Anathema

Institutions that lose moral authority often resort to social execution. If they cannot buy your silence, they will try to strip away your community, hoping that the cold air of isolation will force you to your knees. They aren’t just firing an employee; they are attempting to erase a family.

 

Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church enforced compliance through a legal instrument known as the Interdict. Rather than punishing only the individual at the center of a dispute, an Interdict could suspend much of a community’s sacramental life, placing the burden of the conflict on ordinary people. On paper, an Interdict was supposed to encourage repentance and reconciliation. In practice, it often accomplished something else entirely: it turned an entire community into leverage.

 

Whether viewed as a spiritual discipline or an exercise of institutional power, the Interdict demonstrated how collective hardship could become a powerful tool for securing obedience. 

 

Centuries later, I found myself confronting a different form of the same institutional logic. The methods had changed, but the underlying dynamic felt familiar: when direct control failed, social pressure filled the gap.

 

When I walked away from that desk without signing their NDA, the retaliation wasn’t just a loss of a job. It was a total, calculated social exile. The terms they presented would have barred me from attending my own children’s sports games on parish property. They wanted to prevent me from walking them through the doors of the church they grew up in. They knew they couldn’t legally control my mouth, so they tried to buy my silence and exile for a mere couple months worth of low pay.

 

 

We call it “cancel culture” today. Medieval bishops called it an Interdict.

Different vocabulary. Same instinct.

Isolate one person by making everyone else afraid to stand beside them.

 

 

They didn’t need hashtags. Every institution has labels reserved for inconvenient people.

• Heretic.
• Disobedient.
• Divisive.
• Difficult.
• Scandalous.

The label changes. The purpose rarely does.

 

Anathema Archives

Occasionally, I’ll share a brief scene from my memoir, Anathema. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the guilty. 

 

A few months later, I overheard a phone call that a friend of mine was on with the personnel director from the archdiocese.

 

“Her kids are still in school there, she still brings them to church. Not to mention their dad is still around. The situation is creating scandal,” the personnel director said.

 

 As soon as the phone call ended I started in. “Are you kidding me? What do they want? Should my kids stop attending school? Should I stop taking them to Church? What happened to the dignity of the human person?  They constantly preach that ‘the human person is sacred and possesses inherent dignity.’ I can quote more of the Catholic Church’s jargon. Hell, I taught it for years.”

 

“And what does their dad have to do with any of this? Isn’t it good he’s around as much as he is? Isn’t it good that we are still raising the kids together, even if we aren’t together?”

 

My friend responded with, “You know they’re just looking out for themselves. You know too much, you’ve experienced too much, and you never signed the NDA. That’s what this is about. They only care about the dignity of the human person when it’s convenient, and you are not convenient.” 

 

“Okay then why bring my kids into it? Why bring their dad into it?” I asked.

 

“Because they figure that’s the best way to get rid of you and keep you quiet,” my friend responded.

 

 

I didn’t understand it fully at the time, but that conversation became one of the defining moments that eventually gave my book its title: Anathema.

 

That experience taught me something I hadn’t fully understood before. Institutions often have only as much power as people are willing to surrender to them. The threat wasn’t merely the loss of a paycheck or access to parish property. It was the fear of becoming an outsider, of watching relationships disappear, of being quietly written out of a community that had once felt like home.

 

 

Throughout history, exile has been one of the oldest tools of institutional control.

 

That is why I titled my book Anathema. For centuries, the word ‘Anathema’ marked those who stood beyond the boundaries of institutional acceptance. I quickly found out that asking uncomfortable questions can make you feel ‘anathema’ long before anyone formally declares it. But there is a profound difference between being rejected by an institution and abandoning the truth.

 

Institutions can close doors, revoke titles, and sever affiliations, but they cannot dictate the conscience. When a religious organization treats family, fellowship, or community as bargaining chips to protect its own reputation, it sacrifices the very moral authority it claims to defend.

 

They may lock the parish doors, but they cannot lock the door to the truth. And once you understand that, exile loses much of its power.

 

 

 

“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first… I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you” (John 15:18-19).