Charlie Kirk Was Nothing Like Saint Paul
Trump Toady Dolan Needs to Be Removed (Excerpt)
Late last week on a Fox News television program, “Fox & Friends,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York said the following about the recently murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk:
“He was a missionary, he’s an evangelist, he’s a hero. He’s one I think that knew what Jesus meant when he said the truth will set you free.”
Charlie Kirk was not a missionary. He was not a hero. Kirk’s “truths” were nothing like what Jesus meant when he said “the truth will set you free.” Dolan is lying. He probably knows he’s lying. Timothy Dolan, the top bishop in charge of the Archdiocese of New York has made a career of lying. Dolan is not only lying about who Kirk was, he’s also being duplicitous about who Saint Paul was. (Sidebar: he’s chatting here with a Fox & Friends presenter who recommended involuntary lethal injections for mentally unstable homeless persons who commit violent crimes just a nine days earlier. Kilmeade, a Roman Catholic, apologized three days after video evidence of this comment went viral, and Dolan was obviously happy to appear on his program to dissemble about Charlie Kirk and Saint Paul.
Scholars Catholic and not don’t know very much about the life of Saint Paul. Roman Catholics in the pews, for the most part, know a fraction what of Bible scholars know, and it is curated. The person of Paul and editorial concerns involved in the making of the Christian Testament were shaped at various points for “religiopolitical” reasons. What most of the Fox & Friends audience tuning in to hear Cardinal Dolan talk about Charlie Kirk know about Saint Paul comes from scripture proclaimed and re-proclaimed, in cycles, as part of Sunday Mass liturgies. This content was curated. Some of letters attributed to Paul were not written by Paul, and while they tell a lot about Paul’s character and nature, much of what Catholics learn about Paul and the apostles in general comes from Acts of the Apostles. Paul was born after Jesus died, and Acts of the Apostles is believed to have been written late in Paul’s life or after his death.
In pastoral and scholarly circles both, Catholic and not, “Acts of the Apostles” is sometimes called “fan fiction.” This may be an unfair characterization, but there are inconsistencies between the Epistles and Acts. Every time I return to reading Acts, I am struck by the degree to which it feels like a Roman Empire-inflected packaging of the Jesus story. Elements which are prominent in the letters — Paul’s clear faith in and reliance on women leaders and the messaging about economic justice barely make it into the canonical Sunday Mass readings, and “Acts,” employs (deploys?) dazzling storytelling, can read at parts, like a sales pitch. What the “owners and operators” of the Roman Catholic Church — the bishops — have tried to do for the past half-century when it comes to presenting Saint Paul is teach this: Paul had a vision of Jesus, became an apostle mystically, fell of a horse, cast off his Jewish name and Jewish character, and traveled and the known world to make everyone Christian.
Most bishops in the United States today are more or less required to obtain doctorates in Catholic areas of religious study. Very often these are not advanced degrees as we know them, especially now, when Koch Brothers/David Koch — funded Catholic University of America (CUA) started and is run by bishops. CUA gives bishops a lot of freedom to do doctorates remotely, etc. These prelates learn about the Bible, of course, but only fifty years ago that Roman Catholic bishops discouraged Catholics from reading the Bible. The clerical hierarchy believed the laity lacked capacity to understand it in proper Catholic context, and that mediation was imperative for understanding the “Old” and “New” testaments.
This prohibition kept Catholics from, in a sense, going to the source — The Gospels. How many Christians know that much of the Bible is poetry, or how to read it as poetry/rad poetry at all? I remember hearing Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan talk about the importance of reading the Bible without mediation. He knew the Bible — both Christian and Hebrew testaments — was liberative. Men with higher degrees in religious studies like Timothy Dolan know damned well that Charlie Kirk is no Saint Paul. The question every person watching as Dolan tries to sell this “Charlie was like Saint Paul” notion is “what’s really in that crock?” Dolan’s praise for Charlie Kirk, in other words, is predicated on Kirk’s “New Evangelization” usefulness. The rest isn’t important to Dolan. What is important to Dolan is that Charlie is young, can fill a stadium with angry young white Christianity-curious men who are ripe for some christofascist indoctrination.
New Evangelization Usefulness and Millennials
It can surprise no one who pays attention to Timothy Dolan that he should laud by a young, angry, not-the-sharpest-knife-in-the-drawer entrepreneur-cum-grifter who can fill college stadiums with white college ‘bros’ whom he can sell Jesus and the Project 2025 agenda and Christian nationalism. (Even if one does not see Kirk as a snake oil peddler, one might ask how a 31 year old college dropout amasses a net worth of $12 million. Quite a haul for a Christian “missionary”!) Kirk’s white supremacist misogynoir whining about Affirmative Action and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI), indicating openness to bigotry may be what Cardinal Dolan most appreciates in Kirk.
