Aaron Irber

I was asked to resign in August for the same reasons I was removed in February. You knew about this because you called me immediately after I sent you this email, and you were in shock. Do you really want to stick with this story, Your Excellency?

i don’t like this painting in my hotel

Your Excellency, you shared with me through text message to me that my position reflects Catholic teaching, especially that the modern state of Israel is not the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. That is the position I expressed, and yet I was removed from the Religious Liberty Commission. Respectfully, it is difficult not to conclude that this commission does not truly care about religious liberty when a Catholic can be removed for faithfully articulating the Church’s teaching. Asking me to deny Catholic teaching in order to satisfy a political ideology is itself a violation of my religious freedom. As Pope Leo XIII warned, “To recoil before an enemy, or to keep silence when from all sides such clamor is raised against truth, is the part of a coward.” Whether I serve on this Commission or not, my voice will only grow louder for those being persecuted for their faith. I believe this appointment was ordained by God, and I will not abandon my Catholic faith to keep a position on a commission that has abandoned its mission. If my religious freedom is not protected, then no one’s is. Please speak up. Please stand up for Catholics. Be brave, Bishop Barron. The world needs brave men.

I read the first hundred pages of The Road last year, and read the first hundred pages of Blood Meridian this year, and in both instances, gave up, because the books never clicked. Lyrical writing, but the characters are reduced to way down Maslow's hierarchy, and the tone is so relentlessly bleak, with almost no humanity breaking through, it was difficult to feel anything besides the flint clicking against the cold steel in the overwhelming darkness. I know many of you love it, but to me, it's overwrought, overstylized, and overhyped.