The man known informally as “The Bishop of the Internet” used his massive online platform Tuesday to condemn the nationwide response to the incident involving students of a Catholic high school in Kentucky.
Bishop Robert Barron — who has more than 1.5 million likes on his official page on Facebook and 120,000 Twitter followers — called the quick and sharp criticism of students at Kentucky’s Covington Catholic High School “satanic.”
“My purpose in this article is not to adjudicate the situation, which remains, at best, ambiguous, even in regard to the basic facts,” Barron wrote on his website. “It is to comment, rather, on the morally outrageous and deeply troubling nature of the response to this occurrence, one that I would characterize as, quite literally, Satanic.”
On Saturday, photos and videos surfaced of students at the school smiling and standing in front of Native American elder Nathan Phillips banging a drum on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Initial reports portrayed the encounter as being one where the students were being disrespectful of Phillips, but further details, including longer video, emerged that showed there was more to the story and that Phillips was actually the one who walked into the crowd and said in interviews that he was trying to diffuse a tense situation between the students and another nearby group.
Although the backlash against the teenagers was initially widespread, the new information about the encounter has led some to backtrack and apologize.
The students have denied any malicious intent during the confrontation.
“The internet can be a marvelous tool, and it can be a weapon used for Satanic purposes,” Barron, who is the Catholic auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, wrote about the incident. “Applying the test of love can very effectively undermine the scapegoating mechanism and drive the devil out.”
President Trump weighed in on the incident Monday night, saying the students had become “symbols of Fake News” and media bias against him and his supporters.
