If you want to support the show, share an episode with a friend or hit the tip jar and buy me a coffee. Thanks!
Dr. Taylor Marshall Catholic Podcast
SFX - intro music
It’s Andy’s Podcaster Podcasting Podcast - EPISODE 30
ANDY
Welcome to Episode 30! Today I’m taking a look at the Catholic Podcast scene, in honor of our new Catholic President - only the second Catholic to be elected to the top job after JFK. Also in honor of the leader of Congress, Nancy Pelosi… a Catholic. And in honor of the Supreme Court - which is - like what 2/3 Catholic now? As a non-Catholic, normal, non-religious person who doesn’t believe that Jesus is magic and with the knowledge backed by science and statistical analysis that things like prayer are superstitions - just psychological self soothing techniques - born from our need to explain and control the big scary unknowns of existence… this has been a pretty strange and exhausting listening trip for me these past few weeks. And the Catholic Podcast scene is pretty big. There are a lot of them, so it’s impossible for me to be comprehensive in just one take, so this is just an opening salvo, a provisional sample… I’m drilling a hole down into the iceberg, and doing a tasting… hmmm I’m getting notes of zealotry, delusion and hypocrisy… and what is it… repression, oh yeah deep repression, a cave aged sexual repression and undertones of burning… jockstrap patriarchy with more than a jarring hint of stale milk of moldy rotting medieval relics hmmm and oh yeah… yep… the finish… yup there it is, a really strong aftertaste of opium…
Music - Rise of the Black Centipede - Mario Rom’s Interzone
ANDY
Its… Review… Time… Mmmmmwahahahahahahahahahahaha
First up The Father Mike Schmitz Show Ascension. Father Mike is a 45 yeah old Catholic Father up in Minnesota. He trades on the classic gosh darn it Ned Flanders nicety of a lot of religious people, the wolf in sheep clothing approach, that appears harmless but is just a facade ready to unleash a overpowering tsunami of Catholic ego at a moments notice…
Mike Schmitz explains how he ‘wrestles with god’.
ANDY
What to say. Fortunately I’m immune to the illogical jibber-jabber of this one tribe of religion because I was not captured by them at birth. Catholicism is fascinating though, it’s a couple of thousands of years of human history. And we are a story based pieces - it’s our strength and also our weakness and the Catholic Church is an epic story and they are absolute masters of narrative manipulation. Right back to funding Artists to produce thousands of oil paintings promoting their White Supremacist image of Jesus. And using them to round up support for Crusades, Witch burnings and pushing the agenda of Kings and other criminal gangs.
Literally, the hands behind a thousand blood drenched Iron Thrones. The history is a quite grim and nasty at turns encompassing everything from the imprisonment and slaughter of native Americans from Colonial monsters like Saint Junipero Serra to the recent participation by actual Catholic Priests and Nuns in the Rwandan Genocide. And at other times it’s quite hilariously fantastical, like the creation and trading in Holy relics like the Virgin Mary’s milk or the Holy Foreskin for example (many in the Catholic Cult are ignorant of such history as it is very inconvenient to promoted mythology and in 1900 the Church threatened to excommunicate anyone writing about it). So, anyway, for the billions and billions of my fellow human’s out there who do not think Jesus is magic in all the ways Christian’s claim he is, the nutshell take - of people like Father Mike in the Podcast - is that they think God, the infinite super being who created the world then sent himself disguised as a carpenter to the Middle East as quote ‘the savior of mankind’. And so this podcast is called Ascension which links it to the Catholic story of the Ascension of Christ - because Jesus wasn’t merely a mild manner janitor - I mean carpenter - sorry, got mixed with Hong Kong Phooey there, you know, there so many of these super hero yarns it’s hard to keep them all straight. Marvel, Tolkien, Eddic Norse poems, The Bhagavad Gita. But anyway, in Catholicism - God, the all-powerful super being is pretending to be a mild mannered - carpenter - in the middle East somewhere until he discovers he has intermittent magic powers as recorded in the collection of stories known as The Bible… Like he had this great catering power where there was this sudden big party and this was before DoorDash and they only had like a few loaves and bit of unrefrigerated fish and then - Abracadabra - sushi for 5000 people. Another time he went to a wedding - and you know it’s like a free bar but