Bishop Barron’s final accusation was particularly weird, because the only reason for my question was papal teaching.

Enter, at this point, Bishop Robert Barron, he of the American evangelisation mega-corporation Word on Fire, who declared to his half a million followers on X that I had “objected to Pope Leo’s revival of the ancient tradition” (I hadn’t, of course). He said I had criticised the “peaceful and symbolic moment” as “a form of cruelty”. (I hadn’t: cruelty involves a deliberate act of harm.) And he poured scorn on the idea that because the lambs were “momentarily confined” this was somehow a “violation of the spirit of Laudato si’”. Such symbolic rituals rooted in tradition, Barron went on, “deserve to be treated with charity and theological depth”, not subjected to “the reflexive judgements of the culture wars”. And so on, deploying the kind of guns-blazing, grenade-throwing rhetoric that Pope Leo has been asking us to “disarm”.

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