Online Catholic Outrage Culture Isn't Just Dishonest, It's Destructive

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I came across the following post on X this morning:

As soon as I read it, I felt old reflexes kicking in automatically. I immediately sensed a rising irritation. I may technically be “out of the fight” in terms of Catholic commentary, but it was the state of the Church that largely drove me to that place, and I still look at the developments with some degree of interest and angst. There is no off-switch on a lifelong commitment to a thing that comprised my entire identity, and to which all of my friends and family remain devoted.

Often, I feel that the things that are happening only affirm my decision to leave.

So when I saw this post, I was ready to fire off a snarky quote tweet of my own, adding fuel to the fire.

But then something in me told me to stop, take a breath, and actually read the article before reacting.

So I did.

And I found that there was absolutely nothing wrong with it. The outrage was pure “fake news.”

There is a reflexive hatred among traditionalist and even many conservative Catholics towards any ecclesial posturing about the environment.

But this was merely a piece extolling the virtue of acting as good stewards of the home we have been given, and it took pains to make appropriate distinctions between populist secular environmentalism and what the Church recommends:

The Catholic Church has been “green” for a lot longer than any modern environmental movement or “climate change” concern. But, of course, in the correct way. The Catholic Church has taught that we are called to what is a relational environmentalism. And to embrace of our stewardship of the gift of creation.

After all, God is the Creator. He has called us to embrace our stewardship with the earth which He made and entrusted to us as a gift. He calls us to care for the gift and to share it.

Some leaders of the current “green” movement and those promoting a wrong kind of fear over changes in the climate have lost their way, especially in their pro-abortion extremism. They are doing a serious disservice to all.

One obvious example of this is the inherent contradiction of worrying about polluting the atmosphere with toxic chemicals and at the same time supporting making toxic chemicals available to be ingested by mothers in order to kill the children in their womb.

We need an ancient but ever new way of being green, a Catholic way.

The author, Deacon Keith Fournier (who can be a burr in the saddle for many of the traditionalist persuasion) quotes a 2009 letter from Pope Benedict XVI to buttress these distinctions:

Without belief in the true God our efforts are in ultimately fruitless, in fact not only fruitless, but they bear poisonous fruit if the Church’s magisterium expresses grave misgivings about notions of the environment inspired by ecocentrism and biocentrism, it is because such notions eliminate the difference of identity and worth between the human person and other living things.

In the name of a supposedly egalitarian vision of the ‘dignity’ of all living creatures, such notions end up abolishing the distinctiveness and superior role of human beings. They also open the way to a new pantheism tinged with neo-paganism, which would see the source of man’s salvation in nature alone, understood in purely naturalistic terms.

The reaction by Stephen Kokx brought back memories of the days when I was working as the Editor in Chief of the Catholic publication I founded, OnePeterFive.

Back then, I would run across a piece like this and immediately feel my hackles rise. I’d start skimming the article, looking for something juicy to attack, which was an extremely effective tactic when writing an article that was sure to be widely shared and commented on. I wasn’t doing it cynically — I believed in what I was doing — but attention is the currency of online publications, and when you do this for a living, you develop a sixths sense for what works and what doesn’t, even if that’s not the main reason you’re writing about a topic. And I was nothing if not a master at getting noticed and keeping the public’s focus where I wanted it — on the enemy and his misdeeds.

I was only half-cognizant of it at the time, but I was regularly engaging in the principles of “one-sentence persuasion,” a technique created by author Blair Warren, which has been echoed by a number of business and communication gurus over the years. Distilled down to its simplest essence, One Sentence Persuasion (OSP) is this:

“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”

I was very, very good at confirming suspicions and throwing rocks and enemies. This is the model upon which a great deal of conservative media — political and religious alike — is built. I actually had a print-out of an OSP illustration on the wall above my desk during those days, to help remind me what to focus on if I wanted my articles to “hit.”

