Originally published at crisis magazine
It’s hard to tell if the popularity of certain ideas on Catholic podcasts and social media accounts signals the overall popularity of those ideas or just one small corner of the digital realm. I’d like to think that most faithful Catholics are too busy spending time with their families, building their parish communities, doing charity, and engaging in other meaningful offline activities to bother with fringe online movements. Regardless, it’s been hard to ignore the vigorous winking recently from many in the Catholic commentariat toward…well, literal Nazis.
As a politically and religiously conservative Catholic, you can be assured that I’m not using the term Nazi in the way an activist at the local campus would use it. I mean it in the more traditional sense—as in, those who believe Jews are collectively trying to undermine Western civilization through means that are barely perceptible until you join “the noticers”—who unironically use the term “the Jewish problem” to describe this issue; and who believe some fairly extreme measures may be necessary as a final solution to this problem.
The similar gnostic feel of these “noticers” to “the woke” of the Left is an interesting parallel I’ll leave for someone else to unpack.
