Catholicism won't find itself reformed until Catholic people face honestly the fact that, in recent decades, the Catholic church — especially in the US — has drawn to itself men modeling the worst kind of masculinity around. /1

Descend to the gutter level of Catholic Twitter — it's just a hop, skip, and jump to find it on Twitter, since it's not hidden beneath ground but is mainstream — and, if you're honest, you'll be struck by the bizarre fixation of many Catholic men on "masculinity." /2

The bizarre fixation of many Catholic men right now on asserting the dominance of their heterosexual "masculinity," and policing the purportedly defective masculinity of gay men, and the femininity of women….

This is everywhere in Catholic culture at present. /3

It's taken for granted as "normal" by large numbers of "mainstream" Catholics including some of the most prominent spokespersons for Catholicism in the public square. A lot of Catholic women who are comfortable with the dominance of straight men are on board with all of this. /4

Because this fixation on "masculinity" defined as John Wayne (hat tip to Kristin Kobes du Mez) is everywhere in Catholic culture right now, it appears to be "normal," and anyone pointing to it as abnormal is treated as a bit cracked, as imagining things, creating problems. /5

Yes, I'm reading James Carroll's The Truth at the Heart of the Lie right now, with its insistence that "a male-supremacist clericalism is both the root cause and the ongoing enabler of the sexual abuse crisis." /6

But I suspect that many lay Catholics who might agree with Carroll's contention that clericalism is at the root of the problems demanding radical reform in the church don't see just how deeply the problems are rooted, too, in a male-supremacist, heterosexist worldview. /7

Hence the casualness with which many US Catholics accept that some of their key spokespeople in the public square freely, shamelessly talk about the need for women to submit to men, about the need for men to recover "masculinity" (all those cigars waiting to be smoked), etc. /8

It has, God help us, come to the point where it seems normal for a cardinal infatuated with wearing scads of lace and silk and eye-popping hats to inform us all solemnly that the big problem in the church is that it needs to be re-masculinized. /9

None of this is normal. It's intrinsically disordered, right to the roots of Catholic culture — the grotesque fixation on gender defined in crude biologistic ways, the grotesque fixation on exalting the "masculine" defined in the grossest dominative ways possible. Disordered. /10