that gets expensive so they run out but then Jesus - Abracadabra - your adequate but dank well water is now Chateaux Nerf Du Pape, you know, vintage - the good stuff. You know a lot of magic done by religious figures does involve food, it’s a quite common theme - Mohammad did a bunch of them, fed an army before battle, and he also catered a big wedding - made Figgy Pudding for everyone out of a couple of dates… Going more modern - The food miracle of Scientology, I think, hard to know, they are very secretive, but it’s well known that if you get to be like a Level 9 and above, then you have slaves appear to cook and buy all your food… The Mormons claim Joseph Smith made the best Stone Soup, an Angel gave him the recipe, he lost it - but you know but it did happen - honest… The North Korean Living Gods in the Kim Jong family are really good at taking rice from the mouths of children and turning it into Russian Caviar for themselves. And what else… well the Buddha of course, you know he’s not just big boned, his bowl forever runneth over… And NO don’t start on me — I’m Not FAT SHAMING the Buddha - I love the Jolly guy, a real marvelous twinkle in his eye. Good vibes. Same with Ganesha the Elephant god, he’s on the portly side, graven images pointing towards humor and complexity, and away from the depiction of torture like some statues they try and hoist over you…
So, yeah you know all these food miracles make sense when you think a lot them were written in hungry times. But, back to Catholic Jesus, I don’t want to do him a dis-service, it wasn’t just have food based super powers, there was other stuff, there was something about Leprosy I think, - which we can now cure with a couple of tablets but again, it was a big deal back in the day… And coming back to The Ascension - Jesus’s big trick was Returning back to life and then Ascending to heaven. Which father Mike has such a giant celibate boner for with his Podcast. So, anyway The Ascension story is Jesus - who is also the all-powerful - manifestation of an infinite God - pulls this stunt where he allows himself to be killed, crucified - on the cross and then his body is hidden in cave but then it disappears and then they couldn’t find his body and some people said ‘oh you put it in that cave where they jackals eat all the dead bodies?’ - ‘no no no not that cave another cave actually and I put a big rock in front of it to stop the jackals and when I went back this big giant stone that couldn’t have possibly been moved by anybody’ - ‘well how did you put it there?’ - ‘IT COULDN’T POSSIBLY BEEN MOVED BY ANYBODY…’ ‘OK OK calm down…’ ‘it was moved and his body was gone except for a shroud with sweat stains on it’ and then some people were like, ‘you guys are a bit weird, you know we all saw Jesus die on the cross and you can’t even get straight what his last words were, he was probably just eaten by jackals or one of you weirdys have taken him away to like eat bits of him…’ And they were like, ‘NO - HE CAME BACK ALIVE - TOTALLY NORMALLY NOT LIKE A ZOMBIE - BECAUSE HE WAS REALLY GOD!’ - ‘Oh, so he didn’t really die for our sins then?’ ‘NO HE DID AND HE CAME BACK AND YOU NEED TO THANK US NOW BECAUSE YOU ARE A SINNER AND IF YOU COMMUNICATE YOUR WISHES WITH HIM TELEPATHICALLY AND EAT HIS FLESH THEN YOU”LL BE SAVED!’ ‘Oh so we are right you are a Cannibal Cult’… ‘YOU ARE GOING TO HELL I WILL KILL YOU UNBELIEVER… ‘OW OW OK OK STOP IT OK HAVE YOUR WAY - JUST DON”T KILL ME…’ ‘BUT CAN WE STILL DO THE FERTILITY PARTY IN SPRING WE ALWAYS LOVE THAT PARTY?’ ‘YES YES, that’s a good one we’ll work something out.’ ‘With CAKE?’ ‘Yes cake and chocolate,’ ‘What’s Chocolate?’ - ‘oh don’t worry we’ll make it OK for us to go and steal it from some peasants over there.’…. Yeah so Father Mike and co have really have wrapped themselves up in this bizarre story of the ascension, but the underlying conceit - and it is very conceited - what can you call it really? - peddling a 1000 year old myth as fact and putting yourself in charge of it like a gate keeper - so if you follow Father Mike Schmitz who is - so so nice - Minnesota nice - you will be able to achieve ascension to heaven - sugar candy mountain where you can hang with this magic carpenter dude for all eternity. Yeah. It’s odd to me to hear this podcast and try to understand where he’s coming from. AND People have been killed working out this ascension stuff over the centuries. The fight over the Holy Prepuce - the Holy foreskin of Christ is in itself fascinating reading. I’ll link to some stuff about in the transcript, but nutshell - Christ -a jew was Circumcised and they saved his foreskin as a magic relic - only at one point there were ten of them