What Would You Call This Style Of Bad Writing?

Describing writing isn’t that different from writing about painting. You want to say what the writing or the picture is about, but words fail, the essence is slippery, the description ultimately incomplete. Maybe the best you can do is show the painting or writing and let others see for themselves what it’s all about.

Yet, knowing this, the urge remains. So let me try to describe a kind of writing now common in certain religious quarters. The kind of writing that when you come across it a feeling of nausea develops. The kind where you can’t say in any given word or sentence exactly what has gone wrong, but that, when it’s all put together, the disease is obvious. This kind of writing might be best captured in one word: effeminate.

Start with the headline (the typo, for once, isn’t mine or my enemy’s): “Many laity find Catholic Church to be ‘judgemental and condemning’“.

I’d guess only one in a hundred, maybe fewer, see the contradiction. Do you?

If you can’t, then substitute judge for find—the two are synonyms here—and read the headline again.

If you don’t like that swap, try condemn for finds.

The You’re All Judgmental Fallacy is similar to the Imposing Your Beliefs Fallacy (discussed here). Both slide judgments and impositions in arguments under disguise. Every time somebody says don’t be judgmental, they are being judgmental. Every time somebody says don’t try to impose your beliefs, they are trying to impose their beliefs.

That’s one. Here’s two: and three:

Earlier this year, laity were invited to meet and discuss issues within the Catholic Church in a “listening” process that is part of the build up to the Synod on Synodality called by Pope Francis and scheduled to take place next year

The bizarre scare quotes around listening trigger me. The bile rises to my molars. It’s gay, pathetic, squeamish, and condescending all that once. Just what in the world—I mean the world itself—do you need to listen to at this late date? Who cannot see the signs?

As we discussed before, synod means meeting. As in people sitting around and “listening” to words they don’t hear, drinking stale coffee, pretending not to stare at their phones, making idiotic and asinine comments in an effort to signal to the attendees one’s importance or intelligence (always a self-refuting act). Meetings.

So what in the unholy Hell can a “Synod on Synodality” mean except “Meeting on Meetingness”? As in, let’s get together in a meeting and discuss the nature of getting together in meetings? As in, how we can spread the spirit of meetingness and encourage people to have meetings?

It’s therefore obvious synodality is not a word, but a cartoon of a word, designed purely as a signal, a code word. When somebody in earnest speaks “synodality“, he looks for the heads that nod and knows he has found allies.

The same heads bounce when hearing judgmental and condemning.

The code word therefore describes the group who wish to pass judgement and condemn the Church, the group who wishes to impose their values on the Church. When this is done openly and clearly, as by, say, the ACLU or some woke scatterbrain, we understand it. The enemy identifies herself in an admirable way. When it is done by code, by synods on synodality, we know we are dealing with spies and covert action.

Never mind, never mind. Back to the writing. There are some words on some document or other, then this:

According to an initial analysis of the diocesan reports for The Tablet there is a “sense of the unity of voice” with which the Catholic laity have spoken.

Unity of voice? What was it the valley girls used to say? Gag me with a spoon? Make it a big one, the kind with serrated edges used to scrap out grapefruit. Anything to end the pain.

It goes on and on like this. Right after another instance of synodalians condemning and judging judging and condemning, we see the true desire revealed: they want “a more tolerant attitude towards those deemed to be in irregular relationships” and they say “the Church’s position on women was seen as anachronistic and damaging.”

Ah.

Well, I’ve said it a thousand times, but the Church still will not let men becomes nuns. This angers many.

Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.

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