It's NOT the end of the world as we know it

David Bawden

Meet David Bawden. He lives about 20 miles outside of Topeka, Kansas and calls himself Pope Michael I. He was elected to the papacy by a conclave of six people (one of whom was his father) in the early 1990s.

Bawden is a traditional Catholic who believes the Roman Catholic Church strayed into heresy and error during its Vatican II sessions in the 1960s. Because it has "embraced heresy," it is no longer the Catholic Church, or so the traditional Catholic believes.

You may think all of this is perfectly ridiculous (and it is), but Bawden is not the only "pope in exile" wandering around the planet. There is Pope Linus II in Hertfordshire, England, Pius XIII in Montana (now deceased) (and not to be confused with the new movie starring Jude Law), Pope Krav I in Croatia and Alexander IX in Argentina, among others. This Wikipedia entry is a good place to start your own research.

Since I grew up in the traditional Catholic world, I know about these things.

We believed:

• That the end was near and we lived in the End Times.
• That the Roman Catholic Church had been destroyed from the inside out by heresy and error.
• That the pope, by embracing heresy, was no longer pope. 
• That the mass, because it had been changed and was now said in the vernacular rather than Latin, was no longer valid.
• That all Catholics (from the pope and cardinals on down) who were part of the "New Church" with its "bastard rites and bastard sacraments" were in heresy and would therefore go to hell.
• That we alone - traditional Catholics - were "true Catholics."  

There are many flavors of traditional Catholicism. The brand I followed featured a bishop (Francis Schuckardt) who stockpiled weapons and was extremely anti-Semitic and who had a painting of Adolf Hitler overlooking his bed. We passed around a pamphlet called The Six Million Swindle about how the Holocaust never happened. We attended John Birch Society meetings and waited for society to collapse.

Francis Schuckardt

You can read the official version of Schuckardt's life here, but you might also want to have a look at this article as well as this article.

Glenn Beck

I read an article recently in The Atlantic about Glenn Beck, that perennial purveyor of doom and gloom who found his voice by comparing Obama to Hitler. If you thought Beck would be happy to see Trump become president of the United States, you thought wrong. Beck has now turned his guns on Trump and is convinced, yet again, that the END IS NEAR and that the US Constitution "hangs by a thread" and the Ship of Liberty is about the founder on the rocks and ... you know the drill. Same same but different.

I was reminded that people like Beck - and Pope Michael I and traditional Catholics and all the other doom and gloomers among us - have always been around, and will always be around, and that it's not the issue of the day that concerns them. It's the outrage. The feeling of outrage. The feeling of moral superiority - that they know something the rest of us don't. That they "get it" while the rest of us are clueless.

I could easily populate this post with an endless list of examples of hysteria and fear-mongering going back to Jesus himself, who seemed to believe the end was indeed near.

None of this is new.

It's been more than fifty years since the Second Vatican Council closed in Rome in 1965 and there are still traditional Catholics who are utterly convinced the Roman Catholic Church has been destroyed and is no more, despite the fact that it is still very much alive and actually prospering.

As we head into 2017 and whatever a Trump presidency will bring, there is a sense of doom and gloom among many of my friends, some of whom have been talking in rather apocalyptic language. My message is simple: It's not the end of the world as we know it. There is cause for concern and renewed vigilance, but the world is not about to collapse around us.

I've heard all of this before. In fact, I've heard it over and over and I wasted too many years engaging with the doomsayers, trying to reason with them, trying to comprehend what the fuss was all about. I've come to realize that some people enjoy a sense of impending catastrophe and that if there wasn't something awful on the horizon, they would invent it just so they could have something to rail against.

To each his own.

As for me and my house,  we're going to go about our business and enjoy whatever time we have together in the quiet confidence that this too shall pass and all shall be well.

It's time to end the American Family Association's one-sided conversation on gay rights

As an openly gay man living in the reddest of the Red States, I can be forgiven for spending an unhealthy amount of time thinking about Bryan Fischer and the American Family Association. Headquartered not far from where I work in Tupelo, an omnipresent voice all over the radio, with a daily tsunami of Facebook posts and tweets, Bryan Fischer and the AFA, like magnolia trees and dry counties and Duck Dynasty, are inescapable facts of life in the state of Mississippi.