doing the rounds in the medieval world and then whatever they were smoking at the Vatican wore off a bit and they decided they had to get rid of them - because - it blows a hole in the evaporation Ascension to heaven thing… yeah its utterly batshit crazy and for a time they even tried to get away with saying the foreskin became the rings around Saturn… So, Yeah, bottom line, I’m not sure it’s totally healthy to be listening to people like Father Mike peddling this nonsense anymore… I know what your saying… BUT BUT BUT ANDY - but surely the modern Catholic Church in Minnesota is a moral force for good… well… OK, you know apart from being part of a Church that is mired in a hideous 40 year world wide abuse scandal that is just the latest depravity of a church with a deep history of horror - MAGDALEN slave Laundries as recently as 90’s in Ireland, - but but but you know apart from that, Father Mike Schmitz does sound so nice, he must know right from wrong, he must be a strong moral compass for his people… Well, lets look where he was on the last election, was he for the caging and separation of kids on our border or against it… was he for installing Trump and his cadre of corruption as our new dictator or was he against it… was he against the White Supremacist terrorism unleashed by a triple divorced bankrupt…
Clip from Father Mike’s Ascension - election episode ‘Distraction’.
ANDY
Yup, that’s the extent of it… er basically telling people to only vote once. Essentially buying into and promoting THE BIG TRUMPIAN LIE that there is election fraud because black people and minorities cheat and vote twice. WHICH IS JUST HEAPING YET MORE EVIL AND INFAMY ON BLACK SKIN. How has he not seen the outrageous lines and hardship they enforce on black communities to stop them voting? News flash. If you’re in a poor black district in this country they will not make it easy for you to vote. You will have to wait all day. In the predominantly White neighborhoods I’ve voted in, it usually takes about 5 mins. In the little 8 min episode called ‘Distraction’ he mentions how not to vote more than once, on two occasions and then has a go at DIVERSITY - in a very weird and tentative way which while not being an outright bigot - does manage to throw shade on DIVERSITY in such a way as to wink at his White Supremacist Church during protests about the never-ending murder of Black people at the hands of racist cops. So yeah Father Mike, not an outright bigot but certainly - as Elie Wiesel put it in condemning the Catholic Church’s appalling chumminess to Hitler and the Nazi party as they built and enacted the holocaust - ‘using silence to side with the oppressor’. So Father Mike is up in Minnesota, it’s been quite a sticky time for him what with the police murdering George Floyd on his doorstep. So he was obviously feeling the heat, and he did a special longer episode with a Black Catholic Father after the murder of Ahmed Artery and George Floyd… and it was an interesting conversation… the whole thing itself was tender exposition of White Fragility… here’s a clip…
Father Mike and Father Johnson
ANDY
Did you hear that bit - ‘oh yeah yeah - I like that I’m going to pray for the gift of tongues too!’ Grown men here - bonding over Catholic cosplay - No wonder the world is in the state it’s in… SO yeah maybe if we just Stopped Qualified Immunity, actually fired and prosecuted and rooted out racist storm trooper cops - went on to re-build the justice system so you know it’s the same laws enforced on the rich as it is for the poor - look at the where the taxes are spent - stop wasting all the money on bloated police budgets and fund the schools… We would make the real change that is desperately needed. It’s common sense and easy to get behind that, but maybe it’s just easier for me because I don’t have my head wedged up the ass of an imaginary magic carpenter - but back to the clip - there is a bit of a revelation from the Black Catholic father in the talk…
Clip of Father Josh Johnson from special episode.
Black Catholic Father there broaching on some things he’s noticed about the historically White Supremacist Church institution he’s in. But they don’t go on and complete the thought, maybe recognizing the 2000 years of demonizing and slaughtering non-white people, might have something to do with how the Police are able to dehumanize black lives TODAY. They don’t go on to complete that thought, they just reset in the classic religious way to more listening before diverting the spark of human agency into prayer. Once more using religion as the ultimate opium to put people to sleep. I forget who said that, I’ll look it up and put a link to it in the transcript (HERE).
