Newsletter

How woke is the Pope?

Also, how much bread are those nuns wasting?

Rohan Salmond

Oct 20, 2021 • 4 min read

First, a Discord

One of the things I’ve come to believe since the earliest days of making things online is that there’s value created by things separate to how many eyeballs it attracts (and therefore how much money it can potentially make).

“Value vs broad appeal” is a false dichotomy - one of the goals for a subject area specialist like me is to make previously esoteric material accessible to as broad an audience as possible. But I’m under no illusions that I’m going to become notable or especially successful by passionately pursuing a career in what is now considered a niche subject area.

Still, there’s about 50-ish people who’ve taken to regularly reading this newsletter so far, and I believe a small but highly engaged audience has its own value.

So even though, strictly speaking, nobody asked for this, I’ve started a Discord just to see what will happen if you can easily connect with each other. Come join and post some memes and talk about religion in the news and popular culture!

This is an experiment and I’ll be tweaking things as we go in response to if/how people engage, so come hang out!

Britney Spears still no longer anagrams to Presbyterians

I’ve written before about Britney Spears’ conversion to Catholicism, and she’s still posting Christian stuff online.

‘Woke Pope’ takes Twitter by storm

Last week Pope Francis gave a cracker of an address to the World Meeting of Popular Movements, where he called out governments and industry for being greedy and spineless when it comes to their moral obligations. His official Twitter account also posted the following thread (click through):

You can read the full translation of the sermon on the Vatican website, but some of the highlights include the greatest hits of what could be described as leftwing politics:

Exhorting pharmaceutical companies to release the patents for COVID vaccines
Referring positively to the Black Lives Matter protests
Calling for an end to environmental destruction by extractive industries
Demanding that arms manufacturers close down completely
Advocating for a universal basic income (UBI)
Referring to the way the world currently works as “a system of death”.

“This system, with its relentless logic of profit, is escaping all human control. It is time to slow the locomotive down, an out-of-control locomotive hurtling towards the abyss. There is still time.”

Of course, I don’t really believe these things are ‘left wing’ at all - at least not how Pope Francis is talking about them. They are squarely in the centre of Catholic social teaching (I note he did not talk about non-descrimination on the basis of gender or for LGBT people).

Elise Ann Allen in the independent Catholic publication Crux points out that these are all things he has talked about before and the address sounds a lot like his latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. “It was his entire papacy in miniature,” she says.

I think there’s further analysis that could be done about how Pope Francis is perceived by people inside and outside the Catholic Church. In the very first issue of Relics I wrote about Liz Bruenig and how she short-circuits the established left-right political spectrum. I think the Pope does the same, while making all the same kinds of people confused and angry.

A musical interlude

How much bread are those nuns wasting?

In response to last week’s post about Irish nuns making altar bread, reader Luke has written in saying, “I calculate (conservatively) that those nuns are wasting Jesus' body to the tune of 65% by not adopting a square wafer system.” He has helpfully included his working:

You may recall Luke from his previous email and diagram insisting Cars Jesus could be crucified by opening his doors and using very long nails.

As for the wafers, they are not yet consecrated, so as far as the nuns are concerned they are just regular bread which can be thrown out if needed - no desecration required. Still, I agree it’s not optimally efficient.

I don’t know exactly why they are round. They’re unleavened because that’s what Jesus would have eaten during the Passover meal during the Last Supper, so maybe there’s a belief that Jesus ate round bread too? But in many Eastern Rite Catholic churches, they use square leavened bread! So who knows. If you do, please comment below or email me.

Besides the point, but when I was on AskACatholic.com looking for this answer, I saw this amazing ad for catholicgamereviews.com and you know I clicked on it.

"Catholics play games, too. But only after going to Mass"

I thought nuns with guns only existed in 40k

The (former) Wizard of New Zealand

Besides being an incredible headline, it raises some obvious questions and plenty of people were asking them. I won’t go into the whole story here, but his Wikipedia entry tells a story of cleverly subversive protest. Missing are the horrible and offensive comments that got him fired as New Zealand’s literal, official wizard, but the Guardian’s got you covered, if you’re curious.

The Doom guy is canonically a Latter-day Saint

Speaking of religion and sci-fi, here’s a good RNS piece about Islamic themes in Dune and Star Wars and how they have inspired Muslim artists.