Rebranding bigotry, so that it looks less like bigotry, to millennials is one of the New Evangelization project’s central goals.
I’m old enough to have been literate and interested in the late 70s / early 80s when the “Moral Majority” made headlines. Conservative evangelicals and Roman Catholics were much less eager to collaborate back then. It was not until conservative Christian evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics joined forces that they were able to overturn Roe v. Wade. Having created Project 2025 together, they hope, with help from God and our dictator president, to join together to perpetrate white supremacist attacks on immigrants; and to discriminate against and persecute Black Americans, migrants, queer people and other minority groups and people of color.
Those who watched the funeral of Charlie Kirk witnessed a creepy cross between a Christian Rock arena concert and a Reich Party Congress. Erika Kirk turned in a spectacular performance as a radically forgiving Christian widow. She was hoping to radiate Jackie Kennedy vibes, but came it off as Tammy Faye. She had the honor of being pawed at by “the president” who has shown little sign actually mourning the truly horrific death of this young man, Kirk.
As obscene as this whole epic Medicine Show was, I found seeing the Vice President of the United States citing Christian Testament and preaching at a podium bearing the presidential seal to be the most profane moment. A white guy carried an enormous rood — on wheels. Failson Trump Junior talked about the Son of God and did unfunny impressions of the dictator. How ironic to see this cabal of speakers pissing on Christian faith while bashing the Establishment Clause to smithereens, Even MAGA Catholics like Dolan know this version of “gathering in His name” is soft blasphemy, but because it is soft blasphemy that opens the door to integralism, we will never see fascist prelates like Timothy Dolan object.
“No scruples” applies. Dolan has militated for over a dozen years in his capacity as New York’s top bishop, to impose Catholic law on Catholics and non-Catholics under the (misnomer) banner of “Religious Freedom.” It’s happening now. Dolts like Charlie Kirk helped.
Dolan cannot be quite so impolite and ostensibly sadistic in public as Charlie Kirk was able to be, but like Kirk, Dolan has a mean streak. They also had in common their belief in the imperative of bringing secular law in line with conservative Christian teaching (integralism), their fealty to the dictator (Trump), their lust for power and adulation, their avarice and love of the rich; and their fervent embrace of bigotry: misogyny, white supremacy, homophobia, and transphobia.
Dolan and Kirk, Brothers in Homophobia and Transphobia
In 2011 Timothy Dolan went to war with Barack Obama over same-sex marriage. He used a fortune in Catholic pew-sitters’ contributions to lobby to defeat marriage equality, thus seeking to rob even non-Catholics of marriage equality. The cardinal made an embarrassing, unsuccessful attempt to bully President Obama, and he threatened to punish select charity organizations and the nation as a whole for its refusal to permit Catholic teaching to shape its laws. Dolan said: “While all persons merit our full respect, no other relationships provide for the common good what marriage between husband and wife provides…The law should reflect this reality.” The reasoning behind this effort consisted of little more than an opinion that he views of his religion were right, and those of others. Too bad for members of faiths whose clergy consecrate same-sex marriages; they were in the wrong religion.
Charlie Kirk was an ardent homophobe. Don’t take my word for it. Watch this footage to hear Charlie Kirk express not only his homophobic vitriol but also demonstrates his tenth grader’s level of Biblical knowledge via his reliance on idiotic use of prooftext to support his bigotry. (Every time I observe Kirk discussing the Bible, his being a college dropout without a church affiliation males sense. Like Trump, he shows lots of signs of low literacy.) Kirk called transgender people “perverted,” the acknowledgment of transgender identities “one of the most destructive social contagions in human history,” and gender-affirming care for young people an “unimaginable evil.” If I’d encountered a guy at at a party who talked about gay people as Charlie did, I’d have assumed he was gay. He reminds me of Vance in this regard, pathologically homophobic, especially for a young man, finding salvation and remedy , perhaps in Christian complementarianism.
Charlie reserved some of his most vitriolic “truth” for LGBTQIA+gay people. Dolan has contempt for LGBTQIA+ people also, but Dolan can’t share his venom as freely as Charlie did. There’s too much money involved, and more than half of the priests with whom he works are gay. News outlets have downplayed Dolan’s bigotry for 16 years — along with his other malfeasance, while highlighting his jolly “Bells of Saint Mary’s” “hail fellow well met”persona.
Timothy Dolan has had the best public relations and legal representation money can buy and armies of brother priests in New York who hold the Omertà for him. I thought, while watching the Cecilia Gentili funeral following story unfold, that Dolan’s optics team shielded him from coverage of this story. There should have been much more more press coverage, and more outrage following Dolan’s decision to purge Saint Patrick’s Cathedral after the funeral of trans activist Cecilia Gentili in February of 1974.