…So, The Father Mike Schmitz show… no thumbs up… one stars for not going full Trump I guess… a Jim Morrison, a bit of GIL SCOTT HERON…
ANDY
… and a cover up…
Mother and Baby scandal in Ireland 2021
ANDY
Next up is The Dr Taylor Marshall Catholic Podcast. This is a very very popular show, As far as I can tell, it is massively more influential that Father Mike, with listeners in the hundred thousand range. This guy is a sort of minor celebrity on the far right and maybe we should be a little dubious about his real reach. I mean half of Trump’s Twitter following was bots hosted on servers in Russia. And Taylor Marshal is a big Trump acolyte and CATHOLIC traditionalist. He’s a fan of medieval history and he sounds like a character from a Dan Brown book.
CLIP - Perfidious Jesuits
ANDY
Perfidious Jesuits! Brilliant. Love that… Good name for a band. So get this, he’s so into Trump that he doesn’t count Biden, Pelosi, Justice Kennedy and even the Pope Francis as real Catholics! Because they are nowhere near fundamentalist enough for him! In fact he’s pushing a book he’s self published that believes the church has been taken over by Freemasons who worship Satan and they are leading the Church away from its fundamentalist roots…
CLIP from show.
ANDY
Incredible… I think I’ve stumbled into an internecine Turf War amongst the crazies… Perfidious Jesuits! Brilliant. I think his whole church is perfidious, taking Billions from the Taxpayer funded first Covid Relief Bill under Trump when you don’t even pay taxes yourself, then sitting on it, because you don’t even need it… while diocese like Rochester are just claiming bankruptcy to try an avoid another big payout on an abuse cases. That’s perfidious. Sitting on it to try and see how you use the money to pay off your global Trillion dollar abuse debts, or funnel it into your White Supremacist School Systems - perfidious. Waking up knowing all this stuff about your church but still choosing to be a Catholic - That’s Perfidious - BUT he thinks his Church is perfidious because what he terms ‘Effeminate Bishops’ haven’t burned Dr. Faucci at the Stake in the Rose Garden! It’s mad stuff. But still… great name for a band…
PERFIDIOUS JESUITS
HELLO CLEVELAND! We are The Perfidious Jesuits!
We Skull Fucked the Indians
Out of their Land
And told them while smiling
It was what God Planned
Rolling in sin
Is the Human Condition
We made it that way
Missionary Position
Opus Day had better Pray
But they haven’t got a hope
While they were fucking all the kids
We went and stole the Pope!
Yes, we stole the Pope!
We stole the Pope!
We stole the Pope!
While they were fucking all the kids
We went and stole the Pope!
ANDY
So he got a big popularity boost in 2019 by funding a White Supremacist stunt, during a Vatican Synod, where they were trying to build some bridges that had been burned down under previous Colonialist Administrations against Amazonian indigenous communities. And there was a gift from some indigenous Amazon tribe to the Pope of some Pachamama fertility statues which were accepted with good grace and placed in a side chapel of a Roman church and this guy, Taylor Marshall - this would be CORTEZ from his PODCAST YOUTUBE Kingdom - funded two fascist goons to break into the church and throw the statues into the Tyber river. Yeah, a real nice guy this one. So he’s based in Texas, I think actually near the place that reported 50 hospitalizations for drinking bleach when Trump was touting that as possible cure for Covid. So literally operates on fertile ground for scammers and those who would profit from the weak minded. And he’s doing very well for himself. Anti-mask. And he jumped fully on the insurrectionist band wagon to the point of CALLING FOR MARTYRS like Thomas Beckett to do violent MARTYR action to steal the election for Trump.