Bryan Fischer, host of FOCAL POINT

When I moved here three years ago, I could not fathom how it was legal for Bryan Fischer to go on public airwaves and say, on an almost daily basis, the most disparaging and woefully ignorant things about gay people. Comparing them to Nazis, suggesting they were responsible for the Holocaust, calling them a danger to public health, a threat to religious liberty, a threat to the economic well being of the United States, routinely classifying them with pedophiles, deeming homosexuality a “sexual sickness” and just as dangerous as addiction to hard drugs, talking about how we can either have religious liberty or homosexuality, but not both – day after day, the tide of myth,misinformation and just plain foolishness was hard to stomach.

But harder to stomach was the apathy of Mississippians who shrug and sigh and seem to believe there is nothing to be done even though Bryan Fischer and the AFA have earned themselves a hate group designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Protected by the right to free speech and freedom of religion, wrapping their myth and misinformation in religious garb and calling American Family Radio programs like Bryan Fischer’s FOCAL POINT a “ministry,” they are a monolithic entity safely removed from the consequences of their actions.

I have watched in disbelief as most local media outlets, when they report on gay rights (rather rare, to be sure), go microphone in hand to the AFA for a comment—as if there were no other religious or spiritual leaders in north Mississippi they could talk to.  I find it incredibly offensive that anyone would care what a hate group would have to say about a complex issue like gay marriage. Even more offensive is the media’s failure to seek out other voices on such issues, as if the AFA alone had some sort of monopoly on the gay rights conversation. But then the AFA has been having a one-sided conversation on gay rights since it was founded back in 1977.

When I inquire as to why no one will speak out against the AFA, I am frequently told that one does not mess with them. It’s as if they were some sort of mafia organization, as if one might wake up one day with concrete boots while being tossed into a swamp for having the audacity to have one’s own point of view.

When I started a Facebook page (Stuff the American Family Association Says) designed to document the hate speech coming out of the AFA, I was warned to be careful.

Why, I wanted to know.

Just be careful, I was told.  

Really? Am I supposed to be afraid of an organization that calls itself Christian? Are they going to break the law, or do something unchristian to me?

How very odd.

Yet I’ve noticed how silent politicians and elected officials are with regard to the AFA. I’ve also noticed that local media outlets don’t mention the fact that the AFA was designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, as if ignoring that fact of life might make it go away. Or are they afraid of offending and losing advertisers?

My Facebook page has not exactly been a rousing success. As of this writing, only about one hundred and fifty souls have been brave enough to click “like” on my page. Some people have sent private messages stating they cannot “like” my page for fear that people on their friends’ lists will find out. Are we back in grade school? Are we not allowed to have our own opinions?

Last year, a small group of hardy souls organized a protest march in front of the AFA headquarters in downtown Tupelo. We were about two dozen, in all. We were largely ignored by the media – as if a protest against the AFA right on their own front door was somehow not news, or not newsworthy.

While the AFA believes itself protected by free speech and freedom of religion, so are the rest of us. We have just as much of a right to engage in this conversation as they do. As a gay man, in fact, I would argue that I have more of a right to speak my mind than they do. This is an issue that affects me directly. This is an issue I have struggled with for decades.

I listen to American Family Radio frequently, but I have never once heard them talk to a gay man about the issue of homosexuality. What are they afraid of?

No doubt they have enjoyed their one-sided conversation on this issue. But isn’t it time to hear the other side? Isn’t it time for gay Mississippians – and there are many of them – to speak up, to speak out, to tell their stories, to tell the truth about what it means to be gay or lesbian or transgender? Might we not be allowed to hear from other spiritual and religious leaders? Is there no room in Mississippi for alternative points of view?

Bryan Fischer hides behind his microphone and religion. I wonder how comfortable he would feel if challenged to a public debate on the issue of homosexuality. Since the man talks about homosexuality almost every single day, surely he would relish the opportunity to demolish an articulate gay rights advocate like John Shore or Dan Savage.

No?

And that’s the point.

Fischer and the AFA are, in my opinion, cowardly bullies who hide behind religion and radio dials and Facebook posts and tweets. They are interested only in a one-sided conversation. They do not seem to realize they are talking about real people, a great many of whom live next door to them, in their own communities, people who attend their churches, who rub elbows with them at the grocery store. They seem oblivious to the harm caused by their hate speech and demonization of others.

I will continue my no doubt woefully inadequate efforts to document their hate speech and provide an alternative point of view and I will do so because it’s important for young members of the LGBT community to realize that Bryan Fischer does not speak for everyone in this state.

I am not afraid of the AFA; neither should you be. We have the right to decide our own religious beliefs. We have the right to free speech and we are entitled to our own opinions. We do not live under a fascist dictatorship where the AFA talks and the rest of us do nothing but listen.

