The Brothers in the Spirit tackle Black Pilling

Brothers In the Spirit is a new spiritual outreach for Men at St. Clare's and St. John Fisher, an outgrowth of the ACTS retreat and our council's COR program.  We've been meeting in the Clare Room weekly, drop ins and drop outs welcome.  The schedule is Saturday mornings, 9am-10:30am, but we try to have coffee ready and the Mary's Garden door open by 8:45am.

David Villigas will not be able to attend many of our sessions in August, and has invited Ted Seeber to lead our discussions.  

For Our August small group series, we will be discussing a Crisis Magazine video, "Deliver Us from Black-Pilling". Please watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/live/DhAZZGECvtc.  Due to the elephant-in-the-room topic that has attacked the Church for at least the last 30 years, we will also have copies of Bishop Barron’s https://media.wordonfire.org/ebooks/Letter-to-a-Suffering-Church.pdf available as our Knights of Columbus Council purchased several a number of years ago.

If you haven't heard the term, "black-pilling" is what happens when a person looks honestly at the human wreckage in the Church — the scandals, the cover-ups, the disillusionment — and concludes that faith itself is naive, or that the whole institution is beyond hope. It's cynicism dressed up as clear-sightedness.  Recently, we’ve seen the autoexcommunication of the SSPX despite repeated warnings from the Vatican not to repeat their mistake from the 1980s; many of us have watched friends and family abandon the church due to focusing on one scandal or another.

At St. Clare’s we’ve been lucky- we’ve barely been touched by the pain suffered by victims or the deep cost that bankrupted the archdiocese in past decades: yet even here, we've seen people leave — and, by grace, we've seen many more come back. Staying faithful in the depths of black-pilling is hard. It is also possible.  Despair doesn’t have to be the end of the story- Hope is still possible, but requires our own conversion to a deeper faith. That's what I want us to wrestle with together this August.  We will be handing out copies of Bishop Barron’s “Letter to a Suffering Church” as a part of this, and we’ll be delving deep into the role social media has played in the polarization of our politics and our religion.  Our discussion will follow the ACTS “River Rule”- and the point is that this will be a safe place to try to rediscover not only the ways we’ve been Black-Pilled, but to hear from people who may be outside of our personal social media bubbles and be tempted by OTHER social media bubbles, other scandals we are blind to.

One more thing before the outline — and forgive me for reaching outside of the Faith and into science fiction for a moment. There's a line from the Battlestar Galactica reboot (yes, the one with the heavy Greek Pantheon/reincarnation undertones combined with the discussion between polytheism and monotheism) that's been rattling around my head: "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." The Church has weathered corrupt popes, schisms, scandals, and apostasy for two thousand years and is still standing. That's not a reason for complacency — but it is a reason for hope. Grace doesn't run out.  History doesn’t necessarily repeat, but it does rhyme.  If you choose to accompany us on this four week journey, you can expect deep dives into previous times when our leaders were not necessarily the saints they should be- but also how previous generations of Catholics dealt, in humility and obedience, with the human frailty of the men chosen to sit in the Cathedras of power.  

Proposed 4-Week Format:

August 1 - Week 1 - Naming the Black Pill What is black-pilling, really? We'll unpack the Crisis Magazine video together, talk honestly about scandal fatigue, and name what despair actually costs us spiritually — not to wallow, but to diagnose the wounds of the past before we treat it, moving towards the future.

August 8 - Week 2 - The Scandal Is Not New A look at Church history's darkest chapters (the Avignon papacy, the Borgias, past clergy abuse crises) and how the faithful before us endured. "All this has happened before" - grounding our current crisis in the long memory of the Church rather than the endless scroll of the news cycle.

August 15 - Week 3 - Grace in the Ordinary Parish Turning inward to St. Clare's itself: where have we seen quiet acts of grace? Where have we seen people leave and return? A discussion, not a lecture - bring your own stories.

August 22 - Week 4 - Staying, and Staying Faithful Practical and spiritual tools for remaining in the Church without either naive triumphalism or bitter cynicism - prayer, accountability among brothers, and what it means to hold hope "all this will happen again," including the renewal.

I think this hits home for a lot of guys in the group, whether they've said it out loud or not.  We’ve all seen friends and family and sometimes even our own children leave the Church due to the narrow vision of black-pilling.   We all feel the pull from the political and social media bubbles we’re in.  This series is supposed to become a way out.

In Christ, Ted Seeber