CLIP MARTYRDOM
Yeah… so, again, this is one of the most popular Catholic shows. Firmly in the cannon of rightwing propaganda, cheerleading White Supremacist terrorism. And we know where this kind of drum beat for intolerance from the right wing leads. it leads to Kyle Rittenhouse, the kid crossing state lines with an AK47 to kill people at a Protest about police brutality, it leads to the Nashville suicide bomber that took out cell towers and thankfully no people over the holidays. IT LEADS TO 9/11. It leads to the INVASION of the Capitol Building - a dead cop and countless injured. The Confederate flag of race hatred paraded through Government halls by people who believe Trump is the savior. I honestly don’t know how anyone is down with this, even Catholics who view all humanity as steeped in sin and therefore perhaps worthy of eternal hellfire. It’s a grim view that devalues human life and creates needless suffering which they exploit. And the support of Trump - outright in this show and tacit in all the others I’ve listened to - I guess ultimately, it all comes back to the issue of abortion. Which is the underlying Elephant in the room. Abortion is the big wedge issue of propaganda that has united Catholics with the Evangelical Taliban to the point of them willing to commit insurrection and sacrifice any claim to a normal morality because of this one issue. It seems they are happy with Storm Troopers marching from the Bible Belt because they have been screamed at over and over that life begins at conception, with the underlying play being that White Supremacy and a church based on White Supremacy depends on White population numbers. And of course this kind of rhetoric - is obviously very profitable, its profitable for Taylor Marshal - Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Newt Gingrich and all these bellowing evil rightwing zealots who have shown him the way. Profiting from division and pain.
ANDY
So The Taylor Marshal Catholic show… riding Trump’s coattails to the top of the religious Podcast charts… Gets… zero stars… a Papal apology for the Rwandan Genocide and a sketch about the Holy Foreskin…
THE HOLY SKIN SKETCH - YOUTUBE VIDEO
ANDY
As you can probably guess, I’m a big fan of Bob Newhart, an homage to his one sided phone call routines there. Bob is turning 92 this year. I think I send him the sketch as some birthday fan mail. He’s Catholic. I’ll thank him for all the laughs and inspiration - while laughing about the history of his faith. I imagine he’ll take it well. I imagine he’s not the Taylor Marshal kind of Catholic, who is kind of humorless… but I don’t know him personally. I’m guessing, he’s probably your average part time high holidays only - no confession kind of catholic. Whatever that’s called - maybe… a Biden Catholic, not quite pro-gay, but not quite anti-gay, not quite pro-choice but not quite pro-life as understood by the extreme pro-life Christian Taliban crowd. Yeah, maybe that’s the Biden Catholics… Anyway, next up is a show called The Catholic Feminist… from Claire Swinarski. This lady started her podcast to try and create a safe space for a woman who is a fully indoctrinated Catholic but is also beginning to resent the over-bearing patriarchy of the Church and the narrow baby making place of womanhood within it. So - because she feels like she is considered a daring Feminist by the super conservative crowd of her church but is clearly also not really an actual Feminist by women who will NOT be told what they can and can’t do with their bodies by indoctrinated patriarchal lap dogs like Claire Swinarski, she decides to call herself a ‘Catholic Feminist’ in much the same way as some Muslim women try to argue that wearing the full hijab is actually super feminist liberation. Yeah, so I feel sad for her, as she neither fits in either place, the modern world or the medieval thought-space of her Church that pays lip service to equality but does not actually support female equality… As Taylor Marshall says on his more popular Catholic Show…
CLIP FROM TAYLOR MARSHALL PODCAST
SEXIST CATHOLIC ZEALOT:
“The Father, a HE, The Son, a HE, and the HOLY GHOST, ALSO A HE…”
ANDY
CLIP - a using one show to heckle another, that’s new for me… So Claire Swinarski is very ernest in her love of the church, and she’s deeply anti-abortion, and I think this is the issue that has been confusing me. I came into this review of Catholic Podcast expecting to find more love for Biden and Pelosi. But I understand now, as they always have been in the church, life starts at conception for them, which is nonsense, no matter how much they try to bend and misrepresent the science to try and prove their point. They see abortion at any time as the actual murder of babies. Which, again, before - what is it 22 or 23 weeks - it actually isn’t. I don’t want to rehash all the pro-choice arguments out there, but in terms of this Catholic Feminist podcast - I think it important to say one of the single most important factors for the advancement of women in society is giving women control over their own bodies and fertility, without that they are trapped by the mundane mammalian realities of pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing and all attempts to limit women’s reproductive freedom are just ways of ‘keeping women in their place’ subservient and not equal to men. And when you are coming from a constructed male serving system such as the Catholic Church you can not with a straight face call yourself a Feminist. I’m sorry Claire, but words matter and the use of words matter, You’re not a feminist, you’re a church handmaiden chaffing at the mental chains placed on you but your unable due to indoctrination at birth to free yourself from them. Florynce Kennedy said it best - “If men could get pregnant then abortion would be sacrament”.