Dolan’s Metaphorical Stoning of Cecilia Gentili
Cecilia Gentili
The decision to cleanse the church after Gentili’s funeral service, was a way to punish and shame Gentili’s beloveds, for the salty language in their eulogies, but really for being theatrical, Black and Latino trans and queer . It was a sadistic, vicious call. Kirk fantasized aloud about stoning queer people, but Dolan did in a more cowardly way. (N.B. This footage in which Kirk argued about the supposed sin committed by queer people, and then cited the section of Leviticus that recommends stoning, is difficult to find. You’ll need to get on X to see Kirk make a case for punishment of LGBTQIA+ people. He did not say “I want to stone gay folks.” explicitly.
However, pointing to this verse, in an a “debate” on the occasion of Pride Month, and smirking — Kirk has admitted to being anti-empathy — is, even if not a formal endorsement of stoning people for their same-sex love — a recommendation to punish them cruelly for being queer. He is not just misreading Leviticus here. He’s endorsing tortmenting gay folks. Those, like the people who jumped on writer Stephen King are also splitting hairs. Kirk was boosting the idea that savaging LGBTQIA+ people is a just and reasonable. When I first read something about a year ago about Kirk’s fondness for the idea of stoning gay people, I figured he did not intend this literally. That the debate around this emerged as a test of Kirk’s desire to torture and execute LKGBTQIA+ says a lot about how deranged fans of this idiot crusader believe Kirk to be.
All that said, Kirk and Dolan have deep contempt for queer people in common, and the purification of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral the day Cecilia Gentili’s funeral service was a metaphorical stoning. Who do those people gathering in our church think they are? Timothy Dolan’s signing off on the decontamination of the cathedral after Cecilia Gentili’s send-off was, not only a most unholy flex; it was red meat for the bloody MAGA Catholic base. Furthermore, it was a move to remind us all that Saint Patrick’s Cathedral belongs to the princes, not to the people who built it.
Deeming some people as “impure” is as old as the Bible. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has perfected the tactic of claiming to ‘love all of the Lord’s children” while classifying some as “disordered” and cashing their donation checks. This bigotry does have its roots in ancient views on religious purity. The idea underneath the decision to resanctify the cathedral is that the high priests who hold the temple purse strings decide who is fit to enter. Under this order, marginalized don’t really belong.
But that is not what Jesus taught, and it is the people at the margins who built that cathedral. The women the Vatican still refuses to ordain, Black folks, immigrants and queer folks — including a multitude of gay priests — they built Saint Patrick’s in Christ’s name. That cathedral belongs to them, and to Cecilia’s chosen family and admirers. Announcing a plan to purge the cathedral of Latinx queer “cooties,” in order to appease “devout” Catholic bigots sent a message: ‘Those people don’t belong on our church.’
How many members of organized crime families have been buried out of Saint Pat’s? How many men who trafficked children, besides Dolan, have celebrated Mass there? Do they ‘sage’ the sacred space after their funerals?
Did they cleanse the sanctuary the day after they buried the prolific rapist shuffler Cardinal Edward Egan there?
Trump’s Christian Vassals and and the No Scruples — Fascism Connection
“Get rid of those scruples that deprive you of peace. — What takes away your peace of soul cannot come from God.
When God comes to you, you will feel the truth of those greetings: My peace I give to you…, peace I leave you…, peace be with you…, and you will feel it even in the midst of troubles.’
(258, El Camino The Way, of Josemaría Escrivá.)
No Scruples: Brothers in Depravity
Nowhere was Dolan’s slavering fealty to Donald Trump more in evidence than at the 2024 Al Smith Dinner. (Please read “On the Sickening 2024 Al Smith Dinner: Trump and Dolan are Semblables” here for full analysis of this.) Dolan has always been lousy at hiding his appreciation for the criminal from New York City who became favored by the christofascist integralist me who bought the Supreme Court of the United States — Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society, Opus Dei, the heritage Foundation, etc.
On Easter Sunday in 2020, Dolan extended praise to Donald Trump from his Easter Sunday pulpit for his leadership, especially in the context of the Covid 19 pandemic. Dolan said on the television program Fox & Friends:
“The president has seemed particularly sensitive to the religious community… I’m in admiration of his leadership…”
Approximately five years later, following the death of Pope Francis, while the world’s Catholics were awaiting the conclusion of the Conclave, Trump posted an AI image of himself on his social media platform, and the White House (account) shared it: an AI-generated photo of Trump in pontifical vestments. Many Catholics were offended. Timothy Dolan rolled with it. He kept a lid on any strenuous objections he might have had, because he wanted to keep in filling up his bag.
“It’s not good” Dolan said.
Read “Charlie Kirk is Nothing Like Saint Paul” on Indie Theology