We live in a free country.

Don’t we?

We’re Americans.

Aren’t we?

Our fathers and forefathers did not fight for our freedoms so that organizations like the American Family Association could run roughshod over the rights of fellow citizens. They fought, and many times died, to preserve our right to hold our own religious beliefs and to speak our minds on issues that matter to us.

I do not believe the AFA speaks for everyone in the state of Mississippi. They may be a powerful organization and there may be good reasons to fear their retaliation. And they may well run the table on the gay rights conversation in the magnolia state. But they are not the only ones with a point of view.

It is way past time for Mississippians to shake off the dust of apathy and indifference in the face of this massive and daily assault on the rights and dignity of fellow Mississippians.

Gay people are not child-molesting, goat-buggering, disease-ridden threats to religious life and limb. We are sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, created by the same God and entitled to the same rights and dignities as everyone else in this great country.

It’s high time we acted like it.

BOY CRUCIFIED: Truth much stranger than the fiction

Like much of my work, the action in BOY CRUCIFIED: A Thomas Noel Mystery takes place in an unusual setting. In this case, the background is the Traditional Catholic movement in the United States. I grew up in this movement and I can assure you the truth is stranger than any fiction I might write about it.

Traditional Catholics are right wing, conservative types who reject the changes introduced into the Catholic Church at Vatican Council II during the 1960s, such as having the Mass said in English, or entertaining the idea that people of other faiths might actually hope for salvation (Religious Liberty).

My group, the Fatima Crusade, was one of the most extreme. We believed all the popes from John XIII onward were heretics, thus not popes at all, which meant that the Chair of Peter was empty and we were living in the End Times. When Reagan choose the elder Bush as his vice-president, we were told Bush was quite possibly the Antichrist. We believed we were the only "valid Catholics" -- all the rest were going straight to hell for embracing heresy.

Those were some of the nicer features.

Among my group, during the 1970s and 1980s, there was a strong undercurrent of Antisemitism. We were lectured endlessly on the Jewish World Conspiracy. We read pamphlets like "The Six Million Swindle," which purported that the Holocaust was a complete fiction. We were told Adolf Hitler was actually a great leader who tried to save the world from Jews. We sang the Nazi anthem, Deustchland Deustchland Uber Alles, at private gatherings, and our leader is said to have had a painting of Hitler hanging over his bed. High school underwent paramilitary training in the style of the Brown Shirts.

Read what the Southern Poverty Law Center says.

During my time with this group, I experienced various forms of abuse, sexual, physical and otherwise. We had bizarre punishments, shaved heads and whatnot.

The group was sued for "alienation of affection" from time to time by estranged family members (usually the spouse of one of our members; wives were encouraged to ditch husbands who refused to follow the party line).

BOY CRUCIFIED is about a boy found murdered in a bizarre fashion, the clues leading eventually to a fictitious traditional Catholic group in Missouri that bears many of the common characteristics of traditional Catholic groups, not just the one I belonged to. And while my book is nothing but fiction, Traditional Catholicism is not.

The group I belonged to still exists, and despite a lot of scandal, they are going strong. They claim to have cleaned house and gone mainstream under new leadership, ridding themselves of their worst excesses. Perhaps they have; for the sake of their followers, I hope so.

The original founder (Bishop Francis Schuckardt, pictured left), who described himself as the "only valid Catholic bishop left on the face of the earth," was ousted in the 1980s and has since died. Read this article on his legacy.

He consecrated two bishops before he died and they continue to run a small splinter group in the Seattle area. They were recently involved in allegations of sexual abuse.

Let me point out again (and very clearly) that the Traditional Catholic group ("St. Konrad's") described in my book is complete fiction. If it seems to resemble the Fatima Crusade, that's because it also resembles most Traditional Catholic groups, especially the more radical, right wing groups. There is no "St. Konrad's" in Missouri, or anywhere else.

But then again, there are a great many "St. Konrad's," both in the United States and abroad, groups that reject the authority pope and have voluntarily excluded themselves from the Roman Catholic Church, groups who attend Latin Masses and talk about the Jewish World Conspiracy and other nutty conspiracy theories and engage in Holocaust-denying (like Bishop Williamson, perhaps one of the more famous examples).

There are even Traditional Catholic popes: Check these out. David Bawden in Kansas, AKA Pope Michael, is one of my favorites.

Readers who complain about "all that Catholic stuff" in BOY CRUCIFIED are missing the point: All that "Catholic stuff" is the story, and it's a lot more bizarre than any murder-mystery I could dream up.