So she began the podcast in 2017 and reached 176 episodes before ending the show in November because God told her to stop it. I love it when Religious people pull out the ‘God told me to do this or that thing’, this all-powerful being who could end child cancer is appearing to you to get you to start and then stop a podcast. I know, I know it’s all harmless fun… until it isn’t. She has episodes about how Christian’s are really the ones being persecuted around the world. Lot’s of episodes on Anti-abortion and how even things like egg donation and surrogacy are against GOD’s plan. The episode on talking about How to frame Racial Justice in a god honoring way is head spinning in many ways - Claire brings up her issue of what she sees as the mass murder of children in abortion as a more important problem. And she highlights Joe Biden telling a black activist ‘he aint Black’ which was awful - but if you’re just going to spotlight the Democratic candidate for criticism and ignore the hourly out-pouring of racist hate speech from Republicans - I think we know what kind of moral side you are lining up on. And it’s not the side of MLK, it’s the side of all the Christians who used the Bible to justify slavery - since the Bible doesn’t actually condemn slavery - and just asks you to be a bit nicer to the slaves - which was why Slave owners were so happy to contaminate their property with the Magic Carpenter bit in the first place - it’s great, Christianity is, better than opium really… I don’t know who came up with that but he was on to something. I’ll hit Google and put a link in the transcript. SO The Catholic Feminist, just ugh. And also. Le Sigh. gets zero stars, A Bill Hicks…
‘Oh Childbirth is such a miracle’, WRONG, - no more a miracle than eating food and having a turd fall out of your ass. It is a chemical biological reaction the end. Case closed the end.
ANDY
And - Sinead O’conner ripping up the popes picture in 1993!
Fight the real enemy!
ANDY
Next up - is… The Catholic Man Show - these are two lads from Tulsa Oklahoma who are trying have fun being CATHOLIC MEN - but being full of Catholic guilt and sin and with heads crammed full of the Apologetics - the empty academic exercise in trying to defend magical thinking through rhetorical tricks, makes it really really hard work - you know - to - actually be… any fun. You know you’ve got to watch out for spaces were humor is outlawed. Where Solemnity rules. The house of the Frowning God, ours is a frowning God who tortured himself - BE BE GUILTY BE GUILTY… If you let joy and laughter in you’d be rolling in aisles at the silly gold hats and wonder why people are giving them money for a show that essentially tells them they are pieces of shit. But these Catholic Men try to be fun, in their way. Primarily by sampling a new alcohol every episode and testing a new man tool or bespoke hipster item. MEN. BEER. TOOLS. HIPSTER OBJECTS. Yes, each episode is a flimsy Trojan horse of Catholic indoctrination.
CATHOLIC MAN SHOW CLIP - EPISODE on ‘SIN’
David Niles and Adam Minihan are products of the extreme Catholic Education system and I guess their minds were overloaded with dogma to the point of being useless for anything other than being groomed for Priesthood - but perhaps wanting to avoid celibacy or scared of getting some shitty missionary posting or wasting their lives jockeying for position in some tedious seminary full apologists for pedophiles and they avoided the full Holy Calling and instead got gifted a Catholic Radio station in Oklahoma, And I think the timing has worked out well for them, in prime position to carve a nice niche for themselves in the Podcasting Boom. So, these guys are not Taylor Marshal storm trooper overt Trump loving Catholics, but they are still good soldiers of the faith, who wish the church would just have told them clearly who to vote for in November. They are not Taylor Marshall but they are still a Holy Pube away from joining their Evangelical brothers and going full American Taliban on the rest of secular America. They didn’t say Vote Trump outright, that’s too unpalatable but they are clear that the one issue of abortion - of which they and their community has been bombarded with Propaganda on for years - so this is unsurprisingly the only thing that matters. They are either playing up to their Nazi audience or they are subconsciously wrestling with the knowledge that they would totally go full Nazi for like what is it really maybe a 5% chance of overcoming the will of the people and overturning Roe v Wade. There probably this exact same show in Mumbai and Karachi and Iran, preaching essentially the same pack of lies to a different choir, probably starting the show sampling something else or talking about a movie or making a joke of the day or something. They have shows covering various aspects of the Catholic dogma, constantly repeating the mantra ‘That we are on God’s side’ with the dead eyed inhumanity of robots. One episode covering ‘How to Evangelize’ in a non- creepy way is deeply ironic, since they are evangelizing in a deeply weird creepy way. - Have a scotch - we’re on GODS winning team, and they don’t even understand the core point of evangelism is psychological make work to keep them engaged in the myth of their own cult. Wrapping them up evermore in the Sunk Cost fallacy. Getting them to double and triple down in mental time and resources, so you’ll never see the stars or look at your own child’s face without thanking the White Magic Carpenter. There is no way to evangelize that is not weird and creepy. Because what you are selling is weird and creepy…
SFX - KNOCK AT DOOR - CHAIR SCRAPE…
ANDY
That’s weird, excuse me… hi…
EVANGELIST
Would you like to buy some magic beans?