I was doing most of it instinctually, so the reminder was only for those times when I found myself floundering about the intent and purpose of a piece.

Occasionally, though, when I would start to read a piece like the one at LifeSite so I could find some damning section to quote, only to not find anything really awful to grab hold of. I would realize — often with disappointment and frustration — that I was barking up the wrong tree, and only seeking out my own confirmation bias. I’d be forced to abandon my fixation on the piece and let it go if I didn’t want to try to mount a disingenuous attack.

Many trad writers do not have this kind of restraint. They can sensationalize anything. They can read something into a piece that simply isn’t there, and then whip themselves into a frenzy as they light into a total strawman. I was just scrolling through the timeline of one of these writers (not mentioned in this piece) looking for a recent thing I’d seen him post as a supporting example. As I looked through his posts, I felt like I was drowning in sewage. Everything he puts out is laden with vitriol and contempt. Every imagined slight is an act of war.

I gave up on looking for the post. Not worth it.

So to return to the LifeSite piece, yes, it's a departure from their previous sensationalist rage-bait content, but it's not the heretical piece Kokx wants it to be, nor does it mention "Pachamama" or reference those ceremonies that took place (very problematically) under Bergoglio at all.

The angry trads are going to keep digging themselves a deeper grave if they don't knock this off. They need to focus on the true, the good, and the beautiful in the version of Catholicism they love and stop looking for things to foam at the mouth at.

I was listening to something the other day about how useless it is to criticize or punish if you want to change people's behavior.

What actually works is positive reinforcement when they do something good. Everyone wants praise and affirmation. And if they get a dopamine hit for something they do, they are likely to keep doing it.

You can debate the merits of this approach, but there's an underlying truth there: Human beings are evolutionarily hardwired to focus on danger to keep themselves safe —hence, an automatic preoccupation with the negative over the positive. It's far easier to destroy than to build, far easier to condemn than to praise. We focus on what helps us survive.

I don't know for sure if doing the opposite of what feels natural could be applied here successfully, but it does seem like it would be more effective in attaining the outcome traditionalists want.

But I also fully understand that, as Jordan Peterson says, "When you have something to say, silence is a lie." Rome and the body of bishops are full of corruption and scandal and petty cruelty, and not confronting that can feel like a moral failing. An abdication of duty. Traditionalist Catholics have a real grievance, and have suffered real injustices that are ongoing to this day.

But seething anger and contempt and snark and endless attacks on everyone they even suspect is insufficiently ideologically pure only creates enemies. It certainly hasn't gotten them anything they desire.

A friend on X, having seen me post about this earlier today, replied:

What you describe is easy to slip into. You can even become what Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, calls the “candid friend”. You don’t want to be the candid friend.

“I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back - his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help.”

And that really is the seedy underbelly of this whole online angry trad, perpetual malcontent movement. It’s inherently vengeful and nasty. I noticed that ugly tendency growing within myself the more time I spent doing it. I’d wake up in the morning actually feeling eager to go sniff out the next scandal I could write about, boosting my ego and credibility as I aimed my weapons at the enemy.

“See? HERE’S ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW RIGHT I’VE BEEN ALL ALONG.”

What made it intoxicating isn’t that this was self-delusion. I actually had been right and these people actually were doing a lot of awful stuff. But I was in a dopamine-fueled negativity spiral, and so was my audience. More and more, I started feeling like I was some kind of drug dealer, doling out hits to all the addicts lining up on my digital street corner.

And I was high on my own supply.

A number of times in the final years of my tenure at 1P5, I tried to pull back.

In March of 2021, just a few months before I hung up the mantle, I wrote a piece called, “Negativity is a Drug, And We’re Hooked.” In it, I complained how toxic everything was becoming, and how pieces we did extolling the excellence in the lives of saints got no traffic, while hit pieces on ecclesial corruption went viral instantly.

