Charity For The Bishop

The more I interact with bishops and clergy, the more sympathy I have for them as men. I know, that certainly doesn't come out on this blog, but maybe it will in the future, starting now.

If you haven't read Helen Andrews' The Great Feminization, it is one of the greatest essays of 2025, quite possibly the best. It deals with the pathological femininity that has taken over the West. Here are just a few snippets from it. I can't recommend it highly enough. Read the whole thing.

This cancellation (of Larry Summers at Harvard) was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently...

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition...

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it.

Emphasis mine. That last sentence perfectly encapsulates synodality within the Church. Helen's essay is a perfect summary of the modern Church itself. I don't have time to find it now, but there is a direct quote, repeated in our synod meetings, that says almost that same bolded sentence, verbatim. The conversation is the goal.

It has finally dawned on me that our Church leaders and the AWFLs that populate our diocesan and parish staffs are completely impervious to data that contradicts their devouring mother tendencies. For them, every problem is a baby and every solution is cuddling and nothing can move them off of top dead center. Nothing.

Tens of thousands of white, working class, British girls were groomed and gang raped by gangs of Pakistani Muslims. Nope, doesn't matter. Don't judge. Be nice.

Thousands of young women were seduced into transgenderism resulting in bodily mutilation and irreversible, hormonal poisoning. Affirm them. God loves people of all kinds.

A hundred thousand or more Nigerian Christians have been killed by Muslim paramilitaries over the past few years. Pray for peace.

I wish I could find it now, but Rod Dreher tweeted once that if the gang rapes in England weren't enough to light a fire under the church and drive it to militancy in defense of its daughters, then nothing would.

Nothing will. Not with the bishops, priests and AWFLs who infest the management teams. It's not that they're evil or trying to do bad things, it's that they are operating under rigid, indestructible information filters that don't allow data like what I listed above to penetrate their world view.

There's got to be another angle to pursue, one which I haven't had time to suss out yet. In the meantime, simply pointing out their inability to cope with current events is a waste of time. As long as we are dominated by The Great Feminization, the Church will continue to be totally incapable of a proper response.

Even when they know this happened, they can't interpret it properly.