ANDY
Errr, no sorry.. how did you?
EVANGELIST
It’s the only way you can get to Heaven…
ANDY
I don’t believe that. I don’t want any…
EVANGELIST
YOU WILL BURN IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY…
ANDY
No I won’t.
EVANGELIST
I’M A DOCTOR IN MAGIC BEAN THEORY - you have to listen to me.
ANDY
OH you’re a Doctor eh, where did you get your Doctorate - let me guess THE MAGIC BEAN UNIVERSITY OF BATON ROUGE.
EVANGELIST
…How did you know? Are you satan?
ANDY
OK, bye. Get away from my door now. No really GO. Get off my property. I have a gun.
ANDY
Sorry about that. SO where was I oh yes, The Catholic Man Show - gets some very fine Proud Boys marching on Charlottesville…
UNITE THE RIGHT RALLY
YOU WILL NOT REPLACE US, YOU WILL NOT REPLACE US…
ANDY
and a Brett Kavanagh
BRETT
I like beer. Sometimes I drunk too much Beer. Sometimes other people did. I still like beer…
ANDY
and a big bag of magic Holy Foreskins.
SFX of bag of actual foreskin relics liberated from Vatican Treasure Vault #3908
OK… LAST UP… It’s been quite a trip listening to all these folks… but here we are finally, made it… to the END OF LEVEL BOSS - a super star in the English Speaking Catholic World _ Bishop Robert Barron, known as the Bishop of the Internet after his crazy popular youtube videos - and his Word on Fire ministry which has a Podcast outlet - recycling all his carefully constructed evangelism and pseudo-academic defenses of his medieval and ludicrous - but highly profitable ‘FAITH’. -
CLIP Bishop Barron on the reality of ‘the devil’
ANDY
Look. You can probably tell I’ve listen to about as much as I can stand of this nonsense this past couple of weeks. It makes me feel kind of nauseous tbh, these people selling their 3 tier vision of the world, with Angels and a devil and a belief in exorcism but this guy - Got to hand it to him - is really slick. He’s does a great job of marshaling the faithful and trying to reach new territory. He’s the front man of 12 part PBS show on Catholicism and he’s got a weekly show on WGN - the first priest to get such a thing in decades. It’s tough times. People are reaching for the opium. Help Jesus beat the Devil - vote Trump. Join the storm troopers or be called unpatriotic. Because GOD IS ON OUR SIDE. Personally, he’s doing really well. He has power. It’s a good ride for him. He takes the money and paints you saved. And what has he done these past four years, when we have had this disgusting, would be dictator at the head of our government. A man so provenly corrupt and so profoundly lacking - by any moral standard - who whipped up Race War to hide his corruption and attempt to cling to power… what did Bishop Robert Barron do… he appeared with him at the National Prayer Breakfast, providing the keynote address after him, legitimizing his message and platform to his own gigantic following. Why would he do this? Well the Church is very conservative it supports existing power structures, always has. And then - new information came out last week - that of course the Church took Billions in aid from the first round of Covid Stimulus Paycheck Protection Program - as revealed by an investigation from the Associated Press. Link to their report in the transcript (HERE). As usual, whenever you follow the money the story is depressingly unsurprising. So how much of those billions went as payment for the Church to legitimate Trump, to dull the conscience of the flock? And of course, you can bet Biden and Nancy will look the other way, Good catholics that they are. Nobody will make sure none of that taxpayer money you’re sitting on goes to pay off your billion dollar abuse settlements will it? And your white schools that do a very good job of shielding White Power and dominating resources for Whites to the detriment of suspiciously and constantly underfunded Black Public schools are also doing great by the looks of things as well. No no, nothing to see there is there. Not suspicious at all. So lets look at what you said then. The content of your speech as you platformed Barr and Trump right before an election. At the end of a horrible summer of strife, where hundreds of thousands were dying due to malicious incompetence… Did you use that position to speak for the downtrodden, to issue a rebuke for those suffering at the sharp edge of his horrible rhetoric, stirring up violence against minorities. No, in that Big moment - you invoked and misrepresented Thomas Jefferson to further weaken the separation of Church and State - AS IF THE BILLIONS you got from us weren’t enough - and then you whined about the attack on statues of slave owning murderous elites. You spoke not for the living people, the oppressed, you came out, with your WORD ON FIRE to protect the statues. You did not speak up for the kids in cages, the butchered Black men at the hands of racist cops, you spoke up to defend the statues of Junipero Serra, one of the symbols of your own White Supremacist murder and power. You fucking disgust me.
