The theological effect was immediate and durable. A woman with a claim to independent religious authority became instead a symbol of redeemed sin, forgiven rather than empowered. Historian Susan Haskins called the matter "settled" for nearly fourteen hundred years, and the settlement held remarkably well for something built on a mistake.

Bishop Robert Barron says he hates the tribalism eating Catholic social media, the scapegoating mobs, the little liberal and conservative teams throwing punches at each other online. He has a point. Anyone who has spent ten minutes in Catholic Twitter knows exactly what he means. But the timing of that complaint, arriving after a year in which Barron himself became one of the more polarizing figures in American Catholicism, deserves a second look. Fifteen years ago, then-Fath