Beware the Priest as Clown

The priest as clown is worse than a heretic who leads God's people along the wrong path. The clown priest leads God's people into not regarding God at all—a spiritual shrug and disinterested blasphemy.

Published in Crisis Magazine on July 11, 2025

Clownishness reached new depths several months ago in the Philippines. Not the Bozo kind, the Catholic kind. Cardinal Antonio Tagle took to the stage, donning a chorus line outfit, microphone in hand, bobbing and swaying as he crooned John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

For those fortunate to have escaped the cultural junk-littered demi-monde of the ’60s and early ’70s, this song was a paean to the consolations of atheism. His Eminence held the Filipino Catholic crowd in thrall as they, too, swayed to this spectral reinvention of Catholicism. Yes, this was in the Philippines, where Roman Catholics reach 78.8 percent of the population.

Disturbing as this should be to grounded Catholics, it should not be considered heretical. Heresy is far too respectable to descend to such redoubts of vaudeville religion. Heresy takes the Faith in great earnest, enough to understand its central dogmas and to calculate fatal substitutes. Heresy is a serious business, and it requires serious thinking. 

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