The only Hell is the one the Catholic Church has played a big part creating here on earth, through colonial genocide from priests like Junipero Serra, through the lies and crusades of the middle ages, twisting morality, tying the churches business interests to fascist regimes over and over again to enrich yourselves, exploiting the fear of death by promising a ridiculous snake oil of an imaginary salvation. The Devil does operate on lies and he is your creation and there are no bigger liars than all you religious charlatans, preying on the innate goodness of humanity as laid out expertly in by historians like Yuval Noah Harrari in books like Sapiens… so lets look at your own scripture shall we… your Saint Paul in Galations exhorts you to check the spiritual fruits of your actions and what are the fruits of the Catholic Church over two thousand years, or even over the past four years? You stand in the way of science, you spread fear and the guilt of sin, you lower the intellectual level of humanity and you exploit it. You platform Trump, cheer on his insurrection, take money from the public purse and stockpile it to further your own agenda. You are the hand behind the throne of the rich, the parasite in the brain of the violent. It’s time to condemn your voices and ideas to the trashcan of history.
ANDY
Word on fire, gets an evil empire… and another cover up
SFX - montage of a few catholic sex abuse cover-ups, from the UK, Buffalo, Boston, Dallas, Pennsylvania and Cardinal Vigano calling on Pope Francis to Resign…
SFX - VOICEMAIL
ANDY
This is Andy’s phone - LEAVE A MESSAGE
BERNIE
Comrade Andy! Thank you for the kind message following the meme storm about my mittens at the inauguration. My favorite one was where they showed me sitting by the guillotine as they beheaded Mitch McConnell. The costume details of the Obama’s dressed as French revolutionary peasants was particularly well done. But, yes, they screwed me out of the nomination and now they mock me as they pretend a return to the polite brand of corrupt corporate governance is going to fix America. But we all need a laugh right now and I’m happy my mittens and grouchy demeanor can play the role of Lear’s Fool to Joe’s White House. And make no mistake, IT WAS a good day of speeches, made up of complete sentences appealing to the better instincts of humanity rather than the base and violent lies we were all being poisoned on, this past four years. But Fine words butter no parsnips… You were the only one who spotted the hidden TRICOTEUSE messages in the stitching on the mittens. The coded names were Reality Winner - who should be freed immediately. Eric Garner who was strangled for cigarettes by police under Biden’s last administration. And Amy Coney Barrett the Catholic conservative who replaced RBG on the Supreme Court who Joe is totally happy with. Well, let them have their laughter. They think they dodged a bullet but the problems of injustice, inequity and inequality they profoundly failed to tackle during the Obama administration are still here and much much worse. So, stand back and stand by, comrade Andy. To quote Martin Luther Vandross King, ‘You might say I’m a dreamer - but I’m not the only one’.
ANDY
That’s a wrap!
Music - Everything is Permitted - Mario Rom’s Interzone
Andy
If you like listening, please spread the word, come join the group on Facebook or sign up for the transcript and news letter on the website… And if you really want to help, click the link, hit the tip jar and buy me a coffee for a couple of bucks! The Jazz is provided by the amazing Mario Rom’s Interzone. I don’t know who’s providing your jazz, but I think you should switch to these cats! The New Album is out, tell you more about that next time. I’ve had fun looking at all your pictures from FLAN-UARY. Baking all those flans, posting pictures on Facebook and Instagram. Amazing work. And raising money for those Skinless Weasels! You’re all just beautiful people! BBBBBeyebeye!