“It had me up last night thinking about all of this stuff,” I wrote. I continued:

[S]ince I started trying to do a lot more St. Marianne Cope-type pieces and fewer Wuerl-type pieces, traffic on this website has dropped faster than Gavin Newsome’s approval rating. Whereas in 2018, at the height of all the Vigano revelations, we were getting somewhere between 25-30K pageviews a day, lately, we’re at fewer than 10K. In fact, we haven’t broken the 10K barrier in the past 30 days. Not even once. There could be several reasons for this, but traffic metrics over time tend to be a semi-reliable indicator about whether the content you’re producing is what your audience wants to consume.

In theory, we want to know about the good stuff. The stuff that’s positive and motivating and helps us to live better, more virtuous lives. The stuff that helps us to be inspired to make changes in the right direction.

But the minute someone drops a nasty, negative, outrageous story in front of us, we swarm like flies.

When I look at those still in traditionalist media, it seems this is something most never learn or accept. They have somehow become oblivious to the effect it has on them and on those who read or listen to them. And whether you think it’s justified or not — I personally don’t — the more they do this, the more the institutional church tightens the vice on what they want. Which, ironically, are the very things that are more likely to help them increase in virtue, rather than in viciousness.

Traditionis Custodes — which I excoriated in no uncertain terms in my last column at 1P5 before I left — was NOT deserved. But destructive trad behavior will forever be used as a justification for why it happened. And as TC is applied more and more forcefully in dioceses around the world, the conflict only escalates.

The irony in all of this is that while I am defending LifeSite’s publication of this particular article, I think their directional shift and internal purge of co-founder and CEO John-Henry Westen is not just intellectually dishonest, it’s organizational suicide. Kokx, who posted the commentary that occasioned this essay, was also let go. My old colleague and friend, Dr. Maike Hickson resigned in protest over Westen’s ouster.

Whatever you or I may think of what LifeSite had become, the sensationalism and rage-bait and unfortunate praise for every loudmouthed fool who said something they liked, like Fr. James Altman, or even the hitching of their wagon to Archbishop Vigano long after he had jumped the shark, is the entire reason for their explosive growth over the past few years.

The fact that co-founder Steve Jalsevac and a board of directors who seemed to be fine with this direction and all the benefits that came with it right up until they decided it was time to go back to reflexive papal positivism with Leo XIV — who appears to differ from Francis only in style, but not substance — makes me lose what respect I had left for what they were doing.

They were once a formidable force. But this is a media form that's dying, much like cable news, and by doing this they will onlyh see their audience shrink drastically over the next few years. Nobody in 2025 wants to read milquetoast Catholic articles admonishing a return to docility and papistry when everyone is well aware how far afield the Catholic Church is from her mission and teaching, and has been for a very long time.

Perhaps this is for the best, but I don’t think they even realize what they’ve done.

I can virtually guarantee you’ll see LifeSite start hemorrhaging donors, increasing fundraising appeals, and laying off more staff, if not this year, then next.

The entire Catholic landscape is a smoldering wreck; a battlefield strewn with the metaphorical bodies of those who have lost their ability to trust the hierarchy or, like me, even the Church’s claims of authenticity and divine authorship and protection themselves.

I don’t claim to know what the answer is, or I would have pursued that rather than throwing up my hands and walking away. I’m a bad agnostic, I suppose, because I pray pretty much every day, asking a God I’m not sure I believe in to show me the truth he wants me to believe, and help me see my own errors in judgment if my assessment of the situation is wrong.

He still does not answer.

I don’t know if things will ever get better for Catholicism, but the return to mediocre, Bourgeoise Catholicism that is happening now as vindictive bishops attempt to stomp out traditionalists so that they may proceed with their agenda uncontested means there’s no end to this kind of battle in sight.

The faithful who are just trying to live good lives, pleasing to God, are caught in the middle of this war, trying to navigate between the opposing sides.

It’s a bad situation with no obvious remedy.