. The entire spectacle played like a farcical inversion of John Paul II’s presence in Warsaw’s Victory Square, in 1979, and in stark contrast to the message he brought to Cuba in 1998.

What collapsed was any lingering sense of obligatory constraint. Gone is the time for courtesy extended to an occupant of the papacy despite his hubris and ruinous impulses. Out the window is dutiful tolerance for this man’s accusatory or incendiary language. Politesse has run its course. Historian Roberto de Mattei, writing on the wound to marriage delivered by Francis’ recent motu proprio (a personal mandate) ends his analysis with this: “Silence is no longer possible.”

Out the window is dutiful tolerance for this man’s accusatory or incendiary language. Politesse has run its course.

You are likely thinking that silence is hardly what we have had. Gushing prattle has not stopped since Francis hopped a bus back from the conclave. De Mattei used the word silence to cover the servile readiness of clerics and the court press—the credulous, the timid, the self-serving—to spit-polish the veneer of goodwill that overlays the discernible hostilities driving this pontificate and its planetary ambitions.

Make no mistake—there is malice in this pope. It takes little sophistication to realize that the intentions by which people understand themselves to be motivated are often not the ones that really drive them to speak and act as they do. However incoherent Francis’ logic on issues from economics to munitions, his stridency makes clear his antipathy toward the developed world. In this, he is a commonplace Leftist ideologue intent on finding ever-new sources of incrimination in the works of the West.

But actually after reading all that, I didn't think First Things would fire her. I thought she'd quit.  I figured she was in the process of packing up her things and moving to The Federalist, and perhaps that was the plan all along (or heading to another place).  Comparing her articles on The Federalist to her articles on First Things, it's clear that First Things had a moderating influence on her (which may have lead her to feel the need to lash out on a less sober-minded website).

I guess Reno just got tired of putting up with the angry letters and threats to cancel. 

If there's a moral to the story it's this:  It's hard to be the loyal opposition without becoming simply the opposition.  It's hard to criticize just a little.  First you criticize actions, then you discern motivations for those actions, then you criticize those motivations. Meanwhile, you're just a lone blogger, the object of your ire either doesn't know of your musing, or doesn't care. So you amp it up because obviously your enemy is craftier than you thought because he's immune to your barbs. So you derive his motivations to ignore your brilliant insights and it goes on an on until "there is malice in this pope". 

But I want to remember Mullarkey's time at First Things so I'll end with this wonderful article she wrote last year titled, appropriately enough "Who Killed Extreme Unction?"

...
A precious friend died not long ago. Some weeks before the end, while he was still able to speak and take the Eucharist, the local pastor came to anoint him. In requesting the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, the family anticipated Extreme Unction as they had always known it. They were wrong.

The priest commissioned to carry out this liturgy in the name of Christ arrived in dungarees, a plaid flannel shirt, and red suspenders. He had troubled to put on cologne but not his Roman collar. Was dishabille a democratic gesture toward the demotic tastes of the times? By the look of him, he had come to help with yard work. Left behind with his clerics was any visible sign of the divine Agape that was the reason for his being there.

He offered no personal words of consolation, no talk of Jesus, nothing of what it means to pass through death to life as a child of God in Christ. After a bit of light chat about his sciatica and the hazards of an icy road, he announced his intention to get on with administering the Sacrament of the Sick.

The dying man quipped, “Well, I certainly qualify.”

It was the remark of a man fully conscious, poised for accompaniment through the concluding step of the dialogue between himself and his God. But the move never came. The family was not asked to leave the room while the priest heard the man’s last confession. There was none. After a brief spasm of blessings, the priest was gone. Bewildered by grief, and constrained by deference toward a priest in their home, the family saw him politely to the door. But the deficiency stayed behind, dangling like an unpaid debt.

Some weeks later the wife asked why the traditional sacrament of Penance had been omitted. The answer: “Unless someone requests confession, we don’t offer it any more. That would be an intrusion.”

The pity of it.

Nikolai Ge. Crucifixion (1893). Musee d’Orsay, Paris.

We call it Anointing of the Sick. But the dying are not sick. Not any longer. They and sickness are finished with each other. Sickness is a tool of mortality, a loyal servant to the germ of death we were born with. In the moribund, sickness has done its work. It has accomplished what it was ordained to do. No matter now the affliction or assault that opens the grave. Every deathbed is a slaying stone.

The dying lie at the edge of the world, at the very verge of their allotted time. In their extremity, they suffer on the margin of time itself. All flesh is grass, Isaiah tells us. It shrivels at the root; dust in the wind. Where is grass on Golgotha? The place of the skull is rock. The shadow of the Cross is sharpest there. And in that shadow mercy learns its own name.

A fatal chasm exists between the hour of death and the deluge of unwelcome conditions that overtake us. Sickness yearns for treatment; death thirsts solely for redemption. And for the last rite that escorts the dying into the fellowship of those for whom time no longer exists.

Extreme Unction has been relativized, made friendly for a generation that does not want to hear the death knell in the words Last Rites. All the while, death grins in our faces.

I hope that Maureen Mullarkey finds peace.  I hope that either her hatred for this Pope dissipates on it's own, or Francis changes her mind. I hope she finds her way out of the fever swamp.  I hope that she doesn't tone down her razor wit, but that she directs it where it would be better served: against the enemies we all face, not against our leader who's actually on our side, even when it doesn't look that way.